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Rating: The figure of Hanns Heinz Ewers fits well within the context of the renaissance of horror literature in Austria and Germany that took place between the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His name is thus comparable to those of Gustav Meyrink, Alfred Kubin, Oskar Panizza, Leo Perutz, and Karl Hans Strobl.
These writers were the main driving forces who gave momentum in Austria and Germany, under the strong influence of recognized masters of the genre such as Poe (Ewers wrote a memorable essay on the American writer), Hoffmann, Villers de L’Isle Adam, Nerval, and others, to a new fantastic literature that aimed to be an “ideal” rebellion against the prevailing culture of positivism and capitalism.
Stylistically, these new artistic “canons” produced a literary aesthetic that made extensive use of decadent and grotesque stylistic features and often drew from themes then widely spread, like occultism and esotericism. It should not be forgotten that numerous sects of theosophical derivation thrived in Germany at that time.
Born in Dusseldorf in 1871, Ewers was fascinated from childhood by the dark atmosphere of German folklore. His persona is one of the most original, eccentric, and nonconformist of the period, and his stories were even appreciated by Adolf Hitler himself.
His narrative always remains on the boundary between conscious and unconscious, grotesque, occult, and deviant eroticism, in which women are often identified as a symbol of death and beauty. This theme of the “femme fatale” is of decadent origin (Ewers’ admiration for Oscar Wilde is, in fact, great) but is exploited masterfully by the German writer in many of his stories, often infusing it with sadistic and masochistic impulses.
Particularly in his masterpiece story The Spider, the theme is brought to perfection. The Spider is continually reprinted even today and is an absolute must-have in any library of horror literature: it depicts the tragic end, in a room of a small hotel in Paris, of a student who becomes a sort of puppet, drained of energy and at the mercy of a woman identified as a spider.
It is a shame that no cinematic version of this gem has ever been made unless one considers The Tenant, a famous film by Polanski based on a novel by Roland Topor which was blatantly inspired by The Spider.
The story was also published in 1910 in an anthology by the famous publishing house Georg Muller of Munich, which at that time enjoyed considerable public success, alternating horror classics like Poe and Gogol with new authors of the period like Meyrink, Kubin, and Strobl.
In addition to stories, Ewers is also famous for some novels filled with suggestive and gruesome images, as in the well-known Mandragore (Alraune -1911-), a book adapted several times for cinema, where the female body is seen as the antechamber of Hell. It is a powerful image that roots itself in legends of medieval German folklore and brings to light all the overwhelming charge of dark, satanic, and prophetic symbolism in which Ewers was a master. In the end, the story, in which Alraune behaves like a true mistress towards males made her slaves, and where Ewers certainly does not shy away from any scandalous description, veers towards sadistic eroticism. But rather than the marquis De Sade, the novel conjures the figure of Leopold Von Sacher Masoch and his Venus in Furs. The mistress-slave relationship is, in fact, described in meticulous detail.
This volume is part of the so-called Frank Braun trilogy, a kind of alter-ego of Ewers himself. Frank Braun is also the dissolute protagonist of two other very well-known novels by the German writer: The Sorcerer's Apprentice (1907) and The Vampire (1921).
In these books too, the themes marvelously combine eroticism and mysticism in a delirious and decadent amalgam that immerses the reader in a universe of mental alienation.
His collaboration on the screenplay of the film “The Student of Prague”, one of the masterpieces of Expressionism, should also be remembered.
In Italy, apart from the reissue of The Spider and a few scattered stories, he unfortunately did not achieve the same notoriety granted to Gustav Meyrink and Alfred Kubin. But in 2017, Edizioni Hypnos finally reissued Alraune in a beautifully curated edition by Germanist Alessandro Fambrini. As for the stories, his best collection was published in 1972 by the IL SIGILLO NERO series of Edizioni del Bosco (The Spider and Other Horror Stories), recently reissued by Meridiano Zero (2017).
A great traveler, Ewers traveled extensively in Europe and went to South America and later to the United States where he was imprisoned due to the outbreak of the Great War. He died in 1943 in Berlin, weakened by tuberculosis and personal issues.
Essential Italian Bibliography
The Horror (La Nuova Italia Editrice – Venice -1921)
Chills (Sonzogno – Milan – 1927)
Mandragora (Ed. Cappelli – Bologna – 1922)
The Spider and Other Horror Stories (Il Sigillo Nero – Edizioni del Bosco – Rome 1972)
The Hearts of Kings and Other Stories (Edizione la Conchiglia – Bari – 2005)
Red Brain (Urania supplement no. 21 -2005 – curated by Dashiel Hammett – contains “The Spider”)
Hanns Heinz Ewers. The Wizard of Terror (Hypnos – magazine of literature and fantasy – Milan – 2009)
Margherita Cottone Fantastic Literature in Austria and Germany (1900-1930) – Gustav Meyrink and surroundings (Sellerio editore Palermo – 2009)
Alraune – The Story of a Living Being – Edizioni Hypnos – 249 pages – Euro 18 – ISBN: 9788896952559
The Spider and Other Chills, translated from the German by Marie Odazio, pp. 187, €10, Meridiano Zero, Bologna 2017.
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