On a winter’s day in 1898, a stocky young man with a handlebar moustache was hurrying along the banks of a canal in Hamburg, north Germany. Franz Karl Bühler was in a panic, fleeing a gang of mysterious agents who had been tormenting him for months. There was only one way to escape, he thought. He must swim for it. So he plunged into the dark water, close to freezing at this time of year, and struck out for the far side. When he was hauled on to the bank, soaked and shivering, it became clear to passersby that there was something odd about the man. There was no sign of his pursuers. He was confused, perhaps insane. So he was taken to the nearby Friedrichsberg “madhouse”, as it was known then, and taken inside. He would remain in the dubious care of the German psychiatric system for the next 42 years, one of hundreds of thousands of patients who lived near-invisible lives behind the asylum walls.
In Franz Karl Bühler’s masterpiece Der Würgengel, the artist portrayed a choking man struggling on the ground, unable to breathe, as a blank-faced angel of death prepares to finish him with a luminous sword. It can be read as a portrait of the way he felt treated by the deity and by life, and as an uncanny premonition of his death, which came as he fought for breath on the floor of Hitler’s prototype killing plant, a doctor’s hand on the gas tap. The government’s propaganda stated that he and his fellow victims were killed for economic reasons, because Germany could no longer afford to keep them.
As
Grafeneck scythed through the psychiatric population in south-west Germany,
Berlin expanded the “euthanasia” program across the Reich, constructing new
industrialized murder facilities based on the Swabian prototype in six
strategic locations around Germany and Austria. These new centers were referred
to by the letter codes B, Be, C, D, and E. Grafeneck took the letter A.
Killing
station B was built in a converted prison in Brandenburg an der Havel, forty miles
west of Berlin, and opened within days of Grafeneck, in January 1940. The SS
“Death’s Head” unit that staffed this plant was overseen by the ambitious young
Austrian psychiatrist Irmfried Eberl, who would later command the Treblinka
extermination camp. Nine thousand seven hundred and seventy-two patients would
be murdered at Brandenburg, according to the official count, and at times there
were so many corpses in the ovens that the flames that leapt from the top of
the chimney were sixteen feet long.
The
operation produced a horrific smell of roasting human flesh that tended to
settle over the city, but this problem was solved in the summer, when the
cremation units were moved to a shed some miles away, where the corpses were
delivered by a Reichspost van every day at 5 am. The body of the Prinzhorn
artist Paul Goesch would have been burned here. A painter of bright watercolors
with religious themes, Goesch was gassed at Brandenburg in August 1940,
although killing-center staff wrote on his death certificate that he died in
Austria in September, both to throw his relatives off and to fraudulently claim
extra money for his upkeep.
In
November, Eberl moved on to Bernburg, near Halle an der Saale, to establish
killing center Be. Bernburg was unusual in that it was built in the wing of a
functioning regional asylum whose staff had to be sworn to silence about the
murders that were taking place on the premises. The hundred or so T4 employees
who worked at Bernburg did little to ingratiate themselves with the deaconesses
who ran the asylum, partying so late and so hard that the killing center was
internally known as the Nuttenstall, or “whorehouse.” Almost nine thousand
patients would be killed at Bernburg, including the Prinzhorn artist Karl
Ahrendt, who drew intricate, psychedelic patterns and brightly colored symbols.
Ahrendt had once been a coachman and was committed in 1907 after marching
around Berlin’s Alexanderplatz in a general’s uniform. He was in his late
eighties when he was murdered, on or after March 18, 1941.
Killing
center C was at Hartheim, a medieval castle outside Hitler’s hometown of Linz,
where operations began in January 1940. Of the six murder facilities, Hartheim
killed by far the largest number, at 18,269. The victims included Alois Dallmayr,
who liked to draw androgynous figures with lots of curly hair, and was gassed
here in August or September 1940, and Anton Fuchs, a woodcarver who probably
died in February 1941.
Auguste Opel and Anna Margarete Kuskop, meanwhile, are represented in the Prinzhorn collection by a single drawing each: Opel by a ghostly, almost imperceptible townscape, Kuskop by a pastel portrait in which the subject’s head is tilted slightly, eyes closed, as if absorbed in an inner retreat. This may be a likeness of a friend she met in the asylum system, Miss Alice, to whom Kuskop once wrote: “Above all, I ask you not to forget me.” Opel was transported to Pirna on December 6, 1940; Kuskop on May 8, 1941. They were both gassed.
