“Without the futurist elements of Doblin’s work from Wang Lun to Berlin Alexanderplatz, my prose is inconceivable…. He’ll discomfort you, give you bad dreams. If you’re satisfied with yourself, beware of Doblin.” — Gunter Grass “I learned more about the essence of the epic from Doblin than from anyone else.” — Bertolt Brecht “I consider The Three Leaps of Wang Lun the best contemporary German novel by far. It exhibits an entirely superior, most rare, talent. It is true art.” — Max Horkheimer In 1915, fourteen years before Berlin Alexanderplatz, Alfred Doblin published his first novel, an extensively researched Chinese historical extravaganza: The Three Leaps of Wang Lun. Even more remarkably, given its subject matter, the book was written in Expressionist style and is now considered the first modern German novel, as well as the first Western novel to depict a China untouched by the West. It is virtually unknown in English. Based on actual accounts of a doomed rebellion during the
