St. Petri - Schnee

Escaping from the turmoil of post-war Europe in the 1920s, a medical doctor settles in a small village in northern Germany. Recovering from an accident, the doctor witnesses a chemical-political experiment in which a reactionary count intends to put an entire village on a drug originating from fungi growing on cereals in order to restore the old order. The experiment fails and ends in an uprising of the villagers against the count. Leo Perutz mastered also in this novel his technique of the “unreliable narrator”, and anticipates the psychotropic and political dimension of LSD - 10 year prior to its discovery by Albert Hoffmann in 1943.