The Gallery of Miracles and Madness

by Charlie English

  Prinzhorn seems to have been psychoanalyzed by Jung (Weber, “Prinzhorn”), although Röske argues that this was likely short, so it did not constitute a full psychoanalysis as we know it today.

  Prinzhorn’s visit to the Bauhaus is recounted in Röske, “ ‘Sie wissen nicht, was sie tun.’ ”

  The date of May 4, 1922, for Prinzhorn to hold a copy in his hands for the first time is from Brand-Claussen, “Drohender Zusammenstoß: Alfred Kubins Freundschaftsbund mit der Kunst der Irren,” in Beyme and Röske (eds.), Ungesehen und unerhört. The book’s full title was Bildnerei der Geisteskranken: Ein Beitrag zur Psychologie und Psychopathologie der Gestaltung (Artistry of the mentally ill: A contribution to the psychology and psychopathology of configuration). It weighed 12 pounds 10 ounces. Ingeborg Baier Fraenger noted that Prinzhorn forgot to attribute the term Bildnerei to the Heidelberg scholar (Röske, “Außerhalb”).

  6. ADVENTURES IN NO-MAN’S-LAND

  Prinzhorn’s pleasure at the success of his book despite the general depression that had engulfed him is recounted in a letter to Knobloch on August 21, 1922 (in the Sammlung Prinzhorn archive). The book was reviewed in Kunstwart und Kulturwart 36, no. 1 (1922–1923). Emil Ludwig’s appreciation is cited in Geinitz, “Hans Prinzhorn”; Oskar Pfister’s is in Imago 9 (1923). Jaspers’s remark was in the third edition of his Allgemeine Psychopathologie (General psychopathology), 1923, cited in Röske, “Suchende Kierkegaard-Natur.”

  Clara Malraux’s recollections of Berlin cultural life in 1922 are in Memoirs, although she called him “Pringhorn.” Sophie Taeuber’s letter to Jean Arp is in Stefanie Poley, “ ‘…und nicht mehr lassen mich diese Dinge los.’ ” Bildnerei was later found in Arp’s library.

  Lothar Schreyer’s recollections of Paul Klee and his “wizard’s kitchen” were published in Erinnerungen an Sturm und Bauhaus (Munich, 1956), cited in Klee, Winston, and Winston, Paul Klee: His Life and Work in Documents. James Smith Pierce’s analysis of Klee’s debt to the Prinzhorn collection was published in Arts in 1977; a more modern take is Gregor Wedekind’s “Paul Klee und die Bildnerei der Geisteskranken,” in Beyme and Röske (eds.), Ungesehen und unerhört. James Smith Pierce went on to identify even greater similarities between Klee and Karl Genzel in “Paul Klee and Karl Brendel.”

  For André Breton’s biography and search for mad inspiration, see Peter Bürger, “The Lure of Madness.” Breton’s claim that “Les champs magnétiques” showed “the unrevealed and yet revealable portion of our being” is cited in Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind.

  Biographical sources for Ernst include Werner Spies’s Max Ernst Collagen, Patrick Waldberg’s Max Ernst, and Ernst’s own “Notes pour une biographie.” A visit by Ernst to the collection at Heidelberg was “highly likely,” according to MacGregor in The Discovery of the Art of the Insane.

  For relations between the Éluards and Ernst, see McNab, Ghost Ships. Éluard gave his opinion that Bildnerei was “le plus beau livre d’images qui soit, c’est certainement…cela vaut mieux que n’importe quel tableau,” in a letter of March 5, 1928, in Éluard and Scheler, Lettres à Joë Bousquet. André Masson’s quote is from a letter to Le Monde titled “Une précision d’André Masson sur l’art brut,” published on October 6, 1971. Breton wrote that Prinzhorn had given the artists a “presentation worthy of their talents” in 1948 in “Freedom to Roam Abroad,” in Breton, Taylor, and Polizzotti, Surrealism and Painting. On the difficulties of “automatic painting,” see Max Morise, “Les yeux enchantés,” in La révolution surréaliste, December 1, 1924. The notion that Masson’s dessin automatique was inspired by an unnamed Prinzhorn patient is in Gisela Steinlechner’s “Underhand: André Masson’s Automatic Drawings,” in Beyme and Röske (eds.), Surrealismus und Wahnsinn.

  August Natterer’s biographical details are from Bildnerei. Breton’s list of notable Prinzhorn artists also included Hermann Behle, Joseph Schneller, and Adolf Wölfli. The idea that Surrealism used Natterer’s “collapse in meaning” to mirror that caused by the war is from Röske, “August Natterer,” in Raw Vision 51 (2005). For a comprehensive analysis of Ernst’s borrowing from Natterer, see Röske, “Max Ernst’s Encounter with Artistry of the Mentally Ill,” in Beyme and Röske (eds.), Surrealismus und Wahnsinn.

