Alfred Döblin

Born in 1878 in Stettin, in the Prussian province of Pomerania, to a Jewish family shattered when his father abandoned them for a younger woman, Doblin moved with his mother and four siblings to Berlin's working-class east side at the age of ten. He studied medicine, specialized in neurology and psychiatry, and opened a practice in Berlin's proletarian quarter, treating factory workers and the poor while writing in the early mornings before patients arrived. His early novels, including The Three Leaps of Wang Lun (1915), experimented with cinematic narrative techniques that broke radically with the psychological realism of Thomas Mann. Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), his masterpiece, followed the ex-convict Franz Biberkopf through the roaring streets of Weimar Berlin in a torrent of montage, stream of consciousness, slang, advertising copy, and biblical allusion that rivaled Joyce's Ulysses in ambition. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Doblin fled to France, then to Hollywood, where he lived in dire poverty, largely ignored by the German exile community. He converted to Catholicism in 1941, bewildering his secular and Jewish friends. He returned to Germany after the war as a French cultural officer but found a country uninterested in its exiled writers. He died on June 26, 1957, in Emmendingen, nearly blind and largely forgotten, though Berlin Alexanderplatz would later be recognized as one of the supreme achievements of modernist fiction.

In exile, the author of Berlin Alexanderplatz drew a hundred dollars a week as an MGM scriptwriter, produced nothing the studio filmed, and watched the contract lapse in 1941. That November, the secular Jew who had built a novel out of Berlin's gutters was baptized a Catholic in a Hollywood church, barely noticed by the émigré writers around him.