Art wasn’t the only area where degeneration was visible. “Parasitic growths” could be found in almost every field of culture over the previous twenty-five years, the symptoms of a “slowly rotting world.” The Weimar Republic was hastening Germans “toward the abyss.” Sooner or later, they would be ruined, he warned: “Woe to the peoples who can no longer master this disease!”
Having painted this dystopian vision, Hitler put forward his radical solution: a merciless purge of Kulturbolschewismus, combined with a new social model that would promote conservative morality and “Aryan” values. To combat the decadence of the intelligentsia, the whole education system would be reorganized and geared toward the military-style training of boys, since a fit young man was less inclined to “sexual ideas” than a lazy stay-at-home. Big-city “civilization” would be cleansed of its current filth, and art, theater, literature, cinema, the press, and even window displays would be placed in the service of his campaign for cultural renewal. Most drastically—and here he echoed Binding and Hoche’s argument for the killing of “life unworthy of life”—Hitler called for a “medical struggle” to preserve the genetic strength of the race. Individual rights were irrelevant in the face of this most important task, and the gravest decisions would have to be made. Future generations, however, would thank them, since
the demand that defective people be prevented from propagating equally defective offspring is a demand of the clearest reason….[I]f necessary, the incurably sick will be pitilessly segregated—a barbaric measure for the unfortunate who is struck by it, but a blessing for his fellow men and posterity.
If Germans did not swallow this bitter medicine, the consequences would be severe: They would simply die out, to be replaced by healthier, tougher peoples, more resistant to degeneracy.
Schultze-Naumburg was astonished by Hitler’s tirade. He came away from the Bruckmanns’ dinner with the impression that he had met a “very peculiar man.” Later he would describe him as a “monomaniac” and as a “pressure cooker overheated to the point of bursting,” filled with “enormous forces” that were “tamed only with difficulty.” Even so, he was impressed by his companion’s rhetorical dexterity and found him impossible to forget. The two men would meet many times after that, sometimes at the Bruckmanns’, sometimes at the large house and extensive gardens Schultze-Naumburg had built near Weimar. The architect would come to see Hitler as “almost clairvoyant,” possessing the “highest wisdom of a statesman,” and turn their conversations into some of the first tangible Nazi arts policies.
Hugo Bruckmann published the first volume of Mein Kampf in July 1925, with a second part to appear the following year. In most ways it was a terrible book, a mishmash of scientific and historical misunderstandings, conspiracy theories, fantasies, and downright lies, which managed also to be badly written and difficult to follow. Even some of Hitler’s allies were appalled. His friend Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl, who looked over an early draft, described it as “really frightful stuff…the style filled me with horror.” Mussolini said it was “a boring tome,” which he had never been able to get through. The Nazi dissident Otto Strasser called it “a veritable chaos of banalities, schoolboy reminiscences, subjective judgements, and personal hatred.” Some reviewers attacked the author’s mental stability; few thought he meant it all literally. But in the febrile, violent interwar atmosphere, its logical and stylistic shortcomings wouldn’t matter. Hitler worked in the mediums of emotion and prejudice, and after four years of addressing the beer hall mobs, he understood what worked, which buttons to push, which scapegoats to pick. He mined his personal history of intensely felt humiliations—at the hands of his father, the academy professors, civilians during the war—to paint himself as the German martyr, Jesus-meets-Prometheus, whose suffering could be read in his grim-set features, and who would never give up the fight to restore dignity to his adoptive country.
For one twentysomething reader, at least, Mein Kampf was a revelation. “Who is this man?” wrote Joseph Goebbels on finishing the first volume. “Half plebian, half God! Is this really Christ, or just John the Baptist?”
9.
GLIMPSES OF A TRANSCENDENTAL WORLD
For the moment these arguments lay on the political fringes as Germany enjoyed the Golden Twenties, a period of rare prosperity and stability bookended by the inflation crisis of 1923 and the Wall Street crash of 1929. At last, the people had food, work, clothing, even a little luxury in the form of lipstick and whipped cream, silk stockings and automobiles, radios and air travel. Passport restrictions were lifted. Borders reopened. A zeppelin flew to America, and Americans flew to Germany, looking to invest in its industry and infrastructure. German academics were once again invited to international conferences. “The world opened up like an immeasurable blue sea full of golden islands,” the historian Konrad Heiden remembered. “Again all water and land routes led into the infinite; again each man was free to go out and search for his horn of plenty.”
Prinzhorn, now a famous intellectual, spent these years hurrying through a surprising number of doomed romances and dead-end careers. He left Heidelberg for Dresden to move in with a new lover, the Expressionist dancer Mary Wigman. It took Wigman just a year to realize she couldn’t live with him. He ran a private sanatorium in Wiesbaden after that, but hated being surrounded at all hours by “hysterical jellyfish” who robbed him of sleep. Nine months later he was in Frankfurt, where he taught psychoanalysis at the university and founded a psychotherapy practice, but the business didn’t perform well, and he had to return to the lecture circuit. On one of his speaking tours he met a sixteen-year-old girl, Margarethe Hofmann, nicknamed “Lychee.” At the start of 1926, despite the twenty-two-year age gap, Margarethe agreed to become his third wife.
