Copyright © 2021 by Charlie English
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Random House and the House colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Published in hardcover in the United Kingdom by William Collins, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, London.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: English, Charlie, author.
Title: The gallery of miracles and madness: insanity, modernism, and Hitler’s war on art / Charlie English.
Description: New York: Random House, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020044464 (print) | LCCN 2020044465 (ebook) | ISBN 9780525512059 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780525512066 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: National socialism and art. | Art and mental illness—Germany—History—20th century. | Prinzhorn, Hans, 1886–1933—Art collections. | Prinzhorn, Hans, 1886–1933. Bildnerei der Geisteskranken. Art—Destruction and pillage—Germany—History—20th century. | Killing of the mentally ill—Germany—History—20th century.
Classification: LCCN 6868.5.N37 E54 2021 (print) | LCCN 6868.5.N37 (ebook) | DDC 700.94309043—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020044464
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020044465
Ebook ISBN 9780525512066
Maps by Mapping Specialists Limited
randomhousebooks.com
Title-page art by Franz Karl Bühler, Das Selbst, 1919. © Prinzhorn Collection, University Hospital Heidelberg, Inv. No. 3018
Book design by Barbara M. Bachman, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Alex Merto
ep_prh_5.7.0_c0_r0
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Principal Artists
Maps
Preface
Part One: Bildnerei
Chapter 1: The Man Who Jumped in the Canal
Chapter 2: The Hypnosis in the Wood
Chapter 3: A Meeting at Emmendingen
Chapter 4: Dangerous to Look At!
Chapter 5: The Schizophrenic Masters
Chapter 6: Adventures in No-Man’s-Land
Part Two: Entartung
Chapter 7: Pleasant Little Pictures
Chapter 8: Dinner with the Bruckmanns
Chapter 9: Glimpses of a Transcendental World
Chapter 10: Art and Race
Chapter 11: A Cultural Revolution
Part Three: Bildersturm
Chapter 12: The Sculptor of Germany
Chapter 13: Cleansing the Temple of Art
Chapter 14: To Be German Means to Be Clear
Chapter 15: The Sacred and the Insane
Chapter 16: The Girl with the Blue Hair
Part Four: Euthanasie
Chapter 17: Foxes with White Coats
Chapter 18: Choking Angel
Chapter 19: You Will Ride on the Gray Bus
Chapter 20: In the Madhouse
Chapter 21: Landscapes of the Brain
Epilogue
Photo Insert
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Notes
Selected Bibliography
By Charlie English
About the Author
PRINCIPAL ARTISTS
Franz Karl Bühler
Else Blankenhorn
Karl Genzel
August Natterer
Hyazinth von Wieser
Paul Goesch
Carl Lange
Katharina Detzel
Joseph Schneller
Gustav Sievers
Agnes Richter
August Klett
Frau von Zinowiew
Josef Forster
Wilhelm Werner
PREFACE
—
A LETTER FROM BERLIN
On October 9, 1939, when the Second World War was barely a month old, the German Ministry of the Interior issued a directive to mental health institutions throughout the Reich, signed on behalf of Berlin’s top medical official, Dr. Leonardo Conti. As part of new wartime economic measures, Conti required asylum doctors to register every patient in their care who suffered from certain psychiatric illnesses, including schizophrenia, epilepsy, senile dementia, syphilis, “feeblemindedness,” encephalitis, and Huntington’s disease. They were also to register anyone without these conditions who had spent five years or more in an institution, or who was classed as criminally insane, or who did not possess either German nationality or “German or related blood.” In unclear cases, medical staff were to err on the side of registration, since it would be better for Berlin to have too many rather than too few patients on its lists.
Conti’s letter was followed by registration forms: one copy was to be filled out for each patient. Besides logging their racial category (picking from a menu that included “Jew,” “Jewish half-breed, first or second degree,” “Negro,” “Negro mongrel,” “Gypsy,” and “Gypsy mongrel”), doctors were to provide details of each individual’s ability to work, the nature of his or her illness, and whether they received visitors and how often. The forms had to be completed by typewriter where possible and returned to Berlin within a tight deadline.
As the directive landed in psychiatric institutions across the country, medical staff tried to guess at what it meant. Was the government going to relocate these patients? If so, to where? Were they looking for laborers to dig trenches at the front, or trying to free up beds for wounded soldiers? The registration form itself was scoured for clues. As the bureaucrats hadn’t left much room for a detailed medical opinion, at least one doctor concluded that it couldn’t signify anything too drastic. Others found the question about visitors highly suspicious. Why would Berlin need to know that?
