The Soul-Stripped Body: Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929)

Abstract

Alfred Döblin: prose author, essay writer, theorist, doctor, and film buff. One name, multiple personalities — and not all of them compatible, as Döblin himself acknowledged. In an autobiographical essay from 1928, whose title “Zwei Seelen in einer Brust” is a clear riff on Faust’s famous lamentation “Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach! in meiner Brust,” the physician Döblin and the writer Döblin appear as distinct individuals talking about each other in a teasing, antagonistic manner. The publications of the latter leave the former “total gleichgültig” (Döblin 1986: 103), and the writer does not mince words either, calling the neurologist “mein gerades Gegenstück” (ibid: 105). This dramatization of Döblin’s divided allegiances was originally meant to be satirical, but over time it fueled the idea of an unbridgeable gap between his medical and literary pursuits. Recent scholarship has successfully challenged this misconception. Critics have started to look at Döblin’s medical writings in conjunction with his literary texts by way of demonstrating that an integrated approach is not just possible and worthwhile, but necessary in the case of someone with such varied interests. Untangling the intricacies of Döblin’s thinking on psychopathology and on other pressing issues of the time can shed new light on his fictional works, as well as on the interaction between literature and other disciplines during the early 20 century. In the spirit of this recent shift in critical paradigm, I wish to argue in this chapter that physical descriptions from Döblin’s novel of 1929 relate in complex ways to contemporaneous developments in mental health, novel writing, visual media, and politics.