The Goebbels quote “Is this really Christ…” is from Goebbels’s Tagebücher, cited in Kershaw, Hitler.
9. GLIMPSES OF A TRANSCENDENTAL WORLD
The “Golden Twenties” are described by Heiden, who lived through them, in Heiden, The Fuehrer. According to Geinitz, “Hans Prinzhorn,” Prinzhorn’s time in Dresden with Wigman was a high point in his life. Geinitz also describes his time at the sanatorium in Wiesbaden surrounded by “hysterical jellyfish.”
Prinzhorn’s study of the art of prison inmates, Bildnerei der Gefangenen: Studie zur bildnerischen Gestaltung Ungeübter, was published in Berlin in 1926. The friend at Emmendingen to whom he wrote to inquire about Bühler on December 12, 1926, was the parapsychologist Gerda Walther. This letter is in the Sammlung Prinzhorn archive.
Details of the numerous upgrades to the Emmendingen asylum in the late 1920s, and the growth in patient numbers, derive from Mathes and Waßmer, Die badische Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Emmendingen 1930, and from Richter, “Geschichte der ehemaligen Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Emmendingen.” Hermann Simon’s therapies are discussed in Burleigh, Death and Deliverance. According to Mathes, where in 1924 only the able-bodied in Emmendingen were chosen to work—around 40 percent of the population—by 1930, 80–85 percent of male patients and 70–75 percent of female patients were occupied with some form of employment. Mathes described Emmendingen as “exemplary and progressive.”
Grebing’s pleasure at his inclusion in Bildnerei is cited in Torsten Kappenburg, “Josef Heinrich Grebing—‘ein fürchterliches Gefängnis—diese Heil- & Pflegeanstaltschaft—ich war nervenkrank,’ ” in Brand-Claussen, Röske, and Rotzoll (eds.), Todesursache. The upgraded assessment of Genzel’s work is cited in Brand-Claussen, “Der Revolutionär für ewige Dinge und die Irrenkunst”; details of his escape bid are in Brand-Claussen, “ ‘KnochenWeltMuseumTheater.’ Holzskulpturen von Karl Genzel aus der Prinzhorn-Sammlung,” in Kunst & Wahn. Details from Natterer’s notes are in Jádi and Brand-Claussen, August Natterer: Die Beweiskraft der Bilder: Leben und Werk: Deutungen. The autopsy suggested the cause of death to be inflammation of the aorta, a late vascular disease of syphilis. Paul Goesch’s post-Bildnerei life is documented in Sabine Hohnholz, “Die Farbe muß sich wohl fühlen im Pinsel,” in Brand-Claussen, Röske, and Rotzoll (eds.), Todesursache. The value of 70,000 marks at this time is hard to assess since June 1923 was a period of hyperinflation, but it was not much. That month there were between 57,000 and 193,500 marks to the U.S. dollar, according to online sources (http://marcuse.faculty.history.ucsb.edu/projects/currency.htm).
Franz Huber founded Graphische Werkstätte Franz Huber, latterly Druckerei Huber, in 1929, which published the local magazine Ortenauer Rundschau (Ortenau review). His recollections of Bühler as a young man were published as “Franz Bühler. Das Genie im schizophrenen Künstler.” The report of the Offenburg county fair is from the Badische Presse 47, no. 459 (morning edition of October 3, 1931), 3.
The “refreshing” review of Psychotherapy was by Arnold Eiloart, “Psychotherapy: Its Nature, Its Assumptions, Its Limitations: A Search for Essentials by Hans Prinzhorn,” British Medical Journal 2, No. 3751 (November 26, 1932): 971. Geinitz, “Zur Biografie Hans Prinzhorns,” notes that “among his colleagues the book found little recognition, sometimes even harsh criticism,” and that Klages “objected to the language and style, but also believed that the title promised something different: in fact, it was a critique of psychopathology.”
Details of Prinzhorn’s American trip are from Watson, “In the Teeth of All Formalism,” and Geinitz, “Hans Prinzhorn,” who notes that he did not become a Navajo representative, “for reasons that neither the Home Office in Washington nor the current tribal representatives of the Navajos could tell me.”
