The Gallery of Miracles and Madness

by Charlie English

  A Frankfurt newspaper report of the opening of Entartete Kunst in the city. The headline reads “Art = Madness.” The top photograph shows a bust by the Prinzhorn artist Karl Genzel next to a larger sculpture by Eugen Hoffmann.

  The guidebook contained several Prinzhorn images that were compared to those of professional artists. The caption on the right reads: “Which of these three drawings is the work of an amateur, an inmate of a lunatic asylum? You will be surprised: the one on the right above! The other two used to be regarded as master drawings by Kokoschka.”

  The “euthanasia” order, signed by Hitler, instructing Philipp Bouhler and Karl Brandt to give incurable patients a “merciful death.” It was backdated to September 1, 1939.

  A page of the T4 transport list for Emmendingen, dated March 5, 1940. Bühler is number 15 on the list.

  Medical staff load psychiatric patients on to a bus belonging to the Gekrat transportation service. It will take them to be killed.

  Author’s photo

  Grafeneck Castle in the Swabian Jura hosted the first killing center. More than ten thousand patients died here, including Bühler.

  Courtesy of Gedenkstätte Grafeneck

  Grafeneck’s former coach house was turned into a prototype gas chamber. A doctor, working in the small room at the left-hand end, released carbon monoxide into the airtight chamber next door, killing everyone inside.

  Courtesy of Gedenkstätte Grafeneck

  Grafeneck’s first gassing doctor, Horst Schumann

  For Doris Noell-Rumpeltes

  1949–2021

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book could not have been written without the generous support of the staff at the Sammlung Prinzhorn in Heidelberg, where the significant material relating to this story is kept. I am indebted to the collection’s director, Thomas Röske, for his support and his patience, and for allowing me access to the archives; and particularly to Doris Noell-Rumpeltes. Doris, who died in February 2021, spent much of her career researching the Heidelberg artworks and the often obscure lives of the people who created them. Her knowledge of some of these artists, notably Else Blankenhorn, was unrivalled. In her last years, Doris helped me navigate the harder-to-access parts of Prinzhorn’s papers, the archive, and the collection itself. It is with the deepest gratitude that I dedicate this book to her.

  Others at the Sammlung Prinzhorn—Ingrid von Beyme, Sabine Hohnholtz, Torsten Kappenberg, Christine Piehler, and Ingrid Traschütz—welcomed and helped me in various ways, often through their own prolific writings, as did the former curators and employees Maria Rave-Schwank, Bettina Brand-Claussen, and Inge Jadí, who were restoring and researching the history of the collection long before I happened upon it.

  I am lucky to have received advice and assistance from numerous other experts in Germany, including Maike Rotzoll, professor at the Institute for the History and Ethics of Medicine at the University of Heidelberg; Christoph Zuschlag, professor of modern and contemporary art history at the University of Bonn; Gabriel Richter, chief medical officer at the Reichenau Centre for Psychiatry; Thomas Stöckle, head of the Grafeneck memorial site; and Martin Burst of the Emmendingen Centre for Psychiatry. I would also like to thank Dagmar Taylor for helping me with interviews and translations, and Natasha Abbas for trying to improve my German. In the UK, I sought help from the art historian Alison Price-Moir, of Hull University, and from Frank Rohricht, consultant psychiatrist at the East London NHS Foundation Trust: They have my gratitude. Though all of the above generously shared their specialist knowledge with me, any errors are my own.

  There are at least four people without whom this project would never have begun. These are my superb agents, Stuart Krichevsky and Felicity Rubinstein, who always have a far better understanding of what might work than I do; and my fantastic publishers, Arabella Pike at William Collins and Hilary Redmon at Random House, whose faith allowed me to write the book and whose editing skills shaped it. Thanks must also go to the friends who advised and supported me during the writing process, among them Tomas Campbell, Ingrid Kari-Kari, Nick O’Toole, Toby Clements, Pascal Wyse, Sam Wollaston, Ian Katz, and Biddy Arnott; and to my family, Barbara English, Hugh English, and Harry, Arthur, and Eddie English. Most of all, I would like to thank Lucy Blincoe, for generally being fabulous.

