The Gallery of Miracles and Madness

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The Gallery of Miracles and Madness Page 12

by Charlie English


  That terrible thing…lies in the fact that this is not about the persecution of works of political tendency, but about purely artistic, aesthetic works which, simply because they are novel, different, idiosyncratic, are equated with “Bolshevism.”

  What Schlemmer did not understand was that German art was being redefined. For the völkisch wing of the NSDAP, it was no longer sufficient for something to have been created by Germans, in Germany; instead, it had to exhibit the classical signifiers Schultze-Naumburg had identified as race-based, and avoid the gamut of motifs and concepts that had been designated “un-German,” “Jewish,” “Bolshevik,” “exotic,” “not of our blood,” and “degenerate.”

  The nationalist media hailed the NSDAP’s assault on modernism in Thuringia as a heavy blow and a triumph. The painter and critic Bettina Feistel-Rohmeder, a fierce reactionary who in 1920 had founded the anti-modern Deutsche Kunstgesellschaft (German Art Society), of which Schultze-Naumburg was a member, used the moment to call for “a great iconoclasm throughout Germany.” “It began in Weimar,” she wrote. “Heil Frick!”

  The Thuringian experiment did not last long. Frick was ousted by the Social Democrats in April 1931, and Schultze-Naumburg lost his position as the head of the United Art School, at which point he threw himself into battle for the Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur. He was second only to Alfred Rosenberg in the Munich-based organization and was its main draw, speaking to sell-out crowds in universities and colleges across the country. These lectures, which had such titles as “Kampf um die Kunst” (Battle for art), drew heavily on the theories he had set out in Kunst und Rasse and used the same technique of juxtaposing images from medical institutions with cropped modernist paintings, in an attempt to prove that contemporary art was leading Germany toward a “true hell of subhuman beings.” Asylum inmates were included in this slideshow as evidence of the artists’ “mockery of nature.” Paul Ortwin Rave, then a curator at the Berlin Nationalgalerie, recalled:

  In his lectures he demonstrated—by his words and a projector—the disturbing similarity of some of the expunged images with physical deformities and cretins from the madhouse, whose photographs he presented alongside the paintings of degenerate artists to facilitate a comparison.

  The atmosphere at these gatherings was more akin to Nazi beer hall rallies than academic lectures. They often descended into riots, provoked or encouraged by the whole unit of brown-shirted storm troopers from the Sturmabteilung (SA) that was allocated to provide “security.” Rosenberg would kick the proceedings off with a short introduction, whereupon the “itinerant preacher for racially pure German art,” as one artist described Schultze-Naumburg, climbed to the podium amid the jubilant cheers of nationalists in the crowd and the whistles and roars of the academics and anti-fascists. The architect proceeded to hurl one accusation after another at the guardians of contemporary German art. The lectures concluded with a chorus of the Nazi anthem “Deutschland Erwache!” (Germany, awake!).

  Feistel-Rohmeder described the “most vehemently excited” character of these events, writing, with an almost palpable shiver, that to find oneself in the audience was “luck.” Summing up Schultze-Naumburg’s influence on the heady spirit of the time, she stated that after him, the German Volk would never again forget the criteria for judging art:

  [He had applied] the heavy artillery of his serious scholarship to categorically dismiss all art that is not blood-bound…It is his conviction that the visual arts of the future will recognize as its sole ideal the German people, which originates from generations who bring with them rigor and strength and true heroic disposition.

  Anyone who asked awkward questions of the architect took their lives in their hands. At one lecture in Munich on March 31, 1931, two young German painters, Günther Graßmann and Wolf Panizza, found the courage to interject, asking, “Where is the good modern culture?” The National Socialist “venue security” responded by beating the two artists with brass knuckles and throwing them out of the hall. Panizza’s cheekbone and jaw were broken in the process.

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  This could have been Prinzhorn’s moment, the time when he brought his unrivaled expertise and considerable intellect to bear on the debate over modern art and psychiatry. At a minimum, he might have reiterated his 1922 conclusion that all configuration was a legitimate expression of the human psyche, no matter what the state of the intellect behind it, and rejected the racial ideas of Hitler and Schultze-Naumburg. Instead, he remained silent on the subject, and when, in the early 1930s, he chose to intervene in politics, he sided with the National Socialists.