The secret purpose of the Conti letter would unfold over the following weeks. Once the paperwork was returned, it was copied and sent out to a panel of psychiatrists, all ardent National Socialists, who were instructed to mark each case in pencil with a red “+” or a blue “−”. The few patients who received a blue minus sign were left alone. The red “+” was a death sentence. These people would be collected from their clinics and asylums in groups, loaded onto buses, and taken to specially converted nursing homes, where they were undressed, weighed, and pushed into airtight chambers, which were then flooded with lethal carbon monoxide. When they were all dead, their corpses were burned and their ashes dumped on the fields. Aktion T4, as this program was known, represented the first time a government had organized the industrialized extermination of a section of its population. For the Nazis, it would serve as the prototype for the greater mass murder to come.
Among the hundreds of thousands of mentally ill and disabled people killed in the so-called euthanasia actions were two dozen whose artwork had been collected by the psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn in the aftermath of the First World War. The way in which these artist-patients found themselves on a collision course with the Nazi government is the story I’ve tried to tell in this book
Exploring art in the context of National Socialism may seem coun
terintuitive, even distasteful. What relevance can painting or sculpture have when measured against so many deaths? Aren’t Hitler’s ideas about culture a distraction from his far more pressing crimes, to which so many words have already been devoted? In fact, the following narrative shows that the opposite is true. Hitler’s mass murder programs and his views on art were intimately connected through a network of pseudoscientific theories about race, modernism, the concept of “degeneracy,” and the people he deemed to be lebensunwertes Leben, “life unworthy of life.”
* * *
—
The art collection Hans Prinzhorn gathered at Heidelberg consists exclusively of work by the inpatients of mental hospitals. Though at one time it was envisaged as a research archive for the University of Heidelberg Psychiatric Clinic, Prinzhorn soon became far more interested in its artistic value than in its potential to help diagnose mental illness. This was in large part due to the extraordinary qualities of the material he discovered.
The men and women who created these works spent their lives cut off from the outside world, often forgotten by their peers and even by their families. Diagnosed mostly with schizophrenia, they didn’t always intend to make “art.” They used sketches, sculpture, and writing to chart aspects of their psychotic reality, or to communicate messages from an isolated interior. The collection includes all kinds of products, from paintings, drawings, and collages to doodles, poems, and music, executed on or with whatever came to hand: discarded nursing rosters, menus, sugar bags, used envelopes, even toilet tissue. Sculptures sit alongside designs for great inventions, diaries, and letters—none of which seems to have ever been sent. One woman repeated the same penciled phrase—“Sweetheart come”—on hundreds of sheets of paper, until each was dark with longing. Some drew pornography. Others worked with needle and thread, creating stuffed mannequins or embroidering clothing with words and phrases that they wore next to the skin. Viewing this often strange material is a moving and sometimes transcendent experience. Visitors remark that it’s as if it “bubbled up from the depths of the human psyche” or “opened windows on a different reality.” One former curator compared her encounter with the collection to the moment a dam bursts: “Remarkable worlds opened up before me,” she wrote, “drew me into their power; open spaces took away my equilibrium and made me dizzy.”
Prinzhorn’s achievement was to liberate this art from the psychiatric clinics and nursing institutions where it had been made, and release it into the wider world. He showed it to a new generation of artists who were seeking to explore the madness they had experienced in the First World War. These painters, sculptors, and writers—Paul Klee, Max Ernst, André Breton, and Salvador Dalí among them—saw Prinzhorn’s collection as a direct expression of the human interior, untainted by bourgeois education and training. The result was that, for a few giddy years in the 1920s and 1930s, art inspired by insanity stood at the forefront of the avant-garde. But it was never less than provocative, and in Germany, as the Weimar Republic crumbled, modern art came under attack from the far right.
National Socialism peddled the dream of a future based on a mythical past, a time of “blood and soil,” when the land was worked by a race of ethnically pure Aryan Volk. The messiah of this movement, Adolf Hitler, had more in common with the Prinzhorn artists than he would have liked to admit. Though few ever examined him, his hysterical, psychopathic personality has produced reams of diagnoses from psychiatrists and mental health experts. He also saw himself as a man of culture. His most unconscionable actions sprang from a belief that he was the “artist-Führer,” a recurring figure in German history who had both the vision to conjure his people’s path and the will to send them on it, no matter what the cost. He presented his politics as a cultural enterprise, and saw modern art, with its borrowings from psychiatry, its abstractions, and its raw emotional expressiveness—so different from his own tepid watercolors—as a symptom of the “insane” malaise that had polluted the community of ethnic Germans, the Volksgemeinschaft. True Aryan art, he believed, made the German spirit visible, and this spirit would recover only when Entartung (degeneracy) had been eradicated. The cultural cleansing was a precursor to racial cleansing. Uniquely, the Prinzhorn artists would be caught up in both.
