Hans Sahl, and Manès Sperber. Here he also saw Robert Musil, with whom he had kept up a sporadic relationship for over a decade, for the last time. Döblin finished his novel Babylonische Wandrung at the end of 1933. In 1935, he began work on his Amazon Trilogy, which narrates the colonization and Christianization of South America and was published in 1937–1938. During this time he also began work on his four-part novel project November 1918 about the revolution in Germany at the end of the First World War. He acquired French nationality in October 1936. In May 1939, he briefly visited the United States to take part in a PEN congress in New York. With other writers, he met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the White House, and saw his old Berlin acquaintance Ernst Toller again, who was suffering from severe depression and killed himself shortly thereafter. After the start of the Second World War the family fled Paris, while Döblin's manuscripts were stored in the basement of the Sorbonne. Between the start of the war in 1939 and the German occupation of France in 1940, Döblin worked for the French ministry of information, writing counter-propaganda texts against Nazi Germany with a group of French Germanists and journalists, as well as artists like Frans Masereel. In 1940, aged 62, he was again uprooted by the German invasion of France, and spent weeks in a refugee camp in Mende. During this time, he began attending mass at the cathedral in Mende, taking a turn towards Christianity that would culminate in his religious conversion the following year. On 3 September 1940, Alfred, Erna, and Stefan boarded the Nea Hellas in Lisbon, reaching New York six days later; in October they moved to Los Angeles. Döblin worked briefly for Metro Goldwyn Mayer writing screenplays for $100 a week, but his contract expired in October 1941 and was not renewed, despite the interventions of Thomas Mann and others. Alfred, Erna, and Stefan were baptized as Roman Catholics in Hollywood's Blessed Sacrament Church on 30 November 1941. Döblin completed work on November 1918 in the spring of 1943, but was unable to find a publisher. The only work of his that was published in German during his American exile was a private printing of 250 copies of the Nocturno episode from November 1918. Döblin was embittered by his isolation and setbacks in exile,