Prinzhorn returned from their honeymoon to embark on a feverish round of literary activity, which included a second book, Bildnerei der Gefangenen (Artistry of the prison inmates), an attempt to replicate his initial success by exploring the art of convicted criminals. But he failed to find the same transcendent insight in Germany’s jails that he had found in its asylums, and admitted in a preface that “the problems raised here are not that important.” The experience does seem to have rekindled interest in his original study, however, since at the end of that year he wrote to a friend who worked at Emmendingen to ask after the great find of his former project:
The patient Bühler, who plays an important role in my Bildnerei, died some time ago. I would now like to know if his drawings, which at that time included several large packages (mainly with soft crayon on newsprint), are still preserved.
If that was the case, he would try to stop by after Christmas when he was driving to the Black Forest with Margarethe. Though he had no need for more material relating to Bildnerei der Geisteskranken, he would be fascinated to find the artist’s last works, he explained. Bühler had fallen into “a phase of disintegration” after the heights of Der Würgengel, Prinzhorn believed, and these works would help “round off the overall picture.”
There is no evidence that the doctor did return to Emmendingen that winter, but if he had, he would have discovered that Bühler was very much alive, and that conditions at the Breisgau asylum had improved dramatically since 1920. Every part of the institution had been upgraded. The cells in the secure central block, once filled with agitated, confused, dirty patients, had been converted into light-filled day- and workrooms, well-ventilated halls, and staff accommodation. The isolation unit had been abolished. Builders had given the pavilions a makeover, chopping down trees that overshadowed them, painting the walls in bright colors, and hanging artists’ prints. Gardeners were now tending the parkland so that it resembled a “most beautiful jewel,” as the asylum supervisor Otto Waßmer remembered, a “magic forest” richly decorated in summer with flowers and blossoms, which filled the air with their scent. Electric lighting had replaced the dangerous old gas system; unhygienic commodes
and chamber pots had been swapped for plumbing and sewers; telephones had been installed, bringing instant communication with the outside world; and two tractors and a new Mercedes-Benz had been added to a growing motor pool. Visitors could now be picked up from the station, and patients taken out on drives through the picturesque countryside.
The inmate population was growing, too: By 1927 it would climb to around thirteen hundred, almost double that of 1918, a trend that was repeated across the country. There were so many patients, in fact, that a system of community care had to be devised, in which large numbers were sent home or to host families where they were monitored by teams of health visitors. Those who remained found their days increasingly filled, thanks to a new therapy developed by the director of the Gutersloh asylum, Hermann Simon. Simon understood that inactivity, boredom, and poor living conditions created new pathologies, “bad moods, moroseness, excitability,” arguments, and fights, so he devised a system of occupational therapy, looking both to improve the environment and to keep patients busy with purposeful tasks, since “successful activity creates satisfaction, inner and outer calm.” He established a hierarchy of jobs to cover all levels of ability, ranging from pushing a wheelbarrow while supervised to overseeing other work parties. Some better-off patients were even encouraged to pursue hobbies such as photography and painting. These reforms produced tangible benefits for inmates and reduced asylum costs, but there would be a downside, in that psychiatrists increasingly came to view health as synonymous with useful economic activity.
There was plenty of work to be done at Emmendingen. As well as sowing and reaping the crops, the asylum had to manage hundreds of pigs, eight horses, a bull, fifty cows, twenty cattle and calves, and more than two hundred chickens. There was a butcher’s shop to run, a bakery that produced 185 tons of bread annually, and a vegetable garden that yielded beans, carrots, lettuce, cucumbers, celery, leeks, radishes, and cauliflower. On the gentle slopes to the north stood 2,500 fruit trees, whose harvest kept the cellars filled with 32,000 gallons of drink. More employment could be found in the kitchens, which had to feed up to 1,500 people three times a day. All this industry meant that by 1930 almost every male inmate and three-quarters of the women were in some form of employment. Even on Sundays and public holidays the patients were encouraged to keep busy with a range of leisure activities. There were outdoor games and board games, card games and parlor games, swimming pools, a bowling alley, and a substantial library. Every month, local and international artists performed in the festival theater, and in summer, an asylum orchestra played in the gardens.
All in all, the Emmendingen and Baden asylums were now exemplary and progressive psychiatric institutions. As Otto Waßmer put it, the staff—whose motto was “Love, serve!”—were there to ease the lot of the patients, to treat them with humanity, and, where possible, to return them recovered to their families. Reflecting on the four decades that had passed since Emmendingen’s founding, Waßmer hoped that it would be able to “continue its work in blessing for a long time to come.”