In 1908, Paul Klee, struggling as a painter, saw his first van Gogh canvas at a gallery in Munich. The Dutchman’s genius was at once clear to him; so, too, and inseparably, was his madness. ‘Pathetic to the point of being pathological,’ Klee wrote, ‘this endangered man’ has a brain ‘consumed by the fire of a star’. Three years later, and shortly before joining them himself, Klee reviewed a show of works produced by the Blaue Reiter group. Once again, it was the irrational that drew his eye. ‘Neither childish behaviour nor madness are insulting words here, as they commonly are,’ Klee enthused. ‘All this is to be taken very seriously, more seriously than all the public galleries, when it comes to reforming today’s art.’
A decade later, the polymath Oskar Schlemmer, shortly to take up a teaching post at the new Bauhaus in Weimar, went to a slide show of images of the art of the insane. What he saw in Stuttgart that night stirred him to ecstasy. ‘For a whole day I imagined I was going to go mad,’ an excited Schlemmer wrote to his fiancée, ‘and was even pleased at the thought, because then I would have everything I have been wanting.’
For all that, the young Swabian spotted a problem. ‘Klee’, he went on, ‘has seen these things and is enthusiastic’; the work he and other moderns were making bore ‘surprising similarities’ to that of the mad – men such as the ‘schizophrenic master’ August Klett, who thought himself Christ and, locked for decades in an asylum, produced émaillée paintings of odd beauty with names such as Die Republik der Hähne in der Sonne hat ohne Kostüm gegessen und getanzt (‘The Republic of Roosters Ate and Danced in the Sun without Costumes’). But if the art of the moderns resembled that of the insane, then the reverse was also true. With what would turn out to be unhappy prescience, Schlemmer saw that this resemblance would one day be used as a weapon against modernism. ‘See!’ he went on, rhetorically to his fiancée. ‘They paint just like the insane!’
Between Klee’s Blaue Reiter review and Schlemmer’s letter had come the First World War. Having seen, in many cases first-hand, the insanity of the trenches, avant-garde artists across Europe found themselves moved to paint something more than reality. The Surrealists in Paris found their subject first in the irrational of the Freudian pre-conscious and then in the communitarian unconscious of Jung. In Germany, the drive was towards abstraction, so-called non-objective art. Here, particularly, the insane had a head start. ‘The madman lives in a realm of ideas which the sane artist tries to reach,’ Schlemmer wrote sadly. ‘For the madman it is purer, because completely separate from external reality.’
As he had also realised, opposition to this view in Germany was already growing. If modernists sought to redeem madness by owning it, a counter-tendency aimed more simply to eradicate it. This latter movement was led by a plodding and talentless figurative painter called Adolf Hitler. The realism ordained by Hitler was to give rise to a kind of madness beyond the wildest schizophrenic dreams of Klett. Officially prescribed art presented a fantasy world in which men were universally strapping, women subservient and pink-cheeked and children had unvarying blue eyes.
***
This parallel shift in German thinking on art and insanity is the subject of Charlie English’s compelling new book, The Gallery of Miracles and Madness. Its two principal themes, the demonising of modernist art as degenerate and the murder of the inhabitants of asylums in the so-called Aktion T4, are well enough known. Where the particular fascination of English’s book lies is in his discovery of an overlap between them.
By 1938, Schlemmer’s prediction had come woefully true. In that year, the ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition in Munich juxtaposed a pair of self-portraits by Oskar Kokoschka with another by a man called Georg Birnbacher. The accompanying guide asked visitors to guess which of the works was by a supposed master, which by ‘an amateur, an inmate of a lunatic asylum’. ‘You will be surprised!’ the text crowed. Birnbacher was a long-term resident of the psychiatric clinic at the University of Heidelberg and a patient of Hans Prinzhorn. Prinzhorn, a brilliant psychiatrist, had been the first to recognise the extraordinary artistic talent of many of the inmates, particularly those diagnosed as schizophrenic. He had carefully collected and catalogued their work and travelled the world proselytising on its behalf. It was his slide show that Schlemmer had seen in Stuttgart in 1920.
In English’s narrative, the twin strands of Hitler’s thinking on art and racial purity draw remorselessly together. The year after the ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition, a National Socialist couple from Leipzig wrote to the Führer, begging his permission to kill their badly disabled infant son: ‘the monster’, as his father referred to him. In July 1939, the baby became the first victim of a policy of state murder that would see the death of perhaps three hundred thousand Germans deemed ‘ballast’ and ‘useless eaters’. Some seventy thousand of these were inmates of asylums, among them many of Prinzhorn’s artist-patients.