  He had returned from America more directionless than ever. He wrote poetry. He translated André Gide’s Les nourritures terrestres (The fruits of the Earth) and D. H. Lawrence’s The Man Who Died into German. He embarked on a new relationship with a friend from his student days, but when she pressed him for marriage, he refused, and she left to wed a wealthy industrialist. The manner of this breakup pushed Prinzhorn into a new cycle of despair. He developed speech problems. His voice became hoarse and almost toneless, and medical specialists diagnosed a hysterical disorder. Lecturing became painful at a time when he really needed the money.

  If he’d had any political leaning during the time of Bildnerei der Geisteskranken, it was toward the left. An early outline for the book even proposed a section on “Tolstoy and the socialist sentiment as salvation,” though this never appeared in print. Since then, he had tried to remain aloof from “the shallowness of timebound affairs,” as he put it, refusing to read the newspapers, considering himself to be an explorer of long-standing human truths. By 1930, when he decided, Zarathustra-like, to come down from the mountain and put his insights at the disposal of the Germans, he had bought into the right wing narrative of impending doom. This was an “age threatened in its cultural, sociological and artistic foundations,” he wrote, a “disintegrated and restless time,” much like that of late Rome. The Zeitkrankheit (time sickness) presaged the great reversal, long predicted by German philosophy, when the people would reject the current “untenable, rotten worldview” and return to the age-old values that lay deep within them. His desire for cultural renewal, combined with the theories he had expressed in Psychotherapy about the importance of strong leaders, increasingly drew him toward the Nazis.

  He entered the political arena in December 1930, writing a letter to the editor of the Berlin conservative weekly Der Ring in which he announced that, after many years of political skepticism, he had come to “agree…in the main lines” with the aims of Hitler’s party. He would write four more articles on the subject of National Socialism for the publication by 1933, exploring the phenomenon from a psychological standpoint.

  The key to the movement’s appeal lay in the response of the young, he wrote. In intolerable social and economic circumstances, Hitler had given German youth a cause, a purpose greater than themselves, which demanded self-sacrifice, and in return for the meaning this brought them, they showed him “genuine devotion.” The weakness of Prinzhorn’s argument was pointed out by his mentor, Ludwig Klages, who told him: “What you say…about National Socialism is in itself quite correct; but there is one serious snag. The fact that a willing and uncritical youth is enthusiastic about a so-called idea or person neither speaks for the quality of this idea nor for any ability of this person to be a leader.” Prinzhorn wasn’t put off. After observing Hitler at close quarters at a rally in Weimar in April 1931, he announced that his “interaction with the comrades is free, buoyant, well-rehearsed, carried by relaxed, well-intentioned discipline,” and that the Führer, though a coarse and clumsy speaker, represented “something like a constitutional monarch” of the masses and showed a remarkable ability to “hammer a few facts and judgments and guiding principles” into his audience.

  He was critical of some Nazi activities, particularly the “unspeakably vulgar” tone of the propaganda shee
ts. He took Wilhelm Frick to task for his show-off tone and insult-laden style and opposed his attempts to politicize culture in Thuringia. Something like that could only happen, he wrote, “under de facto dictatorship.” Attempts to include artistic activities in political propaganda were a “violent coup against the vitality of art,” and the Hitlerian idea that the average SA man should be able to understand everything was misguided, since “every good artist has a right to see his work and his personality first judged by experts, whose opinion is then to be respected by politicians.” The most deadly atmosphere for artistic blossoming was one in which the grassroots were paralyzed, for fear that their self-expression was illegitimate.

  Overall, though, he brushed aside Nazi attacks on civil liberties and Jews with the phrase “not nice but perhaps tactically necessary.” While he could admit that there was hardly a field of work in which he hadn’t encountered a Jew who had been “exemplary…in character, achievement and contribution to German culture,” there was clearly a tension between “Nordic” and Semitic peoples, which arose from their instinctive feelings of difference. It was true that a “Jewish spirit” had overtaken Germany during the Weimar period and that it had become “unendurable in many fields.” To redress the balance, he suggested a war against “Judaism,” rather than individual Jews.