  Antonin Artaud’s 1925 “Letter to the Medical Directors of Lunatic Asylums” is in Antonin Artaud: Collected Works—Volume One. Salvador Dalí’s statement “The only difference between myself and a madman…is that I am not mad” is in George A. Cevasco, “Dalí’s Christianized Surrealism.” Dalí would finally meet Freud in London in July 1938, when the Spaniard was thirty-four and the Austrian eighty-one. Freud was initially unimpressed, but afterward wrote (to Stefan Zweig, cited in Letters of Sigmund Freud 1873–1939, London, 1970), “I was inclined to look upon the surrealists—who have apparently chosen me as their patron saint—as absolute (let us say 95 percent, like alcohol), cranks. That young Spaniard, however, with his candid and fanatical eyes, and his undeniable technical mastery, has made me reconsider my opinion.”

  For Lange and Schneller’s influence on Dalí, see Peter Gorsen, “Salvador Dalí’s Imagined World of Madness.” Dalí wrote his paranoid interpretation of Millet’s painting in the 1930s, but it was not published until 1963, as Le mythe tragique de l’Angélus de Millet.

  Stefanie Poley, in “ ‘…und nicht mehr lassen mich diese Dinge los,’ ” suggested that Picasso’s 1926 Tête de Femme was inspired by Heinrich Anton Müller, although Röske questioned this in an interview with the author.

  According to MacGregor, in The Discovery of the Art of the Insane, Dubuffet was given a copy of Bildnerei shortly after its publication by his friend the Swiss writer Paul Budry. MacGregor is also the source of Dubuffet’s remarks about Bildnerei’s impact on art: “Prinzhorn’s book struck me very strongly when I was young. It showed me the way and was a liberating influence. I realized that all was permitted, all was possible. I wasn’t the only one. Interest in art of the insane and the rejection of established culture was very much ‘in the air’ in the 1920s. The book had an enormous influence on modern art.”

  Richard Lindner’s tribute to Prinzhorn is in Beyme, “ ‘The Most Important Artistic Experience of My Life.’ ” Hans Bellmer is quoted by Wolfgang Rothe in “Zur Vorgeschichte Prinzhorns.” Koga Harue is in Croissant, “Koga Harues ‘Endloser Flug.’ ” Hugo Ball, “the turning point of two epochs,” is in Ball and Burkhard, Der Künstler und die Zeitkrankheit.

  PART TWO: ENTARTUNG

  7. PLEASANT LITTLE PICTURES

  Details of Hitler’s life in Landsberg are partly from Kershaw, Hitler, who asserts that he typed the drafts of the first volume himself. King, The Trial of Adolf Hitler, notes that he typed with two fingers on a new Remington machine given to him by Helen Bechstein, sitting at a small varnished table provided by the warden. Hitler told Hans Frank that this was his “university paid for by the state,” cited in Kershaw. The prison psychologist Alois Maria Ott’s reflections were given in an interview with Der Spiegel in “Von guter Selbstzucht und Beherrschung” on April 17, 1989, and are cited in Roger Moorhouse, His Struggle. The Nazi leader’s shift from believing he was a herald or “drummer” to thinking he was the messiah is recorded in Kershaw, Hubris.

  I used the 1943 Ralph Manheim translation of Mein Kampf. The phrase “usual morning glass of wine” is from Kershaw, Hitler, who has details of the complex domestic arrangements of Alois Schicklgruber, aka Hitler’s father. For Hitler’s self-conception as an “artist-genius,” see Birgit Schwarz, Geniewahn. Palmer et al., A History of the Modern World, gives details of the idea of genius in Romantic philosophy: “The idea of original or creative genius was in fact another of the most fundamental romantic beliefs. A genius was a dynamic spirit that no rules could hem in, one that no analysis or classification could ever fully explain. Genius, it was thought, made its own rules and law. The genius might be that of the i
ndividual person, such as the artist, writer, or Napoleonic mover of the world. It might be the genius or spirit of an age, or it might be the genius of a people or nation, the Volksgeist of Herder, an inherent national character making each people grow in its own distinctive way, which could be known only by a study of its history; romanticism thus merged in many places with new forms of nationalism.” Idee und Gestalt is from Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, who says it appeared again and again in Nazi literature. Michaud writes: “What National Socialism sought to highlight in both of its models, art and Christianity, was a process that was able to lead from idea to form. It was this process, placed under the direction of a Führer who presented himself as both the German Christ and the artist of Germany, that was designated by the expression ‘creative work.’ ” According to Arieli-Horowitz, Romanticism of Steel: Art and Politics in Nazi Germany (an English version, Painting Totality, is available online at https://www.ourboox.com/​books/​painting-totality-nazi-leaders-and-politics-of-culture/), the greatest influence on Hitler’s worldview was not a painter, but the composer Wagner. Hitler proposed himself as Wagner’s twentieth-century counterpart.

