The Jewish District of Warsaw

Alfred Döblin

1925

[ . . . ] The eve of the Jewish Day of Atonement. In the morning, I wander down Gesia Street, a long thoroughfare. A few stores are still open, the majority are already closing. A tremendous human surging fills the street, the trolley is mobbed. I walk past an old, long building, a military prison; red iron crates are attached to the windows; the…

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Creator Bio

Alfred Döblin

1878–1957

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.

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