Thread by @kingofpain666

I don't have a #Stolperstein in Ireland that I can clean today, but I can remember Expressionist poet and painter John Höxter, who has one on Hardenbergstraße 28a in #Berlin, in front of the new Romanisches Café. #KeinVerblassen

Born 1884 in Hannover, he went to Berlin to study arts but soon immersed himself fully in the café scene around Ku’damm. Höxter became a permanent fixture of the Romanisches Café and was friends Else Lasker-Schüler, Renee Sintenins and Erich Mühsam.

He painted and composed lyric, had affairs with men and women (among them actresses Spela Albrecht and Emmy Hennings), and soon developed a lasting morphine addiction. Leo von König painted Spela and John together in 1909 under the title ‘Boheme-Café’.

Höxter haunted the cafés for the next 30 years, but unlike many of his friends who became established artists, Höxter never moved on. He fed his morphine addiction through scrounging money and became known as the 'Ahasver of the Romanisches Cafe'.

After 1933, the Nazis banned Höxter from his beloved cafés, and killed some of his friends: poet and playwright Erich Mühsam for example, whom Höxter had sketched for his memoir 'This is How we Lived', was killed in a concentration camp in 1934.

He witnessed the #Novemberpogrome with horror and despair. Five days later, on November 15th, 1938, he entered a small forest between Potsdam and Caputh near Berlin and opened his veins. He was 54 years old when he died.

In his final letter he said: 'May the noble, naive German people one day wash away the horrible guilt they incurred when they all too willingly followed that rule of the unholy trinity of the devil of madness, the devil of rabble-rousing and the devil of greed.' #KeinVerblassen

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