Alfred Henschke, who wrote under the pseudonym Klabund, was one of the most widely read and admired authors of the blossoming of German literature during the Weimar Republic. At home in genres from the political song to the novel, from literary adaptations to contemporary drama, Klabund was indeed, as he himself defined the meaning of his pseudonym, the epitome of "change." He wrote in Irene (1918):

My name Klabund
That means: change
My father is called phantom
My mother: show.

Born in 1890 in Crossen on the Oder, the son of a pharmacist, Klabund was a childhood friend of the poet Gottfried Benn. In 1906 he was diagnosed as tubercular and spent the rest of his life in and out of sanatoria. His work reflects this lifelong struggle with a disease which at the close of the nineteenth century had already attained the status of "aesthetic" illness: the tubercular patient approximated...