Mountains, seas and giants

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Berge Meere und Giganten is an experimental novel by Alfred Döblin , which was published in 1924 by S. Fischer Verlag in Berlin. 1932 was titled Giganten. An adventure book published a heavily modified, abridged version. It tells the story of the development of mankind from the 23rd to the 28th century. Based on the situation in the 20th century, which is conveyed in a flashback, and the rivalry between the West and the East in the 23rd century, a balance of power develops that crumbles in the 27th century in an Ural war . Migration from the victorious East and the disintegration of political systems in Europe and North America as well as the advancement of de-industrialization are urging the development of new habitats on the island of Greenland . The melting of the ice sheet brings primeval monsters to life, which in turn are fought by so-called giants, organic human creations. The novel is divided into nine books.

content

Appropriation

The appropriation is directed to an indefinite addressee. The writer addresses it directly, but the other person is not a concrete being like “animal, plant or stone”. Rather, the description of different objects of observation, such as one's own writing hand, the lawn with its flowers or the Schlachtensee, shows the presence of the natural. According to Katharina Grätz, the author also reveals his poetological intention to put the illustration in front of the narrated.

Emergence

Döblin began working on the novel in 1921. He acquired the material in the Berlin city library and consulted atlases, specialist literary works on geology and mineralogy, as well as the existing literature on Iceland and Greenland. The largest part was most likely written in the summer of 1922. For this purpose, Döblin stayed in a boarding house at Lessingstrasse 1, not far from the Schlachtensee named in the appropriation . During this time, Döblin was visited by his girlfriend Yolla Niclas, who was the model for the character Venaska.

genre

Like Andy Hahnemann, Robert Leucht classifies the novel under geopolitical fictional literature. Numerous popular discourses from the interwar period are taken up in the novel. According to Leucht, the awakening of ice beings refers to Hanns Hörbiger's ideas, which were widespread at the time, but scientifically untenable .

reception

Literary criticism

The most idiosyncratic novel from Döblin's oeuvre polarized from the start. Some critics were enthusiastic, while others saw excessive writing. Ernst Blass judged in his review that appeared in the year the novel was published: “Its author created a large, moving, teeming and lively worldview, analytical and mysterious, mythical and scientific. He unsealed a bottle with powerful substances. ” Fred Hildenbrandt called the work an“ exorbitant artistic achievement ”. Max Krell spoke of the “Homeric power” of the author and Erik Ernst Schwabach judged: “Any criticism must be silent in the face of this no less titanic fantasy of Döblin”. Other reviewers gave some scathing criticism. Moritz Goldstein , an accomplished critic, who recognized the importance of the historical novel Wallenstein early on, even said that “one cannot be angry with the reader who does not put up with such excesses of the imagination and throws the book into the corner”. Gaetano Mitidieri sums up the contemporary criticism as follows: “While some critics appreciate the aesthetic and content-related experimentalism, those who judge the book against the standards of literary tradition consider the book to be leaky due to the unpoetic subject matter, the images of violence and perversion, or the deviating style and the chaotic narrative structure and illegible. "

The novel was also received very differently after 1945. Peter Härtling called the work hermetic and partly illegible. He summed up: “It should have been a great flight; it was a fall. ” Among other things, Marcel Reich-Ranicki said of the novel that there were“ impressive, even wonderful chapters ”, but that the work could not hide a certain emptiness. Walter Delabar assessed the narrative chaos positively, but admitted that Döblin ignored the rules of narration and torpedoed "every attempt by the reader to get the text or its characters even to some degree". “Even Döbline experts are avoiding the mammoth opus,” Ulrich Holbein scoffed and praised the engagement with modern topics such as technology, human breeding and urbanization.

Within literary studies, the novel was also viewed from an aesthetic point of view. Uwe Steiner spoke of a "basically unjustifiably little known and read Döblin's novel". Gabriele Sander classifies the novel as an experiment. According to Volker Klotz, the novel can be read as a “super fairy tale” or “science fiction” and sums it up: “It's hard to imagine that anyone who even just looked into it wouldn't care about this novel. It attracts and repels, pulls with you and wears you down, exhilarating and disgusting, but it probably leaves no one indifferent. "Uwe Japp said that BGM has a" reputation for illegibility "and calls the gathering of descriptions, an unmanageable number of characters and collectives, which contradict the glaring imagery due to their lack of character drawing, as well as the accumulation of depictions of violence as possible obstacles to reading. Similar to Krell, he recognizes a correspondence between representation and technical discourse, but he evaluates the absence of "epic continuity" while maintaining expressionistic stylistic devices as a narrative shortcoming of the novel.

