Alfred Döblin's Wadzek's Fight Against the Steam Turbine Part 3

Please join us in an Alfred Döblin seminar over the next two years where we will try to tackle and read all of Alfred Döblin's writings.

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.

In this meetup we will discuss his 1918 novel Wadzek's Fight Against the Steam Turbine in three meetings. Please read Pages 201-314 for this third Meetup.

Wadzeks Kampf mit der Dampfturbine (Wadzek's Struggle with the Steam Turbine) is a 1918 comic novel by the German author Alfred Döblin. Set in Berlin, it narrates the futile and often delusional struggle of the eponymous industrialist Wadzek against Rommel, his more powerful competitor. In its narrative technique and its refusal to psychologize its characters, as well as in its vivid evocations of Berlin as a modern metropolis, Wadzeks Kampf mit der Dampfturbine has been read as a precursor to Döblin's better-known 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz.

The novel, originally conceived by Döblin as a novel in "Kino-Stil" ("cinematic style"), is characterized by rapid shifts of perspective and the increasingly sophisticated use of montage. Döblin, having emphatically rejected the psychological novel in his 1913 essay "To novel writers and their critics," presents the reader of Wadzek with a depiction of characters from a perspective that, rather than offering psychological motivations for their actions, opts for a "psychiatric method" that records events and processes without commenting on them or attempting to explain them. Condemned by contemporary critics for its overly detailed and grotesque descriptive language, the novel's style has since received acknowledgment for its "radical naturalism".

Amazon Purchase Link:
https://www.amazon.com/Wadzeks-Fight-against-Steam-Turbine-ebook/dp/B08D7S8P12/ref=mp_s_a_1_34?qid=1684945984&refinements=p_27%3AAlfred+Doblin&s=books&sr=1-34