"Liebe ist nur ein Wort": Der Streit zwischen Trieb und Geist im Fruhwerk Alfred Doblins

Abstract

<p>In his writing and his theoretical essays on literature Alfred Doblin tries to find a way to understand the inner reality of the human being. As we see in his early prose works from 1896-1903, he tries to show the individual's hopeless battle against his natural dependence on his basic drives. Doblin concludes that the human being is neither free to make rational decisions nor to able to love because of his dependency on the determining drives. In the following years Doblin in his essays tries to answer the question as to how, through literature, he might come closer to understanding and describing the real dependence of the human being has on unconscious forces, but we find his first attempts at this discussion linked to basic questions about the condition of human life, in his very first works of fiction.</p>