DÖBLIN POET AND DOCTOR
Alfred Döblin was a German psychiatrist as well as
novelist (Berlin Alexanderplatz, 1929).
He had a colorful and difficult life.
He fled the Nazis to France and escaped around 1940 to the U.S. where he
lived unhappily in Hollywood and knew other refugees like Brecht. In about 1946, Döblin headed rapidly back to Germany. His last decade, about 1947-1957, was also
difficult. Increasingly forgotten, he
lived in both Germany and France but after 1952 was increasingly disabled by
Parkinson’s and other illnesses. He did,
however, live to the advanced age of 78. 1878-1957.
This is one passage he left behind re: Parkinson’s disease.
Since this affliction seized me and carries me off into the
darkness like a tiger carrying away a deer; since my legs and my hands now hang
from me almost uselessly; since my voice fails me more and more, and more and
more craters of wounds open within me—since then, from time to time, I look out
the window…
There in Paris at the iron metro overpass, but my attention
no longer belongs to the world outside. It belongs nowhere—or perhaps somewhere
I cannot name.
Memory grows dim. Thoughts seem less my own than visitors
moving through me, and I let them come and go.
In sleep there arise dreamlike oases, islands of existence in
a desert, experiences in which I take part. Recently these visions have shone
with a happiness unlike any I had ever known. It seemed to me that I had passed
beyond the frontier of life and entered another realm of being. Does life end
with death? Death, I felt, is merely an empty word.
And below is a Chat GPT translation of his two-page essay in
which Döblin the doctor discusses Döblin the poet, and vice-versa.
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TLDR
This essay below is a witty
self-portrait split into two mock interviews: “Dr. Döblin” dismisses “the
poet Döblin” as obscure, overly difficult, politically confusing, and not
worth much attention; then “the poet Döblin” visits “Dr. Döblin” and
finds him a hard-working, anonymous Berlin panel doctor, almost the poet’s
opposite — not a prima donna, but “a gray soldier in a quiet army.”
The joke is that Döblin stages
his own divided identity: doctor versus writer, public literary ego versus
ordinary clinical laborer, observer versus observed.
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The Neurologist Döblin on the Poet Döblin
As a physician, the poet who bears my name is known to me
only from a great distance. To speak honestly, he is really not known to me at
all. I have a medium-sized, not overly large, panel medical practice in eastern
Berlin; I am a neurologist/psychiatrist, and during the day I am reasonably
occupied with that.
My literary inclinations are not great. Books bore me
considerably. As for the books by the man who, as you say, bears my name, I
have occasionally picked them up at acquaintances’ houses; but what I saw there
was completely foreign to me and also totally indifferent. This gentleman seems
to have a great imagination, but I cannot go along with it. My income permits
me neither trips to India nor to China. And so I cannot check up on what he
writes. Besides, I prefer to read such things in the original — namely, actual
travel descriptions, of which, incidentally, I am a great lover.
Nor can I do anything with this gentleman — I mean the
author who has the same name as I do — because of his style. He is simply too
difficult for me. One cannot ask exhausted people to work their way through
such things voluntarily.
Permit me, by the way, a general remark that may sound
somewhat political or ethical. More than this author’s books, I know his
occasional public statements, which my newspaper brings me — and of course I
read my newspaper. I must confess, I cannot make sense of the man, politically
or generally. My appetite to get to know him does not grow after these
statements. Sometimes he seems definitely to stand on the left, even very far
left — left squared, so to speak. Then again he utters sentences that are either
thoughtless, which is quite impermissible in a man of his age, or else he acts
as though he stood above the parties, smiling in poetic arrogance.
In short: it was you, Mr. Editor, who asked me for my
opinion about the author, the man with the red rose. The accidental coincidence
of names led you to do so. I myself would never have concerned myself with him,
any more than with the other young authors. And I say once more, briefly: the
gentleman is almost unknown to me; he does not interest me; I am related to him
neither by blood nor by marriage; and I calmly await his judgment of me, since
you have informed me that you intend to question him about me as well. His
apparently humorous attacks will not touch me.
The Poet Döblin on the Neurologist Döblin
I am very grateful to you, Mr. Editor, although at Easter,
as you can imagine, I have all sorts of things to suffer from — questionnaires
and so on — that you have put this curious question to me and, in a certain
respect, enriched my knowledge.
I am just now occupied with a Berlin novel — I mean, an epic
work in normal language — dealing with eastern Berlin, the area around
Alexanderplatz and the Rosenthaler Tor. So your request that I comment on the
neurologist/psychiatrist of my name was an interesting hint. Perhaps I can get
some more material there, I thought — not only from the Salvation Army, the
cattle yard, and criminal files.
So I went there, and I will report to you. The gentleman
makes a lively and not at all bad impression. I was at his office hours; I sat
in his waiting room. Such a waiting room is the strangest milieu one can
imagine. And when I introduced myself to the gentleman and we had laughed at
each other — we come, God knows, from the most different regions — he told me
many things, which, with his permission, I immediately wrote down.
These panel doctors are not to be envied. I saw the
peculiar, intensely pressured work in which he moved, and with especially
constituted patients besides. I am convinced he is no special specimen in this
branch, but precisely the way he worked there anonymously pleased me quite a
bit. He is my exact opposite, it occurred to me in passing, as he handled
things matter-of-factly, spoke, paid attention: I am always a solo dancer, a
prima donna, as my publisher once said; he is a gray soldier in a quiet army.
I am convinced I made no particular impression on my
namesake. Several times I grew quite anxious when he looked at me with a
psychotherapeutic gaze. I have all sorts of defects, probably complexes, and
the old hand there likely smelled something of the sort. Please do not be angry
with me if I confess to you that for this reason I did not deepen my knowledge
or my acquaintance with this namesake very much.
Honestly speaking, I did not feel very comfortable sitting
in the chair opposite him; too many unpleasant things come to mind there. But I
retain a good memory of the slender, not tall man with the doctor’s spectacles,
and I would actually be pleased if you would tell me what this anonymous man —
to whom I was surely not an author, but merely a human being — told you about
me.
