Döblin, die Stadt und das Licht by Oliver Jungen (review)

Abstract

MLR, 98.4, 2003 1057 tion in a 1939 letter to his son Klaus, quoted here in Paul Bishop's illuminating essay on the intellectual world of Thomas Mann: 'But in the end, to inherit something, one has to understand it; inheritance is, after all, culture' (p. 41). University of California, Irvine Jens Rieckmann Doblin, die Stadt und das Licht. By Oliver Jungen. (Cursus, 15) Munich: Iudicium. 2001. 200 pp. ?16.50. ISBN 3-89129-465-4(pbk). It is not the least of the virtues of Oliver Jungen's study that it packs a great deal into a very brief compass, and italso packs a considerable (theoretical) punch. Almost half of the argument is taken up by a discussion of the implications of light and light imagery within the Western European tradition. They are (as one would imagine) manifold. There are, for example, weighty theological inflections to be noted, and also cultural-historical resonances (having to do, for example, with the metaphorics of Enlightenment, with the growth of the modern city as the site of technically producible light). Moreover, images of light being shed in dark places link suggestively with (often self-reflexive) notions about the work of art itself, with certain forms of divinatory reading, with manifestations of hermeneutic epiphany. Yet light has not been a universally welcome or beneficent phenomenon: light, in the form of torches, lamps, searchlights, can be symptomatic of surveillance and oppression. Oliver Jungen is marvellously alive to the range of his chosen theme and metaphor; and in the second part of his study he exemplifies the meaning(s) of light with refer? ence to Alfred Doblin's work. If I find the textually interpretative part of his study a little disappointing, it is, I suspect, because he chooses to range over the whole of Doblin's vast oeuvre. In the process we tend to be rushed from one example of light to the next, without time and space being allowed forthe thematic and stylistic instances to find their appropriate expressivity in the context of the individual works. However, I do not want to end on a negative note. Jungen's study is a lively and vigorous account of a key preoccupation of the modern literary imagination, and one is grateful for the range and urgency of his writing. University College London Martin Swales Die Apokalypsein der WeimarerRepublik. By Jurgen Brokoff. Munich: Fink. 2001. 187 pp. ?30.60. ISBN 3-7705-3603-7 (pbk). Jurgen Brokoff's book, the result ofthorough doctoral research, concentrates on an in? creasingly fashionable subject. Klaus Vondung, a venerable predecessor of Brokoff's, offeredan ambitious study of the topic, Die Apokalypse in Deutschland (Munich: dtv, 1988), which is both wider and less focused in terms of intent and design. Vondung's reader benefits from the vast panorama of the motif he sketches in the book and from the numerous parallels and rich allusions; but the inclination towards a certain omnivorousness is hard to miss: almost every conceivable fact and detail of German culture proves related to the apocalyptic in Vondung's interpretation. Brokoff is thus determined to delineate more acutely the boundaries of his subject, and he wisely suggests that he is not interested in the apocalyptic as a particular mental disposition or spiritual experience, but would rather explore it as a discursive formation by paying attention to the intersections between particular ideas and uses of language that produce the modern apocalyptic. To do so, he discusses the work of four authors: ...