Döblin, Alfred

Döblin, Alfred (äl`frĕt döblĭn`), 1878–1957, German novelist and physician. His experiences as a psychiatrist in the workers' district of Berlin served as the basis for his experimental novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929, tr. 1931), in which he applied the techniques of James Joyce's Ulysses to his story of the life of a Berlin worker. Other novels include Die drei Sprünge des Wang-lun [the three leaps of Wang-lun] (1915) and Pardon wird nicht gegeben (1935, tr. Men without Mercy, 1937). Döblin left Germany in 1933, lived in France and the United States, and returned to Germany after World War II.

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Döblin, Alfred

(born Aug. 10, 1878, Stettin, Ger.—died June 26, 1957, Emmendingen, near Freiburg im Breisgau, W.Ger.) German novelist and essayist. He studied medicine at the Universities of Berlin and Freiburg, specializing in psychiatry. His first novel, The Three Leaps of Wang-Lun (1915), describes the quashing of a rebellion in China. His best-known work, Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929; film, 1931; adapted for television, 1980), is written in an Expressionist vein and dramatizes the miseries of working-class life in a disintegrating social order. His Jewish ancestry and socialist views compelled him to leave Germany upon the Nazi takeover, and he fled to France (1933) and then to the U.S. (1940), resettling in Paris in the early 1950s.

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Döblin, Alfred 

Born Aug. 10, 1878, in Stettin; died June 28, 1957, in Emmendingen. German writer. Exponent of German expressionism.

Doblin wrote the mystical-philosophical novel The Three Leaps of Wang Lun (1915), the historical novel Wallenstein (1920), and the Utopian novel Mountains, Seas and Giants (1924). A realistic tendency is embodied in the novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929; Russian translation, 1935). In 1933, Dóblin emigrated to France and then to the USA. During the prewar years and later, Dóblin preached the ideas of Catholicism (the trilogy The Amazons, 1937-48). In the tetralogy November 1918 (1918-50), Dóblin sought to interpret the November Revolution in Germany from a Christian point of view. After returning to Germany in 1945, Dóblin published a literary and philosophical magazine with a Catholic orientation, Das Goldene Tor. In 1955 he emigrated to France from West Germany, having expressed his disagreement with the reactionary policies of the Bonn government. Dóblin’s last novel, Hamlet or the End of a Long Night (1956), was strongly antiwar (published only in the GDR).

WORKS

Hamlet, oder Die lange Nacht nimmt ein Ende. Berlin, 1957. Pardon wird nicht gegeben. Berlin [1961].
Die Vertreibung der Gespenster. Berlin, 1968. (Bibliography on pages 546-48.)

REFERENCES

Rubin, V. “Malen’kie Liudi.” Inostrannaia literatura, 1956, no. 10.
Schwimmer, H. Erlebnis und Gestaltung der Wirklichkeit bei A. Dóblin. [Munich] 1960.
Peitz, W. A. Doblin Bibliographic 1905-1966. Freiburg, 1968.

V. I. STEZHENSKII