  NOTES

  My account of the life of Franz Karl Bühler and his fellow artists is built on decades of research by staff at the university psychiatric clinic in Heidelberg, work that continues to this day under the current director of the Prinzhorn Collection, Thomas Röske. As well as an impressive exhibition space and an expanding repository of art, the collection is now an archive of primary and secondary sources for all things Prinzhorn, including copies of the medical files of individuals, the collector’s own letters and writings (many of which remain unpublished), and other priceless artifacts from the 1920s and 1930s. An expanding list of Prinzhorn Collection publications, as well as Prinzhorn’s own glorious Bildnerei der Geisteskranken, provide a wealth of information about the art, the people who created it, and their influence on the avant-garde. All of this material fed into the narrative.

  There is an equally rich seam of literature dealing with Hitler’s ideas about modernism and the cultural politics he pursued. This is often said to begin with Paul Ortwin Rave’s Kunstdiktatur im Dritten Reich (1949), in which the former Nationalgalerie director recounts many of the events firsthand, and continues in the work of Hildegard Brenner, Henry Grosshans, Eric Michaud, Lynn Nicholas, Frederic Spotts, Jonathan Petropoulos, and Dana Arieli-Horowitz, to name a few. There are a range of primary sources, too, many written by Nazis or published during NSDAP rule, including Mein Kampf, the memoirs of Kubizek and of Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s Table Talk, and Goebbels’s Tagebücher. To help navigate them, I turned to the biographies by Joachim Fest (Hitler), Konrad Heiden (The Fuehrer), Ian Kershaw (published in two parts as Hitler: Hubris and Hitler: Nemesis, and then in a single abridged volume, Hitler), Richard Evans (The Coming of the Third Reich), and Brigitte Hamann (Hitler’s Vienna), among others. I found no better authority on the degenerate art show than Christoph Zuschlag, whose encyclopedic Entartete Kunst (1995) provided more valuable source material than anyone barring Prinzhorn himself.

  The “euthanasia” actions are overshadowed by the even greater horror of the “Final Solution,” yet they deserve an important place in history, not least because they acted as a gangplank for the Holocaust, and were devised by psychiatrists, abetted by medics and care givers, and carried out by doctors on German soil, with insufficient popular resistance. The subject was still taboo in 1983, when Ernst Klee published his groundbreaking exposé, “Euthanasie” im NS-Staat, later revised as “Euthanasie” im Dritten Reich. Others have picked up Klee’s baton, notably, in the case of Heidelberg, Maike Rotzoll and Gerrit Hohendorf, who have explored the connections between Carl Schneider, the murder programs, and the Prinzhorn artists, and helped the clinic to remember its past. Though Klee’s work is unavailable in English, there are two substantial Anglophone accounts, by Henry Friedlander (The Origins of the Nazi Genocide, 1993), and Michael Burleigh (Death and Deliverance, 1994), which I have mined.

  LANGUAGE

  I have tried to avoid several dangers in writing about mental health. One is to perpetuate stigma through defining people by their diagnoses, seeing conditions as defects and not differences, and assuming that everyone is “suffering.” At the same time, it would be wrong to underestimate the difficulty of living with schizophrenia, for example, in the early twentieth century, which meant lifelong incarceration in many cases, and sterilization or murder for hundreds of thousands. I have retained some of the terminology of the period, and in places quoted abusive or offensive language, to reflect the attitudes of the time and give a sense of the hostility the Prinzhorn artists fac
ed.

  I have used the German titles of various artworks, exhibitions, festivals, films, and buildings, as they seem to me to convey something more than a straightforward English translation, although this is also provided.

  PREFACE

  Conti’s letter of October 9, the infamous registration forms known as “Meldebogen 1,” and the “information sheet” attached to the circular, setting out the categories of inpatient covered, appear in full in Klee’s “Euthanasie” im Dritten Reich, pp. 90–93. The Grafeneck historian Thomas Stöckle has called this moment “the practical beginning of the collection of victims for euthanasia,” in Thomas Stöckle and Eberhard Zacher, “Euthanasie” im NS-Staat: Grafeneck im Jahr 1940. The dispatch of the registration forms was done by region: Brandenburg and Württemberg were the first states to receive them, according to Harald Jenner (“Quellen zur Geschichte der ‘Euthanasie’—Verbrechen 1939–1945”), and Baden followed soon after. By the summer of 1940 they had been sent to all of the nearly one thousand institutions involved in Aktion T4.

