Alfred Döblin

The inspiration for Rainer Werner Fassbinder's epic film and that The Guardian named one of the "Top 100 Books of All Time," Berlin Alexanderplatz is considered one of the most important works of the Weimar Republic and twentieth century literature. Berlin Alexanderplatz, the great novel of Berlin and the doomed Weimar Republic, is one of the great books of the twentieth century--gruesome, farcical, and appalling, word-drunk, pitch-dark. In Michael Hofmann's extraordinary new translation, Alfred D blin's masterpiece lives in English for the first time. As D blin writes in the opening pages: The subject of this book is the life of the former cement worker and haulier Franz Biberkopf in Berlin. As our story begins, he has just been released from prison, where he did time for some stupid stuff; now he is back in Berlin, determined to go straight. To begin with, he succeeds. But then, though doing all right for himself financially, he gets involved in a set-to with an unpredictable external agency that looks an awful lot like fate. Three times the force attacks him and disrupts his scheme. The first time it comes at him with dishonesty and deception. Our man is able to get to his feet, he is still good to stand. Then it strikes him a low blow. He has trouble getting up from that, he is almost counted out. And finally it hits him with monstrous and extreme violence.

Alfred D blin'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 D blin'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.

Reissued as a paperback by Plunkett Lake Press, Destiny's Journey is a memoir reconstructed partly from notebooks that D blin kept from the time he worked in the French Ministry of Information in the spring of 1940 and partly written without notes in Los Angeles where he took refuge during the Second World War. It tells the personal and generational story of the flight of Jewish and anti-Nazi intellectuals from Europe to America, their fear and frustration, isolation, and inability to work. D blin's story differs from that of other Jewish intellectuals and artists in that his family converts to Catholicism in Los Angeles. Unlike most of them, he returns to Europe as an officer with the French forces and works on denazifying German literature. The conversion narrative bridges the departure from and return to Europe. "The first part of 'Destiny's Journey' about] D blin's departure from Paris in] 1940... is magisterial: acidly observed, saturated in telling detail, grimly comic and harrowing... with an exemplary introduction by Peter Demetz... an important, nourishing book" - John Simon, The New York Times

Alfred Bruno D blin (1878 - 1957) z hlt zu den f hrenden Expressionisten und Wegbereitern der literarischen Moderne, dessen bekanntestes Werk "Berlin, Alexanderplatz" zum Kanon der Schullekt re geh rt. D blins Einfluss auf die deutsche Literatur nach 1945 ist enorm. So erhielten Schriftsteller wie G nter Grass, Arno Schmidt oder Wolfgang Koeppen wichtige Anregungen f r ihr schriftstellerisches Schaffen. Der vorliegende Band umfasst 12 Erz hlungen, von denen die Titelgeschichte als Schl sseltext des literarischen Expressionismus gilt. "D blin war nicht nur einer der phantasiegewaltigsten Poeten; er war, zwischen Geburt und Tod, der umhergetriebenste, erfahrenste, vielf ltigste, am wenigsten lokale deutsche Repr sentant des Jahrhunderts." (Ludwig Marcuse) Nachdruck der zweiten Auflage aus dem Jahr 1913.