The Inkblots

by Damion Searls

  Charcoal drawings by Ulrich Rorschach (left) and Hermann, ca. 1903 (right)

  In the summer of 1897, when Hermann was twelve, his mother Philippine came down with diabetes. In an age before insulin treatments, she died after four bedridden weeks of terrible, constant thirst. The family was devastated. A series of housekeepers moved in to help, but none fit in. The children especially despised one ostentatiously religious woman who spent all her time proselytizing.

  On an evening a little before Christmas in 1898, Ulrich walked into the children’s playroom with an announcement to make: they would soon have a new mother. And no stranger, but Aunt Regina. Ulrich had chosen to marry one of Philippine’s younger half sisters, Hermann’s godmother; Hermann and Anna had spent vacations with her in Arbon, where she had a little store selling fabrics and textiles. She would be coming to Schaffhausen over Christmas, Ulrich said, for a visit. Anna started screaming; young Paul burst into tears. Fourteen-year-old Hermann stayed calm and reasoned with his siblings: they should think of Father, this was no life for him, with no happy home to return to at the end of the day. Naturally he didn’t want these housekeepers turning his children into sanctimonious little hypocrites. Everything, Hermann said, would be fine.

  The marriage took place in April 1899, and a new child was born less than a year later. She was named Regina, the same as her mother, and called Regineli. The siblings welcomed their new half sister “and had several peaceful, lovely, harmonious months together,” in Anna’s words—“but alas only months.”

  Ulrich may already have had symptoms more severe than a lisp: his hand shaking at school when he took off his hat, to the point where his students made fun of his palsy. After Regineli’s birth, he began suffering from fatigue and dizzy spells, diagnosed as a neurological disease resulting from lead poisoning when he was a journeyman painter. Within months, he had to give up his teaching, and the family moved one last time, to Säntisstrasse 5, where Regina opened a store in the building so she could support the family while staying home to care for Ulrich. Hermann started tutoring Latin to bring in some extra money and hurried home from school every day to help his stepmother look after his father.

  Ulrich’s last years were filled with what his obituary called “unspeakable torments”: depression, delusions, and bitter, senseless self-recriminations. Hermann was with his father much of the time toward the end and came down with a severe lung infection exacerbated by the stress and strain. When Ulrich died, at four in the morning on June 8, 1903, Hermann was too sick to attend the funeral. His father was buried in the cemetery between the Munot and Hermann’s school, a few steps away from their house down a pretty, tree-lined path. He was fifty; Hermann was eighteen, his siblings fourteen, eleven, and three. Helplessly watching his father’s illness and death made Hermann want to become a doctor, a neurologist. But for now he was an orphan, his stepmother widowed, without a pension, a single mother of four.

  Anna’s fears of a wicked stepmother soon proved justified. Regina was rigid, strict to the point of cruelty. Hermann’s cousin later described her as “all work and no ideals,” thinking only about how to make a living: she had married late, at age thirty-seven, “because she was a shop girl for thirty years and knew nothing else.” Whereas Philippine Rorschach had been a firstborn child and her husband’s first wife, Regina was a stepmother’s daughter, a second wife, and a stepmother to three willful children with personalities very different from her own.

  She fought often with Paul and made life miserable for curious, outgoing Anna, who now felt the family home was “narrow and constraining, with almost no air to breathe.” Anna later described Regina as “like a chicken with short wings that cannot fly. She had no wings of imagination.” The house under her miserly regime was kept cold, with the children’s hands sometimes literally turning blue. They had no time to play, their free time devoted to working or doing chores.

  Hermann, still in high school, had to grow up fast. When Anna looked back on her childhood, she remembered Hermann as being “father and mother both” to her. At the same time, he was Regina’s main support, the man of the house, who would sit and talk to her for hours in the kitchen. He understood Regina and her inability to show more love—“I am afraid that, in her timid pride, she has never been able to make an attachment to anyone”—and he urged Anna and Paul not to be too critical of her. They should forgive what they could and think of little Regineli.

