- Born
- Died
- Birth nameHans Heinrich Ewers
- 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. 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. His first novel "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" was published in 1910 and his masterpiece, "Alarune", in 1911. 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. 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.
A penniless Hanns Heinz Ewers died from tuberculosis on June 12, 1943 in Berlin. He was 72 years old.
- IMDb mini biography by: Jon C. Hopwood
- SpousesJosefine Bumiller(1921 - June 12, 1943) (his death)Caroline Elisabeth Wunderwald(May 15, 1901 - 1912) (divorced)
- Most of his materials related to film (screenplays, photographs etc.) can be found at Heinrich-Heine-Institute, Düsseldorf (Germany).
- 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".
- 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. - Ewers is associated with the pro-German George Sylvester Viereck, son of the German immigrant and reported illegitimate Hohenzollern offspring Louis Sylvester Viereck (a Social Democrat famous for sharing a prison cell with August Bebel), who was a member of the same Berlin student corps (fraternity) as 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.
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