| rdfs:comment | - Döblin was born in Stettin (Szczecin), Province of Pomerania, as the son of a Jewish merchant. His family moved to Berlin in 1888, where Döblin studied medicine, first at the University of Berlin, then at Freiburg University. During his student years, he became interested in German philosophy, especially that of Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. After graduating, he worked as a journalist in Regensburg and Berlin, before actually beginning a psychiatric practice in the working class neighborhood of Alexanderplatz.
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| abstract | - Döblin was born in Stettin (Szczecin), Province of Pomerania, as the son of a Jewish merchant. His family moved to Berlin in 1888, where Döblin studied medicine, first at the University of Berlin, then at Freiburg University. During his student years, he became interested in German philosophy, especially that of Immanuel Kant, Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche. After graduating, he worked as a journalist in Regensburg and Berlin, before actually beginning a psychiatric practice in the working class neighborhood of Alexanderplatz. During this time, he wrote several novels, but none of them were published until 1915, when Die Drei Sprünge des Wang-Lung first appeared, for which he won the Fontane Prize. It tells the story of political upheaval in 18th century China. The English translation "The Three Leaps of Wang Lun", published by the Chinese University Press in Hong Kong in 1991, describes this as "the most sustained and hallucinatory evocation of China as itself that we have in any European language." He was garnering popularity through several expressionist short stories in the magazine Der Sturm. Eventually he dropped out of the Expressionist Movement, but many of his 'Sturm' stories were published in 1913 in a collection called Die Ermordung einer Butterblume. During World War I, Döblin served as a doctor with the German Army, but continued his writing. His historical novel, Wallenstein, set during the Thirty Years' War, was written during this period, but not published until 1920. During this time his son the mathematician Wolfgang Doeblin was born (he had two other sons as well).
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