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.

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.