The Gallery of Miracles and Madness

by Charlie English

  Though Prinzhorn was deeply interested in the arts during his time in Munich and wrote some reviews of exhibitions, he does not appear to have been aware of Wassily Kandinsky or the forerunner Expressionist groups, who were not yet famous. He was probably more interested in music at this time, particularly Wagner.

  The observation that Schwegerle represented Prinzhorn as “half Apollo, half Orpheus” is from Weber.

  Rumors evidently swirled around the suicide of Prinzhorn’s and Hoffman’s singing teacher, whose death appears to have hit them very hard: According to Geinitz, “Hans Prinzhorn. Das unstete Leben eines ewig Suchenden,” Prinzhorn spent several weeks afterward in a sanatorium. The fallout also had the effect of connecting Prinzhorn with the expensive and progressive Bellevue institution, run by Ludwig Binswanger. Binswanger may have shown him paintings by Else Blankenhorn even before he began his work at Heidelberg, according to Rotzoll and Röske in “Karl Wilmanns (1873–1945) und die Geburt der Sammlung Prinzhorn aus dem Krieg.” The same source states that Prinzhorn met Wilmanns in a field hospital after graduating as a doctor in August 1917.

  Prinzhorn wrote his somewhat glorified account of the Second Battle of the Marne to his sister, Käthe, on July 21, 1918, while recuperating from his injury. He began the letter: “I lie in a beautiful high-ceilinged room with a major handsome view out onto the Neroberg through the open window, between the firs even a bit of blue mountain to indicate the distance. Wonderful bed, best care and food, good condition except for a slight discomfort on the one leg—simply a wonderful existence. The wound is doing well.”

  The idea that Prinzhorn continued to mull over Wilmanns’s offer after turning him down is supported by him writing, in the Magdeburger Zeitung in 1927, that the collection “had ignited, as it were, what I had carried in me half-finished in old studies on artistic creation or on the psychology of the creative process.” This is cited in Röske, “Außerhalb der Kontinuität geschichtlicher Prozesse.”

  Brecht’s description of spring 1919 as the fifth spring of the war is from his “Ballad of the Dead Soldier,” cited by Carl Zuckmayer in Als wär’s ein Stück von mir (1966), which is also the source of Zuckmayer’s memories of the “crazy hunger” of those months. The impact of the food blockade is related by N. P. Howard in “The Social and Political Consequences of the Allied Food Blockade of Germany, 1918–19.” The plight of German asylum inmates at this time, and data on the numbers who died from hunger, disease, and neglect, are from Burleigh, Death and Deliverance, as is the quote from Karl Bonhoeffer.

  Karl Binding never got to see his eugenic collaboration with Alfred Hoche, Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens, since he died in April 1920, shortly before it was published. Translations are from Burleigh.

  Prinzhorn wrote of his “deepest nihilism” at the end of the war in 1927 in “Die erdentrückbare Seele.” He describes his entry into the clinic in 1918–1919 in a footnote in Bildnerei: “When the author, returning from military service, entered the clinic in the winter of 1918/1919, Prof. Wilmanns had already chosen a few drawings by patients in the clinic and offered them for study. They included several notebooks and sheets which had already been separated from the medical histories for some time and which were kept in the teaching collection where they were arranged by diagnosis and accompanied by handwriting samples.” He went on to add that Wilmanns was “most understanding,” relieving the younger man of clinical work and granting him almost unlimited leave for study and extensive research trips.

  Copies of different versions of the circular letters sent out by Prinzhorn and Wilmanns are in the Heidelberg archive. Prinzhorn wrote of the quick response to his shout-out in Bildnerei, describing it as “immediate and surprisingly good.” Many details of Prinzhorn’s collecting activity, including the correspondence with Dr. Hermkes at Eickelborn, can be found in Bettina Brand-Claussen’s essay “The Collection of Works of Art in the Psychiatric Clinic, Heidelberg—from the Beginnings Until 1945,” in Beyond Reason: Art and Psychosis—Works from the Prinzhorn Collection (1996). The Genzel quote, “otherwise there is going to be a fight,” is from Prinzhorn’s profile of the artist in Bildnerei.

  Prinzhorn reported the statistical makeup of his collection as follows: “The majority of the pictures (about 75 percent) originate with patients who are schizophrenics. The remaining 25 percent are divided as follows: by manic-depressive patients, 7 to 8 percent; by psychopathologic patients, 5 to 6 percent; by paralytics, 4 percent; by imbeciles, 4 to 5 percent; and by epileptics, 3 to 4 percent. We cannot arrive at very precise figures because many diagnoses are lacking and others are very uncertain. Women drew 16 percent of the pictures.”