  The Der Ring articles caught the eye of Hugo Bruckmann, who was keen to position himself as an expert on cultural renewal in Hitler’s eyes. He approached Prinzhorn with the idea of a nationalist cultural magazine, and the doctor seized on it, since it promised exactly the sort of spirit-guide role he imagined for himself. On January 6, 1932, he presented Bruckmann with an idea for a German cultural reeducation program, which would run alongside the magazine. At this time, Elsa Bruckmann was still energetically supporting the Nazis through her salon, which was attended by senior party members and, when he had time, by Hitler. Prinzhorn was now also invited. He met Rosenberg there, who became involved with the project. That May, Prinzhorn wrote spontaneously to Hitler himself, offering his services:

  I have long wished to place my powers at the disposal of the only national movement which, because of its youthful momentum and impartiality, is perhaps receptive and ready for those teachings…that emerge from the triad of Goethe-Nietzsche-Klages as the German worldview of the 20th century.

  What Prinzhorn failed to recognize was that there were major points of difference between his own position and that of the Nazis. A measure of how deeply he misjudged the party was his proposal to include Freud’s works in his cultural program: soon, Nazi students would be burning these very volumes on ritual bonfires. By the end of 1932, he understood his project could not be realized with Hitler and his followers and abandoned it. His fourth, more critical Der Ring article appeared that November, after a summer of unprecedented political violence, when the storm troopers had been allowed to create an atmosphere akin to civil war. “There should no longer be anyone outside the party who wishes Hitler and his people to take over government even from the point of view of the least evil,” he wrote. The Nazi leader was not a legitimate Führer, and his rule could lead to a “catastrophic” conclusion. Even now, though, he left room for reconciliation, asking the reader to consider how much easier it had been for Mussolini, whose black-shirted Fascists had simply marched on Rome at the end of 1922 and been handed power by the king of Italy. And he remained close to the Bruckmanns. That Christmas, Elsa sent a copy of Prinzhorn’s new book, Persönlichkeitspsychologie (Personality psychology), to Hitler as a gift. Judging by the crispness of the pages many decades later, the Nazi leader didn’t read it.

  Prinzhorn was attacked from many quarters for his dalliance with National Socialism. The Jewish writer Ludwig Marcuse railed against the NSDAP’s new “recruit” and accused him of opportunism. More surprising was the welcoming response of the German Jewish newspaper C.V.-Zeitung, which asked, “Will they listen to him? A sincere critic of the NSDAP.” He never joined the party, and his sensibilities may well have been offended by the crackdowns on dissent and artistic freedom that were soon to come. His interest in National Socialism stemmed from his own despair, narcissism, and naivety. He yearned for relevance and public acclaim, but his complacency and his belief that he could help steer Hitler’s wrecking ball, using his influence to “try hard to avoid the worst,” would tarnish his reputation for decades after his death.

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  As the economic and political weather in Germany changed, so, too, did the public reception of Prinzhorn’s collection. Between 1929 and 1933, an exhibition of the Heidelberg material toured at least nine cities in Germany and Switzerland, showing between 150 and 330 works at a time. The impetus for this traveling show may have been the inclusion of thirty-six Prinzhorn artworks at the Exposition des artistes malades (Exhibition of ill artists) in Paris in the summer of 1929. Buyers here included Paul Éluard and André Breton, who stressed the importance of asylum art as a source of inspiration. Equally, Wilmanns may have been trying to combat misconceptions about the mentally ill in the increasingly febrile climate.

