Snow from Broken Eyes: Cocaine in the Lives and Works of Three Expressionist Poets

Abstract

This thesis investigates the role of cocaine in the lives and works of Gottfried Benn, Georg Trakl and Walter Rheiner, all of whom used the drug during the same brief historical period, that is, the First World War. To date, relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to the cocaine use of these three poets, who can all be linked to the Expressionist movement, and even less to exploring possible relationships between the drug and their literary works. Starting with brief accounts of, first, the historical association between psychoactive substances and imaginative literature, and second, the critical responses this association has generated, this study undertakes to establish a set of interpretative criteria that permit meaningful discussion of an individual writer's drug use and, more important, the treatment of the drug theme in his works, as well as possible connections between the two, without the risk of falling into biographically or poetologically reductive readings. The main body of the thesis is divided into three parts. The first develops a twofold perspective on Benn's "brief episode with cocaine in the First World War," on the one hand evaluating to what extent it can be related to his literary activity of the same period, and on the other examining two poems and two short plays, all featuring the drug, as an autonomous textual "episode". The second part, by identifying parallels and contrasts between Rheiner's 1918 novella Kokain and other poetic and prose compositions of the same writer, proposes a reading of these works as a meta-narrative of Rheiner's own increasingly difficult relationship to cocaine, to which he became addicted in 1914. In the third part, Trakl's extensive and eventually fatal drug use is seen in an intricate reciprocal relation to his poetry, in particular to his "intoxicated" style, as well as to the occurrence - and conspicuous non-occurrence - of certain drug motifs in his verse. The principles underlying Trakl's poetic expression that emerge in this discussion are then integrated into a consideration of reading cocaine as a subtextual, semantically underdetermined element in various Trakl poems. Throughout the study, particular weight is given to probing the significance of evasions, ambiguities and apparent incongruities so as to bring the full complexity of each text-drug relationship into view.