The Inkblots

by Damion Searls

  In the spring of 1906, as a student-doctor in Zurich having just passed his preliminary exams, Rorschach was in no position to imagine such a synthesis, much less create it. He was hungry for experience but not allowed to do much on his own beyond eye exams, physicals, and autopsies. As he wrote to Anna, though, he was thrilled to be practicing medicine at last: “Real work with real patients, a glimpse of my future career!” He could “mostly only look on. But there’s a lot to see.” After two weeks of his first residency, working more than fifty hours a week: “I don’t think I will ever forget these fourteen days.”

  He had so many stories to tell. A sixteen-year-old boy had fallen through a glass roof and the doctors thought he could be saved, “but three days later his brain was on the anatomical demonstration table.”

  An old woman with a waxy yellow face was shown to us; she did not open her eyes once, and two days later I personally saw her body being dissected. A young man with a terribly swollen hand was doped up and operated on, and when he woke up he noticed, with a groan I will never forget, that he no longer had a right hand. A twenty-one-year-old student was put on display: he had made incisions into the place on his forearm where you feel for a pulse—he had wanted to kill himself. A girl, around eighteen, who had a severe venereal disease, had to show herself in front of 150 of us students, and so on, so it goes every day, and all because the poor people don’t have enough money to have themselves admitted as pensioners. That is the tragedy of the clinics.

  He was appalled at how his beer-drinking, silver-handled-walking-stick classmates responded to the show: “Just think how the student types I described before react to all that. We have to be cold about it, that’s the way things are; but to be crude about it, to turn into moral idiots, no, physicians don’t have to do that.”

  These experiences, however gripping, certainly did not make him feel understood from the heart. The reality of seeing dozens of patients a day plus endless hours of consultation “exposed all kinds of ideals to the cold light of day,” he wrote to Anna. “The doctor meets with more mistrust than gratitude, more rudeness than understanding.” That spring, he had put a little book in his Zurich room for visitors to write their name in; six months later, and with thirty names in the book—“nowhere near all” his visitors—the only thing it had to tell him was that he needed to get away. This pattern was a constant in Rorschach’s life. Years later, after “two months busy being extraverted,” he would write to a friend that he had “had his fill of it and was hungry for something more inward. Man does not live by extraversion alone.”

  “I know too many people here already,” he wrote to Anna from Zurich in the 1906 letter first describing Olga Shtempelin. “Do you know what that means? They come and invite you out and come by again and take up the only time you have to be alone the way you need to be. They cast a shadow over your freedom.” Olga was off to Russia, and, for all his interest in people, Rorschach was “ready to move away and let the dispensable ones go.”

  He spent the rest of medical school alternating study abroad, travel, and a series of short-term jobs across Switzerland with his time in Zurich. Advanced medical students often spent semesters at different universities with different specialties and substituted for doctors in private practice over the summers, but Rorschach ended up with a broader range of experience than most—partly because of his personal determination to be “different” from his more privileged classmates and partly because he needed the money from any job he could find.

  He initially went to Berlin for a semester, his first escape from Switzerland since Dijon. “Berlin with its millions of people will let me be more alone than Zurich,” he wrote to Anna. At first he found what he thought he wanted: “I’m in total solitude here….I was entirely alone for all of the first few days, and still am most of the time—luckily.” He lived in a typical Berlin room, on the fourth floor, with one window and a view into many others, overlooking a small courtyard—“a little stone and a little grass”—with a tree “that gives me a lot of pleasure,” if not the other city-types crowded into the building. Nights were spent at home or wandering the streets, always full of people until almost dawn. He enjoyed the theater, the circus, the cinema.

