Hanns Heinz Ewers

Ewers' activities as an "Enemy Alien" in New York were documented by J. Christoph Amberger in the German historical journal Einst & Jetzt (1991). Amberger indicates arrival records which demonstrate that Ewers entered the United States in the company of a "Grethe Ewers," who is identified as his wife. Enemy Alien Office records refer to a recent divorce. The identity of this otherwise undocumented wife has never been established and is missing from most biographies.

His last book Die schönsten Hände der Welt. (e.g. The most beautiful hands in the world) was published by the Zinnen Verlag (Munich, Vienna, Leipzig) in 1943. Ewers died from tuberculosis in the same year.

Though he wrote a novel based on the life of Nazi martyr Horst Wessel, allegedly at the bequest of Adolf Hitler, his works were banned by the Nazis in 1934.

During the last years of the Weimar Republic, Ewers became involved with the burgeoning Nazi Party, attracted to its Nationalism, its Nietzschean moral philosophy, and its cult worship of Teutonic culture, and he joined the NSDAP in 1931. He did not agree with the party's anti-Semitism (his character Frank Braun has a Jewish mistress, Lotte Levi, who is also a patriotic German) and this plus his homosexual tendencies soon ended his popularity with the party management.

His book "Alraune" was filmed again in 1927, 1930 and 1952.

The two novels were part of a trilogy based on the autobiographical character of Frank Braun, who also appears in the 1921 novel "Vampyr". Ewers was deeply attracted to the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, and the Nietzschean philosophy of the "intellectuals" of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, as well as their nationalism (to say nothing of their mysticism) attracted him to the Nazi Party, though he never joined it.

He speciazlised in fantastic and creepy stories. Alraune was filmed for the first time in 1919. A commentary of that time read as followed: "To the most peculiar characteristics of the German movie belongs its cautiousness concerning the sexual. Only an author like Hanns Heinz Ewers, a unique sexual Poltergeist, was able to seduce the movie to giving up its innocence".

After the United States joined the war he was arrested in 1918 as an "active propagandist," as the US government, as well as British and French intelligence agencies asserted that Ewers was a German agent. They evidenced his travels to Spain during 1915 and 1916, both with an alias using a falsified Swiss passport. Later, a travel report in the archives of the German Foreign Office was discovered indicating that he may have been traveling to Mexico, perhaps to encourage Pancho Villa to hamper the U.S. military by an attack on the United States.

Ewers was one of the first critics to recognize cinema as a legitimate art form, and wrote the scripts for numerous early examples of the medium, most notably The Student of Prague (1913), a reworking of the Faust legend which also included the first portrayal of a double role by an actor on the screen.Nazi martyr Horst Wessel, then a member of the same corps (student fraternity) of which Ewers had been a member, acts as an extra in a 1926 version of the movie, also written by Ewers. Ewers was later commissioned by Adolf Hitler to write a biography of Wessel (Einer von vielen), which also was made into a movie.

His first novel "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" was published in 1910 and his masterpiece, "Alarune", in 1911.

He began his literary career as a poet when he published "A Book of Fables", satirical verses, in 1901. In addition to writing, he was an actor and created a vaudeville theater the same year he made his literary debut. He also founded another acting company that toured Central and Eastern Europe, but he abandoned the theater due to censorship. It was his stories about the occult and horror that made his name.

Ewers earned his Abitur in March 1891. He then volunteered for the military and joined the Kaiser-Alexander-Gardegrenadier-Regiment No. 1, but was dismissed 44 days later because of myopia.

Hanns Heinz Ewers (born November 3, 1871 in Düsseldorf, Germany) was a German writer famous for his short stories and novels that expanded the parameters of the horror genre.