Alfred Döblin

Alfred Döblin (born Aug. 10, 1878, Stettin, Ger.—died June 26, 1957, Emmendingen, near Freiburg im Breisgau, W.Ger.) was a German novelist and essayist, the most talented narrative writer of the German Expressionist movement.

Döblin studied medicine and became a doctor, practicing psychiatry in the workers’ district of the Alexanderplatz in Berlin. His Jewish ancestry and socialist views obliged him to leave Germany for France in 1933 after the Nazi takeover, and in 1940 he escaped to the United States, where he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1941. He returned to Germany in 1945 at the war’s end to work for the Allied occupying powers, but he resettled in Paris in the early 1950s. He was seeking treatment in Germany for ill health when he died.

Although Döblin’s technique and style vary, the urge to expose the hollowness of a civilization heading toward its own destruction and a quasi-religious urge to provide a means of salvation for suffering humanity were two of his constant preoccupations. His first successful novel, Die drei Sprünge des Wang-lun (1915; The Three Leaps of Wang-lun), is set in China and describes a rebellion that is crushed by the tyrannical power of the state. Wallenstein (1920) is a historical novel, and Berge, Meere und Giganten (1924; “Mountains, Seas, and Giants”; republished as Giganten in 1932) is a merciless anti-utopian satire.

Döblin’s best-known and most Expressionistic novel, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929; Alexanderplatz, Berlin), tells the story of Franz Biberkopf, a Berlin proletarian who tries to rehabilitate himself after his release from jail but undergoes a series of vicissitudes, many of them violent and squalid, before he can finally attain a normal life. The book combines interior monologue (in colloquial language and Berlin slang) with a somewhat cinematic technique to create a compelling rhythm that dramatizes the human condition in a disintegrating social order.

Döblin’s subsequent books, which continue to focus on individuals destroyed by opposing social forces, include Babylonische Wandrung (1934; “Babylonian Wandering”), sometimes described as a late masterwork of German Surrealism; Pardon wird nicht gegeben (1935; Men Without Mercy); and two unsuccessful trilogies of historical novels. He also wrote essays on political and literary topics, and his Reise in Polen (1926; Journey to Poland) is a stimulating travel account. Döblin recounted his flight from France in 1940 and his observations of postwar Germany in the book Schicksalsreise (1949; Destiny’s Journey).