Mel Gordon - Voluptuous Panic - The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin

Born Herschel-Chaim Steinschneider, Hanussen left his lower-middle-class Viennese family to work the itinerant theatre and carnie circuit during the waning days of monarchist Europe. [For a full biography, see my book Erik Jan Hanussen: Hitler’s Jewish Clairvoyant (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2001).] A sleight-of-hand conjurer, tabloid journalist, vaudeville entrepreneur, and psychic detective, the Austrian roustabout had also mastered the arts of Mesmerism and erotic spectacle.

In the early Twenties, Hanussen exhibited a string of hypnotized strongwomen. These dainty subjects not only bent steel bars and pulled heavy wagons with bridle bits in their mouths, they also withstood the weights of anvils placed over their stomachs and sledgehammer blows to wooden planks supported by their breasts. A few years later, Hanussen raised the hypnotic/erotic bar. He selected female members from the audience—the more skeptical, the better—and mesmerized them into orgasmic collapse before the astonished faces of their husbands and colleagues.

Both genders came to Hanussen’s performances and private sessions in order to experience the marvelous, the extraordinary, the obliteration of common sense and moral sobriety. Acquiescing all control to him (or watching it done to a neighbor) spoke to a deep submissive nature that fueled Hanussen’s hypnotic inductions. Passionate desire was about loss of restraints—as was hypnosis and “burning religion.” No one could be faulted when the needy heart or the censoring mechanism of the brain succumbed to the humiliating demands of an arch-seducer or evil cleric. Mankind was made that way. Hanussen merely shaped an amusing variety entertainment out of human frailty.

In 1928, Hanussen was arrested in the Czech town of Teplitz-Schönau. Among the many charges leveled against him was the hypnotic-seduction of naïve housewives and claims of time-traveling clairvoyance. The trial, which took place in Leitmeritz and ended two years later, brought Hanussen into contact with Dr. Leopold Thoma, a leading authority on “erotic suggestibility” and the head of the Psychological Unit of the Viennese Police.

Unlike Hanussen, Thoma worked in tandem with the legal and scientific establishment. He investigated so-called occult crimes in Austria and Germany and studied the verifiable effects of hypnotic suggestion. His Viennese Institute was widely respected by Freud’s growing fraternity and Central European judges frequently cited its parapsychological deductions on criminal motivation and exploitations of the subconscious mind.

Thoma had a bit of the theatrical bug in him as well and produced sensational melodramas about sexual dependency and Svengali-like manipulators of young women. More shocking, however, were Thoma’s own experiments in hypnotherapy. In 1926 he published a booklet, The Wonder of Hypnosis (Württemberg: Johannes Baum Verlag, 1926) that proved the sexual power of verbal suggestion. A young Austrian woman, Mia Osta, was put into a trance state and told her breasts and nipples were rapidly expanding, becoming highly sensitive and unnaturally engorged with blood. Chronometers measured a significant growth (45 mm) in a single sitting. Other sessions convinced her that she was a lesbian. And a male subject was induced into believing that he was a nursing mother. His breasts visibly transformed in shape and size.

Thoma appeared in the Leitmeritz courtroom. His testimony, which endorsed many of Hanussen’s psychic claims, immeasurably buttressed the defense’s difficult position. Furthermore, Hanussen demonstrated his supernatural talents to intuit personality and past events before a panel of Czech jurists.

On May 28th, 1930, Hanussen beat the Leitmeritz rap. He pronounced it the happiest day of his life. He also found a certified scientific partner in his future confidence and occult-sex schemes. Hanussen and Thoma joined forces and moved to Berlin.

In the immoderate metropolis, Hanussen became known as the “Magister Ludi of Sex.” He dazzled the locals with his hypnotic demonstrations and hawked sex crèmes in the foyers of Berlin’s variety halls. After midnight, Hanussen could be seen leading his harem of would-be film starlets to the city’s most fashionable nightclubs and restaurants. He even designed risque gowns based on the astrological signs of his charges.

On his yacht, the Ursel IV , Hanussen fed his pampered guests exotic drugs and performed Sex Magic feats that even the most decadent revue-house would shun. His afterhours orgies were matter-of-factly filmed by the technological wonder. If Berlin’s tabloids failed to report on Hanussen’s latest sexcapades, they found their way into the Hanussen-Magazin or the weekly Hanussen Zeitung . Readers could also learn the master’s secrets for occult seduction in his serialized lessons, “How to Hypnotize Your Lover into Ecstasy.” (Presumably Thoma had a ghostwriting hand in that obliging series.) Hanussen’s publications had love-advice columns and characterological readings as well.

In the spring of 1932, Hanussen’s smirking persona unexpectedly surfaced in the superheated atmosphere of German politics. On March 25th, just when the National Socialist cause seemed to be on the verge of collapse, the Man Who Knows All published a bizarre trance-vision in his tabloid. The headline in the Hanussen-Zeitung screamed that Hitler would lead the nation as Reichschancellor within one year. It was a preposterous joke but one that the despondent Führer treated with solemnity.

Nazi officials in Berlin began to frequent the Ursel festivities, greatly enhancing the already depraved atmosphere. The bisexual libertine Count Wolf von Helldorf argued his Party’s racial platform with Hanussen, whom he assumed was of Danish origin. After one especially decadent evening on the yacht, the Count magnanimously offered to introduce the fun-loving clairvoyant to Hitler. After all, in the reckoning of Helldorf, one master showman had thrust politics into the realm of prophecy; the other had vigorously seasoned the national agenda with mystical belief.

When the two “H”s last met, after New Year’s 1933, Hanussen reportedly treated Hitler like a superstitious peasant woman. He traced the bumps on his scalp and consulted astrological charts to determine the candidate’s divine fate. The Man Who Can See into the Future guessed right: der Führer would soon lead Germany.