The Gallery of Miracles and Madness

Insanity, Art and Hitler's first Mass-Murder Programme

Charlie English

• Publisher: William Collins
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780008299644
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Historia del arte moderno

PART ONE

BILDNEREI

I could spend my life prying loose the secrets of the insane. These people are honest to a fault, and their naiveté has no peer but my own. Christopher Columbus should have set out to discover America with a boatload of madmen.

—ANDRé BRETON,

Manifesto of Surrealism, 1924

1.

The Man Who Jumped in the Canal

On a winter’s day in 1898, a stocky young man with a handlebar mustache was hurrying along the banks of a canal in Hamburg, north Germany. Pohl, as the world would come to know him, was in his early thirties then, a dapper individual who liked to carry a cane or umbrella and to wear a stovepipe hat over his oiled, ink-dark hair. At this particular instant, though, such considerations were far from Pohl’s mind. He moved along in a private cloud of fear, rushing to escape the mysterious agents who tormented him. He didn’t know who these men were—they could pop up in any guise, anywhere, at almost any time—but he did have a pretty good idea who sent them.

It had begun in Strasbourg, a German city at this time, at a moment of great professional humiliation: his sacking from the city’s School of Arts and Crafts. The school’s director, not content with ruining a brilliant career, had sent spies to snoop on Pohl, to listen at his keyhole, forcing him to change lodgings again and again. In the end there had been nothing for it but to leave town altogether. Pohl moved to Hamburg, at the other end of the country, and tried to lose himself in the louche entertainments of the city’s vast red-light district, spending heavily on prostitutes and peep shows. Somehow his enemies tracked him down even here. Strangers threatened him in the street. He was accosted on the horse-drawn tram, singled out by the conductor, who yelled “He’s crazy!” in front of the other passengers. Pimps shouted “Rascal!,” “Thug!,” “Kill him!,” and the like. Even at the theater, he noticed the actors onstage delivering odd, barbed messages, targeted directly at him.

On this March day, he knew they were closing in.

Hamburg, the great port city on the river Elbe, the “Gateway to the World,” home to the fleet of oceangoing liners that carried Germans to Boston and Baltimore, Hoboken and Hong Kong, was a latticework of inlets and lakes, channels and streams. Pohl now found his escape route barred by water. There was only one option: He must swim. At the end of winter, the canal was close to freezing, but he plunged in anyway. The dark liquid engulfed him in its shocking embrace, then he was splashing out for the far bank.

When, at length, he was hauled out onto dry land, soaked and shivering, it was clear to passersby that not everything was well with the strange swimmer. There was no sign of a chasing pack. No one, in fact, seemed to be following him at all. He was disturbed, confused, perhaps insane. So he was brought to the gates of the Friedrichsberg “madhouse,” the giant institution that stood on a hill in the northeast of the city, and taken inside. He would remain in the dubious care of the psychiatric system for the next forty-two years, one of hundreds of thousands of inmates who lived precarious, near-invisible lives behind the walls of Germany’s asylums.

“Pohl” was the alias used to spare his family the taint of mental illness. The man’s real name was Franz Karl Bühler. He was a blacksmith by profession, though that word hardly does him justice. In fact, Bühler was one of the world’s leading metalworkers at a time when the Arts and Crafts movement had pushed the form to unprecedented heights. Working with the 2,500-degree heat of the furnace, he could transform coarse pig iron into something malleable and delicate. By drawing it and bending it, upsetting, punching, and welding it, he was able to mimic flowers, grasses, and reed stalks so perfectly you had to touch them to know they weren’t real. But something had happened to Bühler, an inner derailment of sorts, which interfered with his sense of reality and put him at the mercy of his own fictions and delusions. Doctors examining him over the following months and years would attach different labels to his condition, but the one that would stick was “schizophrenia.”

