The Hakenkreuzbanner was euphoric about the show of “shamed” art, pronouncing that it had “opened the eyes of the Volk to the way their spiritual values were played down.” The conservative newspaper Neue Mannheimer Zeitung also generally approved, asking why the gallery had bought the “smut” of Klee and Grosz, but objecting to the inclusion of works by such Nordic artists as Munch and Beckmann. The more liberal Neues Mannheimer Volksblatt complained that it was “violence” to take paintings out of their frames and defended “good pictures by Rohlfs, Nolde, Marc, Heckel, [and] Munch,” demonstrating that it was still possible to oppose party actions against “cultural Bolshevism” four months into Hitler’s rule.
From Mannheim, the “abomination exhibition” was sent on tour, to Munich in early July, where it was given the title Mannheimer Schreckenskammer (Mannheim chamber of horrors), and then to Erlangen. In Erlangen, the Nazis experimented for the first time with a new discrediting technique: contrasting the modern works with those of unknown provenance by psychiatric patients. The observer was meant to regard the creations of the professional artists and the patients as similar, and conclude that the artists were also “ill,” “broken,” or “decomposed,” thereby discriminating against both groups. The exhibition was not a success: It ran for just three weeks, and the local chapter of the Kampfbund was disappointed, noting that “participation in cultural life is still quite low” and that there was a large amount of work to do “to hammer the meaning of cultural life into these circles.” Nevertheless, the Völkischer Beobachter art writer Franz Hofmann was prompted to call for drastic measures to be taken against such art, just as action had been taken against proscribed books. Evidence of the Mannheim purchases had struck the public suddenly with “what threatened us in Germany,” Hofmann wrote, as had the contents of the modern wing of the Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Book burnings had already dealt with “dirt, shame, and decomposition” in literature, yet no such action had taken place against Bolshevik art, even though it was “more dangerous by the immediacy of its effect.” Hofmann had no time for those who tried to defend Hartlaub. In fact, anyone who had bought or created modern art deserved to be sent to the new facility outside Munich. “We can only wish them a stay in Dachau, in the concentration camp,” he wrote.
Not every party member agreed. In the summer, the National Socialists’ Students Association began to mount an exhibition in Berlin, Dreißig deutsche Künstler (Thirty German artists)—including Barlach, Macke, Nolde, Marc, and Schmidt-Rottluff—with the aim of reclaiming Expressionism as a truly German art. Naturally, Rosenberg and the Kampfbund protested against the idea, describing it as an “act of sabotage.” The exhibition received a favorable critical response on its opening but was shut after only three days on the orders of Frick. The student leaders who had promoted it were expelled from the union.
Visual art was just one target of Gleichschaltung. Similar purges and acts of censorship occurred in the music, theater, literature, and film worlds as Goebbels’s ministry took German life in its grip. “Cultural chambers” were set up to oversee each industry and to weed out Jews, leftists, and artistic modernists. The result was an extraordinary exodus of national talent: An estimated two thousand Germans active in the arts emigrated after 1933, including many of the most skilled and virtuosic creators of the era. Fritz Lang left after his film Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (The Testament of Dr. Mabuse) was banned in the spring of 1933: Coincidentally, the film showed numerous works from the Prinzhorn collection. Lang moved to Hollywood, where he joined a substantial community of German refugees that would include Billy Wilder, Bertolt Brecht, Erich Maria Remarque, and Alfred Döblin. Thomas Mann remained in exile in Switzerland from February 1933 on. “I was expelled [from Germany],” he wrote bitterly. “Abused, pilloried and pillaged by the foreign conquerors of my country, for I am an older and better German than they are.”
There were cultural figures who stayed and tried to operate within the regime’s increasingly draconian restrictions, or even, like Gottfried Benn, to become champions of it. One of Prinzhorn’s friends, the dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann, was among the few celebrated writers who remained. He would come to regret his decision. Asked in 1938 why he hadn’t left, he shouted: “Because I’m a coward, do you understand? I’m a coward.”
