Cocaine: Selected Writings
Translated by Bradley Schmidt and Gijs van Koningsveld

“Clearly, someone had spoken the word, the fatal word that towered over the firmament of his nights and slowly cut him into pieces, a remorseless machine even in its sound: ‘Co-caine! … Co-caine!’ Bit by bit it cut him up, until someday soon he would be pulverised entirely.”

Walter Rheiner remains virtually unknown in the English-speaking world, despite a small but remarkable body of work that captures the essence of German Expressionism. His writing delves into themes of metropolitan alienation, intoxication, and the traumas of trench warfare with a daring poignancy equal to that of his better-known contemporaries such as Georg Trakl or Georg Heym.

Rheiner’s career was tragically brief: most of his output appeared between 1917 and 1918. His (ultimately unsuccessful) attempt to avoid active service in World War I by posing as a drug addict marked the beginning of a lifelong dependence on cocaine and later morphine. His hallucinatory novella Cocaine offers readers an unforgettable close-up of Berlin’s underworld during the war years. The downfall of its tormented protagonist, Tobias, eerily foreshadows Rheiner’s own fate: he died at just 30 years old of a morphine overdose.

This bilingual edition—the first to present Rheiner’s work in English translation—brings together the bulk of his known prose alongside a small but representative selection of his poetry, opening a long-overlooked voice of Expressionism to new readers.