Chicago Alexanderplatz: Alfred Döblin's Prometheus and the Primitive

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 1938 essay on nature and the environment: Prometheus and the Primitive as a prelude to next month’s read through of Mountains Oceans Giants.

What is Nature?
She presents herself as Nature writ large, in the myriad starry worlds. On our Earth she brings forth crystals, animals, plants, people. She shows herself in the changing seasons, she is thunderstorms, heat, cold. We experience her in the simplicity of slow silent fecundity, in gentle never-ending growth, in the transience of life with its youth and age and in great catastrophes, in earthquakes, floods, volcanic eruptions.

She does not dwell in any single presence, finds no sufficiency in any one of her creations. She surges through Time, ever developing and thereby swiftly or slowly subverting herself. Time is her element par excellence, she is inconceivable without Time and without the change inherent in it, the constant unfurling and discarding, dissolving and reconstructing.

The article’s title reflects the same polarity that governs the narration in the trilogy: Prometheus standing for the human desire to rule and to discover, and the “primitive” referring to the original harmony of humankind with nature. Since the beginning of history, according to Döblin, humans have been torn between two opposing forces: on the one side the striving for new territory in both physical and spiritual terms, and on the other side the attempt to regain lost ties to nature. Since neither of the two forces occurs without a trace of the other, each gain by one side causes an increase in the desire for the other, and both sides share the hope of arriving at a synthesis, a goal that no human being ever seems to be able to achieve. Döblin lists the original sin of Adam and Eve, symbolized by their eating the forbidden fruit, and Prometheus’s robbing the fire from the gods as examples of mythological transgressions in the one direction (away from nature), and the irrational veneration of the golden calf by the Israelites and the rebellion of the early Christians against the rational system of the Roman state as examples of mankind’s going in the opposite direction (toward nature and primitivism). The battle between the two forces reached a stage of crisis during the sixteenth century as a result of the Protestant Reformation’s secularization of medieval religious values and the Renaissance’s placement of the human individual in the center of the universe. Never before, says Döblin, has the Promethean force in humans gone to such an extreme as during the past three hundred years, because people have become “nihilistically frozen” and “The breeding, specialisation, and objectification of humans is pursued proudly and deliberately."

Online Text:
https://beyond-alexanderplatz.com/prometheus-and-the-primitive-the-essay/