Bright Magic Stories is a brief collection of Doblin's short stories across his career. His early expressionist stories are shorter than the later samples but much more psychologically complex. The later stories are longer and have more of a sociological bent, focusing on mankind's relationship to itself, its tools, and Nature.
Some of my favorite expressionist stories:
"The Ballerina and the Body": Explores the psychologically fraught relationship a dancer has with her body and attempts to overcome its limits and bend it to her will.
"The Murder of a Buttercup": A man kills a little flower and it comes back to haunt him.
"Memoires of a Jaded Man": This one was one of my favorites. A Weimar volcel internally monologues his vain attempts to learn what love is and details his disgust with women.
Some of my favorite later works:
"A Fairy Tale of Technology": An old Jewish man loses contact with his son, a singer, after a pogrom. For years he hopefully listens on the radio and finally hears him one day. The ending has a new Testament allusion to building on a rock and perhaps the prodigal's son. The son is alternatively called Yitzakh and Isaac, the transliteration of the same name in two different traditions. Clearly a very personal tale for Doblin who lost his own son in WW2, and who converted to Catholicism from nominal Judaism in his later life.
"A Little Fable": Strange little tale about a kingdom that reveres language so much that official matters aren't spoken of. Somewhat a commentary on the farcical gulf between the language of law and the vernacular.
"Traffic with the Beyond": A murder is investigated through the use of a psychic medium.
"Materialism: A Fable" The idea of materialism escapes from humankind and empties out into Nature. All life, material, and even photons become conscious and self-interested. It concludes with all aspects of Nature getting tired of the lack of harmony and everything reverts to a previous state in a sort of dharmic acceptance. This is a very concise, fabulistic retreatment of the themes in his earlier epic, Mountains Oceans Giants.