he began reviewing plays for the Prager Tagblatt, and in 1925 joined the Gruppe 1925, a discussion circle of progressive and communist intellectuals including Bertolt Brecht, Johannes R. Becher, Ernst Bloch, Hermann Kasack, Rudolf Leonhard, Walter Mehring, Robert Musil, Joseph Roth, Ernst Toller, Kurt Tucholsky, and Ernst Weiß, among others. It was likely Brecht, who counted Döblin among his significant influences, who introduced him to Erwin Piscator in 1928. At the end of September 1924, he set out on a two-month trip through Poland, subsidized by the Fischer Verlag and prompted in part by the anti-Semitic pogroms in Berlin's Scheunenviertel of 1923, an event that awakened Döblin's interest in Judaism. His description of his travels to Warsaw, Vilnius, Lviv, and Kraków, among other cities, was published in November 1925 under the title Reise in Polen (Journey to Poland). From 1926 to 1927 Döblin worked on his free verse epic Manas, about a figure from Indian mythology, which was published in May 1927. Manas, like his philosophical tract Das Ich über der Natur published the same year, proved to be a failure with the public. Thus despite his continued rise to prominence within the intellectual world of the Weimar Republic—in 1928, for example, he was elected to the prestigious Prussian Academy of Arts with the persistent support of Thomas Mann—literary and economic success continued to elude Döblin. This changed with the October 1929 publication of his novel Berlin Alexanderplatz which earned him national and global fame. One of the best known appraisals of the novel is Walter Benjamin's essay, "Die Krisis des Romans" ("The Crisis of the Novel") which sees in Berlin Alexanderplatz radical use of montage a solution to the impasses of the traditional novel. Döblin soon began transforming Berlin Alexanderplatz into a radio play and agreed to cowrite the screenplay for the film version that premiered on 8 October 1931. The early 1930s marked the high point of Döblin's fame. During this time he busied himself with lectures, readings, and the effort to contribute to a collective intellectual response to the growing power of the National Socialists. Just over a month after Hitler's ascension to power, Döblin left Germany, crossing into Switzerland on 2 March 1933. 1933–1957: Exile and later life After a brief stay in Zürich, the family moved to Paris. Döblin's closest acquaintances during this time were Claire and Yvan Goll, Hermann Kesten, Arthur Koestler, Joseph Roth,