A Companion to the Works of Alfred Doblin

Alfred Döblin (1878-1957) was one of the great German-Jewish writers of the 20th century a major figure in the German avant-garde before the First World War and a leading intellectual during the Weimar Republic. Döblin greatly influenced the history of the German novel: his best-known work the best-selling 1929 novel Berlin Alexanderplatz has frequently been compared in its use of internal monologue and literary montage to James Joyce's Ulysses and John Dos Passos's Manhattan Transfer. Döblin's oeuvre is by no means limited to novels but in this genre he offered a surprising variety of narrative techniques themes structures and outlooks. Döblin's impact on German writers after the Second World War was considerable: Günter Grass for example acknowledged him as my teacher. And yet while Alexanderplatz continues to fascinate the reading public it has overshadowed the rest of Döblin's immense oeuvre. This volume of carefully focused essays seeks to do justice to such important texts as Döblin's early stories his numerous other novels his political philosophical medical autobiographical and religious essays his experimental plays and his writings on the new media of cinema and radioRoland Dollinger is associate professor of German at Sarah Lawrence College; Wulf Koepke is professor emeritus of German at Texas A&M University; Heidi Thomann Tewarson is professor of German at Oberlin College.