  The job of defending the material at this point fell largely to one of Prinzhorn’s ex-colleagues, the psychiatrist Hans Gruhle. In an introductory essay in the guide that was printed for the tour, he advised viewers to discard two habitual prejudices about schizophrenic art. The first was that anything produced by a psychiatric patient had no artistic value: that it was neither good nor bad, beautiful nor ugly, but “a curiosity and nothing more.” The second was that an esteemed act of literary or artistic creation lost its worth as soon as its author was proven to be “sick”: It was a peculiar confusion of standards to elevate the art of an unknown master, only to overthrow it as soon as one became aware that the artist was mentally ill. The only reason such judgments persisted was because of outmoded ways of thinking, which placed psychiatric patients outside human society and barred them from achieving recognition for anything they did. In fact, the Heidelberg collection showed far greater authenticity than much professional art. If spectators approached the works without prejudice, they would not believe that they had come from sanatoria at all, but would be forced to conclude, as many an important artist had, that “these sick people can do more than we can.”

  This was red meat to the völkisch reactionaries. After seeing an exhibition at the Munich Art Association in June 1931, Bettina Feistel-Rohmeder blamed “supporters of the Indian chief and relativity sage Einstein,” a regular Nazi hate figure, for launching this traveling show of “madhouse art.” Its aim, she claimed, was to prove to “us naive people, who consider a healthy soul in a healthy body a desirable basis for artistic creation,” that “nobody knows anything,” particularly not “where sanity ends and nonsense begins.” She found it most ironic that where two to three thousand artists had once worked in Munich but were now “extinct” thanks to the galleries’ pro-modernist buying policies, the art association was forced to turn to the madhouse to fill its rooms, much as the biblical king, despised by his family, had been forced to trawl the streets for beggars to fill his banquet. Feistel-Rohmeder acknowledged the Heidelberg collection’s influence with a backhanded compliment, writing that there was little question that this sort of event was to blame for the “schizophrenic characteristics” of modern art. There was an upside to the material being put on display, however, since it did at least allow the viewer to compare how closely the art of the “half-baked Expressionists” resembled that of the “mentally deranged.”

  In March 1932, when the collection traveled to Kassel, the public conversation around the creative output of the insane was toxic enough that Gruhle was forced to write to the local art association to explain that he could not allow images from the collection to be given to the media. “Reproductions of abnormal pictures (not from our collection, but from that of Weygandt in Hamburg) have mostly given rise to misunderstandings and unpleasant press discussions,” he wrote. By January 1933, when
the touring exhibition opened for the last time, in Leipzig, the euphoria with which the material was once received had turned to fear and caution. As the liberal Neue Leipziger Zeitung put it, the days of the hegemony of radical Expressionism were over, and there were now “widely divergent answers” to the question of whether these works qualified as art. In the new, more rigorous, psychiatry-led atmosphere, it was a mistake to draw conclusions of any sort. In fact, the newspaper’s critic pronounced carefully, the Heidelberg material probably did not reveal anything much at all.

  11.

  A CULTURAL REVOLUTION

  Hitler’s revolution was a cultural undertaking as much as a political one. His aim was to reshape the Germans, eradicating the Kulturbolschewismus of the Weimar Republic, and to forge a community of ethnically pure Aryans, the Volksgemeinschaft, which would operate in unison in support of the Führer’s vision. In 1930, he had assured Joseph Goebbels, the Gauleiter of Berlin, that once in office he intended to carry through the party provisions of 1920, which called for a struggle against “tendencies in the arts and literature which exercise a disintegrating influence on the life of the people.” He would not waste time.

  Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany at noon on January 30, 1933, the head of a coalition with the German National People’s Party. He had not seized power so much as been handed it, and high-ranking NSDAP officials could scarcely believe their good fortune. “Hitler is Reich Chancellor,” wrote a jubilant Goebbels. “Just like a fairy-tale.” Two other Nazis took key roles in the cabinet: Wilhelm Frick became interior minister, while Hermann Göring was given control of the police in the giant state of Prussia, which accounted for more than half of the country’s population. At 7:00 p.m. on the evening of Hitler’s appointment, Goebbels organized a torchlit parade of SA, SS, and “Stahlhelm” ultra-nationalists around Berlin, declaring that a million men had taken part, though in fact there were only a few tens of thousands. Göring announced on the radio that the mood in the country “could only be compared with that of August 1914, when a nation…rose up to defend everything it possessed.” The “shame and disgrace of the last 14 years” had been wiped out, he said.

 

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