Alfred Döblin

Döblin trained as a physician and practiced for years as a neurologist and psychiatrist in working-class Berlin, including the Alexanderplatz district itself, treating patients whose lives fed directly into the novel that made him famous. Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929) brought the fractured, collage-like technique of Joyce's Ulysses to a German ex-convict trying and failing to go straight amid the city's noise.

Jewish and a prominent target of Nazi hostility, Döblin fled Germany in 1933, eventually reaching the United States by way of France; in exile he converted to Catholicism. He returned to occupied Germany after the war to work in cultural administration for the French zone, found the postwar literary scene largely indifferent to him, and moved back to France in frustration.

He died there, near Strasbourg, in 1957.