The Gallery of Miracles and Madness

by Charlie English

  Werner is the only victim known to have recorded the procedure visually. His pathos-filled drawings capture the helplessness and bafflement hundreds of thousands must have felt in the hands of the medical practitioners who robbed them of their fertility.

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  The hereditary health court for the town of Emmendingen ordered 216 sterilizations in 1934, mostly on inpatients at the asylum, and by 1939, doctors would operate on 2,500 people in the local area. Bühler, who was in his early seventies, was probably too old and isolated to be targeted, but a rare correspondence at the end of 1935 gives us a glimpse of the precariousness of his situation. His father had passed away some years before, and the courts had made him the ward of an Offenburg councilor, Ferdinand Friedmann. Friedmann’s role came with few responsibilities, it seems, since after the councilor’s death in 1931 the city didn’t bother to replace him until November 1935. The new guardian, Wilfried Seitz, at least showed some interest, because the following month Emmendingen’s director, Viktor Mathes, wrote him a brief note explaining Bühler’s situation:

  Franz Karl Bühler has been in the local institution since April 17, 1900. Since the death of his parents, no relatives have cared for him. His board is paid for by Freiburg County Council.

  Any inheritance that had come to Bühler, in other words, had already been spent on his care; his living costs were now paid by the state, and the only person with an interest in his welfare was Seitz, a civil servant who likely had never met him. This was a dangerous situation in Nazi Germany.

  Two years later, another exchange of letters sheds light on Bühler’s growing peril. In 1936, the regime launched a program to create a database of genetic information on everyone in the Reich. Psychiatric institutions were ordered to sweep their geographic catchment areas for the relatives of those designated erbkrank (genetically ill) in the expectation of finding more “defective people” to send before the sterilization courts. Eugenicist doctors and psychiatrists prioritized this “weeding out” over medical care, and the quality of treatment plummeted, particularly in outpatient departments. Hermann Pfannmüller, who ran the outpatient provision at Kaufbeuren-Irsee, saw it as an excuse to pick up anyone he disapproved of from the lower echelons of society, including “asocial drinkers, grumblers, refractory parasites and work-shy psychopaths,” and send them either to concentration camps or for sterilization. Local administrators would refer vulnerable but perfectly healthy individuals to Pfannmüller, including single mothers and illegitimate children, to save the cost of their care.

  As a schizophrenic inpatient designated erbkrank, Bühler was a person of interest to this new racial offensive. On October 19, 1937, Dr. Mathes wrote to Seitz in Offenburg requesting personal details about Bühler’s relatives, “for the purposes of hereditary biology”:

  It would be of particular interest to me to find out whether members of [Bühler’s] family were sick with illness or were housed in an institution (health and nursing home, district nursing home, correctional center, penal institution, etc.), or if there was any known mental disorder, drunkenness, neglect, antisocial behavior in the family.

  The asylum director enclosed a “genetic inventory” questionnaire. Seitz was to note any relevant details and then return the form to Emmendingen. There is no evidence that Seitz did this; he may have struggled to find other close family members to report. In any case, he was transferred away from Offenburg the following month, leaving the question of Bühler’s guardianship open once again. Town officials noted that the patient was now seventy-three and had no assets. They advised that the role “be taken over by the local office, so that larger administrative work does not develop.” Cost, once again, was paramount.

  13.

  CLEANSING THE TEMPLE OF ART

  Early on the morning of Saturday, June 5, 1937, Hitler and Goebbels flew from Berlin to Munich. It was a sweltering day in Bavaria, and soon after the aircraft touched down, the propaganda minister went to his hotel for a few hours to rest.

  Hitler loved these excursions. He had designated Munich the “capital of German art,” and he liked to travel there every two to three weeks to inspect the giant redevelopment projects he had ordered for the city. The architect to whom he had entrusted these works, Paul Ludwig Troost, was now dead, but the practice continued under his widow, Gerdy. Hitler would drop by the Troost studio to speak with her and inspect the latest plans, then tour the construction sites. In between, he liked to relax in Munich’s plentiful cafés and restaurants, where he would lecture his entourage on a range of pet themes with which they were now overfamiliar.

