The Three Leaps of Wang Lun (4 page)
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Authors: Alfred Doblin
Twice Döblin had to flee into exile: in 1933, one day ahead of a Nazi arrest warrant (his Jewishness naturally aggravated by his “degenerate art”), to Zürich and then to Paris, where he was granted French citizenship. In 1940, aged 62, he was uprooted again by the German invasion and spent arduous months as a refugee before finally reaching the United States, where he worked for a year in a Hollywood film studio alongside many other famous exiles.
33
The former sceptic experienced a religious conversion at this period, and became a Roman Catholic. After the War he returned to Germany in the uniform of a French officer, and tried with little success to help in the recovery from the spiritual and cultural cataclysm that his former countrymen had brought on themselves. The German public remembered him as the mocking iconoclast of the twenties, and showed no interest in Döblin the moralist. The works of his exile, published in Germany for the first time between 1946 and 1950, were barely noticed. His last novel,
Hamlet, oder die lange Nacht nimmt ein Ende
, completed in 1946, was finally published in East Berlin in 1955, with great success, after repeated rejections in West Germany. Döblin died in 1957, then as now the least known of the century’s great German writers. In Günter Grass’ words, “He’ll discomfort you, give you bad dreams. He’s hard to digest. The reader will be changed by him. If you’re satisfied with yourself, beware of Döblin.”
34
Though, as Günter Grass remarks, Döblin occasions no congresses and seldom attracts the zeal of the Germanists, in recent years there have been some detailed studies. The following were particularly useful in the preparation of the Introduction:
Armin Arnold,
Die Literatur des Expressionismus: sprachliche und thematische Quellen
(The Literature of Expressionism: Linguistic and Thematic Sources), Stuttgart, 1966. A lively account, though Arnold’s judgements are sometimes questionable.
Juliet Bredon,
Peking
(1919; reprinted by Oxford University Press in 1982), was invaluable in identifying many of the places mentioned in the text.
Dscheng Fang-hsiung,
Alfred Döblins Roman
,
“Die Drei Sprünge des Wang Lun” als Spiegel des Interesses moderner deutscher Autoren an China
(AD’s novel “The Three Leaps of Wang Lun” as a reflection of the interest of modern German authors in China), Frankfurt, 1979. Dscheng sets
Wang Lun
in the context of a German response to China which he finds more spiritually profound than the response of French or English writers. More importantly, he reveals for the first time just how true Döblin’s imagination was to the deeper meaning of the Chinese works he read. Some of the same ground is covered, rather less thoroughly, in Ingrid Schuster,
China & Japan in der deutschen Literatur 1890–1925
, Bern, 1977.
Otto Keller,
Döblins Montageroman als Epos der Moderne
(AD’s montagenovel as the epic of the modern), Munich, 1980. A detailed study from a psychoanalytical perspective.
Leo Kreutzer,
Alfred Döblin: sein Werk bis 1933
(AD, his work up to 1933), Stuttgart, 1970. A dependable and judicious account of Döblin’s early life and work.
Matthias Prangel,
Alfred Döblin
(Stuttgart, 1973). A bibliography interspersed with useful biographical details.
I wish to thank Professor Anthony Tatlow and Dr Herbert Pierson for help in locating some of these reference materials.
1.
The first German paperback edition was published in 1970, with a second printing in 1980. Both printings together reached 25,000 copies. The only translations of
Wang Lun
up to now have been into Danish (1926) and French (1932). Plans for an English version while Döblin was in exile in America in the 1940s came to nought.
2.
Döblin, “Arzt und Dichter” (Doctor and Writer), 1927, in
Autobiographische Schriften und letzte Aufzeichnungen
(Autobiographical Writings and Last Sketches), p. 26.
3.
Ibid., p. 25.
4.
Döblin,
Schicksalsreise
(Fateful Journey) 1949 (reprinted in Munich, 1986), p. 109.
5.
Quoted in Arnold, op. cit., pp. 22–25.