Literary studies

Blass' announcement that the novel would be the subject of broad interpretation did not come true. BGM was hardly considered in research until its new edition in 1977. 1972 Klaus Müller-Salget saw the novel as a turning point in Döblin's work. In his dissertation published in 1977, Ardon Denlinger put forward the thesis that Döblin would strive for a return to the cosmic conception of the world, in which the subject is in an order and is not subjected to a constant process of alienation through technology. Hannelore Qual pointed out that the novel contained numerous socio-political implications, with which she criticized Denlinger's reduction of BGM as a mystical alternative to current events and pleaded for a deeper examination of the contemporary discourses contained in the novel.

literature

Heinrich Hauser's novel Titans' Battle is similar in structure to Döblin's short version Giganten. An adventure book .

literature

Text output

  • Alfred Döblin: Mountains, Seas and Giants. S. Fischer, Berlin 1924. 1. – 5. Tausend, 589 pages, cover design: Maria Andler-Jutz (1892–1981).
  • Alfred Döblin: Giants. An adventure book. S. Fischer, Berlin 1932.
  • Alfred Döblin: Mountains, Seas and Giants. Book guild Gutenberg, Frankfurt am Main u. a. 1978.
  • Alfred Döblin: Mountains, Seas and Giants. (= Suhrkamp Taschenbuch vol. 3267). Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 978-3-518-39767-1 .
  • Alfred Döblin: Mountains, Seas and Giants. Edited by Gabriele Sander. Dtv, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-423-13516-6 .
  • Alfred Döblin: Mountains, Seas and Giants. Works by IS Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 978-3-10-015551-1 .

Advanced writings

  • Alfred Döblin: Comments on “Mountains, Seas and Giants”. In: Neue Rundschau , 35, 1924, 1, pp. 600–609.

