The Prinzhorn artists were unable to run or hide. They remained incarcerated in asylums across the Reich, derided by state propaganda as “useless eaters,” “ballast existences,” and “life unworthy of life.” Between 1935 and 1937, the Rassenpolitisches Amt der NSDAP (NSDAP Office of Racial Policy) produced a series of silent 16 mm films with such titles as Sünden der Väter (Sins of the fathers) and Alles Leben ist Kampf (All life is a struggle), aimed at dehumanizing the mentally ill and increasing public support for eugenic solutions. Erbkrank (Hereditarily sick), from 1936, was a classic of the genre. It showed asylum inmates and people with physical disabilities enjoying apparently luxurious care at the expense of the state, while “normal” but poor children were filmed playing in the dirt. Captions drove home the message that the mentally ill were a burden the people could no longer afford to carry:
Against all the laws of nature, the unhealthy are cared for disproportionately, while the healthy are neglected…
Up to now this family has cost the state 62,300 RMs
Chained to a bed for a lifetime…
Should things go on like this?
Should yet more distress be produced through casualness and irresponsibility?
NO, NO, NEVER!…
Otherwise our great nation and its culture will be destroyed.
Once again, German culture was the standard around which the racially healthy were expected to rally.
Hitler was so pleased with Erbkrank that he ordered a sequel, Opfer der Vergangenheit (Victims of the past), which would be shown in every cinema in Germany. Other Office of Racial Policy initiatives included a magazine, Neues Volk (New people), which boasted three hundred thousand subscribers by 1938, and ran articles contrasting attractive “Aryans” with unflattering images of the mentally ill. “60,000 reichsmarks is what this person suffering from a hereditary defect costs the People’s community during his lifetime,” stated one Neues Volk advertisement, in which a smiling, white-jacketed orderly rests a sinister hand on the shoulder of a disabled man. “Fellow citizen, that is your money, too.”
At the same time, the education system was indoctrinating children in the benefits of eradicating the “defective” from society. As Hitler had demanded in Mein Kampf, academic subjects in German schools had been downgraded in favor of relentless physical education. Girls were to become fecund mothers, and boys would be drilled into soldiers who were as “swift as a greyhound, as tough as leather, and as hard as Krupp steel,” as the dictator put it. One new academic subject had been introduced, however: eugenics. Textbooks juxtaposed photographs of “degenerates” with “healthy,” hard-bodied army recruits, and even math questions were retooled to deliver the regime’s message. The following arithmetic problem dates from 1935:
At the beginning of 1934 in the state of Baden a total of 6,400 people were in need of care, while 4,500 mentally ill persons, 2,000 hereditarily ill persons, and 1,500 young people were accommodated in care homes. Given that Baden has about 2,400,000 inhabitants,
a) How many persons on average are in need of care per 1,000 inhabitants?
b) How many reichsmarks minimum did these mentally ill persons cost the state?
c) How many healthy families could live on this amount for 10 years?
It was as part of their racial education that a group from Freiburg’s Ludendorff secondary school came to tour Emmendingen in January 1938. Afterward, each of the forty-two pupils was asked to write an essay about the visit. The results show how well the propaganda worked and how public allegedly secret Nazi “solutions” for psychiatric patients had become.
A few of the Ludendorff students clearly hung on to a vestige of pre-Nazi morality, empathizing with the patients, writing that it was wrong to use the sick as “exhibits,” or asking whether a reasonably healthy person might not go insane in such a place. Several were disappointed that the inmates did not look nearly as “repulsive and disgusting” as they had been led to believe. Most, though, followed their teacher’s lead, describing how they had seen the “high point of horror,” or “human ruins with bestial instincts,” and comparing the inmates with animals. No one in the group questioned the necessity of racial legislation. Most surprising was the fact that a possible “euthanasia” action against the mentally ill was openly discussed, and every single pupil remembered to write that the principal argument for such a policy was to save public funds. One even specified that the money should be used “for the purpose of armament.” Thirty-five of the forty-two pupils clearly supported the sentiment that the German people should be “freed from such evil appendages”—meaning the patients—and anticipated that asylum doctors would not be necessary for much longer. The teacher did have to correct one student, though, who failed to identify the Reich’s preferred psychiatric treatment, writing “Hemlock, according to Hoche-Binding,” on the paper in red ink.
Rumors of proposed “solutions” to the issue of psychiatric patients were a part of the discourse in late 1930s Germany. In the spring and summer of 1937, the SS organ Das schwarze Korps published articles that explicitly advocated the “mercy killing” of the mentally ill and disabled, while the director of the Eichberg asylum, Wilhelm Hinsen, recalled being told two or three times by a regional governor, as early as 1936 or 1937, that “it would be better if a law existed which made it possible to kill the mentally ill, since they were all ballast existences.” Hinsen was also told at the end of 1936: “In the future they will only get SS doctors, who know better how to handle syringes.” Unsurprisingly given this context, patient care continued to deteriorate. The relentless propaganda added to psychiatry’s perennial recruitment problems. The nurses and orderlies who did sign up were often fascist or unsuitable, while the system promoted doctors who were party members or at least supported eugenic goals. The attitude of Nazi medicine toward the mentally ill can be gleaned from the advice of Fritz Bernotat, a National Socialist who administered state hospitals in Hesse-Nassau. Addressing a meeting of institutional directors who complained about overcrowding, Bernotat said: “If you have too many patients in your institution, just beat them to death, then you will have space.”