One was
Paul Gösch, who, as English notes, had had the unique and unenviable distinction
of having his work included in the ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition on two counts:
as an example of professional degeneracy (at the original Munich show) and of
amateur madness (when it moved to Berlin). Unusual among Prinzhorn’s stable in
having trained as a professional painter, Gösch had first been incarcerated
with schizophrenia in 1917. In 1934 he was moved from an asylum in Göttingen
run by his brother-in-law to another, more brutal one in Teupitz. In 1940 he
was taken to the killing centre at Brandenburg an der Havel to be gassed with
carbon monoxide.
The same fate awaited Franz Karl Bühler, whose Blakean crayon drawing Der Würgengel (‘The Choking Angel’), used as the frontispiece to Prinzhorn’s ground-breaking book Bildnerei der Geisteskranken in 1922, proved an appalling premonition of his own end. Trained as a master blacksmith – his trio of Baroque gates had been the centrepiece of the Chicago World Fair in 1893 – Bühler was taken in March 1940 from the asylum in Emmendingen that had been his home for four decades to the castle at Grafeneck, one of the most efficient of the Aktion T4 killing centres. There, in a scene that prefigured the killings in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, he was herded into a room tricked out as a communal shower and gassed with fifty-three others as an SS doctor looked on through a spy window. Carbon monoxide kills by choking its victims. One observer at Grafeneck recalled seeing ‘patients, naked … with their mouths terribly wide open, their chests heaving’.
My only cavil about English’s book is that it is too long. For all its fascination, the awful tale it tells is in essence a micro-history, concerning at most a few dozen people who had the great misfortune to be both talented and incarcerated as mad. A tighter focus on these and less time spent on the tectonic shifts that would eventually crush them might have made The Gallery of Miracles and Madness more memorable than it already is.
Virtuosos of the Asylum. By Charles Darwent. Literary Review, August 2021.
The same fate awaited Franz Karl Bühler, whose Blakean crayon drawing Der Würgengel (‘The Choking Angel’), used as the frontispiece to Prinzhorn’s ground-breaking book Bildnerei der Geisteskranken in 1922, proved an appalling premonition of his own end. Trained as a master blacksmith – his trio of Baroque gates had been the centrepiece of the Chicago World Fair in 1893 – Bühler was taken in March 1940 from the asylum in Emmendingen that had been his home for four decades to the castle at Grafeneck, one of the most efficient of the Aktion T4 killing centres. There, in a scene that prefigured the killings in the gas chambers at Auschwitz, he was herded into a room tricked out as a communal shower and gassed with fifty-three others as an SS doctor looked on through a spy window. Carbon monoxide kills by choking its victims. One observer at Grafeneck recalled seeing ‘patients, naked … with their mouths terribly wide open, their chests heaving’.
My only cavil about English’s book is that it is too long. For all its fascination, the awful tale it tells is in essence a micro-history, concerning at most a few dozen people who had the great misfortune to be both talented and incarcerated as mad. A tighter focus on these and less time spent on the tectonic shifts that would eventually crush them might have made The Gallery of Miracles and Madness more memorable than it already is.
Virtuosos of the Asylum. By Charles Darwent. Literary Review, August 2021.
A scant
few pages into Charlie English’s The Gallery of Miracles and Madness, I was
reminded of a recent, strange phenomenon: several accounts cropping up on my
Twitter feed zealously devoted to “Traditionalist architecture.” Their pages
were full of photos comparing Gothic and Neoclassical buildings with what they
termed “communist Soviet-era” apartment blocks. Saturated pictures of idyllic
German farming towns were held up next to shots of dreary urban intersections.
The sentiment never varied. Take us back to before our cities were polluted.
They were sometimes accompanied by captions extolling the virtues of “beauty”
and “elegance” – values that they asserted were now irrevocably warped by
modern architectural sensibilities.
I doubt these posters knew how dangerous and terrible the roots of their rhetoric were, disguised under a longing for tradition. Charlie English’s The Gallery of Miracles and Madness would do a fine job of enlightening them as to how inextricably aesthetic, artistic and political sentiments are linked. Elegant and exhaustively-researched, English outlines the rise of “psychiatric art” in Weimar-era Germany, tracking its influence and eventual clash with Hitler’s obsession with remolding the artistic character of Germany. The fact that we all know the inevitable tragic conclusion – the mass murder and sterilization of individuals housed in psychiatric facilities, as a “trial run” for later concentration camps – doesn’t lessen the horror and impact of English’s careful account. It’s upsetting, and challenging. It’s also necessary reading in our current time, where musicians are thrown into jail over “treasonous” lyrics, and artists are imprisoned for creating their work. To those who still ask the perennial question – “Is art still valuable in our disastrous contemporary moment?” – The Gallery of Madness and Miracles provides a definite, indisputable “yes.”