  Agnes Richter’s Jäckchen (Jacket) has fascinated several modern artists and critics. Sources include Röske’s “Agnes Richter’s Jacket” and Monika Ankele’s “Doing Culture / Doing Gender / Doing Identity.” Brand-Claussen has written about Katharina Detzel in “Viel Lärm, wenig Bilder.” References for other artists mentioned: Jakob Mohr in Beyme and Röske (eds.), Dubuffets Liste; Gustav Sievers and Joseph Schneller in Brand-Claussen, Röske, and Rotzoll (eds.), Todesursache: Euthanasie; Blankenhorn in Noell-Rumpeltes, “Else Blankenhorn—vom Projekt der Versöhnung des Unversöhnlichen”; Carl Lange in Röske, “Das Christusbild in der Schuheinlegesohle”; Josef Forster in Röske, Noell-Rumpeltes, and Brand-Claussen, Durch die Luft gehen.

  Prinzhorn’s overview of the literature on psychiatric art was published in the journal Zeitschrift für die gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie 53 (1919). It is summarized in Weber, “Prinzhorn.” Paul Meunier’s book L’art chez les fous was published under the pseudonym Marcel Réja. Cesare Lombroso’s book Genio e follia was first published in 1864. It appeared in English as The Man of Genius in 1889 (https://archive.org/​stream/​manofgenius00lombuoft#page/​2/mode/​2up).

  Prinzhorn set out his idea for a substantial volume on the subject in the circular letter of January 1, 1920, writing: “Now that we have received some valuable contribution from all the institutions we have requested, our collection has become so abundant that we will soon be able to present an overall picture of the whole area in our museum and we have a large publication in preparation.”

  The idea that he “needed to gather as much information as possible from the artists themselves” is in Brand-Claussen, “Der Revolutionär für ewige Dinge und die Irrenkunst,” who states that “the practice of questioning selected patients…was part and parcel of the initial collecting policy.” Not all his subjects seemed to appreciate his interview technique. After interviewing August Klett at the Weinsberg asylum, Prinzhorn left behind a sheaf of papers. Klett found these documents, and added his own caricature of their meeting to them. The inquisitor is shown leaning back at a forty-five-degree angle, his scalp carpeted with two enormous tufts of hair, his large nose probing the sky. In the background, a perplexed figure, surely the artist, peeps out from behind a table. The patient captioned his sketch “Typisch Herren Doktoren!” (typical doctors).

  3. A MEETING AT EMMENDINGEN

  Prinzhorn recounted his meeting with Bühler in his profile of the artist “Pohl” in Bildnerei. Parts of my description of Emmendingen come from my visit in April 2018, when I was shown around the psychiatric facility by Martin Burst; other details come from former directors and employees. Karl Haardt, a director of the institution from 1894, cited in Monika Ankele’s Alltag und Aneignung in Psychiatrien um 1900, describes how “in the south, from the plain, you can see the tower of the magnificent cathedral of Freiburg when the weather is fine. In the west a mountain range rises from the plain, the Kaiserstuhl. Behind it flows the Rhine.” Mathes and Waßmer, Die badische Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Emmendingen (1930), gives many details of life at the asylum, including the storks on the roofs and a “choir of frogs” outside the director’s house.

  Bühler does not seem to have been violent. Prinzhorn remarked that “Very seldom does his
medical history note that he is irritable or momentarily violent against fellow patients who tease him.”

  4. DANGEROUS TO LOOK AT!

  Prinzhorn’s talent for networking and self-promotion are clear from his correspondence: He was in contact with many of the leading intellectual lights of the German-speaking world at that time, although not all remember him in their memoirs, or are half as complimentary as Watson. (See Binswanger’s remarks to Freud in Sigmund Freud—Ludwig Binswanger: Briefwechsel 1908–1938.) Geinitz, “Zur Biografie Hans Prinzhorns,” notes that a host of famous contacts were gleaned from Eva’s father, “one of the star advocates of Berlin,” who knew numerous cultural and political figures in the Reich capital, including Gerhart Hauptmann, the publisher Samuel Fischer, and the great industrialist and later foreign minister of the Weimar republic, Walther Rathenau. Prinzhorn struck up a lifelong friendship with Hauptmann at this time.

