The Gallery of Miracles and Madness

by Charlie English

  At least once, this distraction was a blessing. On June 5, 1944, Goebbels and Hitler were discussing “problems of the theater and opera, film, literature and heaven knows what else,” at the Berghof, his Bavarian mountain retreat. When, at ten o’clock, German intelligence began reporting the presence of an invasion fleet off Normandy, no one wanted to interrupt. Hitler and Goebbels moved on to discuss “film, opera, and theater matters,” then sat in front of the fireplace until 2:00 a.m., “sharing memories,” before going to bed. Hitler did not learn of the D-Day attack until he awoke late the following morning.

  By this time, it was clear to Speer that a “departure from reality” was “spreading like a contagion” among the inner circle. It was not the burden of incessant murder that seemed to matter to Hitler so much as his personal failures. His rejection of reality multiplied with every defeat and took an increasingly pathological form. His girlfriend, Eva Braun, and his dog, Blondi, were the only living creatures “who aroused any flicker of human feeling in Hitler,” Speer believed. At this time, he lived in a dream world filled, as his biographer Joachim Fest put it, with “more and more transparent fantasies fabricated from self-deception, distortion of reality, and delusion.”

  As well as Morell’s medication—there were up to twenty injections a day, including psychoactive drugs such as heroin, and even commercial poisons—he used culture as a sedative and comfort. Sometimes, when he needed to sleep, he spent hours looking at books about painting or architecture. Toward the end, nothing seemed to distract him so much as his plans for Linz.

  Linz! The thriving provincial city where it had all begun: where he had climbed in the hills overlooking the river, conjuring artistic dreams; where he had strolled the Landstraße, sneaking glimpses of his first love. How appealing it now seemed. As he told Speer, in one of numerous bouts of self-pity: “When I have ended the war victoriously, my life’s task will be fulfilled, and I’ll withdraw to the home of my old age, in Linz, across the Danube. Then my successor can worry about these problems.” First, though, the city would be subjected to Hitler’s “vision,” the makeover he had first planned as a teenager wandering the streets with Kubizek. He was determined that Linz should surpass Budapest as “the most beautiful city on the Danube,” to prove that German artistic sensibility was superior to that of the Hungarians. The centerpiece of his plan was a giant art gallery, the Führermuseum, which he sketched in front of Speer. He would fill this building with the $400 million worth of paintings that had been bought or looted on his behalf. There would be spaces for his favorite high Romantic artists: Böcklin, Trübner, Leibl, Feuerbach, Menzel, Makart, Grützner, Defregger, Schwind, Spitzweg, Alt, and Waldmüller. Even Goebbels balked at the price of this scheme. “Linz costs us a lot of money,” he wrote, “but it means so much to the Führer.” The redevelopment would be Hitler’s legacy, his gift to the German people, and his monument to himself. Within the complex, he drew his own mausoleum.

  The plans for Linz increasingly diverted Hitler from the war Germany was now losing. He regularly spoke with his architect, Hermann Giesler, discussing the details of the design as he had once discussed the remodeling of Munich with Paul Ludwig Troost. Speer often found conversations about weapons production diverted toward Linz: “Between military meetings we then drew together, like colleagues, on the details of the plans. And in the hours when he was waiting for front reports, we talked about urban planning and architecture. This often happened in the times of his greatest tension, in the times of bitter disappointments.” Martin Bormann, his personal secretary, was continually asked to check whether the art collection was safe in its storage depots in Munich and at Kremsmünster, Austria: whether the camouflage nets were in use, and whether the insurance was sufficient. In June 1943, the streets and squares around Kremsmünster were painted black as an extra deterrent to bombers. Eventually, when American planes came within range, he ordered that the art be moved out; most of it was shipped to a salt mine in Styria.

  Like all Hitler’s aides, Bormann was well aware that discussion of the Linz project was the best way to distract him. In the wake of the failed plot to assassinate him on July 20, 1944, Bormann told Giesler: “Talk to him about your plans, mainly Linz, that’s what interests him most.”