10. ART AND RACE
Detailed election results for the period are available in “Historical Exhibition Presented by the German Bundestag,” on the website of the Bundestag (https://www.bundestag.de/resource/blob/189774/7c6dd629f4afff7bf4f962a45c110b5f/elections_weimar_republic-data.pdf). Hanfstaengl’s observed “coffee-house tirades” etc. are described in Kershaw, Hubris. The Hitler speech exalting Wagner was made on October 28, 1925; his remarks about artists “clearing up this garbage” were made on January 26, 1928. All can be found in Arieli-Horowitz, Romanticism of Steel, which states that “the connection between modernism in art and madness appears in many variations in Hitler’s speeches; it shows that Hitler’s beliefs on the subject were well developed and also a not insignificant degree of obsession.”
The Kampfbund für deutsche Kultur was called the Gesellschaft für deutsche Kultur when it was founded in January 1928; it was renamed in February the following year. Rosenberg’s quote about its purpose, “to arouse the conscience,” is from Paret, An Artist Against the Third Reich. The declaration of war on the “swamp culture” of the Weimar Republic is in Borrmann. Zuschlag, in Entartete Kunst, lists the membership of the Kampfbund, as does the Historisches Lexicon Bayerns (https://www.historisches-lexikon-bayerns.de/Lexikon/Kampfbund_f%C3%BCr_deutsche_Kultur_(KfdK),_1928-1934).
Schultze-Naumburg had been a member of the völkisch group Deutsche Nationale Volkspartei from 1918, and was in contact with the race theorists Günther, Darré, and Bartels (Day, “Paul Schultze-Naumburg: An Intellectual Biography”). Rave in particular identifies Günther as the origin of the National Socialist doctrine of visual arts, which, he says, “culminated in the demand that every figural artistic representation correspond to the canon of Nordic racial theory.”
The Nazi theory that the “uniqueness of the artist faded away” in the face of the Volksgemeinschaft, and that art showed the “spiritual direction” in which the Germans were headed, is from Michaud, The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany.
For Weygandt’s diagnoses of professional art, and his previous uses of these photographs, see Brand-Claussen, “Häßlich, falsch, krank,” citing Wilhelm Weygandt, “Zur Frage der pathologischen Kunst” (1925). Evidence that Weygandt was an “enthusiastic supporter” of Nazi cultural policy, despite being a member of the German Democratic Party until 1933, when he tried to join the NSDAP but was refused, can be found on German Wikipedia (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Weygandt). According to Röske, in “Expressionismus und Psychiatrie,” only a few artists tried to stand up to Weygandt.
Schultze-Naumburg’s appeal for National Socialism not to ignore the “instrument of art” appeared in Kampf um die Kunst, 1932. Paul Westheim, in “Rassenbiologische Ästhetik,” summarized Schultze-Naumburg as follows: “The foundation of artistic creation is not the spirit, but the corporeal. And because, according to the proponents of racial ideology, the corporeal is the product of specific immutable racial genetic material, level and worth of artistic creation is entirely dependent on the racial disposition of its creator. If proof can be found, that the artist can express only and nothing but this racially determined corporeal, individual artistic accomplishment remains; but art is merely the medium utilized by race” (translation from Day). The architect’s identification of the “explicitly pathological,” and Hitler’s appreciation of him as an art pedagogue, is from the ex-Nazi official Hans Severus Ziegler, Adolf Hitler aus dem Erleben dargestellt, who wrote that “in his lectures [Schultze-Naumburg] demonstrated—by his words and a projector—the disturbing similarity of some of the expunged images with physical deformities and cretins from the madhouse, whose photographs he presented alongside the paintings of degenerate artists to facilitate a comparison” (cited in Day).
Details of the election in Thuringia are in Kershaw, Hitler. The legislation “Wider die Negerkultur für das deutsche Volkstum” has been described by Dina Kashapova as the first “directive art political legal text of the NS” (Day).
Schultze-Naumburg’s Weimar school was called Künstlerische Lehranstalten.
The Bauhaus had left Weimar in 1925 for Dessau,
where it would remain open until 1932 before briefly reappearing in Berlin.
Details of the first Nazi art “purge” and the destruction of Schlemmer’s murals are in Zuschlag, Entartete Kunst, and in Day. After painting over the murals, Schultze-Naumburg wrote Schlemmer a facetious letter, explaining: “I could not imagine that you yourself considered these exercises as permanent works of art.” The leading cultural figures who protested Schultze-Naumburg’s actions in Weimar included Kurt Weill, Alfred Doeblin, Max Pechstein, and Carl Zuckmayer. The Schlemmer quote, “That terrible thing…” is in The Letters and Diaries of Oskar Schlemmer.
More on Bettina Feistel-Rohmeder’s racialized art ideas and the German Art Society can be found in Joan Cinefelter, Artists for the Reich, who explains how the völkisch art movement predated the Nazis. She states that Feistel-Rohmeder “argued that race determined biological form and psychological content. Art was an expression of both racial biology and psychology. Thus, artistic creations were physical manifestations of the race and its mental universe.”
