Biographical Overview

Alfred Döblin (1878–1957) belongs to a generation of German prose writers of extraordinary distinction. The best known among his contemporaries are Heinrich and Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, Franz Werfel, Erich Maria Remarque, Lion Feuchtwanger, Joseph Roth, Ernst Jünger, Hans Fallada, and Hermann Kesten; not to mention playwrights like Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Toller, Carl Zuckmayer, and Georg Kaiser; and poets like Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan George, Georg Trakl, Georg Heym, Else Lasker-Schüler, and Gottfried Benn. In this field of enormous literary creativity, Döblin must be regarded as one of the most innovative writers of epic prose. His best-known novel Berlin Alexanderplatz was compared with James Joyce's Ulysses (written 1914–21) and John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer (1925). Döblin's oeuvre is by no means limited to novels, but in this genre, he offered a surprising variety of narrative techniques, themes, structures, and outlooks from his first-published “Chinese” novel Die drei Sprünge des Wang-lun (1915–16) to his last “Novellenroman” Hamlet oder Die lange Nacht nimmt ein Ende (1956). During the intervening fifty years, he published Wallenstein (1920), a monumental panorama of the Thirty Years’ War; Berge Meere und Giganten (1924), a grim view of the future of humankind; Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), his famous big-city epic; Amazonas (1937–38), a critique of European colonial imperialism; and November 1918 (written between 1937 and 1943, but first published in 1948–50), a narrative reflection on the failed revolution in Germany after the First World War and the precedents of Nazism — to name but the most important titles of his multi-faceted work. Although the collected works are now available in over thirty volumes, coming close to a comprehensive edition of all of Döblin's writings, they are still modestly called Ausgewählte Werke in Einzelbänden.

Döblin became one of the most prominent figures on the literary scene in Berlin during the Weimar Republic. His productivity was surprising, considering that until 1933 his main occupation remained his medical practice in Berlin. Döblin the writer, whose imagination roamed the world and history, and Döblin the physician, who saw the world with the eyes of a scientific and clinical observer, cannot and should not be separated.