Bruno Alfred Döblin (German: [ˈalfʁeːt døːˈbliːn] ; 10 August 1878 – 26 June 1957) was a German novelist, essayist, and doctor, best known for his novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929). A prolific writer whose œuvre spans more than half a century and a wide variety of literary movements and styles, Döblin is one of the most important figures of German literary modernism. His complete works comprise over a dozen novels ranging in genre from historical novels to science fiction to novels about the modern metropolis; several dramas, radio plays, and screenplays; a true crime story; a travel account; two book-length philosophical treatises; scores of essays on politics, religion, art, and society; and numerous letters—his complete works, republished by Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag and Fischer Verlag, span more than thirty volumes. His first published novel, Die drei Sprünge des Wang-lung (The Three Leaps of Wang Lun), appeared in 1915 and his final novel, Hamlet oder Die lange Nacht nimmt ein Ende (Tales of a Long Night) was published in 1956, one year before his death.
Born in Stettin, Germany (now Szczecin, Poland), to assimilated Jews, Döblin moved with his mother and siblings to Berlin when he was ten years old after his father had abandoned them. Döblin would live in Berlin for almost all of the next forty-five years, engaging with such key figures of the prewar and Weimar-era German cultural scene as Herwarth Walden and the circle of Expressionists, Bertolt Brecht, and Thomas Mann. Only a few years after his rise to literary celebrity with the 1929 publication of Berlin Alexanderplatz, Döblin was forced into exile by the rise of the Nazi dictatorship. Works by Döblin were also considered "Asphalt literature". He spent 1933–1940 in France and then was forced to flee again at the start of the Second World War. Like many other German émigrés he spent the war years in Los Angeles, where he converted to Catholicism. He moved to West Germany after the war but did not feel at home in postwar Germany's conservative cultural climate and returned to France. His final years were marked by poor health and financial difficulties, and his literary work was met with relative neglect.
Despite the canonic status of Berlin Alexanderplatz, Döblin is often characterized as an under-recognized or even as a forgotten author; while his work has received increasing critical attention (mostly in German) over the last few decades, he is much less well known by the reading public than other German novelists such as Thomas Mann, Günter Grass or Franz Kafka.
Bruno Alfred Döblin was born on 10 August 1878 at the house at Bollwerk 37 in Stettin (Szczecin), a port city in what was then the Province of Pomerania. He was the fourth of five children born to Max Döblin (1846–1921), a master tailor from Posen (Poznań), and Sophie Döblin (1844–1920), née Freudenheim, the daughter of a merchant. His older brother was actor Hugo Döblin. His parents' marriage was characterized by a tension between Max's multifaceted artistic interests—to which Döblin would later attribute his and his siblings' artistic inclinations—and Sophie's cool pragmatism. The Döblins were assimilated Jews, and Alfred became aware of a broad, societal anti-Semitism early on.
His parents' marriage dissolved in July 1888, when Max Döblin eloped with Henriette Zander, a seamstress twenty years his junior, and moved to America to start a new life. The catastrophic loss of his father was a central event in Döblin's childhood and would be formative for his later life. Shortly thereafter, in October 1888, Sophie and the five children moved to Berlin and took up residence in a small shabby apartment on the Blumenstraße in Berlin's working-class east. Döblin's parents briefly reconciled in 1889, when Max returned penniless from America; the family moved to Hamburg in April 1889, but when it came to light that Max had brought his lover back with him and was leading a double life, Sophie and the children returned to Berlin in September 1889.
The sense of being déclassé, along with rocky experiences at school, made this a difficult time for Döblin. Although he had early been a good student, starting in his fourth year of Gymnasium his performance tended toward the mediocre. Furthermore, his oppositional tendencies against the stern conventionality of the patriarchal, militaristic Wilhelminian educational system, which stood in contrast to his artistic inclinations and his free thought, earned him the status of a rebel among his teachers. Despite his hatred for school, Döblin early became a passionate writer and reader, counting Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, as well as Heinrich von Kleist, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky among his most important early influences. He wrote his first novel, Jagende Rosse (Rushing Steeds), before completing school and dedicated it to the "Manes of Hölderlin". He sent a copy to the prominent critic and philosopher Fritz Mauthner who returned it a few days later. However, wishing to hide his artistic inclinations from his mother, Döblin had sent the manuscript under a false name, and was not able to retrieve it at the post office; he thus had to rewrite it entirely.
