Alfred Döblin

Born in Stettin in 1878, Alfred Döblin grew up in Berlin and studied medicine before building a career as both a doctor and a writer. He practiced as a physician in working-class districts of Berlin, and that direct contact with ordinary people and the rhythms of the city helped shape the vivid, restless world of his fiction.

Döblin became one of the major voices of German literary modernism and is most widely remembered for Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929), his groundbreaking novel about a former convict trying to rebuild his life in Berlin. His work ranged widely in style and subject, but it is often praised for its formal boldness, psychological intensity, and powerful sense of urban life.

Because he was of Jewish background and openly opposed to the Nazi regime, he left Germany after 1933 and lived in exile in France and later the United States. After the Second World War he returned to Europe, and he died in 1957. Today he is remembered as an inventive, deeply original writer whose books helped redefine what the modern novel could do.