Overview

Towards the end of 1937, having just completed his South American Amazonas trilogy (The Land without Death), Döblin embarked on a new project much closer to home. As a military doctor in Alsace he had experienced firsthand the chaotic scenes in Haguenau and Strasbourg that followed the Kaiser's abdication and the Armistice. His skill at depicting historical events in vivid epic prose would now be applied to seminal events still within living memory, and still highly controversial. He and his family (now with three small children) left Alsace on 14 November 1918 with the hospital staff and patients, reaching Berlin several days later. In March 1919 he witnessed the savage repression of the uprising in Lichtenberg, the eastern Berlin district where he had settled; his sister Meta was killed by grenade shrapnel as she fetched milk for her children. His essay On Cannibalism reveals his anger at both the ineptitude of the insurgents and the callousness of the Social Democrat Minister of War, Noske. Citizens and Soldiers, the self-contained first volume of November 1918: A German Revolution, presents a vivid panorama of fictional and real individuals, scenes and events over a chaotic two weeks. It was published in Amsterdam and Stockholm in October 1939, shortly after Britain and France declared war on Germany. Unsurprisingly it had little chance to circulate. During his exile years in California (1940-45), Döblin completed the remaining parts of what became the longest of his nine epic novels. When in 1947 the question arose of publishing the entire work in Germany, the French Occupation Authority (in which Döblin was serving as Public Education Officer) vetoed Citizens & Soldiers because of sensitivities about the status of Alsace-Lorraine, main location of the novel's action. November 1918 A German Revolution therefore appeared as three volumes successively in autumn 1948, spring 1949 and spring 1950. This truncated edition was the basis for an incomplete English translation in the 1980s. In Germany, a complete edition appeared only in 1978, two decades after Döblin's death, enabling for the first time a proper evaluation of what is now seen as one of Döblin's most impressive achievements. It is high time that English readers too should have access to the missing first volume: Citizens & Soldiers.

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Alfred Döblin, born in Stettin in 1878. For nearly three decades (until exiled in 1933) he pursued a double career as doctor and writer. His first epic novel (The Three Leaps of Wang Lun) appeared in 1916. His greatest success was Berlin Alexanderplatz published in 1929. In 1933 Döblin emigrated to France, and in 1940 escaped the German invasion to spend the war years in Los Angeles. In 1945 he moved back to Germany. He died on June 26, 1957.

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