Döblin, Alfred

German novelist. His Berlin-Alexanderplatz (1929) owes much to James Joyce's Ulysses in its minutely detailed depiction of the inner lives of a city's inhabitants, scrutinizing the social and psychological pressures exerted by the city; it is considered by many to be the finest 20th-century German novel. Other works include November 1918: Eine deutsche Revolution/A German Revolution (1939–50; published in four parts) about the formation of the Weimar Republic.

Major works
After Berlin-Alexanderplatz he produced Babylonische Wanderung/Babylonian Migration 1934 and Pardon wird nicht gegeben/Men without Mercy 1935. His last important work, Hamlet oder Die lange Nacht nimmt ein Ende/Hamlet or The Long Night Never Ends 1956, powerfully observes the inner decay of a family and its relationship to a world of multilayered reality. The whole question of reality was of persistent concern to Döblin, accounting for the uneasy tension in his works between realistic rationalism and elements of mystical religion.