Go Hard Or Go Home

Freikorps on E

MDMA was first synthesized in 1912 by Merck chemist Anton Köllisch who later died in the First World War. Then no one did anything with it for decades. But what if they had?

Köllisch synthesizes MDMA at the Merck facilities in Darmstadt in 1912. Apart from being Germany’s City of Science, Darmstadt is also a major center for “Youth Style” aka the Jugendstil art movement. One of Köllisch’s lab assistants, Alexander Shulgin (also a painter), smuggles out some of the chemical and shares it with the artists also living in the Darmstadt Artists Colony. The psychedelic properties of the chemical accentuate the vibrant colours of the paintings and the morphing forms of the metalware. The accidental intrusion of a brass band also demonstrates an unexpected affinity between the chemical and music. Esp. music with a constant, repetitive beat. They call the molecule “Eingebung”.

“In documenting art on the basis of the supreme simplicity: novelty, we are human and true for the sake of amusement, impulsive, vibrant to crucify boredom.”

The First World War breaks out. Colony member Fritz Osswald returns to his native Zurch with some samples of Eingebung. On 5 February 1916, he attends the Holländische Meierei, Spiegelgasse 1 and encounters Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings at the inaugural Caberet Voltaire. Not all of the Dadaists approve of this drug. Some value it for its power to induce trances and dreamlike states and to keep you awake all night. Others view the yearning for sexless communion that it promotes as psychoanalytically castrated - denying both Eros and Thanatos.

Poet and psychoanalyst Richard Huelsenbeck brings Dada and Eingebung to Berlin. Huelsenbeck is drawn to its use as a therapeutic tool and also its intensification of music Hugo Ball: “Huelsenbeck has arrived. He pleads for an intensification of rhythm (Negro rhythm). He would best love to drum literature & to perdition."

Huelsenbeck begins to treat members of the Freikorps - former German soldiers traumatized by the horrors of war and the loss of national faith triggered when the army collapsed in 1918. Freikorps members use MDMA to bond in all night dancing rituals in the Grunewald and Bucher Forst. Many take it too far the “luved up” serotonin rush falls away into amphetamine psychosis. The different factions of the Freikorps fight each other during the 1919 German Civil War which fractures the former empire into the People's Republic of Berlin led by Rosa Luxembourg, Rhein-Saxony, and Great Bavaria. Underground "Festen" with volk dancing to psychedelic 12-tone orchestras spread throughout the uneasy Kalter Krieg of Central Europe. Then word emerges of a demagogue preaching in a Munich Beer Hall soundtracked by a 180 BPM brass band music known as “Gabba”…

Inspired by Simon Reynolds: https://retromaniabysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/2022/11/sideways-through-time-steampunk.html