6.
Döblin, “An Romanautoren und ihre Kritiker” (Berliner Programm) (To novelists and their critics: the “Berlin Programme”) in
Der Sturm
, Vol. 4 (1913).
7.
Döblin, “Epilog” (1948), in
Autobiographische Schriften
, p. 441.
8.
Döblin (1927), quoted in Kreutzer, op. cit., p. 39. The term “Expressionist” was not used of themselves by any of the major writers who were later so labelled. It was mostly the group around
Der Sturm
with their programmes and manifestos who proclaimed themselves Expressionists.
9.
Arnold, op. cit., p. 84.
10.
Helmut Koopmann, “Alfred Döblin: ‘Die Drei Sprünge des Wang Lun’ in neuer Sicht”. (A new look at AD’s “Three Leaps of Wang Lun”, unpublished essay.)
11.
Döblin, “Aufsätze zur Literatur” (Essays on Literature), p. 338.
12.
Martin Buber
, Die Reden und Gleichnisse des Tschuang-tse
, 1910; Richard Wilhelm,
Tao-te-ching
, 1911;
Dschuang Dsi
, 1912; and
Liä Dsi, das wahre Buch vom quellenden Urgrund
, 1912.
13.
Döblin,
Schicksalsreise
, p. 109.
14.
Döblin, “Aufsätze zur Literatur”, p. 338.
15.
Walter Muschg,
Afterword
to the modern German edition of
Wang Lun
.
16.
Dscheng, op. cit., p. 142.
17.
Samuel Cooling,
Encyclopedia Sinica
(Shanghai, 1917; reprinted in Hong Kong, Oxford University Press, 1983): article on Wu-wei.
18.
J. J. M. de Groot,
Sectarianism and Religious Persecution in China
(Leiden, 1901; reprinted in Taipei: Ch’eng Wen Publishing Co., 1970), Vol. 1, p. 185.
19.
The details are taken from Susan Naquin,
Shantung Rebellion: the Wang Lun Uprising of 1774
(Yale University Press, 1981). Döblin’s source was de Groot, pp. 296 ff.
20.
Döblin, “Der Bau des epischen Werks”, in “Aufsätze zur Literatur”, pp. 123–25.
21.
It was first published as a short story in the magazine
Genius
in 1921.
22.
Dscheng, op. cit., p. 144.
23.
Reported in Kreutzer, op. cit., p. 179.
24.
Schuster, op. cit., p. 216, notes that the tricks by which T’o Chin catches Wang were adopted by Brecht in his play
Man is Man
.
25.
What follows draws on Keller, op. cit., pp. 59–140.
26.
This misreading is found in Ernst Ribbat,
Die Wahrheit des Lebens im frühen Werk A Döblins
(Truth to life in AD’s early work), Münster, 1970, pp. 126–27; and in Francis Lide, “The Episode of the Three Leaps in Alfred Döblin’s
Wang Lun
”, in
Studies in German
(Rice University, 1969), p. 144.
27.
Günter Grass, “Uber meinen Lehrer Alfred Döblin” (My teacher AD), in
Akzente
14 (1967), No. 4.
28.
Mistranscriptions dogged Döblin to the end. His last book,
Hamlet
, for example, refers to a “Wilahwie Boulevard” in Los Angeles—clearly enough a misreading of a handwritten “Wilshire”. The recent French translation does not bother to correct it.
29.
Alfred Döblin,
Schicksalsreise
, p. 113.
30.
English translation by Eugene Jolas, 1931.
31.
English translation by John E. Woods,
A People Betrayed and Kart
and
Rosa
(London: Angel Books, 1983 and 1988).
32.
Walter Muschg, “Alfred Döblin Heute”, in
Text + Kritik 13/14
(Munich: Richard Boorberg Verlag, 1972).
33.