1900–1914: University years and early career
After receiving his Abitur in 1900, Döblin enrolled at Friedrich Wilhelm University (now Humboldt University of Berlin) and began studying general medicine. In May 1904 he moved to Freiburg im Breisgau to continue his studies, concentrating on neurology and psychiatry. He began his dissertation ("Disturbances of memory in Korsakoff's Psychosis") in the winter semester of 1904–1905 at the Freiburg psychiatric clinic. His dissertation, completed in April 1905, was published that year by Berlin's Klett Verlag. He applied for assistantships in Berlin and in Stettin, where he was apparently turned down on account of his Jewish origins, before taking a short-lived position as assistant doctor at a regional asylum in Regensburg. On 15 October 1906 he took up a position at the Berlin psychiatric clinic in Buch where he worked as an assistant doctor for nearly two years. He then transferred to the city hospital "Am Urban", where he dedicated himself to internal medicine with a renewed interest. He opened his first private practice in October 1911 at Blücherstraße 18 in Berlin's Kreuzberg neighborhood, before moving the practice to Frankfurter Allee 184 in Berlin's working-class east.
While working in Buch he met Friede Kunke, a 16-year-old nurse from a Protestant background with whom he became romantically involved. In the spring of 1909 he began seeing the 21-year-old Erna Reiss, a medical student and daughter of a wealthy Jewish factory owner. Despite his continued involvement with Kunke, at the urging of his family he was reluctantly engaged to Reiss on 13 February 1911 and married her on 23 January 1912; his older brother Hugo and Herwarth Walden served as best men. During the early part of his engagement to Reiss, he had been unaware that Kunke was pregnant: their son Bodo was born on 14 October 1911 and was raised by his grandmother, Elise Kunke, in Schleswig-Holstein following Friede's death from tuberculosis in 1918. Until the end of his life, Döblin maintained loose contact with Bodo, and his treatment of Friede became a lasting source of guilt. Döblin's first son with Erna Reiss, Peter Döblin, was born on 27 October 1912, and was baptized a Protestant. Peter later attended Schule am Meer, where he was registered as such.
During his studies in Berlin, Döblin had written his second novel, Der Schwarze Vorhang (The Black Curtain). The novel portrays the developing sexuality of its protagonist, Johannes, and explores the themes of love, hate, and sadism; in its use of literary montage, The Black Curtain already presages the radical techniques that Döblin would later pioneer in Berlin Alexanderplatz. Introduced by a mutual acquaintance, Döblin met Georg Lewin, a music student better known as Herwarth Walden, who founded the Expressionist journal Der Sturm in 1910. Der Sturm, modeled after Karl Kraus's newspaper Die Fackel (The Torch), would soon count Döblin among its most involved contributors, and provided him with a venue for the publication of numerous literary and essayistic contributions. Through Walden Döblin made the acquaintance of poet Else Lasker-Schüler. At regular meetings at the Café des Westens on Kurfürstendamm or at the wine bar Dalbelli, Döblin got to know the circle of artists and intellectuals that would become central to the Expressionist movement in Berlin, including Peter Hille, Richard Dehmel, Erich Mühsam, Paul Scheerbart, and Frank Wedekind, among others. In October 1911 he met the painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, who painted several portraits of Döblin between 1912 and 1914 and illustrated some of Döblin's literary works. Döblin's early novel Der Schwarze Vorhang was published in Der Sturm, and in November 1912 the Munich publishing house Georg Müller published his collection of novellas under the title Die Ermordung einer Butterblume und andere Erzählungen. In May 1913, he completed his third novel The Three Leaps of Wang Lun (Die drei Sprünge des Wang-lun). Published in 1916, this historical novel about political uprising in 18th-century China was a literary breakthrough for Döblin, earning him literary acclaim, public recognition, and the prestigious Fontane Prize. He began writing Wadzeks Kampf mit der Dampfturbine (Wadzek's Struggle with the Steam Turbine) the following year, completing it by December 1914 although it was not published until 1918.