The Jewish District of Warsaw

The German novelist Alfred Döblin grew up in poverty in Berlin, where he trained and practiced as a physician. With little Jewish education and no contact with Jewish religious life, he took an interest in Jewish matters for a short period in the 1920s. He made a two-month tour of Poland in 1924, recording his impressions of Polish Jewry, on which he based his Journey to Poland (1925). A central figure in German modernism, Döblin’s most famous novel is Berlin-Alexanderplatz (1929). He spent the Nazi years in exile in Paris and then in Los Angeles, where he converted to Roman Catholicism in 1940. After the war, he returned to Germany and continued to write.