"Jetzt Kommt das Leben": The Technological Body in Alfred Döblin's Berge Meere Und Giganten

Alfred Doblin occupies a curious position in the landscape of German modernism.1 If it were not for the canonical status of Berlin Alexanderplatz, he could easily passfora"forgottenauthor,"asonecritic pointedlyputit,inspiteofhiscomplex,diverse, and weighty oeuvre.2 Such lopsided reception stems in part from the difficulty of accounting for the vicissitudes of a biography that intersects with major moments in twentieth-century literary and cultural history without being readily assimilable toany of them.3From hisearlyengagementwithExpressionismand Futurismtothe literary celebrity that followed the publication of his city novel in 1929 and his alienatingwartime conversion t°Catholicism;4 from his avant-gardeembrace of technological modernity to a monist philosophy of nature;5 from his exploration of Eastern Jewry to his sustained engagement on behalf of the disenfranchised and suspicion of the organized politics of the left,6 Doblin's heterogeneous array of positions has prompted critics to elide the incongruous aspects of his thought to highlight his contribution to German modernism.In this essay, I focus on one of the most confounding and complex works in Doblin's oeuvre, his science fiction novel from 1924, Berge Meere und Giganten,a sprawling narrative chronicling the future history of humanity between the twentieth and twenty-seventh centuries. Scholars have endeavored to make sense of its conceptual and aesthetic peculiarities by reading it as a cautionary tale about the fateful struggle between nature and technology in industrial modernity.7 The novel would thus fit into a dichotomous discourse organized around a set of neat polarities between nature and technology, the organic and the mechanical, the armored body and the Kreatur, that supposedly dominated the cultural and political imaginary of Weimar culture.8 However, I will argue that Doblin's repeated disarticulation and reassemblage of bodies in the novel, far from constituting a warning against the Promethean hubris of the technological impulse, instead undermines conceptual dichotomies in which nature is pitted against technology, the organic against the mechanical, and the human against the non-human.9 The novel stages the entwinement, rupture, and fusion of human organs with technological apparatuses in order to allow immanent conceptual tensions to play out on the narrative level.Scholars of Weimar culture and the avant-garde have shown how the technological body was mobilized to rework categories of subjectivity, experience, gender, society, labor, and media, as part of a larger critique of a bourgeois humanism that privileged psychological interiority.10 While Doblin appropriates terms and tropes from this tradition in his Zukunftsroman, his aesthetic negotiation of the dual status of the body-as a tool and as the seat of the self-offers a far more complex figuration than the tropes of the armored or prosthetic body that circulate in other modernist art and fiction. Even the newer figure of the cyborg is not fully sufficient to account for Doblin's depictionoftechnology,sinceBergeMeereundGigantendisrupts the very distinction between biology and technology on which the cyborg is necessarily based. How is the cyborg to be understood, if the very prostheses, assemblages, and machines that constitute it are themselves already seen as biological and organic in nature?11Helmut Lethen's study from 1994, Verhaltenslehren der Kalte: Lebensversuche zwischen den Kriegen, serves as a useful theoretical foil for Doblin's novel precisely because the cultural and political polarities Lethen identifies in Weimar culture are constructed on the often tacitassumption of astrongdichotomy between nature and technology, organ and machine. Lethen draws heavily on the philosophical anthropology of Helmuth Plessner, and particularly on the latter's dictum (from Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch [1924]) that the human being is artificial by nature, in orderto ground his interpretation ofWeimar culture as broadlycharacterizedbya pessimistic anthropology, in which expressive immediacy and a concept of subjectivity based on psychic interiority were rejected. …