How did hitler come about? This question pre-occupied German authors in exile to the exclusion of nearly all others, and spurred ever-new attempts at answers. To a great extent, Döblin's exile work is likewise determined by this question. All the novels he wrote after his flight from Berlin are, to a certain extent, reflections on the history of National Socialist rule, and have the Third Reich as their vanishing point, so to speak. Babylonische Wandrung oder Hochmut kommt vor dem Fall (published 1934–35), a wide-ranging survey of the history of violence, ends with the echoes of the marching steps of soldiers. Pardon wird nicht gegeben (1934–35) recapitulates the political-social development between 1895 and 1930, thus ending with the world economic crisis that paved the way for the rise of National Socialism. The Amazon trilogy (1937–38) portrays the murderous conquest of South America by Europeans and the destructive tendencies within European “civilization”; performing a remarkable leap across two centuries, it too ends with the time when National Socialism came to power. The voluminous “Erzählwerk” November 1918, finally, is a multi-layered account of the events in which Döblin saw the actual origins of National Socialist rule: the disastrous First World War and the subsequent “German revolution” of 1918/19, which was crushed by the combined efforts of the Social Democratic national government, the general staff, the army, and the Freikorps. Döblin saw the National Socialists’ coming to power and their accompanying brutal acts of violence as the culmination and conclusion of the ill-fated German revolution. The question of what made Hitler's rule possible — a question posed by Döblin also in his speech at the Pablo Rey Playhouse in Santa Monica in August 1943, on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday — thus focused on the revolution of 1918/19, often referred to as the “November revolution.” It became the topic of Döblin's most extensive narrative work, the current edition of which spans 1,950 pages.

The first volume as originally conceived, Bürger und Soldaten 1918, was the only part of the novel to be published before the Second World War, appearing with Querido in Amsterdam in 1939.