Schizophrenia, the most severe of mental illnesses, remains the hardest to understand. Even articulate people with the condition find it difficult to explain the condition, beyond a sense of strangeness, alienation, or uncanniness. It is “a country, opposed to Reality, where reigned an implacable light,” according to one account, where “people turned weirdly about,” making nonsensical gestures and movements. Others describe it as a feeling of disintegration, or like looking at the world through a telescope backward. Some psychiatrists believe that where most people organize their perceptions into an overall picture of the world which they then act upon, those with schizophrenia combine unrelated pieces of sensory data that can only be understood by making irrational intellectual leaps. Hence Bühler, obsessed with his persecutors in Strasbourg, might hear a tram conductor shouting “He’s crazy!” when he was just calling out the next stop. But not all manifestations are alike, and not everyone affected finds the condition debilitating. Some view it as an “enhancement” that gives them unusually deep insight. Only around a third of cases are now considered progressive, and most people with schizophrenia live full and active lives. When Bühler was hospitalized, however, the diagnosis was brand-new, and was thought to herald an irreversible decline. There was nothing to be done, his doctors believed. It was just a matter of time.

Bühler had always been unusual. He was born on August 28, 1864, at Offenburg, a picturesque town of chiming clocks and steep-pitched roofs in the valley of the Upper Rhine. His mother, Euphrosyne, died young, and his father, who ran a blacksmith’s shop from their house on Glaserstraße, married a second time, to Theresia. Where Bühler senior was calm and polite, Franz Karl was boisterous and eccentric, and heard voices from the age of sixteen. He was also intelligent and well-liked, and performed well at school. He enjoyed music and played the violin in a chamber ensemble. But it was at the forge that he would make his reputation. There he was a virtuoso.

In 1871, the Grand Duchy of Baden was incorporated into the new, unified Germany, ruled over by Kaiser Wilhelm I, and Offenburg went with it. The bold imperial nation demanded bold imperial architecture, and Bühler & Son became leading suppliers of ironwork for the castles and grand buildings that were being thrown up all around the region. At the schools of applied arts in Karlsruhe and Munich, Bühler learned to create the most elaborate and fashionable rococo forms. He had a subversive side, too. When the kaiser commissioned a great palace to be built at Strasbourg, in territory conquered from France, Bühler incorporated a caricature of the emperor’s face into every handrail, with a mighty nose and Don Quixote mustache. His creative flair soon won him craftsmanship competitions around the country, and in 1893, when he was still in his twenties, his career hit a double high: He was appointed head of the workshop at the Strasbourg School of Arts and Crafts and chosen to represent Germany at the Chicago World’s Fair. That summer, as he boarded a liner bound for the United States, this entertaining, brilliant, and somewhat overbearing young man was on course to become one of the most highly regarded artisans in Europe.

The industrial world at that moment was in the midst of transformation, and nowhere in 1893 embodied the change more fully than Chicago. As one contemporary writer put it, the world had changed less since the time of Jesus Christ than it did in the decades before the First World War. In 1870, most people in Western Europe and the United States lived and worked on the land; by 1910, most lived in the cities, drawn in by a raft of new urban professions. London, Paris, and Vienna doubled in size; Munich tripled; Berlin quadrupled; New York grew by a factor of six. Chicago was the most supercharged of them all, expanding faster than any town in history. Barely sixty years old, it was already laying claim to the title of America’s second city, and beating out New York to host that showcase of technological and cultural prowess, the World’s Fair.

The World’s Columbian Exposition, as the 1893 event was officially billed, was the latest of a series of world’s fairs that had begun with the 1851 Great Exhibition in London. As Bühler discovered, Chicago’s show would be bigger and brasher than all the rest. A seven-hundred-acre site on the shore of Lake Michigan was filled with the fruits of humanity’s most technologically advanced era. Twenty-seven million people would visit, the equivalent of almost half the U.S. population at the time. In Paris four years earlier, fairgoers had been astonished by Gustave Eiffel’s tower, an ironwork lattice that pierced the sky to the height of a thousand feet. The American riposte, the first Ferris wheel, was also vast—as high as the tallest of the new skyscrapers—but this construction moved. Powered by thousand-horsepower steam engines, it could lift up thirty-eight thousand visitors each day for a view few had ever seen: that of the human world from above. The shift of perspective in itself was a radical discovery, but down there, in the halls and gardens of the “White City,” were a host of others: the first paying cinema, the first moving walkway, the first zipper-style fastener, the first Shredded Wheat, Mr. Wrigley’s prototype chewing gum. At night, the Chicago sky was lit up with a display of alternating current so spectacular one visitor felt sorry for the moon: “How poor and pale she seemed in comparison!” The futuristic playground contained warnings for the coming century, too: At the southern edge of the site, the million-dollar Krupp artillery pavilion showed off the machines that would one day lay waste to the fields of Flanders.