  Weber, “Prinzhorn,” notes that Prinzhorn wrote to Klages on September 7, 1920, to introduce himself and request an audience, and that this meeting “turned Prinzhorn into a Klages zealot.” She adds that many of those who knew Klages, including Thomas Mann, found this incomprehensible. The strength of Prinzhorn’s infatuation can be judged from the following lines, with which he dedicated one of his works to his mentor: “Midway along the path, fearful, I met you / You taught me to try every route / To first look inside myself / You will find yourself in the deepest part of my soul.” My summary of Klages’s philosophy is culled from several sources, including James L. Foy’s introduction to Artistry of the Mentally Ill.

  The close relationship between Fraenger and Prinzhorn is explored by Röske in “Außerhalb der Kontinuität geschichtlicher Prozesse,” while Zuckmayer relates several of the Gemeinschaft’s evenings, including Prinzhorn’s singing the French fable Aucassin et Nicolette, in Als wär’s ein Stück von mir. Prinzhorn wrote of Dornbusch and the attractive female lead (a “young juicy blond Jew”) to his friend Käthe Knobloch on July 23, 1920. According to Karl-Ludwig Hofmann in Beyme and Röske (eds.), Ungesehen und unerhört, Prinzhorn was on the management board of the Gemeinschaft as early as February 1919; Fraenger borrowed works to present in his apartment, and invited Prinzhorn to give a lecture on January 4, 1921. In “Erforscher des ‘Echten’ Leben und Werk Hans Prinzhorns,” Röske states that artists from the Rih (https://de.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Gruppe_Rih) group based in Karlsruhe may have heard about it, including Gustav Wolf (1887–1947).

  My summary of modernism’s interest in madness, which was heightened by the war, is drawn from Raymond Williams’s “When Was Modernism?” (1987), Robert Hughes’s The Shock of the New, and Louis Sass’s Madness and Modernism, as well as MacGregor’s The Discovery of the Art of the Insane.

  The Die Brücke artist who suggested the group change its name to Van Goghiana was Nolde, cited in MacGregor. Klee’s excitement at seeing Van Gogh in Germany for the first time can be found in Klee, Winston, and Winston, Paul Klee: His Life and Work in Documents. His review of Der Blaue Reiter three years later is in Paul Klee and Felix Klee, The Diaries of Paul Klee 1898–1918. Käthe Kollwitz’s heartbreak can be read in The Diary and Letters of Kaethe Kollwitz. Max Ernst’s announcement of his own death and resurrection is in Spies and Rewald, Max Ernst: A Retrospective. Hans Arp’s reminiscence of searching for an art to save mankind from furious madness is in Hughes, The Shock of the New. The idea that this was a “schizophrenic age” was in general circulation: James L. Foy writes in his introduction to Artistry of the Mentally Ill that “Prinzhorn was saying that a schizophrenic age required a schizophrenic art, indeed it demanded such an art to mirror its own loss of reality.”

  The different types of response to his collection are documented by Prinzhorn in Bildnerei. Hölzel’s “shaken to pieces” remark and “truly artistic path” comments were reported to Prinzhorn by an acquaintance; he included them in a letter to Käthe Knobloch on June 22, according to Ulrich Röthke in “Bis zur Haltlosigkeit erschüttert,” in Beyme and Röske (eds.), Ungesehen und unerhört. Röthke is also the source of Hölzel’s connection with Klett and Frau von Zinowiew. Schlemmer’s letter to Tutein can be found in The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer. Details of Baron Hyazinth von Wieser’s life and work and his influence on Schlemmer are documented by Röske in “ ‘Ganz losgelöst von allem Außen’—Oskar Schlemmer und Hyazinth Freiherr von Wieser,” in Beyme and Röske (eds.), Ungesehen und unerhört.

  Alfred Kubin visited the collection with his friend the neurologist Robert Laudenheimer on September 24, 1920, and wrote about it in the May 1922 issue of Das Kunstblatt. Brand-Claussen collates further details of this encounter in “ ‘…Lassen sich neben den besten Expressionisten sehen’ ”; she includes details of a meeting between Kubin and Prinzhorn, and the exchange of pictures from his own collection with those in Heidelberg, probably in autumn 1920. Brand-Claussen’s “Drohender Zusammenstoß: Alfred Kubins Freundschaftsbund mit der Kunst der Irren,” in Beyme and Röske (eds.), Ungesehen und unerhört, describes Kubin as the “star witness” for the collection’s artistic value, and gives the real names of the artists Kubin anonymized in Das Kunstblatt.

