“I thought: Before I write about my favorite artist, what have others written before me? I thought: Perhaps—Many have written about Edgar Poe. Only I’ve been disappointed, so very disappointed. There was just one able to grasp the spirit of him. There was only Baudelaire. Baudelaire whose art came from hashish. How could he not grasp him, he who formed valuable art out of alcohol and laudanum?”

Hanns Heinz Ewers, 1905