In 1937, two violent new “shock therapies” were rolled out in Emmendingen that held out the hope, as one psychiatrist explained, that schizophrenic patients “would not have to become long-term asylum inmates, and thereby costly ballast existences.” These therapies were based on the assumption that by inducing convulsions, a subject could be “jolted” out of mental illness. In fact they were unscientific and inhumane. Insulin shock therapy involved injecting schizophrenic patients with high doses of the hormone, which reduced their blood sugar to such a critical level they fell into a coma. If the patient regained consciousness, he or she would sometimes have moments of lucidity and even feel “cured,” but common side effects included headaches, disorientation, difficulty moving, extreme hunger, and even death. A course of treatment lasted months and involved anything from ten to sixty such “shocks.” Cardiazol convulsive treatment was thought to work in a similar way. Doctors injected the patient with a cerebral stimulant known to induce epileptic fits. The drug caused massive anxiety, something like the terror of being thrown off a high building, and violent seizures that could stop a patient’s heart, or cause them to break their own bones. Like all psychiatric treatments, insulin and cardiazol therapies were open to tremendous abuse in the hands of unsympathetic medical staff and were soon being used as a way of disciplining the disobedient or disturbed. In Emmendingen, 154 patients were treated with insulin or cardiazol in 1937. It is not known if Bühler was among them.
One way patients could try to escape the dangers of these treatments was to prove their ability to work. Nowhere in Baden was this more evident than in the Heidelberg clinic, which was now under the control of the Nazi psychiatrist Carl Schneider.
* * *
—
Diligent and int
elligent, with a neatly parted quiff of hair, Schneider was in many ways the worst sort of National Socialist: an ambitious character filled with an “uncritical sense of mission,” as one of his successors at Heidelberg put it. He had backed eugenics at least since 1930, when he co-authored a paper arguing for a comprehensive, qualitative population policy in the sense of a “racial hygienic” rearrangement of the entire economic and legal system. He keenly supported the Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring, claiming that it was a “responsible attempt before God to give a new era new people,” and earmarked large numbers of his own patients for sterilization. He was also a pioneer in connecting Hermann Simon’s idea of “work therapy” to eugenics.
Simon’s original ideas about this form of therapy, in which patients were assigned a graduated range of tasks, had liberated many inmates from the listlessness of asylum life. In the punishing economic environment of the early 1930s, however, a patient’s ability to perform useful labor increasingly became synonymous in doctors’ minds with their overall health. Schneider would push the conflation of these two perceptions—ability to work and wellness—to its logical endpoint. He began with the Nazi idea of the Volksgemeinschaft as a “living community ethos of persons belonging to the state.” Every individual could be judged by his or her ability to benefit or detract from that community, he believed. Therefore, all that was therapeutically possible should be done to encourage a patient to useful economic activity for the greater good. But if that failed, as it often would, the patient was proven to be socially useless, and useless patients, in Schneider’s logic, should be removed from the gene pool.
Schneider applied his work therapy principles with great rigor, and the Heidelberg clinic’s cellars soon became such hives of bookbinding, shoemaking, and carpentry that the local craft guilds complained to the government about the unfair competition. There was one form of patient activity, however, that he viewed as utterly without value: making art. He expounded his theories on this subject in a lengthy address he planned to give on the occasion of the first anniversary of Entartete Kunst. The speech was never delivered, but it survives as the most comprehensive analysis of Nazi psychiatry’s views about patient art, expressed by the man who was now in control of the Prinzhorn collection.
Schneider began by asserting the National Socialist idea that artistic ability was a product of genetics. Germans had known for centuries that the noble artist was the “highest perfection of what we are,” with a responsibility to educate the race, philosophically and ideologically, and to lead it. In the nineteenth century, however, due to “racial shifts” in the national cultural leadership, insanity had become confused with the artistic process. This had led to the complete devaluation of art’s noble purpose. What was to blame? “Progressive-rationalist recklessness,” in the form of Marxists, liberals, and Jews, who had placed an “amazingly high valuation” on the art of the mentally ill. Freud was culpable, since psychoanalysis denied the racial superiority of the artist. So, too, was Prinzhorn, whose theory put all configuration on one level, whether it was a Rembrandt or a child’s scribble, and opened the door to “art for every good-for-nothing,” as anyone, however inartistic, could claim metaphysical authority for his need for expression. Even “many serious people” had been misled by Prinzhorn’s worldview, Schneider wrote, which had helped create a time that was itself schizophrenic. Degenerate artists had tried to emulate the work of the mentally ill, which Prinzhorn and his kind had elevated “to so-called high art,” while the ability to judge art had been withdrawn from the common people and given over to “experts” and connoisseurs. Jews and Marxists—whose agenda was the decline of German civilization—had promoted this material, thereby threatening the development of the Aryan race:
Here lies the key to the fact that degenerate art, at the same moment, had to become truly sick art. For, as in all such cases, the outermost wing, i.e. the mentally ill, gradually also took over the leadership. The rest of the…degenerates, and especially the communist Jews, oriented themselves toward this.
