Alfred Döblin Mountains Oceans Giants An Epic of the 27th Century Translated by C D Godwin Volume One (contains Parts 1 and 2) I know of no attempt in literature that pulls together so boldly and directly the human and the divine, piling on every kind of action, thought, desire, love… Here perhaps the true face of “Expressionism” reveals itself for the first time. – Max Krell Originally published as Berge Meere und Giganten, S.Fischer Verlag, Berlin, 1924 This translation © C D Godwin 2019 This English translation of Alfred Döblin's Berge Meere und Giganten by C D Godwin is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Based on the work at https://www.fischerverlage.de/buch/berge_meere_und_giganten/9783596904648 I hereby declare: I have translated this work by Alfred Döblin as a labour of love, out of a desire to bring this writer to wider attention in the English-speaking world. My approaches to UK and US publishing houses have borne no fruit; and so this work, first published in German more than 90 years ago, risks remaining unknown to readers of English. I therefore make it available as a free download from my website https://beyond-alexanderplatz.com under the above CC licence. I acknowledge the rights of S. Fischer Verlag as copyright holder of the source material. I have twice approached S Fischer Verlag regarding copyright permissions for my Döblin translations, but have received no answer; hence my adoption of the most restrictive version of the CC licence. C. D. Godwin 2018 Picture credits (Volume 1) Front cover: Detail from The Temptation of Saint Anthony, by a follower of Hieronymus Bosch. Public domain https://beyond-alexanderplatz.com MOUNTAINS OCEANS GIANTS CONTENTS Translator’s Introduction Dedication Part One: The Western Continents The new people / Boosters / Anglo-Saxon Imperium / Rebellions / Milan Helots, eunuchs, women / Melise of Bordeaux Part Two: The Urals War Assault on the Machines / Flags / No Individual was an Incendiary / Wind and Water Theory / Light Paint / Synthetic Food / Upsets and Disturbances An enemy was sought / War Part Three: Marduk Homecoming / Consul Marke / In the Trees / The Usurper / Depopulation Marchers / Meeting with Marduk / The Russian plain / Zimbo / Angela Castel End of the women / Zimbo victorious Part Four: The Emptying of the Cities The hot continent / Exodus to the Yukon / Delegation from America / Ghosts and dramas / 1st Skit: Mansu the King / 2nd Skit: Hubeane / 3rd Skit: Tiger Hunt Snakes / 4th Skit: The Lion and the Jackal. / In Brussels / Delvil’s Notion Part Five: Iceland The Plan to Melt Greenland / Preparations for a Wedding / Shetland Billows of Oxygen-Nitrogen / Iceland / Basalt / The Island Splits Apart Fugitives / Tourmaline / The Continent Wanted Some Part Six: The Melting of Greenland To Greenland / Oil-clouds / The Mission Accomplished / Observation Squadron Fifteen Vessels met their End / Under the Shroud / Emergent Life Part Seven: The Giants Monsters come Ashore / Delvil’s new Plan / Tower-humans / Underground Time of True Humanity / Kylin’s Call / By the Campfire Part Eight: Venaska Sweet wilderness / Diuva / Moon Goddess / Precipice / Metamorphoses Lyons Burning / In Cornwall / After the Storm / Memorials TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION The 27th century: beleaguered elites decide to melt the Greenland icecap. Why? – to open up a new continent, for colonisation by the unruly masses. How? – by harvesting the primordial heat of the Earth from Iceland’s volcanoes. Nature fights back, and it all goes horribly wrong… In the early 1920s confirmed city-dweller Alfred Döblin – he was 15 before he saw his first cherry tree – became puzzled by a nagging sense of Nature: I experienced Nature as a secret. Physics as the surface, begging for explanations. Textbooks… knew nothing of the secret. Every day I experienced Nature as the World Being, meaning: weight, colour, light, dark, its countless materials, as a cornucopia of processes that quietly mingle and criss-cross. 1 Döblin sensed the seeds of another epic fiction: this time set in the future, following two historical novels.2 He began his new project with an episode eventually placed in Part 6: Mutumbo’s fleet, excavating the ocean to provide a refuge on the seabed, the waters held at bay by dreadful technologies. It became the lead-in to a grand venture: “I would not take off to the stars, this would be an adventure on the Earth, wrestling with the Earth.” And so human beings – “a kind of bacteria on Earth’s skin, grown over-mighty from brains and cleverness” – head for Iceland and Greenland. By early 1922, when he had essentially completed Parts 5 to 7, he could recognise the Theme that was speaking through him: “human strength against Nature’s power, the impotence of human strength.” I keep saying “Nature”. It’s not the same thing as “God”. It’s darker, huger than God. The complete whirling secret of the world.