Max Pulver's Himmelpfortgasse: Fictionalizing the 1920s Cocaine Craze in German-Speaking Europe. (November 2014)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Millington, Richard
• Is Part Of: Central Europe. Volume 12:Number 2(2014:Nov.)
• Page Start: 159
• Page End: 173
• Publication Date: 2014-11
• Subjects: drugs, -- Expressionism, -- inter-war period, -- literature, -- novel, -- Vienna; Politics and culture -- Europe, Eastern -- Periodicals; Europe, Eastern -- Politics and government -- Periodicals; Europe, Eastern -- History -- Periodicals; Europe, Eastern -- Languages -- Periodicals; Europe, Eastern -- Civilization -- Periodicals; 943.0005
• DOI: 10.1179/1479096314Z.00000000029
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1479-0963

Abstract

Abstract : In the years following the end of the First World War, cocaine achieved unprecedented popularity in Europe, a development reflected in the number of novels dealing with cocaine use by writers from across the Continent. One such is Max Pulver's Himmelpfortgasse, first published in 1927, which tells of a Munich-based intellectual torn between his respectable bourgeois existence and his cocaine-fuelled passion for a young Viennese painter. After a brief interlude in Berlin, the protagonist follows his new love to Vienna, but their relationship soon deteriorates. The plot of the novel is unremarkable, but its depiction of three separate cocaine-using cliques, each based in a different city and each with a distinct social position and political orientation, vividly illustrates the extent to which recreational use of cocaine spread across geographical, socio-economic, and ideological divides in the period in question. Moreover, the narrator's essayistic reflections on the function, effects, and social practice of cocaine use allow for productive cross-reading with contemporary toxicological sources. Pulver's novel also occupies a curious position in literary history. As well as being one of several European cocaine novels of the inter-war period, it shows substantial thematic and stylistic links to the treatment of cocaine in the writings of Expressionist poet Gottfried Benn dating to the previous decade. Himmelpfortgasse 's Expressionist elements add to its distinctiveness, but have probably also contributed to the novel's relative lack of commercial and critical success.