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  On January 15, 1945, Hitler and his entourage climbed aboard the special train that would carry him back to the capital for the last time. There was no longer any need for him to be near the eastern or western fronts—by now you could reach all of them in a day from Berlin anyway. The train’s blinds were firmly closed: He would not face the people to whom he had brought so much death and misery. Soon after reaching the city, intensifying air raids forced him to move into the maze of concrete rooms he had ordered to be constructed beneath the Reich Chancellery gardens. The Führer bunker was entirely self-sufficient, with its own diesel generators, heat, electricity, and water. Down here, in this world of artificial light and bare concrete, night and day lost their meaning. Iron doors guarded the few exits, and even his brief walks with Blondi brought him no more contact with nature than a tramp around a prison yard.

  He took numerous works of art underground with him, including his old sketchbook filled with watercolors of Vienna and paintings that had previously hung in the Reich Chancellery. The entrance hall to his underground apartments was lined with classical landscapes, and a still life, probably by the Dutch artist Jan Davidsz. de Heem, hung in the small study where he took meals with his secretaries. The most powerful painting in the bunker was saved for his sitting room. Here he placed an iconic portrait of the Prussian king Frederick the Great, with large blue eyes and hangdog cheeks, to inspire him in his final act. In the dying days of the war, Hitler would borrow the guise of the lucky, art-loving monarch who had snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. “I think everything is lost,” “Old Fritz” had written after the Battle of Kunersdorf. Instead, providence had delivered a miracle: The empress of Russia suddenly died, the tsar sued for peace, and Prussia was saved. Hitler liked to sit beneath the portrait in a sort of trance, frequently looking up to meet the king’s gaze, hoping Old Fritz’s luck would rub off. “In front of this picture I always get new strength when the bad news threatens to depress me,” he told his chief of staff, Heinz Guderian. One night, when Goebbels had been summoned at midnight to talk for five hours about his cultural plans, Hitler lamented the irony that he, “a man devoted to the arts,” should be chosen by destiny to lead this most difficult of all wars for the Reich. “But such was also the case with Frederick the Great.”

  As a last German offensive failed in the west, the eastern front caved, and bombs reduced Berlin to rubble, Hitler demanded that the mock-up of Linz be brought to the capital. The architect Giesler and his model-maker worked around the clock to complete it. Finally, by the night of February 9, they had set it up in the spacious cellar beneath the Reich Chancellery, ready for Hitler to visit. Giesler remembered the moment they first went to see it there together:

  He stood for a long time, overwhelmed by the overall impression, only looking…Never before had I seen him consider a model so seriously, so enraptured and moved at the same time.

  Hitler visited the model twice a day after that, often alone, to check the proportions, the details of the bridges. At times, members of the entourage were taken there, to have the design explained in enormous detail, as if it were “a promised land into which we would find entrance,” as Giesler put it. The model represented a last manifestation of his power, a continuation of his ability to express his artistic “vision.” His secretary Christa Schroeder observed that when he explained the Linz plans to her, he “forgot the war”: “He then felt no more tiredness and explained to us for hours and hours all the details of the change he was planning for his hometown.”

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  Hitler’s retreat into a world of architectural models was bizarre,
but few moments in those last days were more surreal than the final performance of the Berlin Philharmonic. In early April, Goebbels ordered the musicians to be drafted into the People’s Militia to defend the capital. Knowing this was pointless and a death sentence, Speer had all the players’ cards removed from the Berlin draft board and instructed the orchestra’s manager to schedule a series of concerts. He also arranged a coded warning: When he asked them to play Bruckner’s Romantic Symphony, it meant the end was near, and the musicians should flee Berlin.

