„Das indianische Kanaan“: Weltliteratur, Exil und epischer Fluss in Alfred Döblins Amazonas

Abstract

Abstract The paper reads Alfred Döblin’s novel Amazonas (1937/1938) in the context of current debates about world literature. It argues that these debates not only refer to a certain group of texts or to a literary system, but concern problems of reading and representation, namely how to read literature beyond the paradigms of national and comparative literature and how to represent a world, especially the modern globalized and secularized world. Döblin’s novel refers to different meanings of ‘world’ that are implied in these questions: It depicts the ‘discovery’ and violent colonization of the ‘New World’ both from the perspective of the indigene people and the Europeans, as well as the ‘Jesuit republic’ as a different project of colonization with an utopian aspect. Written in exile, it also uses the detour via an exotic setting to diagnose a crisis of Europe. Finally it tries to develop a narrative form beyond the novel, using different forms of mythic but also topographic narration which are figured as the materiality of the Amazonas-‘stream.’