Norman Ohler

Ohler was born in 1970 in Zweibrücken, in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate.⁠[1]

After graduating from the Hamburg School of Journalism he wrote for Der Spiegel and Stern, and Geo sent him to South Africa for a special issue; in 1993 he moved to New York City.⁠[1]

In New York he founded Tribes Gallery.⁠[2]

In 1995 his first novel, Die Quotenmaschine, was published on the internet as hypertext, and his website calls it the first internet novel in literary history; set in nighttime Manhattan, it follows Ray as he morphs into the mute detective Maxx Rutenberg, trying to solve the case of his own identity.⁠[3]

After returning to Germany he published his second novel, Mitte, in 2001, and the last novel of his city trilogy, Stadt des Goldes, in 2002.⁠[1]

Mitte, the second volume, follows Klinger, who moves from London to an unrenovated old building in central Berlin and uncovers its haunted stories, including that of an electronic-music genius and DJ who died mysteriously in his apartment.⁠[4]

The final volume, Stadt des Goldes (Ponte City), tells of a young woman from Soweto who moves into Johannesburg’s Ponte City tower after the end of apartheid and confronts the harsh realities of post-apartheid South Africa.⁠[5]

In 2004, while serving as city writer in Ramallah, he interviewed Yassir Arafat; his author biography says he was the last European to interview Arafat before Arafat’s death.⁠[6]

Palermo Shooting, whose screenplay he co-wrote with Wim Wenders, screened in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2008.⁠[7]

In 2010 he wrote, directed and produced his first short film, Natural, starring Henry Hopper.⁠[6]

He first heard from a Berlin DJ that drugs had been widespread in the Nazi era and intended to write a novel about it, but after reading military records and the papers of Hitler’s personal physician in the archives he turned to writing a work of history.⁠[8]

He spent five years researching archives in Germany and the United States. Published in Germany in 2015 as Der totale Rausch, the book explores the role of psychoactive drugs in the Second World War; it became an international bestseller and has been translated into 30 languages.⁠[9]

German reviewers were divided: historian Helena Barop found it speculative and sensationalist, failing to distinguish fact from possibility, while historian Jörg Baberowski felt the author lost credibility by trying to explain everything through drugs, though he found the questions raised stimulating.⁠[10]

The English translation, Blitzed, was published by Allen Lane in London in 2016. Academic reactions ranged from Antony Beevor’s highly positive review in The New York Review of Books to Paul Weindling’s critical review in Nature and Richard Evans’s scathing response in The Guardian; Evans and Weindling both argued that Ohler overplayed the scale of drug use in civilian and military life; Ohler rebutted, in The Guardian in May 2017, the claim that the book lessened Hitler’s accountability.⁠[11]

Evans called the claim that all or most Germans could only function on drugs “wildly implausible” and dismissed it as a morally problematic account that excuses Hitler, while Ian Kershaw and Antony Beevor regarded it as a valuable addition to scholarship.⁠[8]

Ohler, for his part, has stated that Hitler was the “master of his senses” and knew what he was doing.⁠[12]

In 2017 he published the novel Die Gleichung des Lebens, in which the mathematician Leonhard Euler is the investigator.⁠[6][13]

On July 14, 2020, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt published The Bohemians, translated by Tim Mohr and Marshall Yarbrough, which tells how Harro and Libertas Schulze-Boysen led an anti-Nazi resistance network in Berlin, drawing on the German Resistance Memorial Center and German, British, Russian and American archives.⁠[14]

The British edition is titled The Infiltrators. Reviewer Philippe Sands praised it as deeply engaging but said he sometimes wondered whether the line between fact and faction had been crossed.⁠[15]

In 2023 Kiepenheuer und Witsch published his Der stärkste Stoff, which uses LSD and psilocybin to examine, through their roles as intoxicant, tool of mind control and medicine, how the development, production and spread of psychedelics have shaped politics and society from the postwar era to the present.⁠[16]

In 2024 Mariner published his Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age. Publishers Weekly called it a must-read, while noting Ohler’s argument that the cultural upheaval of the 1960s stemmed from widespread psychedelic use.⁠[17]

On his website he describes the book as based on archival research on both sides of the Atlantic, tracing how Nazi-era research on psychedelics influenced postwar American work, the CIA’s MKUltra program and US drug policy.⁠[18]

Marking the centenary of Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg, he published the nonfiction book Der Zauberberg, die ganze Geschichte in 2024, tracing Davos’s rise from a poor mountain village to a sanatorium and ski resort.⁠[9]

Diogenes published the book in Zurich in 2024, with an audiobook read by the author.⁠[19]

On September 19, 2025, he appeared on episode 481 of the Lex FridmanLex FridmanLex Fridman is a Soviet-born, US-raised computer scientist and podcast host who works as an MIT research scientist on human-AI interaction and autonomous driving. His Lex Fridman Podcast is known for hours-long conversations with guests including heads of state and technology leaders.Open the full entry Podcast, discussing drugs in post-WWI Germany, the Nazi rise to power, Hitler’s drug use, his response to historians’ criticism, Pervitin and the Blitzkrieg, and LSD and MKUltra; the episode description says he is working on a new book, Stoned Sapiens, that looks at the history of human civilization through the lens of drugs.⁠[20]

As of November 2025 he is a freelance writer living in Berlin whose work has been translated into more than 30 languages; Der totale Rausch reached The New York Times and Der Spiegel bestseller lists, and he has received the Pfalzpreis für Literatur.⁠[19]

Personal website: Public link: https://www.normanohler.de/ (opens in a new window)⁠[20]

X: Public account: https://x.com/normanohler (opens in a new window)⁠[20]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Norman-Ohler (opens in a new window)⁠[20]