by the reading public than other German novelists such as Thomas Mann, Günter Grass or Franz Kafka. Life Early life Bruno Alfred Döblin was born on 10 August 1878 at the house at Bollwerk 37 in Stettin (Szczecin), a port city in what was then the Province of Pomerania. He was the fourth of five children born to Max Döblin (1846–1921), a master tailor from Posen (Poznań), and Sophie Döblin (1844–1920), née Freudenheim, the daughter of a merchant. His older brother was actor Hugo Döblin. His parents' marriage was characterized by a tension between Max's multifaceted artistic interests—to which Döblin would later attribute his and his siblings' artistic inclinations—and Sophie's cool pragmatism. The Döblins were assimilated Jews, and Alfred became aware of a broad, societal anti-Semitism early on. His parents' marriage dissolved in July 1888, when Max Döblin eloped with Henriette Zander, a seamstress twenty years his junior, and moved to America to start a new life. The catastrophic loss of his father was a central event in Döblin's childhood and would be formative for his later life. Shortly thereafter, in October 1888, Sophie and the five children moved to Berlin and took up residence in a small shabby apartment on the Blumenstraße in Berlin's working-class east. Döblin's parents briefly reconciled in 1889, when Max returned penniless from America; the family moved to Hamburg in April 1889, but when it came to light that Max had brought his lover back with him and was leading a double life, Sophie and the children returned to Berlin in September 1889. The sense of being déclassé, along with rocky experiences at school, made this a difficult time for Döblin. Although he had early been a good student, starting in his fourth year of Gymnasium his performance tended toward the mediocre. Furthermore, his oppositional tendencies against the stern conventionality of the patriarchal, militaristic Wilhelminian educational system, which stood in contrast to his artistic inclinations and his free thought, earned him the status of a rebel among his teachers. Despite his hatred for school, Döblin early became a passionate writer and reader, counting Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, as well as Heinrich von Kleist, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky among his most important early influences. He wrote his first novel, Jagende Rosse (Rushing Steeds), before completing school and dedicated it to the "Manes of Hölderlin". He sent a copy to the prominent critic and philosopher Fritz