Secondary literature

  • Hugo Aust: Literary fantasies about the feasibility of humans (with special consideration of Alfred Döblin's novel Berge Meere und Giganten and some films). In: Crossing borders. Studies on Modern Literature, ed. by Helmut Koopmann and Manfred Misch (= Festschrift for Hans-Jörg Knobloch) . Paderborn 2002, pp. 127-150.
  • Benjamin Bell: Sovereignty and Experience. Abyss and threshold of the human. Alfred Döblin's works Mountains, Seas and Giants and the Amazon . (= Dissertation), Berlin 2012.
  • Ardon Denlinger: Alfred Döblin's Mountains, Seas and Giants. Epic and ideology. BR Grüner, 1977, ISBN 90-6032-075-1 .
  • Katharina Grätz: Different places, different knowledge. Döblins Mountains Seas and giants . In: International Alfred Döblin Colloquium Emmendingen 2007. Factual fantasy. Alfred Döblin's Poetics of Knowledge in the Context of Modernity, ed. by Sabine Becker and Robert Krause (= Yearbook for International German Studies. Series A, Vol. 95). Lang, Bern a. a., 2008, ISBN 978-3-03911-626-3 , pp. 299-320.
  • Torsten Hahn: "Destructive progress". For the experimental configuration of work and inertia in mountains, seas and giants. In: International Alfred Döblin Colloquium, ed. by Torsten Hahn. Lang, Bern a. a. 2002, pp. 106-129.
  • Volker Klotz: Döblin's epic penetrance. For sensible and sensual handling of mountains, seas and giants. In: Language in the technical age, No. 63, 1977, pp. 213-231.
  • Hannelore Qual: Nature and Utopia. Worldview and image of society in Alfred Döblin's novel Berge Meere und Giganten . Iudicium Verlag, Munich 1992.
  • Johannes Rauwald: Political and literary poetology (s) of the imaginary. On the potential of the forces of (self) change at Cornelius Castoriadis and Alfred Döblin . Wuerzburg 2013.
  • Wolfgang Riedel: Reconstruction of the earth or who creates the world? The battle between physis and techne in Alfred Döblin's science fiction, Berge Meere und Giganten (1924) . In: The Creation of the World. Old and New Creation Myths , ed. by Dorothea Klein. Würzburg 2012, pp. 135–151.
  • Annette Ripper: Reflections on the appropriation of the body and the aspect of bio-power in Alfred Döblin's mountains, seas and giants. In: Musil Forum. Studies on the literature of classical modernism, Vol. 30. Gruyter, 2007/2008, pp. 194–220.
  • Gabriele Sander: To the limits of the real and the possible: Studies on Alfred Döblin's novel Mountains, Seas and Giants. Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1988, ISBN 3-631-40651-7 .
  • Gabriele Sander: Alfred Döblin's novel Berge Meere und Giganten - read from the handwriting. A documentation of unknown text-genetic materials and new sources. In: Yearbook of the German Schiller Society, vol. 45. Körner, Stuttgart 2001, pp. 39–69
  • Klaus R. Scherpe: War, Violence and Science Fiction. Alfred Döblin's Mountains, Seas and Giants. In: International Alfred Döblin Colloquium Berlin 2001, ed. by Hartmut Eggert and Gabriele Prauß. Lang, Berlin 2001, ISBN 978-3-906768-72-4 , pp. 141-156.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Katharina Grätz: Different places, different knowledge. Döblins Mountains Seas and giants . In: International Alfred Döblin Colloquium Emmendingen 2007. Factual fantasy. Alfred Döblin's Poetics of Knowledge in the Context of Modernity, ed. by Sabine Becker and Robert Krause (= Yearbook for International German Studies. Series A, Vol. 95). Lang, Bern a. a., 2008, ISBN 978-3-03911-626-3 , p. 316.
  2. ↑ Matthias Prangel: Alfred Doblin. (= Realia for literature. Volume 105). 2nd Edition. Stuttgart 1978, p. 42.
  3. ↑ Matthias Prangel: Alfred Doblin. (= Realia for literature. Volume 105). 2nd Edition. Stuttgart 1978, pp. 42-43.
  4. ^ Hartmut Eggert: Alfred Döblin and the Berlin literary scene. A topography between the 'old' and the 'new' West ' , in: Weltfabrik Berlin. A metropolis as a subject of literature, ed. by Matthias Harder and Almut Hille. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2006, p. 84.
  5. ↑ Robert Leucht: Dynamics of Political Imagination. The German-language utopia from Stifter to Döblin in its international contexts, 1848-1930. (= Habilitation 2014). Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2016, ISBN 978-3-11-044149-9 , p. 371.
  6. ↑ Robert Leucht: Dynamics of Political Imagination. The German-language utopia from Stifter to Döblin in its international contexts, 1848-1930. (= Habilitation 2014). Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2016, ISBN 978-3-11-044149-9 , pp. 372–373.
  7. ↑ Gaetano Mitidieri: Science, technology and media in the work of Alfred Döblin in the context of the European avant-garde . (= Dissertation) University of Potsdam 2015, p. 541.
  8. ↑ Peter Härtling: Chaos without Chausseen. Ernst Blass on Alfred Döblin's mountains, seas and giants . In: Zeit, published on April 22, 1966, accessed on November 30, 2019, https://www.zeit.de/1966/17/ein-chaos-ohne-chausseen/komplettansicht .
  9. ^ Marcel Reich-Ranicki: Seven trailblazers. 20th century writer. dtv, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-423-13245-0 .
  10. ↑ Walter Delabar: The nightmare of reason and its monsters. Alfred Döblin's utopian novel Berge Meere und Giganten in a new edition . In: Literaturkritik.de, published on April 19, 2007, accessed on November 30, 2019 https://literaturkritik.de/id/10665
  11. ↑ Ulrich Holbein: Expressionism in the future tense II . In: Frankfurter Rundschau, updated on December 4, 2006, accessed November 30, 2019, https://www.fr.de/kultur/literatur/expressionismus-futur-11720625.html
  12. ↑ Gabriele Sander: To the limits of the real and the possible. Studies on Alfred Döblin's novel Mountains, Seas and Giants . Lang, Bern 1988, p. 2.
  13. ↑ Uwe Japp: Technology drafts in novels of the 20th century , in: Technology fictions and technology discourses. Lecture series of the Institute for Literary Studies in the summer semester 2009 (= Karlsruhe Studies Technology and Culture, Vol. 4), ed. by Simone Finkele and Burkhardt Krause. Karlsruhe 2012, p. 105.
  14. ↑ Grith Graebner: Creeping under the skin of life. Heinrich Hauser, life and work. A critical-biographical bibliography of works . (= Dissertation). Shaker Verlag, Aachen 2001, p. 142.