Alfred Döblin (1878–1957) was born in German Stettin
(now the Polish city of Szczecin), to Jewish parents. When he was
ten his father, a master tailor, eloped with a seamstress,
abandoning the family. Subsequently his mother relocated the rest
of the family to Berlin. Döblin studied medicine at Friedrich
Wilhelm University, specializing in neurology and psychiatry. While
working at a psychiatric clinic in Berlin, he became romantically
entangled with two women: Friede Kunke, with whom he had a son,
Bodo, in 1911, and Erna Reiss, to whom he had become engaged before
learning of Kunke’s pregnancy. He married Erna the next year, and
they remained together for the rest of his life. His novel The
Three Leaps of Wang Lun was published in 1915 while Döblin was
serving as a military doctor; it went on to win the Fontane Prize.
In 1920 he published Wallenstein, a novel set during the
Thirty Years’ War that was an oblique comment on the First World
War. He became president of the Association of German Writers in
1924, and published his best-known novel, Berlin
Alexanderplatz, in 1929, achieving modest mainstream fame
while solidifying his position at the center of an intellectual
group that included Bertolt Brecht, Robert Musil, and Joseph Roth,
among others. He fled Germany with his family soon after Hitler’s
rise, moving first to Zurich, then to Paris, and, after the Nazi
invasion of France, to Los Angeles, where he converted to
Catholicism and briefly worked as a screenwriter for
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. After the war he returned to Germany and
worked as an editor with the aim of rehabilitating literature that
had been banned under Hitler, but he found himself at odds with
conservative postwar cultural trends. He suffered from Parkinson’s
disease in later years and died in Emmendingen in 1957. Erna
committed suicide two months after his death and was interred along
with him.
Damion Searls is a translator from German, French,
Norwegian, and Dutch and a writer in English. His own books include
What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going, The Inkblots, and The
Philosophy of Translation. He received the Helen and Kurt Wolff
Translator's Prize in 2019 for Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries.
Günter Grass (1927–2015) was born in the Free City of
Danzig, to a German father and a Kashubian Polish mother. He
published The Tin Drum in 1959 and soon became one of
Germany’s most prominent postwar intellectuals. Throughout his life
he was an outspoken Social Democrat and critic of German
reunification. He went on to publish numerous novels,
including Crabwalk and two sequels to The Tin
Drum: Cat and Mouse and Dog Years. In 1999, he was
awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died in Lübeck at the age
of eighty-seven.
“Bright Magic is the work of a sorcerer, an indispensable
translation welcome in any cabinet of wonders.” —Publishers
Weekly
"Essential anthology of short works by the master of German
literary expressionism...Döblin's stories are uplifting in their
elegance and beauty.” —Kirkus starred review
"An indisputable, though often overlooked, pioneer of modernism is
Alfred Döblin...remarkably, Bright Magic: Stories, translated by
Damion Searls, is the first publication of Döblin's short fiction
in English...[There is] always a courship of the absurd, and
language that is as vivid as Technicolor and as jarring as a car
crash." —Christine Smallwood, Harper's Magazine
“Page by page, sentence by sentence, the writing moves from the
humorous to the grotesque to the philosophical to the tragic,
offering small and lasting pleasures of the kind we don’t often get
from a 500 page novel or a 15-hour long TV series. Döblin’s stories
echo and reverberate with all of 20th century German literature,
and the more we read, the clearer it becomes that other writers are
echoing Döblin.” —Ben Sandman, Full Stop
“Without the futurist elements of Döblin’s work from Wang Lun to
Berlin Alexanderplatz, my prose is inconceivable...He’ll discomfort
you, give you bad dreams. If you’re satisfied with yourself, beware
of Döblin.”—Günter Grass
“I learned more about the essence of the epic from Döblin than from
anyone else. His epic writing and even his theory about the epic
strongly influenced my own dramatic art.”—Bertolt Brecht
“As we look back over the rich literary output of this great
writer, as we look back over the long and fruitful life of this
fighter and this friend of man, this perennial spring of spiritual
life, we venture to ask: When will the gentlemen [sic] of the Nobel
Prize jury discover him?”—Ludwig Marcuse, Books Abroad
“[A] major writer who grappled with the roots of darkness in our
time...”—Ernst Pawel, The New York Times
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