Alfred Döblin

"Tatsachenphantasie" hat Döblin vom modernen Roman gefordert. Und wenn es in der literarischen Moderne einen Roman gibt, der von einer entfesselten, grenzenlosen Tatsachenphantasie angetrieben wird, dann ist es Döblins :Wallenstein9 aus dem Jahr 1920. Mit seinen opulenten und schockierenden Bildern vom Dreißigjährigen Krieg spiegelt der Roman nicht nur den zeitgenössischen Wahnsinn des Ersten Weltkriegs wider, sondern er verweist bereits auf die Barbarei, die noch kommen wird.

Etsitkö jännitystä, uusia näkökulmia tai rentouttavaa lukuelämystä? Tutustu kirjakategorioihimme ja löydä seuraava suosikkikirjasi.

Tervetuloa Pohjoismaiden suurimpaan verkkokirjakauppaan! Adlibris kannattaa sananvapautta, ja haluamme edistää kirjallisuuden ja tiedon saatavuutta.

To an unnamed city in an unnamed country comes an unnamed rural family, left bereft and indebted by the sudden death of the man of the house - a jovial spendthrift. Though unguided by names, we are clearly in Berlin in the years between Germany''s unification in 1871 and the economic collapse of 1929-1933, compressed to a one-generation timeline. The city, its industrial class, its hand-to-mouth underbelly, the debt-ridden family itself, emerge with astonishing reality from a vivid narrative moving effortlessly from authorial viewpoint to interior monologue. The central figure is Karl - eldest son, skilled at every rural task and at sea amid the very different urban milieu. To make sure of him as the family breadwinner; his mother beaks his will. Karl climbs from apprentice in his uncle''s furniture factory to owner, husband of a trophy wife, father of two accessory children. As social tensions mount, Karl must decide either to continue with his fraud of a life, or attempt to follow the path not taken as a teenager when his mother stopped him from absconding with an anarchist friend. He tries but fails to make contact with rebel forces in open rebellion against the government. He is killed. Tautly composed and written (compared with the expansive epic novels) Expect No Mercy provides incomparable insight into the tragedy of German history in the 19th and 20th centuries.

The inspiration for Rainer Werner Fassbinder's epic film and that The Guardian named one of the "Top 100 Books of All Time," Berlin Alexanderplatz is considered one of the most important works of the Weimar Republic and twentieth century literature. Berlin Alexanderplatz, the great novel of Berlin and the doomed Weimar Republic, is one of the great books of the twentieth century--gruesome, farcical, and appalling, word-drunk, pitch-dark. In Michael Hofmann's extraordinary new translation, Alfred D blin's masterpiece lives in English for the first time. As D blin writes in the opening pages: The subject of this book is the life of the former cement worker and haulier Franz Biberkopf in Berlin. As our story begins, he has just been released from prison, where he did time for some stupid stuff; now he is back in Berlin, determined to go straight. To begin with, he succeeds. But then, though doing all right for himself financially, he gets involved in a set-to with an unpredictable external agency that looks an awful lot like fate. Three times the force attacks him and disrupts his scheme. The first time it comes at him with dishonesty and deception. Our man is able to get to his feet, he is still good to stand. Then it strikes him a low blow. He has trouble getting up from that, he is almost counted out. And finally it hits him with monstrous and extreme violence.

Alfred D blin's many imposing novels, above all Berlin Alexanderplatz, have established him as one of the titans of modern German literature. This collection of his stories --astonishingly, the first ever to appear in English--shows him to have been a master of short fiction too. Bright Magic includes all of D blin's first book, The Murder of a Buttercup, a work of savage brilliance and a landmark of literary expressionism, as well as two longer stories composed in the 1940s, when he lived in exile in Southern California. The early collection is full of mind-bending and sexually charged narratives, from the dizzying descent into madness that has made the title story one of the most anthologized of German stories to "She Who Helped," where mortality roams the streets of nineteenth-­century Manhattan with a white borzoi and a quiet smile, and "The Ballerina and the Body," which describes a terrible duel to the death. Of the two later stories, "Materialism, A Fable," in which news of humanity's soulless doctrines reaches the animals, elements, and the molecules themselves, is especially delightful.