Haschisch: Erzählungen

In the dim cafés and smoky rooms of fin-de-siècle Paris, Oscar A. H. Schmitz unfolds a collection of stories that venture where few literary works of his era dared to go: into the labyrinth of altered consciousness. The narrator drifts through Parisian nights, encounters a mysterious Count who speaks of hashish not as mere vice but as a key to unseen dimensions of artistic perception. What follows is a series of tales where fantasy and reality dissolve into something stranger, more permeable. These are not simple drug narratives; they are philosophical investigations into how intoxicants might strip away the veil between the self and the sublime. Schmitz writes with the precision of a psychologist and the imagination of a poet, capturing a moment when European artists and eccentrics were experimenting with every boundary, moral and aesthetic. The stories ripple with conversations about idealism, aspiration, and the dangerous allure of states that promise transcendence but threaten dissolution. For readers who crave the gothic, the psychologically dark, the decadent, this collection offers a portal into a vanished world where art and intoxication were often indistinguishable pursuits.