  But the chaos of the modern metropolis was not for him. In the early 1900s, Berlin was one of the world’s biggest and fastest-growing cities, its population having quintupled in sixty years to two million people, not counting another million and a half in the new suburbs ringing the city. Streetcars ran until 3 a.m.—some lines ran all night on weekends—and bars stayed open until dawn. The perpetual construction only added to the noise and confusion: to walk just a hundred steps down busy Friedrichstrasse at the turn of the century was to face what one chronicler described as a “cacophonous blowing of horns in the traffic, melodies of organ grinders, cries of newspaper vendors, bells of Bolle’s milkmen, voices of fruit and vegetable sellers, hoarse pleas of beggars, whispers of easy women, the low roar of streetcars and their screech against the old iron tracks, and millions of steps dragging, tripping, pounding. At the same time, a kaleidoscope of color…neon lights, bright electric lights of offices and factories…lanterns hanging from horse-drawn carts and automobiles, arc-lighting, light bulbs, carbide lamps.” Even compared to Vienna, Paris, and London, Berlin was seen as especially fluid, indeterminate, and unstable, somewhere that was “always becoming and never is.” As one of its leading dailies, which called itself “the fastest newspaper in the world,” said of Potsdamer Platz in 1905: “Every second a new picture.”

  Many newcomers found freedom and possibility in Berlin, but Rorschach’s heart was back in Switzerland, or maybe already with Olga. His perceptions of Berlin were distinctly uncharitable: “In a few years, Berlin will have many more inhabitants than our whole country, but it’s quality that matters, not quantity,” he wrote to his fifteen-year-old brother Paul. “Just be glad you’re not a Berliner. There are old men here who have probably never seen a cherry tree in their lives. I haven’t seen a cat or a cow in two months.” He encouraged Paul to “enjoy our good Swiss air and our mountains and I hope you become true and free and honest, with real experience of life, not like the types I see here every day.” He found the people “cold” and “boring,” the society “despicable,” the whole experience “idiotic.”

  Worst of all was the conformity of the Germans, who Rorschach felt were less free than even the Russians under the tsar. He happened to turn up in Berlin during one of the most famous incidents of unthinking obedience to authority in German history: On October 16, 1906, four days before Rorschach’s arrival, a drifter who had bought different pieces of a Prussian Guard captain’s uniform at different stores around the city put the clothes on and became a new man. He commandeered soldiers, arrested the mayor of the town of Köpenick, and confiscated the town’s treasury, claiming to act on the Kaiser’s orders, while everyone obeyed his uniform without question. Stories about the “Captain of Köpenick” filled the press before and after his arrest on October 26; he became a folk hero. Germans “worship the uniform and the Kaiser,” Rorschach wrote Anna from Berlin, “and think they are the greatest people in the universe when actually they’re only the best bureaucrats.”

  Russia continued to attract Rorschach. Anna Semenoff, another Russian studying medicine in Berlin and Zurich, had invited him to visit Moscow in July 1906, before his Berlin semester started, but politics had intervened. Russia was convulsed by its first twentieth-century revolution, sparked by a disastrous war with Japan, and Rorschach did not feel comfortable putting himself in harm’s way, since he was still the main support for his family. When Semenoff made it back to Berlin and renewed her invitation for the Christmas holidays, Rorschach accepted. In December 1906, he traveled from Berlin to Moscow.

  It was the most exciting month of his life. He would see the place he called “the land of unlimited possibilities” for the first time with his own eyes. The expansive, glowing report he sent his sister after his return was full o
f wonderfully sensory descriptions of Moscow—the panorama from the Kremlin tower, the total silence of twenty-five-thousand sleighs moving around the city, frozen sleigh-drivers “thawing the glaciers from their beards” at bonfires in the middle of the streets. He attended cultural events, from the Moscow Art Theater, “which people say is the best in the world,” to the Grand Opera, to lectures, sect meetings, political meetings; he saw his old friend Tregubov again. The Russians helped him get outside of himself. A common saying held that St. Petersburg was Russia’s head, Moscow its heart, and Rorschach agreed: “You can see and understand more about Russian life in two weeks in Moscow than in a year in Petersburg.”

