Biography
Alfred Döblin was born in Stettin in 1878; after his father left the family, his mother moved with the children to Berlin in 1888, where he grew up in poverty in the working-class districts east of Alexanderplatz. He studied medicine in Berlin and Freiburg, obtained his doctorate in 1905 with a thesis on memory disorders, and in 1911 opened his own practice as a neurologist in Berlin, which was later located on Frankfurter Allee. As a writer he belonged to Berlin Expressionism around the journal Der Sturm; his novel Die drei Sprünge des Wang-lun (The Three Leaps of Wang Lun, 1915/16) won the Fontane Prize, in 1928 he was elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts, and Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) brought him international fame. In 1933 he fled the Nazis via Switzerland to France, became a French citizen in 1936, escaped to the United States in 1940 and converted to Catholicism in Hollywood in 1941. In autumn 1945 he returned to Baden-Baden as a cultural officer of the French military government; his post-war publications include the novel sequence November 1918 and his last novel Hamlet oder Die lange Nacht nimmt ein Ende (Tales of a Long Night, 1956). Döblin died in Emmendingen in 1957 and was buried in Housseras in the Vosges next to his son Wolfgang.
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