  In Hitler and the Artists, Henry Grosshans has traced Hitler’s personality traits to his idea of an artistic temperament. An English version of Thomas Mann’s essay “Bruder Hitler” was published as “That Man Is My Brother” in Esquire in March 1939. Speer’s analysis that he was “always and with his whole heart an artist” is in Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics. I have also used Spotts’s summary of Joachim Fest, asking repeatedly whether politics ever meant anything more to him than rhetoric, histrionic processions, parades and party rallies, or the spectacle aspects of war. The idea that art can be passed down through the Volkskörper over generations is in Day, “Paul Schultze-Naumburg: An Intellectual Biography.” Hitler’s unchanging views have been noticed by many biographers, who sometimes call him a “fossil.” Speer’s line that he remained arrested in the time of his youth is from Inside the Third Reich.

  The account of Hitler’s upbringing is based on Mein Kampf, informed by several more reliable sources, including Kershaw, Hitler; Fest, Hitler; Hamann, Hitler’s Vienna; and Kubizek, The Young Hitler I Knew. Although Kubizek’s recollections were originally commissioned by the Nazi party, his memoir is a more credible source than was once thought. Kubizek notes how odd it was that the fifty-year-old Führer would carry out ideas dreamed up by the fifteen-year-old: “Indeed, the plans which that unknown boy had drawn up for the rebuilding of his home town of Linz are identical to the last detail with the town planning scheme which was inaugurated after 1938.”

  Kokoschka’s view of the academy is in Hamann, as is the detail of the examination. “At odds with myself” is in Mein Kampf. Dr. Bloch’s views of Hitler were published in two parts in Collier’s Weekly in March 1931 (http://www.ihr.org/​jhr/​v14/​v14n3p27_bloch.html). Given the circumstances, he was remarkably generous about the boy who would become Nazi leader, and clearly astonished by the affection the boy showed for his mother, which he described as his “most striking feature.” It was Bloch who remembered Hitler sketching his mother on her deathbed to preserve a last impression. The “only person on earth he had really loved” is the view of Kubizek. The neighbor who offered to help him get a job at the post office was called Presemayer (Hamann).

  The Schönbrunn Palace museum and Vienna University have collaborated to produce a vibrant virtual exhibition of Habsburg Vienna at https://ww1.habsburger.net/​en. It includes a section on “The Metropolis as Melting Pot,” which describes the makeup of the city at the time Hitler lived there. The description of it as a “Babylon of Peoples” is in Kershaw.

  Hitler met Kubizek off the train on February 22, 1908. According to Hamann, their room was just a hundred square feet, and the first thing that struck Kubizek were Hitler’s sketches, which lay around “on the table, on the bed, everywhere.”

  Hamann describes Vienna’s “filthy, overcrowded homeless shelters,” including the one at Meidling, in detail: Many people would spend the freezing nights on the pavement in front of these buildings to at least have a chance to get into the shelter the following night. She also describes the relationship with Hanisch.

  Hitler took the train to Munich on May 24, 1913, “carrying a light, black suitcase containing all his possessions” (Kershaw), in the company of a friend from the Men’s Home, Rudolf Häusler. Kershaw states that, despite the fact that Munich was a vibrant hub of modern art at this time, “in Munich as in Vienna, the avant-garde passed him by.” That he was more at home with the classical art on display in the Pinakothek and the Schack is reported by Birgit Schwarz in Geniewahn.

  Hitler’s early war experience was undoubtedly terrible. He was assigned to the newly formed List Regiment, and after four days of combat, this fighting force was reduced from 3,600 to 611 men. He said later that this forced him to realize “that life is a constant horrible struggle” (Kershaw, Hitler).

  For more on the proximity of Hitler and Churchill at the start of 1916, see Jones, “Churchill and Hitler.” The two leaders would never be in such close proximity again.