There are several accounts of Schultze-Naumburg’s lectures on behalf of the Kampfbund. Paul Ortwin Rave’s is from Kunstdiktatur im Dritten Reich. The security unit of storm troopers is in Day. A correspondent of B.Z. am Mittag described in “ ‘Kunst und Rasse’: ein Vortrag von Professor Schultze-Naumburg,” May 2, 1936, how, “tracing the development of the arts over the centuries, [the lecturer] arrived in modernity and the National Socialist revolution, which ended the degeneration of the artistic and spiritual realism, brought about by liberalism.” In Kulturbolschewismus (1932), Paul Renner noted that he “shaped the selection and comparison of his photographs to suggest evidence of the moderns’ degeneracy and the way in which he let the ‘NS stewards’ restore quiet in the most brutal manner.” Peter Meyer, in “Schlagringe und Schultze-Naumburg gegen moderne Kunst,” Das Werk 18, no. 4 (1931), described Panizza’s interjection and the SA response. Day cites Hans Eckstein corroborating the incident’s brutality and the use of “brass knuckles.” In an article based on the lectures “Der Kampf um die Kunst,” in Der Hammer 31 (1932), Schultze-Naumburg wrote that “the battle of life and death rages in German art, just as in the political theater.” Bettina Feistel-Rohmeder’s report “Der Kampf um die Kunst” appeared first in Deutsche Kunstkorrespondenz 44 (1931).
The friend from his student days with whom Prinzhorn had an affair was Dory Falck. According to Geinitz, in “Hans Prinzhorn,” the relationship descended into “endless grueling arguments”; he was especially upset when she left him for a monied rival. The reference in an early draft of Bildnerei to Tolstoy is in Röske, “Hans Prinzhorn—ein ‘Sinnender’ in der Weimarer Republik,” in Wahn Welt Bild. His decision to enter politics—his sense of “impending doom,” and of the period being like that of late Rome—is drawn from Röske, Der Arzt als Künstler.
The four published articles for Der Ring are: “Über den Nationalsozialismus,” Der Ring 3 (1930): 884–885; “Zur Problematik des nationalen Radikalismus. Über den Nationalsozialismus II,” Der Ring 4 (1931): 573–577; “Moralische Verpflichtungen. Über den Nationalsozialismus III,” Der Ring 5 (1932): 88–90; and “Psychologisches zum Führertum. Über den Nationalsozialismus IV,” Der Ring 5 (1932): 769–770. A fifth, unpublished article is in the Prinzhorn archive in Heidelberg. Klages’s January 1931 letter criticizing his attitude to the pro-Nazi youth is cited in Röske, “Hans Prinzhorn—ein ‘Sinnender’ in der Weimarer Republik,” and Prinzhorn’s idea, after seeing Hitler at close quarters, that he was “a constitutional monarch” is in Röske, Der Arzt als Künstler.
Martynkewicz, Salon Deutschland: Geist und Macht 1900–1945, states that “Hugo Bruckmann was certainly familiar with these articles.” Martynkewicz also cites Prinzhorn’s letter to Hitler, reported to Bruckmann in correspondence of July 21, 1932. Weber summarized the relationship with the NSDAP thus: “An interview with [Rosenberg] convinced him that collaboration is impossible. After one last attempt to save his project—a letter to Hitler, of which we do not know what happened—he gives it up.”
Röske sums up the fourth Ring article in Der Arzt als Künstler: “The fourth Ring article in the series, from November 1932, which contains seven ‘guiding principles’ under the heading ‘Psychological aspects of leadership,’ seems to respond with complete confidence to the riots preceding the elections since July of that year. Now ‘there should be no one outside the party who would wish Hitler and his people to take over governmental power even from the point of view of the least evil,’ he says; Hitler is denied to be a ‘legitimate Führer’; and a paragraph even ends with the word ‘catastrophic exit’ and a threatening dash. At the same time, however, the text makes one consider (as it did in 1923) how much easier it was for a Mussolini, for reasons of time, social conditions, temperament; and finally, it says that in order to avoid such slander, ‘the popular power of the movement should not be valued less’: The grumbler already shows possible reconciliation on the distant horizon.”
I found Hitler’s copy of Prinzhorn’s Persönlichkeitspsychologie in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., among Hitler’s personal book collection, which was sent to America at the end of the war. The dedication reads: “At Christmas 1932 for Adolf Hitler from Elsa Bruckmann.” The responses to the Ring articles are collated in Der Arzt als Künstler.