… Now as I wrote… I found myself facing a secure, strong power that demanded expression, and my novel had a specific task: to praise the World Being.3 Döblin’s Dedication gives voice to this urge. Readers accustomed to following a story via Plot and Character may at first be disoriented by this epic of the future. Its structure is more symphonic than novelistic, driven by themes and motifs that emerge, fade back, emerge again in new orchestral voicings and new tempi. The prose – supple, rhythmic, harsh, elegiac, tender, unsparing – propels the reader on through scene after vivid scene. Mountains Oceans Giants is a literary counterpart to the painted dreams and nightmares of Hieronymus Bosch, in The Garden of Earthly Delights and The Last Judgement. 1 AD: ‘Remarks on Mountains Oceans Giants. ’ Translated from Die neue Rundschau, June 1924. 2 The Three Leaps of Wang Lun (1916; trans C D Godwin, 2nd ed. NY Review Books 2015) set in 18th century China; and Wallenstein (1920) set in the Europe of the Thirty Years War; my translation can be found at https://beyond-alexanderplatz.com. 3 ‘Remarks…’ The Iceland-Greenland venture on which Döblin first unleashed his imagination is narrated with extraordinary intensity: the technologies for harvesting and storing Iceland’s volcanic heat, the human sacrifices the operation demands, the cosmic horror of this insult to Earth’s being. Oil-clouds are developed to blanket the Greenland icecap with Iceland’s heat, and the biosphere responds to Tourmaline in hideous seemingly magical ways, reviving long- extinct flora and fauna and creating ghastly new lifeforms. On completing the Iceland- Greenland episiodes, Döblin almost suffered a nervous collapse. How did humanity arrive at this point, where an overweening Promethean impetus4 has brought calamity to humans and the Earth? The first two Parts present a broad-brush overview of the six centuries following the historical calamity of the First World War. They highlight problematic themes that in many cases have become only more salient since Döblin wrote in the 1920s: mass urbanisation, local cultures transformed by migration, gender wars and uncertain sexual identities, junk food taken to the extreme, masses sedated by drugs and entertainments, Promethean meddling with the very basis of matter, both living and mineral, power and wealth ever more concentrated, political elites as clueless as they are ruthless. These centuries in which humanity persists on its industrial-technological track culminate in the dreadful Urals War, embarked on for frivolous reasons and abandoned without victory or defeat. A lingering PTSD afflicts masses languishing demoralised and degenerating under the effects of Synthetic Food. The ruthless Marduk, dictator of the Berlin townzone, embarks on a change of direction, to the disquiet of elites in other townzones, by encouraging depopulation and a revived agrarianism.5 More wars ensue. Anti-Promethean ‘primitive’ impulses come to the surface. Shamans, ghosts, and parables played out on the stage bring home to the suffering masses how unnatural is their way of life, and stimulate them to regain agency. The back-to-the-land Settler movement intensifies, and the London elite hit on a spiffing plan to defuse the tensions: open up new land for settlement – on Greenland. Calamity follows. The Greenland monsters unleashed by the mysterious power of the Tourmaline webbing bring havoc to Europe. The townzones retreat underground. A defensive line strung across land and sea from Norway to Ireland consists of Tower-humans: conglomerations of living and mineral matter activated by the power of Tourmaline into gigantic living piles, topped by a gigantified human; these intercept the monstrous flying dragons. In their subterranean laboratories, techno-elites continue to meddle with living and mineral matter, to the point where they can transform themselves into any life form. Post-human Giants rampage; but some (including Delvil, initiator of the Greenland plan) decide to face down the Greenland menace; they embed themselves in the granite moors of Cornwall and Devon. 4 In his 1938 essay ‘Prometheus and the Primitive’, Döblin explores humanity’s dual view of the world – as a resource for exploitation, or as an enduring source of mystery – through three millennia of western history. See my translation at https://beyond-alexanderplatz.com . 5 This section has been substantially abridged. See the Notes on translation, below. At last the survivors among the Greenland expeditionaries who make their way back to ruined Europe arrive in a gentle bucolic Aquitaine, to which Settlers have migrated to recover their humanity through toil in the fields and sacramental sex. Here the expeditionaries strive to come to terms with the meaning of their horrendous deeds. Döblin’s world-building is wanting in some respects – no IT; ‘fliers’ and underground trains coexist with horses; – but the encompassing theme of Humanity, Technology, and Nature focuses on enduring rather than transient features of humanity’s Promethean adventure.