Hoddis, Jakob van pseudonym (and anagram) of Hans Davidsohn (Berlin, 1887-1942, a victim of persecution, place unknown), was an early Expressionist poet, capable of brilliant satire exposing the ugly face of city life to the point of the grotesque and absurd. Favouring rhymed verse, he is noted for evolving a technique of simultaneity by which he relied on the cumulative effect of individual scenes or glimpses of reality. His apocalyptic poem ‘Weltende’ (1911), consisting of two 4-line stanzas and opening with the line ‘Dem Bürger fliegt vom spitzen Kopf der Hut’, was at the time particularly influential. His poems appeared in periodicals, mainly in Der Sturm and Die Aktion, the volume Weltende (1918) being the only collection that appeared during his lifetime. He was one of the founders of the ‘Neuer Club’ (1909), and subsequently of the cabaret ‘Gnu’, but by 1912 he had begun to suffer from schizophrenia. There followed years of increasingly prolonged stays in various mental homes and hospitals, the last being in Bendorf-Sayn nr. Koblenz. It was from here that he was deported on 30 April 1942 Weltende. Gesammelte Dichtungen, ed. P. Pörtner, appeared in 1958; Dichtungen und Briefe, ed. R. Nörtemann, in 1987.

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