The first section of Miracles and Madness is structured around the collection of works from the inmates of various psychiatric institutions by Hans Prinzhorn, a doctor and art historian. Prinzhorn, despite his later tentative support of the Nazi regime, was at that time a progressive, opposed to the popular sentiment that “madness” was a sign of a “diseased” or “degenerate mind.” English clearly and vividly outlines the failure of the era to understand mental illness, most particularly schizophrenia, which was believed to carry a sentence of “inevitable decline,” and the additional failings of the psychiatric care available. Hospitals were a convenient storage space for “deviants,” so the general public would be spared from dealing with them. This dehumanizing attitude later led to forced sterilization under the Nazis, and the term lebensunwertes Leben – “life unworthy of life,” providing the excuse for the eventual mass murder that would claim thousands of neurodivergent lives.
Prinzhorn, however, found the art produced by patients fascinating – and most importantly, of genuine artistic worth. After collecting and exhibiting a vast amount of art from dozens of patients, Prinzhorn photographed the work and published Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Artistry of the Mentally Ill). The book, and the work itself, went on to heavily influence the work of many notable artists of the time. Paul Klee, an avid fan of the Bildnerai, “appears to have taken direct inspiration from a Prinzhorn-owned work, Circle of Ideas of a Man.” Surrealist Max Ernst was so moved by the exhibited work that he began to attempt to create collages that resembled hallucinations. Dalí makes direct reference to a piece by Prinzhorn-owned artist Joseph Schneller in his essay “The Tragic Myth of Millet’s The Angelus,” and Richard Lindner called Prinzhorn’s collection “the most important artistic experience of my life.” There are even claims that Picasso’s Téte de femme is a reference to work by artist Heinrich Anton Müller, who featured in the Prinzhorn collection. Drawings exhibited by Prinzhorn, from artist August Natterer, even influenced Koga Harue to create one of the first works of Japanese Surrealism, Endless Flight (1930)
English’s deeply thorough account of the influence the Bildnerai wielded reveals the fetishization and objectification of “the insane” by artists – a sentiment that is unfortunately alive and well. Affluent and successful artists took direct inspiration from incarcerated patients, sometimes even copying their images and composition, and made little effort to credit them. The Surrealists, who English admits “romanticized mental illness,” were obsessed with the supposed “purity” of insanity, with some artists, like Dalí, trying their best to induce insanity, in the belief it would make their work more “raw” and “true.” André Breton even remarked that “they [the insane] derive a great deal of comfort…they enjoy their madness.” This parasitic relationship is at times glossed over by English, who gives a detailed biography of several artists – most notably a talented metalworker diagnosed with schizophrenia, Franz Bühler – but gives only brief sketches of others. The result is that The Gallery of Miracles and Madness often feels as if it is populated and driven by ghosts. Their lives, “a succession of steps in an endless routine: sleeping, sitting in bed, waiting for food, smoking, queuing for the barber’s chair,” go mostly non-memorialized.
The second and third sections, however, are a masterclass in biography. English’s account of Hitler’s early life, his lack of artistic skill, and “artist-Führer” persona, is brilliantly engaging. Hitler’s hatred of modernist art, which he characterized as “degenerate,” is linked clearly to his deep racism and xenophobia, with the entirety of degeneracy theory itself stemming from Gobineau’s hateful racial hierarchy developed in France in the 1850s. In Hitler’s mind, the mentally ill constituted an entirely different race; they were less than human. His hatred provided “a bridge to the public,” who misunderstood the avant-garde and regarded it as confusing and unskilled. Modern art’s “insane direction,” Hitler argued, “was not mere coincidence, but a deliberate plot by the Jewish-Bolshevik nexus to destroy Germany.” That sentiment hit a nerve with the exhausted and angry German populace, and elevated the political importance of supporting art that reflected ethnic Germans, the Volksgemeinschaft. To that end, the Reichskulturkammer organised twin exhibitions – one of acceptable, Aryan, faux-Classical art (Große deutsche Kunstausstellung) and another, of “degenerate art” (Entartete Kunst), to be shown in direct contrast to each other. English outlines these exhibitions, highlighting their darkly comedic absurdity – thousands of people eagerly flooding Entartete Kunst in favor of Große deutsche Kunstausstellung, Hitler throwing tantrums over a painting of a tennis player that was too “smeared” – without ever losing sight of the human cost of the rhetoric. “Art [was] Germany’s social glue,” Hitler declared. Controlling it, manipulating human expression and choking out any depiction that dissented with Nazi ideology, was of immense importance to maintaining the power of the regime.
