Before the publication ofBerlin Alexanderplatz (1929), the work for which he is most commonly remembered, Alfred Döblin already had an established reputation as a radical literary experimenter. He had been engaging forcefully in the cultural debates of the Berlin avant-garde since around 1910, and the novels he published from 1915 on were uncompromising in their depiction of the materiality of human existence and of the capacity of human beings, individually and collectively, for extreme forms of behavior. Döblin's historical vision, coupled with his energetic pursuit of innovative narrative techniques, made him an inspirational figure for the rising generation of the 1920s, among them Bertolt Brecht. At the same time, however, Döblin's epic imagination was also engaging with metaphysical questions — the place of humankind in the cosmos and the intimate connections between human endeavor and the forces of nature — and it might be argued that his later writings bring a consummation of tendencies that can already be detected in his publications of the Weimar period, but toward which the intellectual climate of that time had been inhospitable. His trilogy November 1918 (1939–50) combines a remarkably detailed account of the historical situation from which the Weimar Republic had emerged with a personal quest for religious orientation on the part of the main protagonist.