  The final concert was arranged for April 12 at the Philharmonic Hall. Electricity was tightly rationed at that time, but Speer had it switched on for the occasion. “Absurd, I know,” he said later. “But I thought Berlin should see that lovely hall, miraculously still intact, just once more fully lit.” The Bruckner piece was on the roster, as was Beethoven’s Violin Concerto and the finale from the last opera in Wagner’s Ring cycle, Götterdämmerung, the “twilight of the gods.” Speer sat with the commander of the navy, Admiral Dönitz, in the dying moments of the Reich, while a full house watched the great orchestra recount the story in which Valhalla burns, along with Siegfried and his lover, Brünnhilde. As the guests filed out into the ruined streets, Speer saw children dressed in uniforms offering them cyanide capsules. Since Hitler had declared his intention to kill himself if the war was lost, suicide had become ever present, the only viable way out: Joseph and Magda Goebbels would soon kill all six of their children, and then themselves.

  Everyone in the bunker now compared their plight to that of Wagner’s characters. Would Hitler’s death be like that of his mythic hero, Siegfried? A stab in the back, a funeral pyre, and a glorious blaze, heralding a new beginning? Bormann’s wife, Gerda, thought so. “The monsters are storming the bridge of the Gods,” she wrote to her husband. “The citadel of the Gods crumbles, and all seems lost; and then, suddenly a new citadel rises, more beautiful than ever before….We are not the first to engage in mortal combat with the powers of the underworld, and that we feel impelled…to do so should give us a conviction of ultimate victory.”

  But it was too late for ultimate victory, or for victory of any sort. The fearless First World War corporal was now a wreck, a drug-addled neurotic who could no longer conceal his alarm when bombs shook the bunker. He felt the German people had let him down, that they deserved to be overtaken by the Slavic races. He had already issued a scorched-earth Nero Decree, ordering that the infrastructure of the entire country should be destroyed rather than fall into the hands of the Allies. Everyone was a traitor. He screamed at his generals, fired them, and promised to execute every commander who disobeyed him. At one point, he even threatened to shoot his physician, Dr. Morell, thinking the doctor was trying to drug him with morphine so he could be shipped off to the Berghof. “Do you take me for a madman?” he railed.

  On April 22, a storm that had been brewing for days broke. Told that a counteroffensive he had ordered with largely fictitious troops had not taken place, Hitler seemed to snap. For a full half-hour, he screamed at his remaining staff about the cowardice and faithlessness of the world. The army was corrupt and weak, his generals were liars—even the SS was lying to him. He had been surrounded by failures and traitors for years. He shook his fists. Tears ran down his cheeks. He was a child again, one whose exaggerated expectations had not been met. This was the end, he sobbed. He could no longer go on. The war was lost.

  On April 29, at four in the morning, he dictated his last testaments. There were two of these documents. The first was a “private will” in which he left his art collection to the party, or, in case that should no longer exist, to the state, and set out his hope that the Linz project would be completed:

  The paintings in the collections which I have bought over the years have never been acquired for private purposes, but always exclusively for the creation of an art gallery in my native town of Linz….It is my most heartfelt wish that this bequest be executed.

  In the second “political” testament, he denied responsibility for the war and reprised the themes of cultural degeneracy and hatred for the Jews that had dominated his career. He had resolved to remain in Berlin and choose his own way to die, he said. He asked his commanders to tell their men he had preferred death to “cowardly withdrawal or even capitulation.” Content to the last to waste other people’s lives, he exhorted them to continue the fight.

  When it came, Hitler’s end was not so much Wagner as Hollywood B-movie. He would die with a revolver, some drugs, and a blonde in a bit part. Soon after midnight on April 30, he married Braun. Later that day, he took lunch with his secretaries as usual, and when the meal was over he said his goodbyes. At 2:30 p.m., he retreated with Braun behind the doors of his study. Soon afterward, a single gunshot was heard against the drone of the diesel generator. It was another ten minutes before his valet dared open the door. He found the newlyweds slumped on the sofa, blood dripping from a bullet hole in Hitler’s right temple. The strong, burnt-almond smell of cyanide filled the small room.

  21.