  The trip to Russia was also when Rorschach self-consciously reached adulthood. He had originally wanted to set off from Berlin “retracing our father’s steps,” he wrote in his report to Anna: “But it’s better to seek out a path of one’s own; if the son doesn’t have enough courage to find his own way, he can always follow someone else’s later.” From this point on, Hermann mentioned his father only rarely in his letters, except around crucial family milestones. He mourned the loss of his father in productive ways, becoming a doctor for him while continuing to pursue the passions for travel and art he had inherited from Ulrich.

  Russia satisfied a need for broader horizons that Rorschach doubtless would have found some other way to fulfill even if he had never met Tregubov in Dijon. No one rereads War and Peace during the grueling, two-month-long period of final medical school exams, as Rorschach would do in 1909, merely out of interest in Russian culture—that is what someone does who refuses to be defined by his immediate environment, who is seeking an intellectual and emotional life elsewhere.

  —

  After Russia, western Europe was a letdown. Rorschach left Berlin in early 1907 “disappointed and a bit depressed,” and his next semester was not much better. “Bern isn’t bad,” he wrote to Anna, “if a bit lowbrow and washed-up, and the people here are mostly quite coarse and crude, to the point where even I, not the most refined person in the world after all, am taken aback.” He spent the rest of 1907 and all of 1908 in Zurich or working as a substitute doctor elsewhere, but clearly felt that student life and Switzerland had little more to offer him.

  At least his sister got out. In early 1908, after she had spent two years as a governess in French-speaking western Switzerland, Hermann helped find her a job as a governess in Russia, and Anna jumped at the chance to see the “land of unlimited possibilities” she had heard so much about. For the next few months his letters were almost giddy with excitement on her behalf: page after page helping Anna with Russian grammar, train routes and schedules, how much luggage to take and how to get it through customs.

  Anna’s journey was a vicarious second visit to Russia for Hermann. Stuck in Switzerland, he could see the sights she described, transposing the written pictures into movement: “When I read your first letter, I actually wandered around Moscow with you in a very visual way.” Memories of his own trip resurfaced as he gave her advice, plying her with questions and suggestions that she see the Moscow theater, the opera, the Bolshoi Theater, Tregubov, Tolstoy, everyone and everything. Rorschach asked her to send him reproductions of Russian paintings and encouraged her to buy a camera to help her see: “Do it. Even if it costs a month’s salary, you will get so much pleasure from it that it will definitely be worth the price. In your later, sedentary days, it is truly wonderful to have pictures of the places from your earlier life—everything stays much more alive in your memory. Aside from that, you look at places better when you have a camera.” He started by advising her—“I can easily send you a few instructions, but you’ll only learn it after you take your fiftieth picture”—but before long he was asking her for advice: “I’m enclosing one of my photos, but it has problems. It’s so brown and airless. What’s wrong with it, do you know? Underexposed or overexposed? Underdeveloped or overdeveloped?”

  After being “father and mother both” to Anna after the death of their parents, he was settling into the role of a big brother. “I could come to him with any and every question,” Anna felt. “As a medical student and a young doctor, he introduced me to the secrets of where life comes from, and gave my hungering soul endlessly much to feed upon.” Among all sorts of other advice and instruction, Hermann had sent his eighteen-year-old sister a description of the “meat market” of Berlin streetwalkers: “Elegant from top to toe, in velvet and silk, with makeup, powder, penciled eyebrows and mascara, red eyeliner.—They walk around like that, but the men looking them over with their shameless, mocking, lustful eyes are even sadder to see, and the whole thing is their fault.”

  Once Anna started having sexual experiences of her own, he remained supportive: “Shockingly many men see women as sex objects. I don’t know how much you’ve thought about this last issue, but I hope you have thought about it on your own. Hold tight to the conviction that a woman is a human being too, who can be independent, and who can and must improve herself and complete herself on her own. Also realize that equality must exist between men and women. Not in political tussles but in the domestic sphere, and above all in sex life.” He thought his sister had as much right to know about sex as he did.

