Abstract
When Alfred Döblin was writing Berlin Alexanderplatz, he was working as a doctor in Berlin. Influenced by Ernst Simmel, he was worried about the impact of the First World War on the mental life of the people in Berlin, and especially the phenomenon of war neurosis. War neurosis is an attempt to maintain psychic integrity and to ward off total dissolution and fragmentation. The phenomenon of war neurosis had devastating consequences on the capacity of people to ‘read’ the modern city and led to a problematic conception of self-protection. I situate the theory of war neurosis within a tradition of theorists, most notably Freud in Jenseits des Lustprinzips and Walter Benjamin in his writings on Baudelaire, who attempted to theorize the ‘stimulus shield’ people develop to cope with the daily shocks of modern life. Benjamin regards Proust’s mémoire involontaire or the correspondances of Baudelaire as tactics to retain a form of experience (Erfahrung) in times characterized by shock. Montage turns out to be an important tactic to make sense of the complex signs and stimuli that make up modern city life. By means of montage, Döblin wanted to restore the capacity to ‘read’ modern society and to overcome the ‘defensiveness’ of the traumatic state of society after the war, which made people incapable of finding their bearings in the modern city.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
References
Benjamin, W. (1974). In R. Tiedemann & H. Schweppenhäuser (Eds.), Gesammelte Schriften Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Benjamin, W. (1998). Understanding Brecht. London and New York: Verso.
Didi-Huberman, G. (2009). Quand les images prennent position. L’oeil de l’histoire 1. Les Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit.
Döblin, A. (1963). In W. Muschg (Ed.), Aufsätze zur Literatur. Olten und Freiburg im Breisgau: Walter Verlag.
Döblin, A. (2007). Berlin Alexanderplatz. Müchen: Deutcher Taschenbuch Verlag.
Fore, D. (2006). Döblin’s epic: Sense, document, and the verbal world picture. New German Critique, 99(Fall), 171–207.
Freud, S. (1940). Jenseits des Lustprinzips. In A. Freud, et al. (Eds.), Gesammelte Werke. Band XIII (pp. 1–69). Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag.
Fuechntner, V. (2004). Arzt und Dichter: Alfred Döblin’s medical, psychiatric and psychoanalytical work. In R. Dollinger & W. Köpke (Eds.), Camden House companion to Alfred Döblin (pp. 111–139). Rochester: Camden House.
Fuechtner, V. (2011). Berlin psychoanalytic, psychoanalysis and culture in Weimar Republic Germany and beyond. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Horn, E. (2003). Literary research: Narration and the epistemology of the human sciences in Alfred Döblin. MLN, 18(3), 719–739.
McBride, P. (2013). Konstruktion als Bildung: Refashioning the human in German constructivism. The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 88(3), 233–247.
Simmel, E. (1993). In L. M. Hermanns & U. Schultz-Venrath (Eds.), Psychoanalyse und ihre Anwendungen. Ausgewählte Schriften. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag.
Weber, S. (2008). Towards a politics of singularity. Protection and projection. In H. de Vries (Ed.), Religion, beyond a concept (pp. 626–644). New York: Fordham University Press.
Weber, S. (2010). Anxiety: The uncanny borderline of psychoanalysis. Konturen, 3, 45–62.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
De Cauwer, S. Beyond the Stimulus Shield: War Neurosis, Shock and Montage in Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz . Neophilologus 99, 97–112 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-014-9405-5
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-014-9405-5