The final fourth section, “Euthanasie,” is an exhausting, devastating read. English chooses to include graphic depictions of the mass gassings of patients, which is a decision that feels necessary in driving home the horror and reality of what constituted the beginning of a genocide. “[I] cannot believe [the patients] died without pain,” one observer states. Franz Bühler, as well as eighteen other Prinzhorn-owned artists, lost their lives that way – scared, confused, deprived of human dignity and respect. Their art was either destroyed or committed to storage. It’s here that the injustice of the situation becomes almost unbearable. Affluent or successful artists could escape Germany, but the patients that they had plagiarized could not; first enduring terrible conditions in overcrowded facilities, and then mass murder. Despite the Surrealists’ profession of how valuable insanity was – “the great art,” as Dubuffet said – actual individuals suffering from mental illnesses were only ever fodder for those lucky enough to live outside of institutions. This is a dynamic that seems to have endured to the present day: Mental illness is still deeply misunderstood and fetishized, even in artistic communities. Many still regard neurodivergent people as dangerous, less valuable; simply a problem for society to solve. In other words, “degenerate.”
Despite occasional gaps in focus – which, admittedly, is most likely informed by the scarcity of surviving records of psychiatric patients at that time – English does a marvelous job of creating a readable, emotional text, elevating fact to narrative – spinning gold out of hundreds of fractured sources. With his capable hand, history comes alive. The Gallery of Miracles and Madness is proof that the past is closer than we think. It was barely eighty years ago that Bühler, master metalworker and artist, one-time representative of Germany at the Chicago World Fair, was being led to his death. We are not as far removed from such violence as we like to believe. In that regard, Charlie English has written something remarkable: a work of historical nonfiction that feels urgent and overwhelmingly relevant to the world we live in.
Charlie English’s ‘The Gallery of Miracles and Madness’ Is a Necessary Read. By Ella Fox-Martens. The Observer, August 2, 2021.
In 1922 Hans Prinzhorn, a Heidelberg psychiatrist, published a book that set the art world on fire. At first glance Artistry of the Mentally Ill didn’t sound as if it was breaking new ground. Ever since the 19th century, medical men working in asylums – “mad doctors” by another name – had pored over the drawings, paintings and sculptures of their more nimble-fingered patients to see if they could discern some sign or signature of madness. Was it possible to spot schizophrenia just by looking at the way someone drew a horse or coloured in the sky? Could you discern neurosis simply because an artist had failed to give her figures two eyes and a mouth?
The
Gallery of Miracles and Madness by Charlie English review – the fate of
Hitler’s ‘degenerate’ artists. By Kathryn Hughers. The Guardian, August 5,
2021.
They were paintings by patients in mental hospitals. To the man who collected them, they were fine art, unschooled and pure. To the Nazis, they were a weapon in their war against modernism. Now the collection has a permanent home; but, asks David Sweetman, will it ever be free of controversy?
It may well be the most unusual art collection in Europe, yet for 80 years it has been with-out a home. This will change in September when the University of Heidelberg opens a new museum to display the 500 paintings, drawings and sculptures that Dr Hans Prinzhorn of the Heidelberg Psychiatrische Klinik assembled in the early 20s. What makes this vast collection so extraordinary is that everything in it was created by patients in mental hospitals across Europe, a mingling of art and insanity that some have found totally unacceptable.
The small selection shown at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 1996 came as a surprise to many, for on offer were not the dour productions of hospital therapy sessions but some of the most flamboyant and, yes, eccentric images imaginable. We may no longer laugh at the insane, but much of this art is gloriously funny: from the brightly coloured depictions of overweight, overdressed matrons, riding about on worryingly fragile bicycles, to the all-female orgy, which seems to be taking place in a throne room, plentifully supplied with calf-high bootees and whips but short on actual sex (for no discernible reason, one of the ladies seems more interested in wrapping her companion in a length of cloth than in anything remotely naughty). Comic, but also mysterious, like the drawing that advertises itself as a portrait of all the Houses of Correction in the Göttingen area, which does indeed offer meticulously drawn studies of 19 buildings, except that, on close inspection, they all turn out to be exactly the same, identical down to the last window and chimneypot. Occasionally, such perversity seems to hint at something deeper: a swirl of dense spirals might have been a seashell but for the title, I Want To Try; a second, almost identical swirl becomes It Is A Cancerous Testicle.
