Facing a Dark Horizon. Alfred Döblin in the Quest for a New Judea

Abstract

The writer Alfred Döblin (1878-1957), one of the most important voices of German Modernism, became involved in neo-territorialism in the 1930’s in search for territories to colonize for the Jewish diaspora. This article traces the exile’s positions concerning the movement and in particular his search for a ‘complete renewal’ of Judaism. For Döblin, this colonial project was at its core an utopian endeavour, and it was introduced as such in his Amazonas triology (1937), after his political activism had ceased. The analysis of his Jewish writings explores the nexus between an acute consciousness of crisis and the imagination of another form of communi