TY - JOUR T1 - Alfred Döblin JF - British Journal of General Practice JO - Br J Gen Pract SP - 958 LP - 958 DO - 10.3399/bjgp09X473349 VL - 59 IS - 569 AU - Iain Bamforth Y1 - 2009/12/01 UR - http://bjgp.org/content/59/569/958.abstract N2 - Alfred Döblin (1878–1957) was one of the major representatives of the generation of great German writers that came to maturity during the First World War and found itself removed from the source of its inspiration by the Second. His life and works reflect the extraordinary disarray and creativity of those times. While continuing his medical studies in Berlin and Freiburg, he distinguished himself with his work for the stage and his short stories for the journal Sturm (in which The Dancer and the Body was first published in 1910), one of the broadsheets of German Expressionism. These stories were published a few years later in a collection with the title Die Ermordung einer Butterblume (The Murder of a Buttercup).Döblin came into his own as a writer while working as a neurologist–psychiatrist in the Berlin public hospital system (his MD thesis had been on Korsakoff's syndrome) and as an army doctor during the war. With his novel Die drei Sprünge des Wang-lun (The Three Leaps of Wang-lun), he developed what he called a new ‘epic’ … ER -