Jakob van Hoddis (birth name Hans Davidsohn) was born in Berlin on 16 May 1887 as the son of a Jewish sanitary councillor. He first studied architecture, then Greek and philosophy in Munich, Jena and Berlin. In 1909 he adopted his pseudonym; in the same year joined with others to found the New Club, the nucleus of literary expressionism. In 1914 he was diagnosed with schizophrenia. From then on he lived in sanatoria and mental institutions or in private care. In 1933, he was interned in the only Jewish sanatorium in Sayn near Koblenz and deported from there to Poland, where he was most likely murdered in the Sobibór extermination camp in May or June of the same year, at the age of 55.