Whatever else they might be, the works from the Prinzhorn collection are clearly not boring. Yet such things were regarded as the mere scribblings of the mad, useful only to study how far a patient's psychosis had progressed, until a few enlightened doctors, Prinzhorn foremost among them, argued that they should be viewed as works of art in their own right. The very words Prinzhorn used to describe the works in his collection reveal his concern: artistry, authenticity, cosmic feeling, empathy, genuine, instinctive, naive, natural expression, primordiality, purity, spiritualisation, spontaneity. Some of the works may have their funny side, but they are all highly original, unfettered by convention and often electric with energy. Prinzhorn devoted himself to pointing this out to a cynical world.
Even a brief glance at his story shows that Prinzhorn, born in 1886, was made for the task. As a young man, he had a number of failed ambitions: he studied philosophy and art history, then tried his hand as a singer, until the encroaching mental illness of his second wife led him to train as a doctor. In 1919, he moved to Heidelberg, where, unable to resist the artistic life, he successfully transformed himself into the Diaghilev of psychiatry, satisfying his own creative ambitions by orchestrating those of others. There was already a small collection of works at the clinic when he arrived, but it was Prinzhorn's idea to contact mental hospitals all over Europe, asking them to send him any patients' work they did not want.
There are other collections of psychotic art, but nothing on this scale. And what took Prinzhorn's collection beyond the realm of a handful of specialists was his ground-breaking study, Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (The Artistry Of The Mentally Ill), first published in 1922 and much reprinted since. In the decade up to 1933, works from Heidelberg were shown in nine German cities and seen by a remarkable array of now-famous artists. Painters such as Paul Klee and Oskar Kokoschka identified with Prinzhorn's championing of an art that celebrated the complexity of individual expression over what they saw as a world reduced to external appearances - a primary preoccupation of western painting since the Renaissance. What seems to have appealed most was the existence of secret, inexplicable worlds - a farmland map, with village and path, hedgerow and stream, suddenly turns into a witch's head; a bald, clean-shaven soldier in the first panel of a diptych sprouts hair and a beard in the second, for no apparent reason.
It is not hard to understand why the surrealists found encouragement in these amazing fantasies, seeing the "spontaneous" creativity of the mentally ill as akin to their own attempts to unleash the unconscious. They were introduced to the collection by Max Ernst, who had been planning to make his own analysis of psychopathological art when Prinzhorn's study appeared. What has continued to attract artists to the collection is the sheer range of imagery on offer: unconstrained by schools and isms, unconcerned about critics or fashions, Prinzhorn's artists made whatever they wished. Some created religious icons, others scrawled erotic symbols or drew a blueprint for the perfect mechanical plough, all with a freedom that belied the reality of their physical condition as effective prisoners in mental asylums few would ever leave.
In the end, Prinzhorn spent only three years at Heidelberg and, despite his strenuous pleading, the collection was never given a permanent home. He died of typhoid fever in 1933, but his writings continued to influence those attracted to alternative forms of ex-pression, in particular the postwar artistic movement Art Brut, whose leading exponent, Jean Dubuffet, was himself a collector of artworks made by the mentally disturbed. The recent restoration of the collection, along with its presentation in major exhibitions and the forthcoming opening of its home in Heidelberg, has given Prinzhorn something of the status of a secular saint. Today, the Prinzhorn Archive is a major source for research into what is sometimes called "Outsider Art" - art produced by those without special training.
Yet despite this renewed interest, many of Prinzhorn's artists remain sadly anonymous. At present, most catalogue entries can list only place of birth, marital status and medical diagnosis as shown in a patient's medical records, though in some cases the rather ominous phrase "last mentioned" is given, followed by a date. It is to be hoped that, as research progresses and the task Prinzhorn began is at last completed, the creators of these extraordinary works will emerge from the shadows to assume their full status as artists.
But nothing from that turbulent period of Germany's history is immune to a new generation keen to expose the sins of their fathers, even those of someone as apparently worthy as Prinzhorn. While allowing that he was genuinely trying to change the way mentally ill people are perceived, younger critics point out that he was not above doctoring the evidence in his attempts to show how creative his patients were. Recent research reveals that he strengthened his case by discreetly providing special materials for those he considered particularly gifted. He even rewarded some inmates for "good" work and would omit to record details of any prior training they may have had.