Prinzhorn was aware that his collecting project was controversial, and that by treating schizophrenic art as something more than a symptom he was challenging the conventional psychiatric and artistic thinking of the time. But he could never have guessed the extreme nature of the confrontation that lay ahead, the danger for his artists, or the destructive purpose to which their work would eventually be put.
—Charlie English London
1.
THE MAN WHO JUMPED IN THE CANAL
On a winter’s day in 1898, a stocky young man with a handlebar mustache was hurrying along the banks of a canal in Hamburg, north Germany. Pohl, as the world would come to know him, was in his early thirties then, a dapper individual who liked to carry a cane or umbrella and to wear a stovepipe hat over his oiled, ink-dark hair. At this particular instant, though, such considerations were far from Pohl’s mind. He moved along in a private cloud of fear, rushing to escape the mysterious agents who tormented him. He didn’t know who these men were—they could pop up in any guise, anywhere, at almost any time—but he did have a pretty good idea who sent them.
It had begun in Strasbourg, a German city at this time, at a moment of great professional humiliation: his sacking from the city’s School of Arts and Crafts. The school’s director, not content with ruining a brilliant career, had sent spies to snoop on Pohl, to listen at his keyhole, forcing him to change lodgings again and again. In the end there had been nothing for it but to leave town altogether. Pohl moved to Hamburg, at the other end of the country, and tried to lose himself in the louche entertainments of the city’s vast red-light district, spending heavily on prostitutes and peep shows. Somehow his enemies tracked him down even here. Strangers threatened him in the street. He was accosted on the horse-drawn tram, singled out by the conductor, who yelled “He’s crazy!” in front of the other passengers. Pimps shouted “Rascal!,” “Thug!,” “Kill him!,” and the like. Even at the theater, he noticed the actors onstage delivering odd, barbed messages, targeted directly at him.
On this March day, he knew they were closing in.
Hamburg, the great port city on the river Elbe, the “Gateway to the World,” home to the fleet of oceangoing liners that carried Germans to Boston and Baltimore, Hoboken and Hong Kong, was a latticework of inlets and lakes, channels and streams. Pohl now found his escape route barred by water. There was only one option: He must swim. At the end of winter, the canal was close to freezing, but he plunged in anyway. The dark liquid engulfed him in its shocking embrace, then he was splashing out for the far bank.
When, at length, he was hauled out onto dry land, soaked and shivering, it was clear to passersby that not everything was well with the strange swimmer. There was no sign of a chasing pack. No one, in fact, seemed to be following him at all. He was disturbed, confused, perhaps insane. So he was brought to the gates of the Friedrichsberg “madhouse,” the giant institution that stood on a hill in the northeast of the city, and taken inside. He would remain in the dubious care of the psychiatric system for the next forty-two years, one of hundreds of thousands of inmates who lived precarious, near-invisible lives behind the walls of Germany’s asylums.
* * *
—
“Pohl” was the alias used to spare his family the taint of mental illness. The man’s real name was Franz Karl Bühler. He was a blacksmith by profession, though that word hardly does him justice. In fact, Bühler was one of the world’s leading metalworkers at a time when the Arts and Crafts movement had pushed the form to unprecedented heights. Working with the 2,500-degree heat of the furnace, he could transform coarse pig iron into something malleable and delicate. By drawing it and bending it, upsetting, punching, and welding
it, he was able to mimic flowers, grasses, and reed stalks so perfectly you had to touch them to know they weren’t real. But something had happened to Bühler, an inner derailment of sorts, which interfered with his sense of reality and put him at the mercy of his own fictions and delusions. Doctors examining him over the following months and years would attach different labels to his condition, but the one that would stick was “schizophrenia.”
Schizophrenia, the most severe of mental illnesses, remains the hardest to understand. Even articulate people with the condition find it difficult to explain the condition, beyond a sense of strangeness, alienation, or uncanniness. It is “a country, opposed to Reality, where reigned an implacable light,” according to one account, where “people turned weirdly about,” making nonsensical gestures and movements. Others describe it as a feeling of disintegration, or like looking at the world through a telescope backward. Some psychiatrists believe that where most people organize their perceptions into an overall picture of the world which they then act upon, those with schizophrenia combine unrelated pieces of sensory data that can only be understood by making irrational intellectual leaps. Hence Bühler, obsessed with his persecutors in Strasbourg, might hear a tram conductor shouting “He’s crazy!” when he was just calling out the next stop. But not all manifestations are alike, and not everyone affected finds the condition debilitating. Some view it as an “enhancement” that gives them unusually deep insight. Only around a third of cases are now considered progressive, and most people with schizophrenia live full and active lives. When Bühler was hospitalized, however, the diagnosis was brand-new, and was thought to herald an irreversible decline. There was nothing to be done, his doctors believed. It was just a matter of time.
The Gallery of Miracles and Madness Page 1