  My characterization of the work in the Prinzhorn collection, and its significance, is based on interviews with and readings of articles by Thomas Röske, Maria Rave-Schwank, Bettina Brand-Claussen, and Inge Jádi, as well as firsthand observation. Jádi has described the impact of the works in the most colorful terms. On first encountering them, she found that something “uncompromising, threatening emanated from many of the works,” she wrote in “The Prinzhorn Collection and Its History.” When she opened the artists’ folders, “it was as if a dam broke…remarkable worlds opened up before me, drew me into their power; open spaces that took away my equilibrium, that made me dizzy. Only when I ceased fighting against these sensations and let myself flow with the stream did I become calmer.”

  Various observers have described pieces in the collection as messages from the isolated interior, or variations on that theme, including John MacGregor in his history of art’s debt to madness, The Discovery of the Art of the Insane.

  PART ONE: BILDNEREI

  1. THE MAN WHO JUMPED IN THE CANAL

  Apart from the substantial quantity of works by Bühler, the key primary source for his early biography are the few dozen scratchily written sheets of his Illenau medical file, which ended with his move to Emmendingen in April 1900. His notes from Emmendingen would have been sent with him to Grafeneck, and may have been destroyed. My re-creation of his early years comes largely from the patient history noted in his Illenau admissions questionnaire. Ruth Kellar-Kempas wrote a brief but invaluable biography in the catalogue of a show of Bühler’s works in Offenburg in 1993, Franz Karl Bühler: Bilder aus der Prinzhorn-Sammlung, which included an analysis of his work by Bettina Brand-Claussen. A more recent, short biography by Monika Jagfeld can be found in Brand-Claussen, Röske, and Rotzoll (eds.), Todesursache: Euthanasie. After three years of reconstruction, part of the giant gate system Bühler took to Chicago stands once again as an entrance to the city park in Karlsruhe.

  I am grateful to Frank Rohrich, consultant at the University of London Foundation Hospital, for helping me to try to understand schizophrenia. Heidelberg’s own Emil Kraepelin is usually credited with naming the condition (as dementia praecox, or “premature imbecility”) around 1896, though it was Eugen Bleuler who adjusted the description, with the help of Carl Jung, and gave it its modern name a decade later. The description of it as “a country, opposed to Reality, where reigned an implacable light” is from the Autobiography of a Schizophrenic Girl, by “Renée,” aka Louisa Düss, cited in Louis A. Sass, Madness and Modernism.

  The idea that Euphrosyne died early comes from Bildnerei, although Prinzhorn gives the date of her death as 1886, by which time Bühler was around twenty-two years old. The magnificent caricatures of the kaiser can be found in the balustrades at the Palais du Rhin, formerly the Kaiserpalast, where they have been photographed by the Badische Zeitung (https://www.badische-zeitung.de/​der-kunstschmied-und-des-kaisers-bart--34451904.html).

  Wikipedia has an exhaustive list of “firsts” claimed to have been made at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago; others include fluorescent lamps, penny-squashing machines, and an electric vehicle. The explosive growth rate of the city is documented in the Chicago Historical Society’s Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago (http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/​pages/​962.html), which states that “Chicago soared from empty prairie and mud flats to world metropolis in a breathtakingly short sequence.” The encyclopedia also contains photographs and souvenir maps of the fairground. There are numerous firsthand accounts of the Chicago World’s Fair, including the one from the Bulgarian satirist and writer Aleko Konstantinov, who felt sorry for the moon, how “poor and pale” she seemed in comparison to the garlands of electric lightbulbs on display, in To Chicago and Back. The seamier side of Chicago was documented by Karen Abbott in Sin in the Second City.

  The contemporary writer who said the world had changed less since the time of Jesus Christ was Charles Péguy, cited in Robert Hughes’s The Shock of the New. Hughes also states that aerial perspective led to abstract art, although he placed this discovery in Paris in 1890, when visitors first climbed the Eiffel Tower.

  The descriptions of Friedrichsberg’s “elephant houses” and violent nurses come from Kai Sammet, “Habitus, Kapital und Spielräume.” More details on the German psychiatric system at this time can be found in Eric J. Engstrom, Clinical Psychiatry in Imperial Germany: A History of Psychiatric Practice, and Monika Ankele, Alltag und Aneignung in Psychiatrien um 1900.