The sad and sometimes comical story of Germany’s Hollywood émigrés (a cross-cultural enterprise almost as notable as
Wang Lun
) is told in John Russell Taylor’s
Strangers in Paradise
(London, 1983). Döblin worked on
Mrs Miniver
and
Random Harvest
, but it is unlikely that any of his work saw the screen.
34.
Grass, op. cit.
Wang Lun
I came upon a slim volume of stories titled
Der Uberfall auf Chao-Lao-Hsu
at a railway bookstall in Austria in the late 1980s. At that time the author’s name was known to me only for
Berlin Alexanderplatz
, and that only from Fassbinder’s 1980 TV adaptation. The Chinoiserie of the title intrigued me, and I started reading as we travelled through the mountains. At the next opportunity I prospected for more Döblin, and at once found his other Chinese title:
Die drei Sprünge des Wang Lun
.
At that time my days were spent drafting government policy documents in Hong Kong. To shape an argument and distill conflicting views is a craft not without satisfactions, but who would read what I wrote ten years, five years, even one year down the line? The vigour and imagination of Döblin’s prose prompted the thought: since no one has translated this work into English in the six decades since it was published, why should a British bureaucrat who knows both German and Chinese not try his hand?
To set the project going I acquired my first computer, a secondhand Apple II with no hard drive, and a dot matrix printer. For the next two years many evenings and weekends juggled child-minding with Döblin. As I became familiar with his prose style and the often enigmatic Chinese references (enigmatic, until I twigged that mistranscription was often the culprit), I explored Hong Kong University library’s sparse but useful holdings relating to Döblin, his critical reception, and the historical and geographical background to
Wang Lun
. At some point it dawned on me that the Chao-Lao-Hsu episode was integral to the novel, though excised by Döblin for obscure reasons and never reprinted with it in Germany. I thought that a mere translator would be amply justified in restoring it.
Twenty years on, I still see
Wang Lun
as a neglected classic of European literature: an almost miraculous invocation of a vanished world by a German who never visited China and never studied Chinese, but whose spongelike mind could absorb the most disparate facts and images and shape them into a coherent symphonic creation. In the quarter century following
Wang Lun
, Döblin applied his vision and artistry to create half a dozen more epic novels, ranging in time from the Thirty Years War to the distant future, and from a shabby quarter of Berlin to the South American jungle. Most remain unavailable in English, and even where available, almost unknown. May this new edition of
Wang Lun
help to stimulate a long overdue interest in Döblin in the English-speaking world.
Chris Godwin
Stroud, U.K
.
April 2014
Lest I forget …
A soft whistling from the street below. Metallic motion
,
humming, rustling. Striking against my pen of bone
.
Lest I forget …
But what?
I must close the window
.
The streets have acquired strange voices these last few years. Mildew has spread beneath the stones; from every pole glass bowls a yard across dangle, grumbling metal plates, echoswilling drainpipes. A booming, jumbled roar of wood, mammoth jaws, compressed air, rubble. Electric flutesounds railgliding. Cars wheezing motors sail on their sides over the asphalt; my doors rattle. Milkwhite arc lamps spatter massive rays against my panes, tip wagonloads of light into my room
.
I do not reproach this maddening vibration. Only I cannot see my way into it
.
I do not know whose voices there are, whose souls feed this thousand-tonned vault of resonance
.
This heavenly doveflight of aeroplanes
.
These fluepipes coiling through the ground
.
This flashing of words across a hundred miles
.
Who benefits?
Yet I know these people on the pavements. Their telegraphs are new. The grimaces of avarice, the hostile satiety of a blueshaven chin, the thin snooping nose of lechery, the coarseness with its heart doll-like in jellied blood, watery dogeyes of envy, their throats have yelped their way down the centuries and filled them with—progress
.
Oh, I know that. I sleeked by the wind
.
Lest I forget …
In this Earth’s life two thousand years are as one year
.
Winning, conquering … An old man said, “We go, and know not whither. We stay, and know not where. We eat, and know not why. All this is the mighty vital force of Heaven and Earth. Who can here speak of winning, possessing?