  All of this left Hermann little time for his own grief. He would later admit to Anna, “I think back about Father and Mother—our real mother—much more than before; I maybe didn’t feel Father’s early death six years ago as deeply as I feel it now.” It also made him eager to get away. Hermann would come to think of “all this scrambling and clawing and sweeping the floors, everything that sucks away so much life and kills off so infinitely much vitality,” as “the Schaffhausen mind-set.” As he wrote to Anna, “None of us can even consider living with Mother for any length of time. She has great and good qualities, and deserves the highest praise, but—life with her demands too much silence, it’s not for people like us who need freedom to move.”

  All three of Ulrich and Philippine’s children would eventually travel far more widely than their parents, and Hermann was the first to set out. “We have a talent for living, you and me,” Hermann continued to Anna: “We inherited it from Father…and all we have to do is keep it, we have to. In Schaffhausen that kind of talent is completely strangled, it struggles and thrashes around for a moment and then it’s dead. But, God knows, that’s why we have the world! So that there’s somewhere to let our talents unfold.”

  By the time he wrote this, Hermann had escaped. But his years in Schaffhausen, though full of upheaval, were important ones for Hermann’s development as a thinker—and an artist.

  In a twist of fate that seems too good to be true, Rorschach’s nickname in school was “Klex,” the German word for “inkblot.” Was young Blot Rorschach already tinkering with ink, his destiny foretold?

  Nicknames were important in German and Swiss-German fraternities, which students joined while attending the six-year elite academic high school called the Gymnasium. A fraternity brother swore an oath of friendship and fidelity and was a member for life, with the connections he made there often greasing the wheels of his whole career. In Schaffhausen, social life was dominated by the fraternity of Scaphusia (the city’s Roman name). Scaphusia members, Rorschach included, wore blue and white with pride on the school grounds, in the bars, and on the hiking trails. They also bore the new name they had received to mark their new identity.

  Scaphusia initiations took place at a local bar, in total darkness except for a single candle mounted on a human skull. The initiate, known as the Fox, a fourth-year student sixteen or seventeen years old, stood on a crate filled with the club’s fencing equipment, a mug of beer in each hand, and answered a tough round of questions. In Switzerland the hazing was no worse than that; at German universities the fencing was with real blades, resulting in the famous Heidelberg dueling scars that marked the faces of the German elite for life. When the Scaphusia Fox passed the test, he got his “beer baptism”—the two mugs poured over his head, or disposed of as usual—and a name: some obvious in-joke about his physical appearance or proclivities. Rorschach’s fraternity sponsor was “Chimney” Müller, because he smoked like one; Chimney’s sponsor was “Baal,” a womanizing rich devil.

  Hermann’s new name Klex meant he was handy with pen and ink, someone who drew quickly and well. Klexen or klecksen also means “to daub, to paint mediocre paintings”—one of Rorschach’s favorite artists, Wilhelm Busch, was the author of an illustrated children’s book called Maler Klecksel, something like “Smudgy the Painter”—but Rorschach was being praised as a good artist, not teased as a bad one. Another Fox nicknamed Klex, in a different fraternity at around the same time, was also good at drawing and later became an architect.

  So “Klex” did not mean “inkblot” in Scaphusia, though
maybe it made an inkblot slightly more likely to come to mind as Rorschach strolled through the grounds of his asylum a decade later, trying to dream up ways to establish a connection with his schizophrenic patients. Either way, what mattered was Klex Rorschach being a Klex at all: an artist, with a visual sensibility.

  —

  Rorschach attended the Schaffhausen Gymnasium from 1898 to 1904—from the year after his mother’s death until the year after his father’s. There were 170 students, fourteen in Rorschach’s class, and the school was known as the best in the region, attracting students from other parts of Switzerland, even Italy, along with liberal-minded, democratically inclined professors from authoritarian Germany. The curriculum was demanding, including analytic geometry, spherical trigonometry, and advanced courses in qualitative analysis and physics. Students read Sophocles, Thucydides, Tacitus, Horace, Catullus, Molière, Hugo, Goethe, Lessing, and Dickens in the original, and the Russian masters in translation: Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov.