From here, it was a short, social Darwinist hop to the conclusion that the genetically inferior degenerate painter had been able to prosper while the “healthy” artist was unable to make a living or reproduce, and that the race’s artistic ability had thereby been driven toward genetic disaster. Luckily, a National Socialist solution was at hand. By preventing “degenerate” artists and patients from producing offspring, and by stopping “noble,” “natural” traits from becoming mixed up with those that were “diseased,” it would be possible to breed out degenerate art, and breed in German artistic talent.
Alarmingly for the collection in his care, Schneider agreed with Weygandt on the central question of whether psychiatric patients could produce art at all. This was impossible, he declared, since any artistic development in these cases was redirected toward their pathology. A professional such as himself could immediately tell the difference between a “mentally ill” work and one by a “healthy” individual, since the non-insane artist produced a degree of meaning, which “insane” art lacked. Worse still, the very existence of such material was evidence of medical malpractice. As the preservation of a healthy art was a prerequisite for the health of the people, a true German psychiatrist had only one option: to destroy the “didactic bogus evidence” that sought to derive the art of “degenerates and lunatics” from the same biological sources as the art of the healthy.
Schneider had already tested his theory himself and had achieved “admirable” results during a work therapy session with a schizophrenic female patient. “We did not keep the artist’s pathological products,” he boasted, “we destroyed them.”
16.
THE GIRL WITH THE BLUE HAIR
Two million visitors passed through the cramped spaces of Entartete Kunst in Munich between July and November 1937. This immense success led Goebbels to extend the show several times, and to push back the Berlin opening. His vindictive wish that it should appear in the capital at the Kronprinzenpalais caused further delays, as Göring and Rust insisted that only upbeat events should be staged in such a prestigious venue. The propaganda minister eventually settled for the Haus der Kunst, a former embassy building next door to the Reichstag. The delays at least meant Goebbels had time to control every aspect of the exhibition, which he entirely recast for Berlin. He removed all the “ballast,” as he called it, added art that had been produced in the capital, for local interest, and sharpened the image of the enemy so that it could now be read as a “political lecture” against the Jewish-Bolshevik racial foe and its destructive cultural program. The most significant change, however, was a new emphasis on madness.
In Munich, the show’s organizers had used such pathologizing slogans as “Crazy at Any Price” and “Madness Becomes Method” to push Hitler’s idea that the avant-garde had polluted art with insanity in order to bring about German cultural degradation. For Berlin, Goebbels hit upon a new technique to ram the message home. He would present works from the Prinzhorn collection alongside those of the “degenerate” professional artists and ask the people to judge which appeared more insane. These visual juxtapositions would work equally well in the guidebook he and Hitler had dreamed up in Bayreuth in the summer. First, though, they needed to source appropriate comparative material, and so, that autumn, a young official named Hartmut Pistauer was dispatched to the Heidelberg clinic.
Pistauer knew the Munich edition of Entartete Kunst well. In the hectic July days before the exhibition’s opening, he had been drafted from the Nazi student organization to help construct burlap-covered partitions and paint defamatory signs and captions on the walls of the Archaeological Institute. The young man’s attitude impressed Goebbels enough that he was appointed exhibition director for Berlin. Pistauer was glad to play his part. He was such an enthusiastic National Socialist, in fact, that in the 1990s, when an enterprising art historian traced him to an apartment in Munich,
Pistauer’s wife met the visitor at the door with the words Wir sind noch braun—“We’re still Nazis.” Pistauer spent a fortnight in Heidelberg that autumn, digging through Prinzhorn’s carefully catalogued artworks. He found some that were “amazingly similar” to those in Munich and recalled speaking in person to artist-patients in the clinic. He photographed anything that looked promising. Professor Schneider was helpful and “very interested” in his task, he remembered.
On January 22, the propaganda directorate in Berlin wrote to Heidelberg to agree on details for the shipment of a quantity of psychiatric works to the capital. More than a hundred paintings, drawings, and sculptures by at least twenty-six artists, including some of the most influential in the collection, were soon on their way. There were at least two Genzels, six Blankenhorns, and seventeen by Josef Schneller. Paul Goesch was unique in having his art sent to Entartete Kunst both as an example of professional degeneracy (to Munich) and of amateur madness (to Berlin). Bühler was represented in the shipment by at least five works, including a beautiful, brightly colored portrait of a blank-faced angel at play with a toy human. Der Würgengel may also have been sent to Berlin.
The Gallery of Miracles and Madness Page 18