  This June day followed the usual pattern. After their rest, Hitler and Goebbels began on Königsplatz with the Führerbau (Führer building), the neoclassical palace Hitler had commissioned to stand next to the Ehrentempel, the twin shrines to the sixteen Nazi “martyrs” killed in the Beer Hall Putsch. Then came lunch at his regular Schwabing restaurant, the Osteria Bavaria, an artists’ favorite that reminded him of the happy days he had spent wandering the city before the war. Guests were often invited to dine with him: The British aristocrat Unity Mitford was a regular, as was his personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann—usually a little tipsy by this time of day—and sometimes a favored painter or sculptor. Hitler would greet the restaurant’s owner and the waitresses with a jovial “What’s good today? Ravioli? If only you didn’t make it so delicious. It’s too tempting!” then install himself at his regular corner table. Always concerned with his waistline, he would scour the menu for lighter options, then order the ravioli anyway.

  His main objective on this visit was the newly completed Haus der deutschen Kunst, which stood at the southern end of Munich’s large central park, Englischer Garten. He had laid the building’s foundation stone himself, in October 1933, during a giant propaganda festival dubbed the Tag der deutschen Kunst (Day of German art). Thousands of storm troopers and Hitler Youth had marched past the building site, where the Führer was welcomed by a body of masons clad in medieval costume as an orchestra played the overture to Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg (The Mastersinger of Nuremberg). A lengthy, deeply kitsch parade of alleged Aryan culture had followed, in which the Nazis appropriated Europe’s most celebrated artistic periods, from the classical Greek to the Gothic, the Baroque, and the Romantic, to create a glorious but fabricated German past. All this, the art magazine Die Kunst pointed out, was “in order to show clearly the new state’s commitment to art, and to make public the truly ‘fated’ vocation and mission of the artistic metropolis of southern Germany.” Speeches had been given. The Bavarian minister of culture, Hans Schemm, saluted Hitler as the “totality of artistic and political genius,” and the dictator himself had announced: “We cannot think of a resurgence of the German people without a resurgence of German culture and, above all, German art.”

  Four years on, and the Haus der deutschen Kunst was just six weeks from opening. It would do this with an exhibition of regime-approved art titled the Große deutsche Kunstausstellung (Great German art exhibition), and Hitler intended to use the occasion for his most comprehensive cultural statement yet. Once again, Munich would submit to a sprawling Nazi pageant, the second Tag der deutschen Kunst.

  When the lunch party at the Osteria Bavaria had broken up, Hitler, Goebbels and Hoffmann crossed the Schwabing to Prinzregentenstraße, the wide thoroughfare designed for military parades on which the new gallery stood. The building presented a monumental facade of twenty-two giant columns to the street, which had led Münchners to call it the Bratwürstgalerie, since it reminded them of sausages hanging outside a butcher’s shop. But it was the preparations inside that Hitler had come to inspect. The curation of this vital first exhibition had been delegated to a panel of nine handpicked experts chaired by Adolf Ziegler, the president of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, and a painter of such exacting female nudes that he had earned the nickname “master of Germ
an pubic hair.” Ziegler and the jurors, who included Gerdy Troost, had been asked to select the highlights of more than fifteen thousand artworks that had been submitted in a nationwide competition, but the judging process was not going well. The chairman had already complained several times to Goebbels that the jury was hard to manage.

  In truth, Ziegler was in an impossible position, as no one really knew what, in Hitler’s view, constituted good German art. Four years earlier, when the Nazis assumed power, Rosenberg, Schultze-Naumburg, and the völkisch reactionaries of the Kampfbund had thought that they knew, but Hitler, following his principle of divide and rule, had pitched them into a fight with the more modern aesthetic represented by Goebbels. The forward-looking wing of the party hoped Nazism could embrace a new kind of nationalist art, perhaps even Expressionism, much as Mussolini had given Futurism the blessing of the Fascist state in Italy. A vicious civil war had ensued, until Hitler had slapped both sides down at the party rally in Nuremberg in 1934. There was no place in Germany for modern art, he announced, and the “charlatan” avant-garde were mistaken if they thought the Third Reich could be befuddled by their chatter, but “even Jews” found the Teutonic revivalism promoted by Rosenberg and the völkisch movement “ridiculous”:

  [These artists] offer us railroad stations in original German Renaissance style, street signs and typewriter keyboards with genuine Gothic letters…perhaps they would like us to defend ourselves with shields and crossbows.