As none of this was known at the time, the conclusion spread that it was insanity, rather than innate talent or acquired skill, that made his patients so good at art - an assumption that seemed both to echo the traditional belief that lunacy can induce ecstatic, visionary experiences, and to endorse the link between genius and insanity proposed in the 19th century. Once it was established that all psychiatric patients were naturally artistic, it became harder to counter suggestions that art itself may be the province of the deranged, an equation readily endorsed by the cultural theorists of the rising National Socialist movement, who would later set up a programme of artistic "reform", aided by their allies from the world of clinical psychiatry.
Notable among these was Carl Schneider, the Nazi sympathiser who came to Heidelberg after Prinzhorn and completely reversed the way the collection was viewed. Schneider, who had joined the Nazi party in 1932, was a wholehearted supporter of the attempt to "purify" Germany's creative life. He, and others like him, believed that, by using chance, the subconscious, the primitive and the childlike to liberate their work from conventional artistic practice, modern artists had entered the twilight world of "the idiot, the cretin and the cripple", and were obviously mad. This attitude finds its clearest expression in the words Schneider used when referring to Prinzhorn's collection: catatonic, chaos, craving, cretinism, defilement, degeneracy, deviance, disgust, disorientation, grimaces, horror, idiocy, infantile, lust, nonsensical, pathological, shameless, wallowing.
Women were especially likely to encounter Schneider's disapproval. Despite the fact that, in the 20s and 30s, there were more women than men in psychiatric institutions across Germany, their art constitutes only 20% of the collection. In the words of a recent curator, female patients "put their energies into women's work, wrote religious verses in their notebooks, and kept quiet". Despite this, it is clear from Schneider's writings that the new director was especially antipathetic to work done by women. Indeed, he was proud of his ability to "reform" those in his care by weaning them away from activities he considered degenerate. In an article for a psychiatric journal published in 1939, Schneider describes his successful treatment of a "schizophrenic female artist [who] had composed pathological productions" and ends by boasting that he has not preserved her work, rather he has had it destroyed.
Presumably, Schneider did not destroy works already in the collection because they were useful evidence that the art of the insane was worthless. The oddly dressed ladies on their clearly impractical bicycles and the strangely coiffed women conducting their unerotic orgy would have been ideally suited to his purposes. Of course, what he and his fellow Nazis failed to see is that, while they are undoubtedly comic, there is no reason to assume that this is simply a product of the helpless battiness of the mentally ill. What if their creators knew what they were doing? What if they were laughing at the world - at us?
Allow that, and it becomes apparent that many images appear to mock the accepted order of things. The fact that all the Göttingen Houses of Correction are identical would have made perfect sense to the inmates. Perhaps so many works resist interpretation because that was the intention; perhaps they are exercises in disguise? Fail to hide, like the witch's head in the landscape, and you will be caught, snared in the words that are scrawled across so many of the pictures like barbed wire at Passchendaele.
Schneider seems to have sensed none of this. Seeing only madness, he was happy to lend works from Heidelberg to the Entartete Kunst, the Degenerate Art exhibitions organised by the Nazis in the 30s to discredit modern art by associating it with the productions of the insane. This more than anything lowered the status of the collection in the opinion of intellectuals across Europe. Even Prinzhorn's reputation was tarnished by Schneider's actions. While it has never been suggested that he gave any credence to the Nazi view of modern art as the work of sick Jews, bolsheviks and anarchists, he has nevertheless been rebuked for his silence at the beginning of the Nazi attacks on his collection, what one sceptic has described as a withdrawal into "pessimistic dandyism", which presumably indicates someone too bored or too fastidious, too preoccupied with higher things, to engage with those he considers beneath him - an attitude some way short of unquestioned sanctity.
Schneider is an easier monster. Arrested by the advancing Americans in 1945, he committed suicide in his cell before he could be tried for his part in the Aktion T4 mass euthanasia programme and his role as a T4 Gutachter, "educating" other doctors in the techniques of "mercy-killing" child patients, his "beautiful idiots". Yet even this tale of unrelenting wickedness has its curious twists. In some accounts, Schneider is the son of a pastor and thus a fallen angel; in others, he is the abandoned child of a failed musician who died in a home for the indigent, with the result that the son came to view psychiatry as a means of social advancement, a prize offered by the Nazi Racial Hygiene programme.
Both sides tend to agree that at some point he underwent a change of heart. The young Schneider was convinced that eugenics would turn healers into hangmen, but he also had a passionate desire to find a cure for "congenital feeble-mindedness and epilepsy", and when he was offered the means to obtain the enormous quantity of children's brains he believed necessary for his experiments, he was seduced, by a heady mixture of goodness and raw ambition, into taking a leading part in the involuntary euthanasia of thousands of crippled and retarded infants.
