DOBLIN, ALFRED
Publié le 22/02/2012
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DOBLIN, ALFRED (1878–1957), novelist, essayist, and physician; known
chiefly for the novel Berlin Alexanderplatz. Born into a Jewish family in Stettin,
he spent a lonely childhood in Berlin* after his father, proprietor of a tailor
shop, fled to America with a shop seamstress; the episode was crucial to his
later writing. After earning a medical degree in 1905, he briefly was an attendant
in a Regensburg mental institution; returning to Berlin in 1907, he came under
the influence of Expressionism* and helped found the weekly Der Sturm in
1910 with Herwarth Walden.* During 1911–1933 he maintained a private neurological
practice. He managed the Aktionsgemeinschaft fu¨r geistige Freiheit
(Alliance for Intellectual Freedom) from 1928, a watchdog group that scrutinized
application of the Law for the Protection of Youth against Trash and Filth.*
Although he was elected in 1928 to the Prussian Academy of Arts, as a ‘‘city
intellectual'' (Asphaltliterat) of Jewish heritage, he foresaw the personal danger
involved in remaining in Nazi Germany. Immediately after the Reichstag fire
(27 February 1933), he left Germany.
While Do¨blin was still studying medicine, he began a literary career that
resulted in more than forty books. His early short stories were collected in 1913
as Die Ermordung einer Butterblume (The murder of a buttercup). As was the
case with Gottfried Benn* (also a physician), Do¨blin's keen eye allowed him
to distill the big-city psyche and its collective soul. Berlin, with a population
nearing four million, was where the individual increasingly withdrew and disappeared.
Yet while he experienced the mass soul of modern-age Berlin as pure
trauma, Do¨blin loved the city. His masterpiece, Berlin Alexanderplatz, an immediate
best-seller in 1929, has been compared to Joyce's Ulysses and Dos
Passos's Manhattan Transfer. Utilizing a montage technique, it provides a striking
portrait of the Berlin underworld. Although he refused to view it as his
magnum opus (he assigned this label to the tetralogy November 1918, written
during 1939–1950), Berlin Alexanderplatz is generally regarded as Do¨blin's finest
work.
Craving Berlin and his German-speaking public, Do¨blin found his years of
exile painful. He took French citizenship in 1936 and fled to the United States
in 1940. Largely forgotten, he returned to Germany in 1945 as part of the French
occupation army. Remaining for eight years, he relocated to Paris in 1953, embittered
by his inability to place his work with German publishers.
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