  2. THE HYPNOSIS IN THE WOOD

  There is no full-length biography of Prinzhorn at the time of writing, although Röske and Noell-Rumpeltes of the Sammlung Prinzhorn (Prinzhorn collection) hope to publish one soon. Primary sources for the doctor’s life include his correspondence with friends and associates, much of which is now in the Heidelberg collection, and Prinzhorn’s fragment of unpublished childhood memoir, “Lebensgeschichte,” in which he gave a no-holds-barred criticism of his parents and his upbringing. The late Heidelberg professor of medicine Wolfgang Geinitz wrote two authoritative biographical essays, “Hans Prinzhorn. Das unstete Leben eines ewig Suchenden” (1987) and “Zur Biografie Hans Prinzhorns” (1992). I also borrowed from Röske’s Der Arzt als Künstler. Useful overviews of Prinzhorn’s life and career can be found in Marielène Weber’s introduction to the French translation of Bildnerei, “L’homme, la collection, le livre,” and in Silke Röckelein’s Hans Prinzhorn (1886–1933); Dokumentation mit Bild- und Textzeugnissen zum Leben und Werk. He also left many books and articles, which are available at Heidelberg, including those for the magazine Der Ring.

  Heidelberg survived the war almost unscathed, but anyone visiting Neue Schloßstraße 9 will find a modern house at the address where Prinzhorn once lived, surrounded by neo-Baroque mansions he would have recognized. Mark Twain’s account of living in Heidelberg in 1878, including descriptions of its hotels and dueling fraternities, was published as A Tramp Abroad (https://www.gutenberg.org/​files/​119/​119-h/​119-h.htm). The English painter J. M. W. Turner also made several visits (https://sublimesites.co/​2015/​11/​20/​in-turners-footsteps-at-heidelberg-part-3/) to Heidelberg between 1833 and 1844 and produced dozens of sketches and watercolors, many of which are in the Tate Britain in London.

  The poor physical state of the psychiatric clinic at the end of the war is revealed by a fundraising letter Karl Wilmanns wrote to German Americans in August 1919, which is in the archive of the Sammlung Prinzhorn in Heidelberg. The hospital, wrote Wilmanns, was “the birthplace of the modern study of mental diseases.” The Encyclopedia of Psychology credits Kraepelin as being the founder of modern scientific psychiatry, psychopharmacology, and psychiatric genetics. He was made professor of psychiatry at Heidelberg in 1890 and stayed thirteen years before moving to Munich. Jaspers is held in similarly high regard, for example by Louis A. Sass, though by 1919 he was in the
process of moving from psychiatry toward philosophy. He published his own contribution to the debate about art and insanity, Strindberg und van Gogh, in the same year as Prinzhorn. The relationship between Jaspers and Prinzhorn has been set out by Röske in “ ‘Suchende Kierkegaard-Natur’ und ‘Enfant terrible’: Karl Jaspers und Hans Prinzhorn.”

  Descriptions of the clinic’s interior, including Prinzhorn’s attic, are largely from my own visit, although certain aspects of the building have been remodeled.

  David Lindsay Watson was evidently bowled over by Prinzhorn’s charisma. He was a young psychologist at Antioch College when Prinzhorn arrived to deliver a guest lecture, “Nietzsche and the Twentieth Century,” in 1929. The German spoke so powerfully that at least one student said he had “never heard anyone talk in that way” and was reduced to tears, Watson remembered. Watson’s eulogy, “In the Teeth of All Formalism: A Tribute to Hans Prinzhorn,” was published in The Psychoanalytic Review in October 1936, three years after Prinzhorn’s death.

  Prinzhorn’s memories of his upbringing and parents are in his “Lebensgeschichte.” Other details are from Geinitz and Weber. His Ph.D. thesis, on the architect and theoretician Gottfried Semper, considered “the psychological origin of the artistic activity” and thereby paved the way for his interest in the art of psychiatric patients.

  Thomas Mann’s satirical description of Munich as a place where “art with its rose-entwined sceptre holds smiling sway” is from “Gladius Dei,” in Death in Venice and Other Stories. Another famous account of the Schwabing was given by the “Scandal Countess,” Fanny zu Reventlow, in her novel Herrn Dames Aufzeichnungen. The Lovis Corinth quote is from Max Spindler’s Handbuch der bayerischen Geschichte, cited in Kershaw.