  LANDSCAPES OF THE BRAIN

  It was 1962, and Maria Rave-Schwank had been working at the Heidelberg clinic for almost a year when she asked her professor, Walter von Baeyer, about the two large cupboards that stood in an anteroom off the institution’s main lecture hall. As a trainee psychiatrist, it was part of Rave-Schwank’s job to assist in demonstrations to medical students, wheeling patients and pieces of apparatus in and out. She liked the job on the whole, but couldn’t stand the hours she had to spend waiting in this side room. Inevitably, her attention was drawn to the wooden cupboards, six feet high and as wide as they were tall, which half filled the small space. What was inside? Why were they always locked? No one seemed to know.

  At length Rave-Schwank asked the professor, who told her the cupboards contained an old and famous collection of psychiatric art, and where she might find the keys. Choosing a moment when the clinic was quiet, she returned to the room in a state of some anticipation. The paneled doors swung wide, releasing fine dust and a wash of stale air. The cupboards were partitioned into compartments and drawers, all of which were jam-packed with colorful and odd-looking materials. The shelves at the top were so tight with cardboard folders that when she tried to pull one out, an avalanche of others came with it. The folders were marked with names and numbers, and contained strange drawings, paintings, doodles, music, and writing, often in the old German script. One file was filled with cutouts from a pornographic magazine, she remembered: exciting girls with obscene and strong men coming to them. Elsewhere were wooden figurines, and even a small woman’s jacket embroidered with illegible phrases. The work seemed immensely fragile, but even in this dilapidated state it drew Rave-Schwank in. It made her think of all the years the authors of this art must have spent alone with their insanity, exiled from the world, killing time. It was a pity everything was so badly stored, she thought, particularly when it was so delicate.

  Baeyer agreed. Though he couldn’t provide any funds, he would be glad if she could do as much as she could to save it. In the evenings and at weekends, she attacked the chaos, sorting through the artworks, cleaning away the dirt and the dust, and reading what she could about the collection’s history. She found a space in the clinic’s attic where the collection could be stored and a few of the pieces displayed. In time, she began to think about putting on an exhibition.

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  Neglected as the Prinzhorn material was, the surprise of the postwar years was that it survived at all. Carl Schneider, who had destroyed psychiatric art as mercilessly as he had destroyed patients, had not damaged the famous collection in his care, probably because it might have been required for another propaganda show of “degenerate” material. Apart from a handful of important pieces that had disappeared during the final stages of Entartete Kunst, the collection had passed the war safely in storage in the Heidelberg clinic. After Hitler’s demise, it w
ould re-exert its influence, thanks in large part to the French artist Jean Dubuffet.

  Dubuffet had been awestruck by his first encounter with Bildnerei der Geisteskranken as a young painter in the 1920s. “It showed me the way,” he said, and made him realize that “all was permitted, all was possible.” At the war’s end he returned to Prinzhorn’s themes with a new movement, Art Brut, or “raw art,” which aimed to liberate the visual arts from the grip of the cultural establishment. He embarked on an epic journey of discovering, collecting, and publishing the work of psychiatric patients and other non-professionals, and in September 1950 he traveled to Heidelberg, the culmination of a years-long voyage of artistic discovery. He spent two days at the clinic, exploring the contents of the purpose-built cupboards and making copious notes. He would use psychotic art—including the work of the Prinzhorn artists Heinrich Anton Müller and Adolf Wölfli—as inspiration for his own paintings of the human interior, which he described as “landscapes of the brain.”

  Thanks to Dubuffet and André Breton, his collaborator in Art Brut, knowledge of the Prinzhorn artists once again began to spread among the European avant-garde. In 1951, Dubuffet took his collection to New York, where it remained for a decade on the East Hampton estate of Jackson Pollock’s close friend, the Abstract Expressionist Alfonso Ossorio. Some of the most illustrious names in American art came to see Art Brut here, including Pollock and Lee Krasner, Elaine and Willem de Kooning, and the critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. Pollock and Dubuffet never met, but they exchanged ideas via the collection and via Ossorio. Dubuffet also traveled to Chicago, where he set out his anti-establishment agenda in a famous lecture to the city’s Arts Club. The theories he presented there sowed the seeds of another celebrated American art group, the Chicago Imagists.