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It was the students—Prinzhorn’s vaunted German youth—who drove Gleichschaltung forward in the universities, leading book burnings and harassing Jewish staff and anyone deemed to represent the “un-German spirit.” In Heidelberg, young Nazis marched through the town with flaming torches, flanked by storm troopers, SS, and Stahlhelmers, carrying books to throw on bonfires and singing far-right anthems. Karl Wilmanns was targeted for a lecture he had given at the psychiatric clinic in November 1932 in which he had described Hitler’s wartime blindness as “hysterical,” provoking the loud disapproval of National Socialist students. Wilmanns wasn’t easily silenced, and he continued to criticize Hitler, stating openly that he did not consider him a capable leader. His alleged insults were conflated with other “suspicious” behavior, such as a research trip he had once made to the Soviet Union, and the fact that his wife, Elisabeth, though a Protestant, was classed as 75 percent Jewish under the Nazi system of racial profiling. Wilmanns also employed several Jewish assistants.
The university began to move against him in April 1933, withdrawing various privileges. Storm troopers raided the family house several times in the middle of the night, turning over every room, screaming that he was a friend of the Jews and a communist. During the third such raid they arrested him, and after his release, the family received nightly death threats. He was formally dismissed from his post on June 22 and replaced by a party member, Carl Schneider. Wilmanns’s pension was halved, and he and Elisabeth fled Heidelberg, eventually settling in Wiesbaden. He maintained that he was proud of being the first non-Jewish professor of psychiatry to be sacked.
His daughter, Ruth, stayed on in Heidelberg to continue her medical studies. She was forced to wear a card announcing she was “37.5% Jewish.” As she walked to a lecture at the university hospital one day, a staff member tried to run her down with his car: She threw herself out of the way, and he shot past, screaming anti-Semitic threats. Ruth left the country soon afterward. She would complete her medical degree in Switzerland before moving to the United States. There, in 1972, she was appointed clinical professor of psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine.
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As Germany fell under Hitler’s control, Prinzhorn went on holiday. That spring, he stayed with a twenty-two-year-old girlfriend in a Roman palazzo a friend had rented, and he returned, tanned and healthy, via Perugia and Venice. A few days after arriving back in Munich, he fell ill with typhoid fever and was taken to a hospital. On May 13, struggling with a cloudy “typhus brain,” he wrote to Klages. He was still working to promote the philosopher and had arranged a visiting professorship for him at Berlin via his friend Hugo Bruckmann, now an NSDAP deputy in the Reichstag. Klages wished him a speedy recovery. By May 23, writing had become too difficult for Prinzhorn, and he had to dictate his next letter. He had a “penetrating headache,” he told Klages, and found it hard to stand. On May 30, he’d “had a setback”: His temperature was 103°F, he felt dazed, and he spent much of his time dozing.
Four days later, with the danger of his situation clear, he begged Klages to visit. The philosopher stalled, and then declined: “I have come to the conclusion that we do better to postpone our reunion a few more moons,” he wrote. “I am convinced that for the time being you would need the utmost calm for at least fourteen days.” Prinzhorn never read this final brush-off. Klages, or perhaps his secretary, mixed up two envelopes, and sent the letter to the wrong person. Prinzhorn waited in vain for a reply from the man to whom he had been devoted for much of his intellectual life, and who, in those last days, meant more to him than anyo
ne. At last he could wait no more. He died on June 14, at the age of forty-seven.
This last scene, with Klages’s apparent ambivalence and the muddle over his final letter, was somehow fitting. Although Prinzhorn pursued life’s meaning with all of the great intellect, passion, and energy at his disposal, in crucial decisions—about his relationships, his choice of mentor, politics—he reliably took the wrong turn. These choices left him unhappy, unable to capitalize on his achievements or win the admiration of his peers. Yet he was fortunate in one respect: that his three years of flurried, obsessive activity at Heidelberg produced a legacy that grew far beyond him.