  Rorschach did well in school without ever seeming to try very hard. He was ranked near the top of his class across all subjects; he learned English, French, and Latin in addition to his native Swiss dialect and standard German and would later teach himself Italian and fluent Russian. Socially he was reserved, a wallflower at school dances, preferring to hand out his visiting card and look on rather than risk the complex figures and maneuvers of the popular dance of the time, the Munot Tower (“Right hand, left hand, one, two, three”). He liked to work in a quiet environment and resented interruptions. Hermann’s best friend in school, an extraverted future lawyer named Walter Im Hof, felt “it was my role to bring him out a little”; others agreed that socializing and drinking parties with his classmates did Hermann good. But Hermann and his more outgoing brother Paul also played pranks, which Hermann would remember with delight long afterward. He got out into nature whenever he could—hiking in the mountains, rowing in the lakes, swimming nude.

  Financial worries were a constant preoccupation. Most of Rorschach’s classmates came from wealthy and, in some cases, quite prominent families. The International Watch Company, still well known today as IWC Schaffhausen, had been founded in the city by an already wealthy manufacturer, and the founder’s daughter, Emma Rauschenbach—Carl Jung’s future wife—was one of the richest heiresses in Switzerland. In that prosperous milieu, Hermann Rorschach was noticeably poor. One classmate wrongly thought Rorschach’s stepmother was a “washerwoman” who “must have had to work very, very hard to put the boy through school”; the classmate’s patrician mother looked down on Rorschach and his family as lower class. Another schoolmate said Rorschach looked like a country bumpkin, “but” was intelligent anyway. Still, Rorschach refused to let his circumstances interfere with his independence. He was excused from fraternity dues and got himself appointed the group’s librarian so he could buy new books when needed.

  He also had access to at least one subject for scientific experiments: himself. Having read that mood can make your pupils grow bigger or smaller, the teenaged Rorschach found he could contract and dilate his pupils at will. In a dark room, he imagined looking for the light switch and his pupils would get noticeably smaller; outside, in bright afternoon sunlight, he could make them bigger. In another experiment in mind over matter, he tried to transpose the discomfort from a toothache into music, turning the “throbbing” pains into low notes and “sharp” pains into high notes. Once, curious to see how long it was possible to go without food and still work, he fasted for twenty-four hours, sawing and splitting wood all day. He found that if he didn’t work he could fast longer. This was around the time of his father’s remarriage.

  There is no payoff from being able to dilate your pupils at will, except the knowledge that you can. These exercises were explorations: Rorschach exerting his will on himself, like his father, who could overcome his lisp or tremor “when he tried.” He was testing his limits, investigating how his different “systems”—food and work, pain and music, mind and eye—fit together and could be put under conscious control. Another experience he found thought provoking:

  I have a rather bad musical memory, so when I am learning a tune I can rely very little on auditory memory images. I often use the optical image of the notes as a way to remember the melody; other times, when I was younger, taking violin lessons, it often happened that I could not imagine the sound of a passage but could still play it from memory, or in other words, the movement memory was more reliable than the auditory one. I have also often used imitation finger movements as a way to awaken auditory memories.

  Rorschach was immensely interested in these transformations from one kind of experience into another.