  As everyone did, for that matter: “The stork question is the most delicate in the child’s life,” he advised her when she was a governess. “Of course you should never say anything about a stork!” She should show the child flowers being fertilized, a pregnant animal, the birth of a calf or kittens. “It’s not a big step from there.”

  Anna craved knowledge of the wider world, and he was happy to give it to her, while expecting to learn at least as much from her. “You will probably know more about Russian conditions than I do soon,” he wrote. Men “see a country only when other people are around, where social intercourse and lies and traditions and customs etc. are dams that block our view into real life,” but it is women who “have it much better,” because they have access to private, family life. “You’re right in the middle of a very different environment now. That’s how someone gets to know a country, truly know it. Take advantage of it and really look at the people there. And write to me about it. It’s you who need to tell me about Russian officer families, I don’t know anything about them.”

  Rorschach burned with curiosity about what he could not see directly, and was convinced from the first that different people—especially those of different sexes—have distinct but communicable perspectives. Knowledge required both closeness and distance: “You only learn to love your own homeland when you go abroad,” he wrote to her once. He wanted to explore every aspect of human nature he could, so he needed Anna. “You have to write me as much as you can squeeze out of your head and your pen, okay?…What are the people like? How does the countryside look, and the people? Write me lots and lots!”

  He also wanted to sustain his bond with his sister. “You know, Annali,” he wrote in 1908, “what I really want is for us to write to each other a lot, that we’ll stay close across all the many countries and mountains and borders that separate us, or grow even closer, I think we will.” They did. Except for a short return to Switzerland in 1911, Anna stayed in Russia until mid-1918, living through war and revolution and losing most of her belongings in the chaos. Hermann’s letters to her after 1911 are lost, but his heart doubtless remained in Russia with his sister—and with Olga.

  —

  The years after Olga met Hermann in the summer of 1906 had been a time of study and travel for her, too, but by early 1908 the beautiful Russian and the handsome Russophile were a couple. He had strong opinions, strong feelings, but kept them strongly in check; he lived through other people’s outbursts of emotion, and in Olga he found someone who supplied him with plenty. He later said that she showed him the world—gave him a way to live in it. She was even synesthetic, an ability that fascinated Hermann—at age four, she had drawn seven pictures of archways in different colors so that she could see and remember the days of the week. For her
part, she was less than enraptured with Switzerland and Swiss ways but accepted them well enough and was as eager as Hermann to find some stability.

  Olga returned to Russia at the end of July 1908, with Hermann accompanying her as far as Lindau, an attractive German border town at the eastern edge of Lake Constance. She was thirty, he was twenty-four. If Rorschach was eager to hear back from Anna, his surviving letters to Lola, as Olga was called by family and friends, were desperate: “My love, my darling Lolyusha, it’s been so long since I’ve gotten anything from you, more than 24 hours already. Write Lola write. It’s horribly boring and empty here for me….I’m sitting here after lunch, smoking and thinking about you. The afternoon mail will be here in an hour. But nothing came in the morning mail, will there be anything at all today? I want to know how my girl is doing!!” Later, with a different pencil: “Now it’s four and I didn’t get any mail today!”

  Olga was busy working with cholera patients in her hometown of Kazan, and by late November she had moved to a smaller and poorer town more than three hundred miles farther east. “She doesn’t feel well there at all,” Hermann reported. “All she sees everywhere is dirt and roughness….She is all alone.” Left behind in Zurich, Rorschach spent another summer working, at Kriens near Lucerne and at Thalwil on Lake Zurich, and continued to collect stories to share with Anna:

  Four people died on me, but they were all old derelicts, dilapidated to the point of, well, dying. The doctor couldn’t have saved them either. On the other hand, I was able to bring a difficult birth to a happy ending, a very difficult breech delivery where I had to pull out the baby with a noose. The midwife stood there and talked about the “rare, miraculous cases” where such children were brought into the world alive. She was already prepared to give him an emergency baptism on the rear end, since the people were Catholic, but I was able to get the baby out alive after all, so now it’s alive and doesn’t need a baptism on the rear end anymore.