  It was high time, he had said, that “these petrified backward-lookers” retire to the museums and cease to “spook about, molesting people and giving them the shudders.”

  No one had been much surprised by Hitler’s attack on modernism: It would continue at the party rally the following year, where he would proclaim victory over the modernist “spoilers of our art,” who were either fools or criminals and therefore belonged “in jail or in an insane asylum.” More unexpected by far was the elimination of the völkisch faction that had supported him throughout his rise. It signaled the end for Schultze-Naumburg, whose relationship with Hitler had already begun to sour. Little more would be heard from the architect and his “comrades in struggle.” The overall result was a vacuum in German arts policy, in which almost everything post-1910 could be dismissed or frowned upon, but no new direction was allowed to emerge. Art’s only real purpose thereafter was as a political weapon, a tool for social control through “art-political” propaganda actions.

  It had been clear to Ziegler and the jury that all sorts of art wasn’t acceptable to Hitler, but no one really knew what was. Now they waited anxiously for the only verdict that really mattered. They had marked up their chosen works with red stickers, and some of these now hung on the gallery’s white walls. Works with blue stickers, denoting possibles, lay piled up in the center of each room.

  Hoffmann entered the gallery first, shortly after 4:00 p.m. The artist-in-chief was not far behind, and soon he began angrily to express his displeasure at the jury’s selection, much of which was “catastrophic,” Goebbels noted later, object lessons in art “horror.” Hitler raged that he would not tolerate works being exhibited here that could mislead the people about his sense of art. In particular, he detested “unfinished pictures,” by which he meant sketchy or impressionistic pieces, since it was the German way to “bring everything that was begun to a thorough conclusion.” He identified several such paintings hanging next to each other, strode along the row, pivoted on his heel and walked back, ordering each of them to be removed with a jabbing finger: “And this! And this! And this! And this!” At one point, to the jury’s horror, he personally took down several works by a group of Austrian artists. Out, too, went the painting of a tennis player by Leo von König, in which Hitler found “everything is only superficially smeared, neither a hand nor a face nor anything can be seen.” Works like König’s must never be shown in the Haus der deutschen Kunst, he commanded. Master builders and architects had worked for years to create this space. Every stone, every window, every door handle had been carefully considered. Then a painter like König came along with something that had evidently been rushed out “in two, at most three hours”! “I won’t let that happen,” he said. It was “an insolence” that anyone dared to send in such a painting at all. He replaced the tennis player with that of an SS man emerging from a dark background, in a faux Old Master style.

  Troost tried to keep pace at his side throughout this tirade, valiantly defending the jury’s choices. “In this picture you can feel that this painter wants something,” she said. “[He] is trying to express something very particular about his mood!” That was not enough, Hitler retorted. It was not a question of desire, but of ability. If a painter wanted to express an idea then he had to have the skill to do it. Otherwise he must study for a further five years, then try again!

  Troost continued bravely to argue the jury’s case, but Hitler was adamant and at length she fainted. The rest of the jury slumped in misery, with Ziegler particularly crushed.

  Hitler was still fuming the following day, when he and Goebbels took the train together to Regensburg. He would disband the jury, he said, even postpone the Große deutsche Kunstausstellung for another year, rather than open the gallery with such “crap.”

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  For Goebbels, Hitler’s fury at the Haus der deutschen Kunst was a spur and an opportunity. Despite the Nazi leader’s long-established critique, National Socialism had failed to deal with modern art decisively. As he toured the disastrous Große deutsche Kunstausstellung preview, an idea to combine the Führer’s rhetoric and government action was taking shape in his head. A great reckoning was long overdue.