Bühler’s contribution to the fair stood in the largest man-made structure on earth, the Manufactures and Liberal Arts Building. It was one of his finest and grandest achievements, a triptych of neo-Baroque gates a dozen yards long, each of which erupted from the ground in a jungle of floral scrolls, a secret garden frozen in iron. Witty, playful, technically superb, it showed that Germany “was far and away at the forefront of blacksmithing,” as the official report to Berlin stated. Bühler was awarded the medal for the highest distinction in his discipline and helped Germany to win first prize overall. It was the greatest honor his profession could bestow.

He spent six weeks in Chicago. The intoxicating atmosphere seems to have put him in an experimental frame of mind, since he began to dabble in the occult, falling in with a group of spiritualists who believed or pretended they could communicate with the dead. For years afterward he would describe his voices and visions in spiritualist terms. He likely explored the city’s vice districts, too, including the Levee, where prostitutes lounged naked in doorways and junkies shot each other up with hypodermics in the aisles of the drugstores. The following year, he would be treated for syphilis, a disease associated with schizophrenia. By the time he returned to Europe, his personality was a dangerous blend of psychotic risk factors. One more heave would push him over the edge.

He arrived back at his new job in Strasbourg stoked with pride, a world-beating exponent of his craft. But it remained just that, a craft, a poor and socially inferior cousin to fine art. To advance himself further, Bühler decided he must elevate his entire profession. It would be his life’s project. He would start by bringing “true modernity and efficiency” to the Strasbourg workshop.

He set about this task with a vigor that surprised his new colleagues, and which soon brought him into conflict with the school’s director, Anton Seder. Bühler had ambitions to open the workshop to students from all over the world, but Seder felt a responsibility to the city. Bühler wanted to travel, to learn the techniques of other master blacksmiths in Budapest, Berlin, Stuttgart, Nuremberg, and Dresden, but Seder wanted him to stay in Strasbourg and teach. At every level, Bühler’s plans were resisted. Compared with classless Chicago, Strasbourg was a maze of invisible social barriers, and at the Café Broglie, where the Kunstmeisters gathered after work, the impudent artisan became the subject of gossip. He started to skip his own lessons. At the end of 1896, after three years at the school, he was fired for unreliability, unauthorized action, and lack of compliance with working hours.

The firing was a public failure that Bühler knew would stain his career forever. He tried to justify his actions in a rambling, thirty-one-page “letter of defense” to the mayor and the city council, filled with puns and alliterations, in which he outlined his vision for the workshop and blamed Seder for blocking it. He never received a reply. There was only silence, into which paranoia crept.

“I am between Scylla and Charybdis,” he wrote, “and I do not know on which rock my rudder should break.”

He began to think Seder’s spies were listening at his keyhole, and moved apartments several times before leaving for Hamburg in the autumn of 1897. More and more he lived in the alternate, paranoid reality in his head. Early in 1898, in a state of mental collapse, he leapt into the canal.

The Friedrichsberg asylum held more than thirteen hundred patients and had a poor reputation even by the standards of the day. Its nursing staff were suspected of violence, and its new accommodation blocks were fitted with iron gratings that reminded visitors of the elephant house at a zoo. Still, the institution fulfilled its function of quietly keeping “deviants” off the streets in as economic a fashion as possible. It was a convenient place to dump inconvenient people.

Bühler did not stay long. Eight days after his admission, he was released into the care of his father, but on the train south he stuck his tongue out at a guard, convinced the guard had done the same to him, and when he reached Offenburg he became a “nuisance” and argued with everyone, especially his stepmother. The family decided to send Bühler to the Breitenau sanatorium in Switzerland for a rest cure, but after two weeks he escaped through a window and sneaked aboard a train bound for Germany, hiding under a bench because he didn’t have a ticket. Police caught him in a post office: He had been trying to wire for money but heard a voice calling him a crook and became upset. He was brought back to Breitenau and put in the secure wing. He thought the doctors, caretakers, and patients were plotting against him. He hallucinated, seeing strange dogs at night.

