and religion, among others. Döblin wrote the novel between August 1945 and October 1946, although it was not published until a decade later. Upon its 1956 release by the East Berlin publishing house Rütten & Loening, the novel was well received. The reference to Hamlet in the German title was likely motivated by Döblin's reading of Sigmund Freud's interpretation of Shakespeare's Hamlet. Legacy Döblin is generally considered one of the most important German writers of the twentieth century; yet popular perception of his work rests almost exclusively on Berlin Alexanderplatz, considered the canonical German novel of the modern metropolis ("Großstadtroman"). His writing is characterized by an innovative use of montage and perspectival play, as well as what he dubbed in 1913 a "fantasy of fact" ("Tatsachenphantasie")—an interdisciplinary poetics that draws on modern discourses ranging from the psychiatric to the anthropological to the theological, in order to "register and articulate sensory experience and to open up his prose to new areas of knowledge." His engagement with such key movements of the European avant-garde as futurism, expressionism, dadaism, and Neue Sachlichkeit has led critic Sabina Becker to call him "perhaps the most significant representative of literary modernism in Berlin." In a 1967 essay, Günter Grass declared: "Without the Futurist elements of Döblin's work from Wang Lun to Berlin Alexanderplatz, my prose is inconceivable." Döblin was also an influence on writers such as W.G. Sebald and Bertolt Brecht; as Brecht wrote in 1943, "I learned more about the essence of the epic from Döblin than from anyone else. His epic writing and even his theory about the epic strongly influenced my own dramatic art." Modern, well-edited, critical volumes of almost the complete œuvre have been appearing in German since the 1980s, published by Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag and, since 2008, by the Fischer Verlag; and the Internationale Alfred-Döblin Kolloquien have been held every two years since the early 1980s. But only a handful of other works of fiction have ever appeared in English translations: The Three Leaps of Wang Lun (trans. C. D. Godwin, Chinese University Press, Hong Kong, 1991), and the November 1918 trilogy: A People Betrayed (which also includes The Troops Return) and Karl and Rosa (trans. John E. Woods, Fromm International, 1983 and 1987); Tales of a Long Night (trans John E Woods, From International, 1987; and the lesser-known big-city novel Men without Mercy (trans. Trevor and Phyllis Blewitt, Howard Fertig,