  For the effect of the gas attack on Hitler in October 1918 and his days as an invalid at Pasewalk, see Kershaw, Hitler, and Fritz Redlich, Hitler. Redlich, a senior psychiatrist at Yale, describes the second attack of blindness as a “psychogenic (more specifically, hysterical) reaction.” Karl Wilmanns’s remarks about the incident are recorded by Ruth Wilmanns Lidz in “Ein erfülltes Leben.” Wilmanns Lidz writes: “The records of this must have been destroyed later, although at that time not only my father was well aware of this. The Nazis later said that he had been blinded by gas. From a medical point of view, however, this does not seem possible, since he could not have regained his sight overnight.”

  The Goebbels quote, “He comes from architecture and painting,” is cited in Schwarz.

  8. DINNER WITH THE BRUCKMANNS

  Hitler’s transformation in Landsberg is remarked upon by many biographers. Fest, Hitler, puts it like this: He became “a man of strict law and order [who] veiled his revolutionary intentions with untiring protestations of how well he was determined to behave and how dearly he cherished tradition.” The makeup of Elsa Bruckmann’s salon is documented in Wolfgang Martynkewicz’s Salon Deutschland: Geist und Macht 1900–1945, in which he describes Hitler’s presence at these gatherings as a “type of demon.” Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s life and notorious works are outlined in Zuschlag, Entartete Kunst, who notes that Kaiser Wilhelm II had been as much a fan of the racist Englishman as Hitler later became. Elsa Bruckmann’s observations about Hitler in Landsberg (that he was “plain and chivalrous and bright-eyed”) are in Volker Ullrich, Hitler: Ascent 1889–1939. “Monkey in a zoo” and “house boy” can be found in Martha Schad, Sie liebten den Führer.

  As well as Schultze-Naumburg’s own writings, my main sources for the architect’s relationship with Hitler are Lara Day, “Paul Schultze-Naumburg: An Intellectual Biography” and Norbert Borrmann, Paul Schultze-Naumburg 1869–1949. Day, it is worth noting, believes it is wrong to think of Schultze-Naumburg and his ilk as simple reactionaries against modernism. The Nazis proposed a radical new social model by which the deficits in “modernism” could be overcome, and this was, some argue, in no way reactionary, but modern itself.

  Schultze-Naumburg’s polemic about the flat roof is in Kai K. Gutschow, “The Anti-Mediterranean in the Literature of Modern Architecture.” Schultze-Naumburg recorded his astonishment at his first dinner with Hitler in “Lebenserinnerungen, Deutschlands Schicksal und Adolf Hitler,” cited in Borrmann.

  Sources for the various meanings and uses of art for Hitler are as follows. Art as an escape: In Landsberg he had drawn up plans for his wildest architectural flights of fancy, the massive Great Hall and Arch of the Triumph, which one day he hoped to build in Berlin. Art as sophistication: this veneer was not ve
ry deep, as on a visit to the Nationalgalerie, Putzi Hanfstaengl recalled him holding forth on the subject of Michelangelo’s genius while standing next to a Carvaggio, having misunderstood the painting’s caption. Art as a bridge to the people: in Zuschlag, “Chamber of Horrors of Art,” among others (the party’s founding manifesto of February 1920 included a demand to take “legal action against those tendencies in art and literature that have a disruptive influence upon the life of our Volk”). Art as a “higher political purpose”: from Peter Paret, An Artist Against the Third Reich, who states that “Hitler’s emphasis on the ‘cultural state’ in his enumeration of the main political forces in world history again points to his association of art and politics. No doubt, the bonding of culture and the state was a rhetorical device. It gave his message of power politics an impressive idealistic sheen.” Art as a way of measuring cultural health and achievement: In 1936, at the Kulturtagung of the NSDAP in Nuremberg, according to Day, he announced that “the only truly immortal talent within [the field of] human endeavour and achievement is art.”

  On Hitler’s buy-in to the concept of degeneracy: Arieli-Horowitz, Romanticism of Steel, intriguingly states that the Nazis fine-tuned the theory, identifying three types of degeneration: individual, collective, and racial. That Prinzhorn’s book “could well have served as a catalyst” for Hitler’s views on madness and art is stated by Sander Gilman in “The Mad Man as Artist.”

  Hanfstaengl’s verdict that Mein Kampf was “really frightful stuff” is in Hanfstaengl’s memoir Unheard Witness (1957), later released as Hitler: The Missing Years. Mussolini’s view that it was “a boring tome” is in Antony Beevor, The Second World War (2012). Strasser’s view that it was a “veritable chaos of banalities” is in Kershaw, Hubris. Paret argues that these stylistic shortcomings didn’t matter much. He notes: “Germans could welcome or at least tolerate these fantasies on the course of world history. Once taken as fact or as metaphoric summaries of basic historical phenomena, Hitler’s shopworn but for that reason familiar racial delusions coalesced into a consequential sequence, stretching from past to present and future.”