Thirty-six Prinzhorn works were shown in Paris at the Exposition des artistes malades at the Galerie Max Bine in May–June 1929, according to Beyme, “Asylum Art as the ‘True Avant-Garde?’ ” in Surrealismus und Wahnsinn. Brand-Claussen, “Der Revolutionär für ewige Dinge und die Irrenkunst,” informs us that anywhere from 150 to 330 works were shown at the art association exhibitions, which were organized by Heidelberg professors Wilhelm Mayer-Gross and Hans Gruhle. Among the towns and cities the collection toured were Ulm, Basel, Geneva, Darmstadt, Mannheim, Heidelberg, Munich, Kassel, and Leipzig. The quotes from Gruhle are taken from his essay “Die Kunst der Geisteskranken” in the exhibition guide for Ulm, which is in the Heidelberg archive.
Feistel-Rohmeder’s review of the Munich Prinzhorn show was first published as “Kunst der Geisteskranken” in Deutsche Kunstkorrespondenz 48 (1931), and later in Im Terror des Kunstbolschewismus (1938).
Gruhle’s reference to Weygandt and the “unpleasant press discussions” he provoked was written in a letter on March 14, cited in Brand-Claussen, “Häßlich, falsch, krank.” The review of the Neue Leipziger Zeitung is reported in Brand-Claussen, “Der Revolutionär für ewige Dinge und die Irrenkunst.”
11. A CULTURAL REVOLUTION
Details of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor are largely drawn from Kershaw, Hitler, and Richard Evans’s The Coming of the Third Reich, in particular the chapter “Hitler’s Cultural Revolution.” Barr wrote three articles on the National Socialist art phenomenon while on a sabbatical year in Europe: this one is cited in Lynn Nicholas, The Rape of Europa.
Hitler’s 1930 assurance to Goebbels is from Brenner, Art in the Political Power Struggle of 1933 and 1934. His “Enabling Act” speech of March 23 is in Domarus and Hitler, Hitler.
The idea that Nazis did not need orders but “worked toward” the Führer is from Kershaw, Hitler. Alfred H. Barr was on a sabbatical from the Museum of Modern Art in New York when he went to a meeting of the Kampfbund. He wrote three articles about Nazi cultural policy, which were deemed controversial at the time. These quotes from the Barr papers are cited in Nicholas, The Rape of Europa.
Rüdiger’s article “From the German Artistic Kingdom of the Jewish Nation” was published in Völkischer Beobachter on February 25, 1933.
The demands of the Führerrat der Vereinigten Deutschen Kunst- und Kulturverbände from March 5, 1933, are in Zuschlag, Entartete Kunst. I have not quoted them verbatim.
Details of the founding of the Propaganda Ministry and Goebbels’s appointment are from Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich. According to Ari
eli-Horowitz, Romanticism of Steel, the eponymous hero of Michael: Ein deutsches Schicksal, which was eventually published in 1929, had clear stands on issues of culture, which were largely those of Goebbels, and although his feelings about modern art were ambivalent, he did not reject avant-garde movements. He admired Van Gogh as a “star” and “the most modern of the moderns.” Goebbels’s approval in 1924 of Van Gogh, Nolde, and Barlach is cited in Paret, An Artist Against the Third Reich. Nine years later he was more confused, writing in his diary, “Is Nolde a Bolshevik or a painter? Theme for a dissertation.” The anecdote in which Goebbels is ashamed of the Noldes in his apartment is in Arieli-Horowitz and elsewhere.
Schultze-Naumburg’s view of Goebbels as an “angry snake” is in Borrmann. Goebbels’s ideas about the Volk and technology are in Evans.
Barlach’s fears about the coming Nazi takeover were recorded in a letter to Hugo Sieker on January 26, 1933 (in Ernst Barlach, Die Briefe). The account of the Klees’ response to Hitler’s takeover of power are from Klee, Winston, and Winston, Paul Klee: His Life and Work in Documents, and from “An Interview with Felix Klee,” in Sabine Rewald, Paul Klee: The Berggruen Klee Collection in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, 1988). Details of artists’ expulsions from their academies and teaching positions are in Zuschlag, “Chambers of Horrors”; Grosshans, Hitler and the Artists; and Nicholas, The Rape of Europa. The statistic that thirty directors were removed from galleries and museums is in Evans.
The Gallery of Miracles and Madness Page 29