Alfred Döblin Libri

Alfred Döblin (1878-1957) composed his epic trilogy of South America under difficult circumstances of exile. It was accessible on first publication in 1937-38 only outside Germany, and for only a couple of years before war broke out. The first postwar edition, like others of Döblin's works apart from Berlin Alexanderplatz, was little noticed in a Germany traumatised by Nazism and defeat. Neither the pre-war not the first post-war edition explicitly linked the separate volumes as parts of a unitary work. In the 1960s the separate novels were first brought together by Walter Muschg, editor of the first series of Döblin's 'selected works', under the overall title Amazonas. Muschg, however, decided to cut Volume 3 entirely. Not until 1973 did the trilogy first appear in full, in East Germany. Another 15 years passed before the first complete edition in West Germany. So only in the past three or four decades has this work begun to receive the critical attention it richly deserves. The epic is set mainly in South America, but its true focus is Europe. The urgent guiding proposition is: The Nazis did not emerge from nowhere.

A marriage gone horribly wrong; a secret female friendship and affair; a murder plot. This precursor to the true crime genre is told by Alfred Döblin, one of the giants of 20th century German literature and author of Berlin Alexanderplatz, which was named as one of the Guardian Top 100 Books of All Time.

Mitten im ersten Weltkrieg, als Militärarzt in Lothringen und im Elsaß, begann Döblin dieses Epos des Dreißigjährigen Krieges zu schreiben und damit eine neue Vision der Geschichte zu gestalten. Die ungeheuerlichen Ereignisse dieser Zeit: die Schlachten und Belagerungen, die flutenden Armeen und Flüchtlingsströme, Triumph und Elend der Fürsten und Generäle, das Ringen der Großen um die Macht und die namenlosen Leiden der Völker, die Gestalten Maximilians von Bayern, Kaiser Ferdinands, Wallensteins oder Tillys - das alles ergibt ein farbenprächtiges historisches Gemälde, und wie ein Wasserfall von Figuren und Ereignissen flutet die Tragödie eines Zeitalters am Leser vorbei. Mit seiner ungeheuren Sprachgewalt gehört Döblins Wallenstein zu den denkwürdigsten Werken der modernen Literatur. Zum 125. Geburtstag Döblins am 10. 08. 03: die erste historisch-kritische Ausgabe seines epochalen historischen Romans im Taschenbuch.