One admirer, at least, was devastated to hear of Prinzhorn’s demise. Recalling the strange power of the German’s personality and his “noble nature,” the American David L. Watson found himself weeping as bitterly as he had at Prinzhorn’s rendering of Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden”:
This was one of the significant literary men of our time. His scientific, philosophic training had been transmuted by his artist mind into novel and beautiful patterns. What he might have told us as a common man, after leaving the platform of the scientist, we shall, alas, never know.
Never before had Watson understood why Shelley had written, on the death of John Keats, “I weep for Adonais—he is dead!” Now he did. Prinzhorn was gone, and only his books remained.
12.
THE SCULPTOR OF GERMANY
By 1933, the golden days at Emmendingen had passed. The psychiatric system seemed to have fallen through a time warp, slipping back to the immediate postwar years, when food was short and costs were only ever cut. In the general economic emergency, with millions unemployed and mental illness spiking, many destitute families were unable to support relatives who needed care and were forced to send them to institutions. At the same time, budgets were being slashed, nurses laid off, and premises rented out or shut, leaving the asylums that survived overcrowded and understaffed. The more prestigious university clinics could at least argue for funding on the grounds that they would treat and discharge cases more rapidly than before, but this meant long-term-care establishments such as the Heil- und Pflegeanstalten, which housed “incurable” patients, suffered disproportionately. Here, the ambition was simply to spend as little as possible on keeping residents alive.
Whatever pittance was given over to psychiatric care, it was too much for the promoters of racial hygiene. In their rhetoric, Germany was being overwhelmed by a wave of useless individuals “unworthy of life,” and caring for such “ballast existences” was a luxury Germany couldn’t afford. Psychiatry congresses and academic journals recalled Binding and Hoche’s theories, and explored ways to eradicate the “less valuable” from society, but even some of the most hawkish party members recognized the difficulties “euthanasia” presented. There were legal and ethical challenges, and the reputation of psychiatry, never high, would be tarnished, possibly for good. There was a less radical option, however. Sterilization had been practiced legally in the United States since 1907, and by 1932 the debate around this draconian solution had advanced enough in Germany that the Prussian Health Council had drafted legislation to allow the neutering of certain genetically “defective” individuals, with the subject’s consent. In the chaotic political climate of that year, the Prussian law was never passed, but the following summer, as the Nazis moved to turn their racial ideology into government policy, they found the ground well prepared.
The Nazi belief that refashioning the race was an artistic enterprise for Hitler had been clear at least since 1931, when Goebbels had pronounced that “only under the hand of an artist can a people be shaped from the masses, and a nation from the people.” In 1933, a cartoonist for the rightwing Kladderadatsch magazine precisely captured this idea in a four-panel strip: A Jewish-looking artist is shown molding a squabbling mass of small figures from clay; Hitler moves in to smash it angrily with his fist, then reworks it into a towering Aryan Adonis. The caption reads: “The Sculptor of Germany.” Of course, the sculptor-Führer would need someone else to do the actual work, so he handed the project to his regular enforcer, the new interior minister, Wilhelm Frick. Barely four months into Hitler’s reign, Frick convened an “Expert Committee on Questions of Population and Racial Policy” to move the eugenic scheme forward. Frick appointed Schultze-Naumburg to the committee, where he would sit alongside the likes of Himmler and the race ideologues Walter Darré and Hans Günther, to advise on the all-important cultural aspects of the Nazi plan. As the architect had written, art made visible both the Volksgemeinschaft’s genetic health and its spiritual direction. It fell to art, therefore, to establish what the future race should look like, to define the Zielbild, the target image of the pure-blooded supermen who would deliver German salvation.
Every lever of the totalitarian state was thrown into the resculpting project: political speeches, films, posters, magazines, newspapers, and radio. Exhortations for racial hygiene were pushed out on all channels, demonizing Jews, Bolsheviks, and the Weimar Republic, and promoting the spectre of degeneracy. Rassenkunde, or racial science, became an essential part of the newly militarized school curriculum, and laws were introduced forbidding marriage between Jews and Aryans. But the first piece of race legislation was aimed at those Hitler had described in Mein Kampf as “whoever is not bodily and mentally healthy and worthy”: the country’s psychiatric patients and the disabled.
