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Döblin, Alfred (1878–1957), German writer. From the very outset of his career he incorporated a variety of fairy‐tale motifs in his work, even in his celebrated novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929). He wrote remarkable fairy tales for adults, such as ‘Der Ritter Blaubart’ (‘The Knight Bluebeard’, 1911), ‘Vom Hinzel und dem wilden Lenchen’ (‘About Hinzel and the wild Lenchen’, 1917), and ‘Märchen von der Technik’ (‘Fairy Tale of Technology’, 1935). In his famous ‘Märchen vom Materialismus’ (‘Fairy Tale of Materialism’, 1948) Döblin illustrated the disastrous consequences of Demokrit's materialistic nuclear theory.

Bibliography

• Kümmerling‐Meibauer, Bettina, Die Kunstmärchen von Hofmannsthal, Musil und Döblin (1991).

— Bettina Kümmerling‐Meibauer

Döblin, Alfred (Stettin, 1878-1957, Emmendingen nr. Freiburg), grew up in Berlin and studied medicine (psychiatry and neurology) at Berlin and Freiburg universities, worked for a time in a mental hospital in Regensburg, and from 1911 practised in Berlin (Lichtenberg). From 1914 to 1918 he was a medical officer in the army. After the war he practised again in the slums of Berlin and supported the Social Democrats (he left the SPD in 1928). Endangered as both a Jew and a Socialist under the National Socialist regime, he took refuge in France in August 1933. In 1940 he escaped from France through the Iberian peninsula to the USA. His experiences on this hazardous journey are described in Schicksalsreise. Bericht und Bekenntnis (1949), which also includes reflections on religion. In 1941 he converted to the Roman Catholic faith. In 1945 he returned to Germany as an American education officer in Baden. He lived for a time in Mainz, was in 1949 co-founder of the Akademie für Wissenschaften und Literatur and its vice-president, but was not at ease in West Germany and, a French national since 1936, settled in Paris in 1951. During his last years he suffered from illness and had lost the verve and spirit to which he owed his best-known work. He died in a nursing-home in Baden-Württemberg.

Döblin was an individualist acutely conscious of the vulnerability of the individual to collective pressures. He felt early drawn to Hölderlin, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, then showed an affinity to Jugendstil and fin de siècle, before becoming associated with Expressionism and Der Sturm, in which he published his early stories, including Die Ermordung einer Butterblume, the title-story of a collection of 1913; this was followed by another collection of twelve stories, Die Lohensteiner reisen nach Böhmen (1917), a volume containing Der Feldzeugmeister Cratz and Der Kaplan (1926), and Heitere Magie (1948, Märchen vom Materialismus and Reiseverkehr mit dem Jenseits). But he was primarily a novelist and (with Berlin Alexanderplatz) an exponent of the modernist novel, which for him also implied radical rejection of Th. Mann's realism ( Buddenbrooks) with its reliance on the narrator's omniscience.

The novel Die drei Sprünge des Wanglun (1915), set in 18th-c. China, describes an unsuccessful and tragic rebellion in which even the most peaceable are impelled to resist by force the tyranny of the state. In Wallenstein (2 vols., 1920) the strongest of men are overwhelmed by the events of history. Berge Meere und Giganten (1924) is a novel of a future age in which a proliferating technology threatens to subjugate the human race. In Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), Döblin's best-known novel, the depiction of the uphill struggle of Franz Biberkopf, a casualty of society, to rehabilitate himself and, ultimately, to seek out the meaning of life, is central to the representation of Berlin during the economic depression of the 1920s. Babylonische Wandrung oder Hochmut kommt vor dem Fall (1934) is a grotesque novel with surrealist features. Pardon wird nicht gegeben (1935), the first novel written in exile in Paris, again shows the individual destroyed between opposed social forces, represented by the mother and her factory-owning family and her son Karl, whose true sympathies with the proletarians are suppressed until it is too late. The novel derives from autobiographical substance (the implied setting is Berlin) and differs from the first Berlin novel both in its structure and in its uncompromising treatment of fate and Nemesis to which the title alludes. The ambitious Amazonas-Trilogie (Das Land ohne Tod, Der blaue Tiger, Der neue Urwald, 1937-48) discovers the seeds of present ills in colonial and religious history. November 1918. Eine deutsche Revolution (a trilogy composed in its second version of the novels Verratenes Volk, Heimkehr der Fronttruppen, and Karl und Rosa, 1948-50) uses an abortive revolution (see Weimar Republic) to expose German society of the time and its attitudes. This large-scale work represents the climax of Döblin's political scepticism. His last novel, Hamlet oder Die lange Nacht nimmt ein Ende, begun in Hollywood and completed in Baden-Baden in 1946 (without then finding a publisher), comprises a main action, a psychoanalytical contribution to Heimkehrerliteratur, and a cycle of stories. Edward Allison loses one leg in action and is brought home suffering from shock and neurosis. His stepfather, the writer Gordon Allison, arranges story-telling sessions with Edward, in the company of friends, in order to divert Edward's relentless search for those who are responsible for the war. The discovery of disturbing family relationships (his Hamlet experience) aggravates his disillusionment with the hypocritical society around him and ends with the disintegration of his home and the death of his mother and stepfather. After P. Huchel published sections of the work in Sinn und Form (1954 and 1955), Döblin changed its original ending, according to which Edward, having given the proceeds of his inheritance to the poor, enters a monastery; in the final version he rejects this idea and decides to shake off the ghost of the past and make a new beginning.

Reise in Polen (1925) is a stimulating compterendu of a visit to Poland. Döblin was a lively and perceptive essayist, convinced of his responsibility, as a writer, to be political without party-political commitment. He used the pseudonyms Linke Poot (Der deutsche Maskenball, 1921) and Hans Fiedeler (Nürnberger Lehrprozeß, 1946). Other collections include Das Ich über der Natur (1928), Der Bau des epischen Werkes (1929), Wissen und Verändern (1931), Jüdische Erneuerung (1933, essays and stories: Der verlorene Sohn; Das Märchen von der Technik), Der historische Roman und wir (1936), Sieger und Besiegte. Eine wahre Geschichte (1946), Der unsterbliche Mensch. Ein Religionsgespräch (1946), Die literarische Situation (1947), Unsere Sorge—der Mensch (1948), and Die Dichtung, ihre Natur und ihre Rolle (1950).

Ausgewählte Werke in Einzelbänden, ed. W. Muschg (until 1965), H. Graber (until 1972), and A. W. Riley (from 1978), appeared 1960 ff., a Jubiläums-Sonder-ausgabe (7 vols.), ed. E. Pässler, in 1977. Two volumes of this edition, Erzählungen aus fünf Jahrzehnten (1979, also containing stories not previously published in book form) and Autobiographische Schriften und letzte Aufzeichnungen (1980), were reprinted as volumes of the Einzelbände, which include previously unpublished work. The volume Schriften zur Politik und Gesellschaft. 1896-1951 appeared in 1972; an edition by W. Stauffacher of the ‘November’ trilogy in 1988; and Kritik der Zeit. Rundfunkbeiträge 1946-1952, ed. A. Birkert, in 1992.

(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.