* * *
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The success of Bildnerei der Geisteskranken and the art collection made little difference to the lives of most artist-patients—they were, after all, anonymized—though some were lucky to receive recognition and respect within their institutions. At Wiesloch, Joseph Heinrich Grebing, a former chocolate salesman who had designed a magnificent “Air Ark” ocean liner for the skies, was immensely proud of his inclusion in the book, which he described as “such an intervention in ‘human education’ that one could almost say that nothing like this had ever existed before.” At Eickelborn, Genzel’s doctors entirely reassessed their view of his creative output: Sculptures that had been referred to in his medical notes as “shameless” and “nonsensical” were now “artistic productions” or “artistic works.” This didn’t stop their one-legged creator from trying to escape, and in November 1924 he succeeded, fleeing a hundred miles cross-country to Mühlhausen, Thuringia, where he was taken in by relatives. But he was difficult to live with, and before long he was brought to the local asylum, where he suffered a stroke; after that he was returned to Eickelborn. He appeared happy to be back at the institution where he had spent most of the past seventeen years. He died there six months later, on August 21, 1925, at the age of fifty-four.
At Rottenmünster, August Natterer’s doctors acknowledged his Heidelberg connection by writing “Prinzhorn!” repeatedly in parentheses in his notes. The Surrealists’ favorite patient abandoned art around this time and became increasingly overbearing. He was occasionally allowed into nearby Rottweil, until police found him in a seedy quarter of town with young girls. His freedoms were restricted after that. In 1926, doctors noted a “flourishing systematized megalomania,” including a declaration that he was the “world saviour and Deputy Lord on Earth,” though he “completely lack[ed] his earlier more artistic and cosmological ideas (Prinzhorn!).” The following summer he returned to art, drawing various symbolic images. Overwhelmed now by hallucinations, he developed an irregular heart rhythm, and would die of cardiac failure in October 1933. He was busy with artistic activity to the end, producing “eccentric figures and machines,” such as an air-driven heating device, and painting scenes that once again expressed his fantastic visions and experiences.
Paul Goesch, the professionally trained architect, even managed to sell some of his work from the asylum. After 1921 he lived in the Göttingen institution, where he produced more than fifty pictures—helped, no doubt, by his brother-in-law, who worked there—and made sculptures of leftover food, paper, and geranium leaves, which he explained by saying “in the transition to recover, one has joy in flowers.” In June 1923, he was paid 70,000 marks when his colored woodcuts were used to accompany twenty luxury copies of a book of biblical texts. By 1926, he was beginning to weaken physically, but he still had an agile mind, and constructed a new language from Greek and Latin. As one physician noted in 1931, he had “an excellent memory for details, productive imagination, and an original way of seeing things.”
Bühler was rare in that his contribution to Prinzhorn’s book was publicly recognized, thanks in part to the Offenburg printer Franz Huber. When Huber was a boy, Bühler used to come almost daily to visit the Huber family’s lodger, a painter and musician named Josef Mandel. Bühler was a “strange gentleman” with black hair and keen eyes, Huber remembered, and though even at a young age he could tell that both he and Mandel were “misfits,” the two men had gotten along perfectly. They had practiced music together—Mandel playing the piano, Bühler the violin—and Mandel had kept a photograph above the washstand in his room of them in a music ensemble. After a while, Bühler had stopped visiting, and when Huber asked where he had gone, he was told that he was in an asylum. He sought out the master blacksmith’s work after that, identifying several wrought-iron pieces in the buildings around Offenburg. In the basement of the School of Applied Arts in Karlsruhe, he discovered the gates Bühler had shown at the Chicago World’s Fair.
Years later, Huber was discussing Bühler and his ironwork with a local physician when the doctor pulled out a copy of Bildnerei der Geisteskranken, opening the volume at Der Würgengel. Turning to the profile of the work’s author, Huber recognized “Franz Pohl” as the man who used to visit their house when he was a boy. It was “one of the strangest discoveries and one of the most shocking at the same time,” he remembered: “The man [I] had so often seen as a boy, who had suddenly vanished…still lived and led a sad existence in a lunatic cell.” He asked around town to see if he could gather any more information. Mandel was dead by this time, but he found some of Bühler’s childhood friends, who told him they had visited Emmendingen, but the artist no longer recognized them.
Prinzhorn was right to pick out Bühler for praise, Huber concluded, since he was “one of the most interesting in the great chapter of the mentally ill.” Not only had he been a great artisan as a healthy person, h
e had confronted the science of psychiatry with “new tasks and insights.”
An exhibition of Bühler’s ironwork would be shown at the Offenburg county fair in 1931. Under the headline “Franz Bühler: A True Great,” the local Badische Presse reported:
The Gallery of Miracles and Madness Page 10