Two months later, he returned to Germany, arriving at the Illenau clinic in Achern in the company of a pair of male orderlies. He cut an elegant figure even now: Admissions staff noted that he wore a top hat and was extremely well-mannered. He told them he was not mentally ill but had come simply because his father wanted him to have a thorough checkup, and he would also like them to sort out his digestive problems if possible. That night he slept excellently, and the following morning he sang a hymn to the staff because he liked the Illenau so much. He didn’t know that the doctors were writing in his file that he was probably a “constitutional psychopath” and that his condition had gradually developed “on the basis of an abnormal character.” On June 4, he wrote to the institution’s director, thanking him for his stay and announcing that he was now ready to leave: He intended to go to a spa. He was astonished to be told he would not be allowed out. He consoled himself by asking for a violin and drawing materials.

Over the following weeks, Bühler grew desperate. He wrote six to ten letters a day, threatening, demanding, begging to be set free. He examined the locks to see if he could pick them. He climbed a tree in the garden to look for an escape route; when challenged, he said he was just trying to get some exercise. As it dawned on him that he had lost his liberty, he became frustrated and angry. He smashed a chamber pot, argued with staff and with other patients, and got into a fight. Despite the collapse of his rational sense, he worked with the same intensity he had shown on the outside, writing, drawing, and practicing his painting in anticipation of returning to his artistic program. At last, in the autumn of 1899, after a year and a half of incarceration, he appeared to find some resolution to his inner conflicts.

A key principle of psychiatry at that time was observation. Patients at the Illenau were kept in large, open “surveillance wards,” where they were confined to bed and their behavior was monitored around the clock. Realizing he couldn’t escape, Bühler began to side with his keepers. From now on, he would be “Doctor” Franz Bühler, a “medical police officer” who had been asked to conduct a study of patients by the ministry in Karlsruhe. This involved sketching every inmate in the asylum, noting biographical information about each case, diligently documenting, numbering, cataloguing, and critiquing every aspect of their existence.

The careful chronicles Bühler produced did not have the medical purpose he intended—the doctors paid little attention to his drawings—but they did capture the atmosphere of life inside. The Canadian sociologist Erving Goffmann would later describe the disturbing psychological effects of “total institutions” such as asylums on their inhabitants. Unlike prisoners, who could return to the world after serving their time, many psychiatric patients were never released. Their lives were a succession of steps in an endless routine: sleeping, sitting in bed, waiting for food, smoking, queuing for the barber’s chair. Robbed of all purpose, the sanest inmate could be driven to despair. Bühler documented it all: the blank faces, the bowed heads, the quizzical, uncomprehending eyes. His self-appointed task had another effect, too: As he produced sketch after sketch of individuals and groups, he was training himself to draw, growing into a figurative fine artist of considerable skill.

After two years in the Illenau, with no sign of improvement, the self-styled “medical police officer” was chosen for transfer to an asylum for long-term incurables at Emmendingen, in the region of Freiburg im Breisgau. He was happy to go, he told his doctors, since the Baden ministry had given him the task of observing and cataloguing an entirely different group of inmates. He arrived at the new institution on April 17, 1900. And that was pretty much all the world would ever have known about Franz Karl Bühler, if it hadn’t been for the man who, twenty years later, came to pay him a visit.

2.

The Hypnosis in the Wood

By the age of thirty-two, Hans Prinzhorn was at once a qualified physician, an art history Ph.D., a decorated combat veteran, and a professionally trained singer with an expressive baritone voice that could move his audience to tears. In later years, he would add psychotherapist, writer, lecturer, champion of the Navajo nation, and translator of the works of D. H. Lawrence and André Gide to his impressive résumé. But it was his work on the art of the insane, conducted at Heidelberg, that would stand as his greatest and longest-lived achievement. With Prinzhorn’s help, madness would become a lens through which to view the horror of the First World War, and a vehicle to explore the newfound psychological territory Sigmund Freud had identified in every human mind.

Prinzhorn arrived at University of Heidelberg Psychiatric Clinic in January 1919, two months after the armistice was signed. He and his young family—Ursula was a toddler, and his wife, Erna, was pregnant with their second child, Marianne—moved into a house on Neue Schloßstraße, a steep street of switchbacks that climbed past mock-baronial mansions adorned with battlements, coats of arms, and even a knight in full armor, all carved from the local red sandstone. From their windows, the Prinzhorns could look out over the town, a picturesque mile of red-tiled roofs and church spi...