  He was also interested in putting himself in others’ shoes, making their experiences his own. On July 4, 1903, at age eighteen, Rorschach gave the talk that Scaphusia members were expected to give to their peers: his was called “Women’s Emancipation,” a full-throated plea for full gender equality. Women, he argued, were “neither physically, intellectually, or morally inferior by nature to men,” were no less logical and at least as brave. They did not exist to “manufacture children” any more than men were merely “a pension fund to pay women’s bills.” Making reference to the century-long history of the women’s movement and to laws and social structures in other countries, including the United States, he advocated for full voting rights and access to university and professions, particularly medicine, since “women would rather reveal their intimate illnesses to another woman.” He strengthened his arguments with wit and empathy, pointing out that while bluestockings horrified the older generation, “a male intellectual show-off is a sour and repellent figure too.” As for women’s alleged gossipy talkativeness, “The question is whether there is more chit-chat at a coffee klatsch or at a bar,” that is, among women or men. He wondered if “we” weren’t as ridiculous as “they” were—trying, as he often did, to see himself from the outside.

  Naturally, Ulrich’s son contributed numerous artworks to the Scaphusia scrapbook. A page of violin sheet music with klexy cats frolicking up and down the staff in place of notes was a pun, since cacophonous, screechy music is called “cat music” in German. A face-off between two people in silhouette, captioned A Picture Without Words, was also signed “Klex.” Rorschach’s artworks outside the Scaphusia scrapbook included a finely detailed charcoal drawing of his maternal grandfather, dated 1903 and copied from a small photograph (see this page). Expressive faces and gestures interested him more than static objects or textures. In one picture, a student’s clothes and furniture are less convincing than his posture; his cigar smoke doesn’t look like smoke but it curls like smoke.

  From the Scaphusia scrapbook, signed “Klex,” a modified copy of Cat Symphony, by Austrian artist Moritz von Schwind. Rorschach simplified the image, removing many of the cats/notes. While some of the cats look a bit mousier, the picture as a whole has a livelier movement.

  Another of Rorschach’s Scaphusia lectures, “Poetry and Painting,” called for better training in how to see. In the timeless fashion of teenagers everywhere, he criticized his school: “There is a lack of understanding of visual art among the people, even among the educated class, a shortcoming that can be traced to our education….One looks in vain for art history courses in our Gymnasium curriculum, yet the child can think artistically as much as some adults.” He also gave three talks on Darwin and our relationship to nature. Darwin was not studied in school, so the lectures were doing real educational work, and again Rorschach focused on seeing. Addressing the question of whether Darwinism should be taught to children, Klex answered, according to the minutes of the meeting, “decidedly in the affirmative. For only through accurate treatment of these themes, adapted to the child’s understanding, does the young person learn ‘to see nature.’ Only in this way will his motivation for observing be stimulated. Only in this way will a genuine joy of nature be awakened in the eyes of the young.” What mattered was how to see, and see
with joy. Rorschach ended his talk with an appreciation of another artist: “Darwin’s great disciple on German soil, Haeckel.” Illustrating his talk with pictures from Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature, he “drew particular attention to how Haeckel, with his method of natural observation, possessed a sharp eye for the art forms in Nature.”

  Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) was one of the most famous scientists in the world. A recent biographer writes that “more people learned of evolutionary theory through his voluminous publications than through any other source,” including Darwin’s own work; The Origin of Species sold fewer than forty thousand copies in thirty years, while Haeckel’s popularization The Riddle of the Universe sold more than six hundred thousand in German alone, as well as being translated into languages from Sanskrit to Esperanto. Gandhi himself wanted to translate it into Gujarati, believing it “the scientific antidote to the deadly wars of religion plaguing India.” Aside from popularizing Darwin, Haeckel’s scientific accomplishments included naming thousands of species—3,500 after just one of his polar expeditions—correctly predicting where fossils of the “missing link” between man and ape would be found, formulating the concept of ecology, and pioneering embryology. His theory that the development of the individual retraces the development of the species—“Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”—was enormously influential in both biology and popular culture.

  Haeckel was also an artist. An aspiring landscape painter in his youth, he eventually combined art and science in luxuriously illustrated works. Darwin praised Haeckel on both counts, calling his breakthrough two-volume book “the most magnificent works which I have ever seen” and his Natural History of Creation “one of the most remarkable books of our time.”