Spuk

Spuk, by Klabund (the pen name of Alfred Henschke), plunges listeners into a fevered, hallucinatory horror where dreams and waking life collapse into one. Told in the first person, the narrator suffers a sudden hemorrhage mid‑cabaret and is carried to the Charité by strangers; from there a relentless sequence of metaphysical visions, guilt, illness, and childhood memories begins to erode any firm sense of reality. Klabund’s spare, punchy sentences and uncompromising language create an atmosphere of raw psychological terror and existential dread. Set against the historical backdrop of early 1920s Germany and written "in the fever of an illness" in 1921, Spuk reflects the author’s lifelong struggle with tuberculosis and an acute sensibility that made his fiction intensely visceral. Themes of grief, bodily fragility, guilt, and the porous boundary between life and the supernatural drive this horror/ghost‑story novel. Listeners who appreciate psychological horror, expressionist-era German fiction, or stark, poetic prose will find Spuk a gripping and unsettling experience. Note: the novel contains vivid, sometimes graphic passages and may be distressing to sensitive listeners.