  By 1920 there was a general move to pathologize modern art in Germany, as the art historian Wilhelm Valentiner wrote to Lübeck’s museum director, Carl Georg Heise: “All sorts of doctors are now spreading out into the criticism of modern art” (cited in Brand-Claussen, “Häßlich, falsch, krank”). Weygandt’s desire to call the police on Freud is told in Ernest Jones, Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. His “neuropathological collection,” gathered at Friedrichsberg between 1905 and 1934, included skulls of Herero people, who had been colonized by Germany, which Weygandt purchased from private dealers between 1917 and 1925, according to a 2017 statement from the University Clinic Hamburg-Eppendorf (https://taz.de/​Fund-in-Hamburger-Uni-Klinik/!5399183/). The University Clinic has recently tried to repatriate them. Weygandt’s attempts to source Genzel sculptures from Eickelborn in 1922 are reported in Brand-Claussen, “Geschichte einer ‘verruckten’ Sammlung,” which also cites Prinzhorn’s letter of October 25, 1921, in which he writes that Weygandt “was already angry about our collection in May.” “Kunst und Wahnsinn,” Weygandt’s comparison of the work of artists with schizophrenia and the “excrescences of modernism,” was published on June 4, 1921, in Die Woche.

  Immanuel Kant was one Enlightenment figure to develop the term “degeneration,” in his 1777 essay “Von der verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen” (On the different races of people). Arthur de Gobineau’s tract on Aryanism and race, Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, appeared in four volumes between 1853 and 1855. His biographer Michael Biddiss, in “Prophecy and Pragmatism: Gobineau’s Confrontation with Tocqueville,” Historical Journal 13, no. 4 (1970), called him the “father of racist ideology,” and described the work as “a racial philosophy…that surpasses even Mein Kampf in scope and sinister grandeur.” Joachim Fest states that “Hitler simplified Gobineau’s elaborate doctrine until it became demagogically usable and offered a set of plausible explanations for all the discontents, anxieties, and crises of the contemporary scene.” Wagner’s friendship with Gobineau is documented by Konrad Heiden in The Fuehrer. “Das Judenthum in der Musik” was originally published in 1850 in Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. Wagner extended it substantially and republished it in 1869. Alex Ross has noted (https://www.newyorker.com/​culture/​culture-desk/​the-case-for-wagner-in-israel) that Wagner’s slogan “The Jew is the plastic demon of the decline of mankind” was used in the Nazi propaganda film Der ewige Jude (The eternal Jew).

  Nordau’s book Entartung was first published in German in 1892–1893, with an English edition in 1895. Shaw’s response, “The Sanity of Art: An Exposure of the Current Nonsense About Artists Being Degenerate” was published in London in 1908. Wilde’s response, that “all sane people are idiots” is cited in Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (London, 1988).

 
I could not find the July 1921 letter stating that it can have a “clarifying effect in the chaos of current art” in the Heidelberg archive, but it is cited in Weber, “Prinzhorn.”

  5. THE SCHIZOPHRENIC MASTERS

  Prinzhorn’s growing disaffection with the Heidelberg clinic is apparent in his correspondence, notably with his friend Käthe Knobloch, which is in the Prinzhorn archive in Heidelberg. See, for instance, the letter to Knobloch of March 10, 1921, in which he describes himself as an “outsider” at the clinic, and an “unstable psychopath with hysterical traits.” He told Knobloch the “book seemed dubious” on May 9, 1921, and that he was “a bundle of feelings of insufficiency” on June 17. At the end of June 1921, he met Jaspers for advice on “agonizing personal development issues,” according to a letter of July 2, 1921, cited in Röske, “Suchende Kierkegaard-Natur.” Jaspers warned him against reacting hastily “out of anger at the hospital’s unpleasant atmosphere,” and considerably strengthened his “courage to become independent at that time” (letter to Jaspers on May 23, 1927, also in Röske). His idea that the Heidelbergers disapproved of Klages is in Weber, “Prinzhorn,” among other sources.

  The boat trip with the Schroeders was related in a letter to Knobloch on July 16, 1921. The reflection that his own neurosis probably drew him to psychology in the first place is Mary Wigman’s, cited in Geinitz, “Hans Prinzhorn,” while Prinzhorn’s remark that Erna “turns majestically away from me” was made in a letter to Knobloch on July 26, 1922.

  The locations in which Prinzhorn could be found in his 1921–1922 travels are from Brand-Claussen, “Der Revolutionär für ewige Dinge und die Irrenkunst.” The exchange of letters between Binswanger and Freud about him can be found in Sigmund Freud—Ludwig Binswanger: Briefwechsel 1908–1938 (Frankfurt, 1992).