Chicago Alexanderplatz: Alfred Döblin's Bright Magic: Stories

Chicago Alexanderplatz is a subgroup of Modernist Fiction that will inaugurate a new series of Meetups dedicated to German Literary Modernism and exploring the life and work of Alfred Döblin, author of the 1929 German Modernist Classic—Berlin Alexanderplatz.

Alfred Döblin is widely known for only this one novel, which has overshadowed all his prior and subsequent work. In recent years, there has been a renaissance of sorts in the reception of Döblin in English, thanks to the pioneering new translation of Berlin Alexanderplatz by Michael Hofmann published by NYRB Classics in 2018, and the launch of Beyond Alexanderplatz by the translator Chris Godwin, a website dedicated to exploring Döblin’s lesser known work and nonfiction.

With August 10, 2028 marking the 150th Anniversary of his birth and June 26, 2027 marking as well the 70th Anniversary of his death, it feels right to start exploring his complete works in an Alfred Döblin Seminar series over the next two years.

In this meetup we will begin our two year Döblin Seminar with discussing his short stories in the collection Bright Magic.

Alfred Döblin’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 Döblin’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.

Amazon Link:
https://www.amazon.com/Bright-Magic-Stories-Review-Classics/dp/1590179730/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=bright+magic+alfred&qid=1606772673&sr=8-1