  Nineteen thirty-seven was a watershed for the National Socialist project, marking the end of the regime’s first Four-Year Plan and the transition to the second. It was a time to take stock of what had been achieved, and to accelerate the program. Outwardly, Hitler’s government was already a success: Germany, for so long the European basket case, was politically stable and economically reorganized. Thanks to the triumphant Berlin Olympics, staged in the summer of 1936, the country was respected, even envied, on the world stage: It was “back in the fold of nations,” as the New York Times correspondent reported. What the newspaper and Allied governments didn’t know at the time was that Hitler was already preparing for war. “I set the following task,” he wrote in a secret memorandum that August. “I. The German armed forces must be operational within four years. II. The German economy must be fit for war within four years.” Rearmament would progress even faster than this timetable implied. “The [military] upgrade continues,” Goebbels told his diary in November 1936. “We put fabulous sums into it. In 1938 we will be completely finished. The confrontation with Bolshevism comes. Then we want to be ready.”

  Every aspect of German life was to be harnessed toward the conflict, including cultural policy, which would be used to sharpen the conceptions of Gemeinschaft, Kulturbolschewismus, and Volk, and to bind the people into closer, ever more obedient lines of battle. As Hitler declared in numerous speeches, art was Germany’s social glue, its battle standard, its Promised Land, its claim to superiority, and its future legacy. It was a physical representation of the new Aryan soul. In the purifying of art as in the purifying of the race, no mercy could be shown.

  The first skirmishes on the new cultural front had been made soon after the foreign visitors to the Berlin Olympics left the country. In the fall of 1936, the NSDAP closed part of the Kronprinzenpalais, the former palace on the Unter den Linden in Berlin which served as the modern wing of the Nationalgalerie. The upper floor of this building, which held the country’s richest collection of Expressionist art, was shut to visitors on October 30. The following month, Goebbels eliminated at a stroke those bothersome intellectualizers of art, the critics. Art criticism was essentially “Jewish,” he announced. It had “killed many German talents by praising unimportant artists and cru
shing really gifted people.” Henceforth, Germans would only be allowed to read purely descriptive “art reports,” written by authorized art “directors,” and regulated in the propaganda ministry’s weekly cultural-political press conferences. But these measures were mere hors d’oeuvres to the idea that was gestating in his head as he toured Munich with Hitler. “Horrible examples of art Bolshevism have been brought to my attention,” he wrote in his diary that day. “Now I am going to take action….I want to organize an exhibition of the art of the time of decay in Berlin. So that people can see and learn to recognize it.”

  On his return to the capital, Goebbels picked up a slender, recently published volume, Säuberung des Kunsttempels (Cleansing the temple of art) by Wolfgang Willrich, a painter of dull, flaxen-haired heroes and heroines. Subtitled Eine kunstpolitische Kampfschrift zur Gesundung deutscher Kunst im Geiste nordischer Art (An art-political polemic for the recovery of German art in the spirit of Nordic style), the book was the product of a collaboration between Willrich and Walter Hansen, a former drawing teacher and long-standing bane of the intellectuals in his home city of Hamburg. Hansen had stockpiled examples of “degenerate” modern art and had given Willrich full access to the collection for his book, which picked up on Hitler’s obsession with madness and disease in the avant-garde.

  Art was meant to be “healthy,” Willrich wrote, but it had been overtaken by unscrupulous charlatans peddling degenerate mischief. It was the duty of those who had “asserted their mental health” during the Weimar years to ensure that the temples of German art were “tidied up.” He had created his book as a “weapon” to be used against “all those who try to pass off the pathological as a characteristic of genius” and who would like to allow “the spirit of fundamental negation” to rule over life and art. The specific targets of his assault were familiar: the leading lights of German modernism, many of whom had been inspired by psychiatric art and by Prinzhorn’s collection. Klee, Schlemmer, and Kubin were among them, and Willrich even included a work by the Prinzhorn artist Paul Goesch. There were many things about these pieces and modern art in general that were “ready to be examined by medical doctors,” Willrich wrote, before issuing the rallying cry: