The highpoint of German Expressionism in the second decade of the 20th century coincided with a
rapid increase in the availability of cocaine as the drug was stockpiled for medical purposes
by armies fighting the First World War. Snow from Broken Eyes investigates the implications of
this historical intersection for the lives and works of three poets associated with
Expressionism: Gottfried Benn Walter Rheiner and Georg Trakl. All three are known to have used
the drug during the War although under very different circumstances and the cocaine
references contained in their works are equally diverse. These range from demonstrative
declarations of drug use (Benn) via agonized textual re-enactments of the addict's humiliation
and suffering (Rheiner) to the integration of drug symbolism into an original deeply resonant
poetic code (Trakl). In this study the findings arising from close readings of key works by
Benn Rheiner and Trakl are contextualized in relation both to the longstanding historical
association between psychoactive substances and imaginative literature and to the radical
innovations in literary style that characterized the early 20th century.