Frick set out the committee’s aims at their first meeting, in June. He explained that while the country was being swamped by large numbers of immigrant Jews, Germany had seen its birth rate decline and its population age. The result, he said, was a huge rise in “degenerate” offspring. At least 500,000 Germans exhibited genetic defects, and there were probably many more: Some experts considered the true figure to be around 13 million, or 20 percent of the German population. Caring for the “asocial, inferior, and hopelessly genetically diseased” was a drain on the exchequer, he said. They needed a population policy that would eliminate these threats to the health of the Volk.
The committee quickly produced the “Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring,” which Hitler passed on July 14. The legislation was based on the Prussian government’s draft from 1932, but with one crucial difference: The new version stipulated that those it targeted could be forcibly sterilized. Nine categories of supposed hereditary afflictions were listed: congenital feeblemindedness, schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychosis, hereditary epilepsy, Huntington’s chorea, hereditary blindness, hereditary deafness, severe hereditary physical deformity, and alcoholism. Applications for sterilization could be made either by people with these conditions or by doctors, psychiatrists, and directors of hospitals, nursing homes, and prisons. Cases were to be decided by a network of “hereditary health courts,” each made up of a judge and two physicians; the presence of the candidate was not deemed necessary at these hearings. The procedures would take the form of vasectomies for men and tubal ligations for women. If a subject refused, the police were empowered to use force to bring them to the operating table.
The law came into effect on January 1, 1934, and quickly led to a rush of referrals: 388,400 in 1934–1935 alone, almost three-quarters of which came from the medical profession. The hereditary health courts were overloaded: They processed 259,051 cases in the following three years, and in more than 90 percent of cases they ruled in favor of the procedure. Over the duration of the Third Reich, doctors would sterilize around 400,000 people, most of whom were judged to be “feebleminded,” schizophrenic, or epileptic, though the categories were vague enough to sweep up large numbers of people who were simply regarded as antisocial and had no risk of passing on their “defects”: moderate drinkers, reformed abstainers, criminals. Complications caused by the operations would kill hundreds of people, mostly women, as their procedure was more invasive. Many found the process traumatic, with some of the most vulnerable individuals attempting suicide rat
her than face the surgeon. One man was so scared he tried to castrate himself with a bread knife.
Wilhelm Werner, a patient in the Werneck asylum in Bavaria, documented his own sterilization in more than forty pencil drawings that are now in the Prinzhorn collection. He may have been deaf or autistic, but in 1919, at the age of twenty-one, he was given the diagnosis of “idiocy,” the lowest form of “congenital feeblemindedness,” which in the thinking of the time meant he would only ever reach the intellectual development of a toddler. In 1934, a new director arrived at Werneck who diligently implemented the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring, overseeing the sterilization of 284 of the asylum’s inmates.
Werner had no artistic training, but he developed a sophisticated cartoonist’s style, which gives the lie to his diagnosis. He drew marionette-like figures who enacted a series of humiliating medical procedures in a Punch and Judy–style pageant. Like other Prinzhorn artists, he was fascinated by mechanisms, showing whole pages of terrifying medical tools and implements: syringes, drips, saws, catheters, gauges, and strange and sinister machines. He depicted himself as a friendly but passive clown, sometimes in a dunce’s cap. Stripped naked in the drawings, he submits meekly as his genitals are manipulated or pulled out with sharp hooks by scowling nurses wearing swastika armbands. Some of his cartoons show an expensively dressed man with a monocle, a mustache, and a bow tie: This is “Director Weinzierl,” Werner tells us, a reference to the chief surgeon of a hospital where many sterilizations took place. Another drawing shows patients sitting on a double-decker Nazi propaganda bus. A banner along the side reads “Sterelation”—Werner’s own word for the procedure. A nurse sits on the roof of the bus with a gramophone and a plate bearing two testicles, while people are shown smoking and chatting on the lower deck: such is the new normal in Germany, the artist seems to say.
The Gallery of Miracles and Madness Page 14