Beyond the Stimulus Shield: War Neurosis, Shock and Montage in Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz

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.