Erik Jan Hanussen: Hitler's Jewish Clairvoyant
| Author | Mel Gordon |
|---|---|
| Published | 2001 |
| Format | Book |
TL;DR — Mel Gordon’s biography of Hanussen, a Jewish-born stage mentalist who became a celebrity seer in Weimar Berlin and was murdered in 1933.
Published by Feral House in 2001, billed on its jacket as the first English-language biography of its subject. Born Herschmann Chaim Steinschneider, Hanussen worked carnivals and music halls in Austria and Germany as a hypnotist, mind-reader and clairvoyant, acted as a “psychic detective”, and published an occult newspaper in Berlin in the last years of the Weimar Republic.
Gordon, a theatre historian, reconstructs his stage career and techniques, his courting of the Nazi Party despite his Jewish origins, and the circumstantial links drawn between him and the Reichstag fire before he was killed in 1933.
What it is: a popular biography from a small publisher known for counterculture titles, by an academic theatre historian. This copy is a scan of a library copy; the book is in copyright.
Where this came from
- A copy saved in October 2026.
304 pages. A PDF copy is held in Kyle’s private archive; it is not linked or shared here.