In the end, any attempt to explain his behaviour gives way to anger when one is confronted with the icy insouciance he displayed towards the gassing or slow starvation of his many victims. In any case, all the official applications for more research assistants, and the interminable arguments over who had the right to which human remains, led nowhere. As with all the other Nazi medical experiments, no cure was found.
Given the turbulent history of Prinzhorn's collection, it is likely to remain at the centre of any debate surrounding psychiatry in Germany. That it survives at all is a miracle - although there is a sense in which the credit for that may have to be given to Schneider. When the Entartete Kunst exhibitions finished touring in 1941, no one knew what to do with the exhibits, which were put into storage until the day when someone higher up should send for them. Likewise in Heidelberg, the bulk of the collection was packed in boxes, where it remained until the mid-60s when it was rediscovered and a programme of restoration, research and exhibition begun, intended to lead up to this year's opening of a museum within the university.
At this point, it looked as if Prinzhorn's hopes were about to be fulfilled and his collection could finally have a permanent home. But in the summer of 1996, Dr Inge Jadi, the current custodian, heard that an organisation called the Bundesverband Psychiatrie-Erfahrener (BPE) had "decided" that the Heidelberg works should be moved to Berlin to form part of a memorial to the victims of the Nazi euthanasia campaign. Enquiries revealed that the BPE had already applied to the Berlin and regional authorities for aid, only to be told that help could not be given unless their new museum contained material of substance and importance, hence the attempt to take over an existing world-famous collection. Initially, it must have been tempting to treat the whole business as nothing more than a publicity stunt by a previously unheard-of fringe group. But the BPE and its allies were to prove unexpectedly tenacious.
The BPE is a radical pressure group, made up of ex-psychiatric patients, dedicated to exposing the "crimes" of earlier practitioners, while rescuing present-day "victims". It maintains a safe house where the mentally troubled can take refuge from those they regard as their persecutors, and the proposed museum was clearly seen as a logical extension of this. Thus, when the authorities in Heidelberg tentatively pointed out that Prinzhorn's efforts had preceded the T4 museum, an outraged BPE announced that the works had been taken from the Jews and were "Beutekunst der Mörder" (art plundered by the murderers). A BPE spokesman, Rene Talbot, delivered what many thought an outrageous lecture, entitled Hans Prinzhorn - A Nazi Ideologist Pathologises Art. Further, they claimed that the collection would be housed in rooms Schneider had used for his experiments, a "horror location" that rendered Jadi and her colleagues unworthy custodians.
Despite the fury, all this might have gone unnoticed by the wider world had the BPE not attracted a number of influential supporters able to engage the attention of the press. It had also allied itself to the Israeli Association Against Psychiatric Assault, which added some weight to its claim to represent victims of Nazi oppression. Clearly, Jadi had no option but to defend herself. She began by emphatically refuting the major charges, insisting that the works would almost certainly have been destroyed if Prinzhorn hadn't asked for them. However, she also felt obliged to admit that, in their attacks on Prinzhorn, the BPE had been quoting from a doctoral thesis which showed beyond doubt that, shortly before his death, Prinzhorn had indeed "flirted with the idea of National Socialism", writing articles endorsing its policies and generally voicing support. While Jadi insisted that this did not alter the good Prinzhorn had done earlier, her revelation of something far worse than mere "pessimistic dandyism" was a blow to those who had formerly held him in such high regard. While her passionate defence fought off this last attempt to break up the collection, the reputation of its founder, a man admired by many of the most inventive artists of his day, was left somewhat battered.
It now remains to be seen whether Prinzhorn's remarkable collection will be allowed to find a peaceful resting place at last. No one knows whether the opening in September will be marked by protests and demonstrations, but whatever happens it will always bear the burden of being not just a museum but also a memorial. What became of many of the artists whose work Prinzhorn brought together is not known for certain, but that curious phrase "last mentioned" indicates that an inmate was removed from an asylum, under the system intended to select those with a "life unworthy of a life", administered by men such as Schneider after his appointment as scientific director of the Mental Patient Extermination Programme. Some received "intensive treatment" at a former state hospital in Grafeneck near Tübingen, others were transported to Upper Austria to be "disinfected" at the castle in Hartheim an der Donau, an outpost of the infamous "school for murderers" at Mauthausen, the training ground for concentration camp killers
Madly Gifted. By David Sweetman. The Guardian, July 28, 2001.
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