The novel “The Three Leaps of Wang Lun” immediately made Alfred Döblin famous. Readers admired Van Lung as a masterpiece of expressionistic narrative art, a decisive breakthrough beyond the bourgeois tradition of the German novel. The decision to place the action of the novel in the Chinese context concealed inexhaustible possibilities of aesthetic play, and Döblin met them so readily that the center of gravity of the book shifted from the real sphere to the sphere of pure forms. Despite its harsh and cold style, Wang Lun remains a work of blissful beauty—a romantic, grandiose Chinese fairy tale. Döblin himself lived in this fairy tale as if in an enchanted kingdom.