The gallery of miracles and madness Insanity, modernism, and Hitler's war on art

Charlie English

Book - 2021

"The thousands of paintings, drawings, and pieces of sculpture Hans Prinzhorn gathered from German asylums in the early 1920s displayed a raw, expressive power that would change the course of art history. When a new generation of modernists discovered his collection--Max Ernst, André Breton, and Salvador Dalí among them--they borrowed its ideas to inform their own investigations of the human psyche. But by the 1930s, Prinzhorn's artist-patients and their delicate creations had begun to attract attention of a different kind. Rejected from art schools as a young man, Adolf Hitler saw modernism's interest in madness as a threat: a Jewish-Bolshevik plot aimed at degrading the Aryan soul. Once in power, he ordered modernist pain...tings and sculpture to be stripped from German galleries and publicly shamed in exhibitions of "degenerate art", alongside "insane" material from the Prinzhorn collection... By 1941, his regime had killed 70,000 psychiatric patients in an extermination campaign that would serve as the prototype from the Final Solution. This is the spellbinding, emotionally resonant story of those artists, of modernism's obsession with the schizophrenic realm, and Hitler's use of that connection to achieve his own genocidal ends"--Dust jacket flap.

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Subjects
Published
New York : Random House [2021]
Language
English
Main Author
Charlie English (author)
Edition
First US edition
Physical Description
xxi, 304 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color), maps ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9780525512059
  • Principal Artists
  • Maps
  • Preface
  • Part 1. Bildnerei
  • 1. The Man Who Jumped in the Canal
  • 2. The Hypnosis in the Wood
  • 3. A Meeting at Emmendingen
  • 4. Dangerous to Look At!
  • 5. The Schizophrenic Masters
  • 6. Adventures in No-Man's-Land
  • Part 2. Entartung
  • 7. Pleasant Little Pictures
  • 8. Dinner with the Bruckmanns
  • 9. Glimpses of a Transcendental World
  • 10. Art and Race
  • 11. A Cultural Revolution
  • Part 3. Bildersturm
  • 12. The Sculptor of Germany
  • 13. Cleansing the Temple of Art
  • 14. To Be German Means to Be Clear
  • 15. The Sacred and the Insane
  • 16. The Girl with the Blue Hair
  • Part 4. Euthanasie
  • 17. Foxes with White Coats
  • 18. Choking Angel
  • 19. You Will Ride on the Gray Bus
  • 20. In the Madhouse
  • 21. Landscapes of the Brain
  • Epilogue
  • Acknowledgments
  • Notes
  • Selected Bibliography
  • Index
Review by Booklist Review

Following the horrors of WWI, artists began creating work that expressed a growing sense of alienation and dehumanization. Young German psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn noticed that patients in his Heidelberg asylum created work similar in style and content to that of these artists. In 1922, he published a book that showed the patients' work, which was well-received by the public and caught the attention of avant-garde artists like Paul Klee. These so-called "degenerate" creations would later be reviled by Hitler as he strove to eradicate "debased" work. Although Hitler fashioned himself an artist, in truth he had little talent, but he inculcated the myth of sculpting a new, pure Germany. English's book tells two stories: One of humanity where mentally ill people were given a voice, and one of inhumanity, where Nazism strove to destroy creativity and human life. The end notes are fascinating for any history lover who wants to better understand Hitler's maniacal grip on Germany.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this fascinating account, journalist English (Book Smugglers of Timbuktu) unpacks Hitler's mad campaign against mentally ill artists. As early as 1941, Hitler had ordered the execution of 70,000 people, including a number of "artist-patients" suffering from schizophrenia. English focuses on a group of these artists--including the painter Franz Karl Bühler and seamstress Agnes Richter--who were under the "care" of psychiatrist and art historian Hans Prinzhorn (1886--1933) at the University of Heidelberg Psychiatric Clinic in 1919 and whose art was collected and eventually published in a book Prinzhorn released in 1922. English writes how Surrealists such as Salvador Dalí felt that the work of Prinzhorn's patients was a "direct expression of the human interior, untainted by bourgeois education and training." Yet years after the collection's release, these idiosyncratic artworks triggered Hitler's concerns about "proper" German art, playing into the "pseudoscientific theories about race, modernism, the concept of 'degeneracy'" on which he relied. Threatened by the "degenerate" art, Hitler demanded that it be destroyed, along with its creators. In musing on the definition of art, limitations of clinical psychology, and the rise of fascism, English's story feels strikingly relevant. While shedding new light on this piece of history, English also provides a cautionary tale for the future. Agent: Stuart Krichevsky, Stuart Krichevsky Literary. (Aug.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

In this history of Nazi Germany's persecution of artists with mental illness, English (The Storied City) focuses on artists in a Heidelberg psychiatric hospital starting in the Weimar era, including seamstress Agnes Richter and painter Franz Karl Bühler. Their psychiatrist, Hans Prinzhorn, was tasked with studying and collecting patients' artworks, like a jacket that Richter made and embroidered with many delicate lines of autobiographical text over her decades of institutionalization. These and other works were included in Prinzhorn's 1922 book Artistry of the Mentally Ill. English writes that the Weimar art world celebrated Heidelberg's Prinzhorn Collection and compared the art to the works of Van Gogh, while artists like Paul Klee and Salvador Dalí took inspiration from it. During the Third Reich, the collection attracted the attention of the Nazi Party, who confiscated several works for display and condemnation in the Reich's 1937 Degenerate Art Exhibition. By the early 1940s, the Nazis had murdered approximately 70,000 psychiatric hospital patients, including many artists represented in the Prinzhorn Collection. English sheds light on this often-overlooked aspect of Nazi Germany. VERDICT A moving account of art and mental illness in Nazi Germany. English's accessible, inviting writing will draw in readers interested in personal perspectives of the Third Reich as well as aficionados of art history.--Jacqueline Parascandola, Univ. of Pennsylvania

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

A powerful and disturbing portrait of a devastating chapter in the history of Nazi terror. In the fall of 1939, Hitler began a program to cleanse Germany of those he deemed "unworthy of life"--particularly individuals diagnosed with mental illness, epilepsy, "feeblemindedness," or alcoholism or engaging in criminal or anti-social behavior, however minor. Although an extensive sterilization project already addressed the problem of procreation, Hitler preferred killing, thereby saving the nation the cost of supporting "useless" individuals. Identified by eugenicist physicians and psychiatrists, the individuals were sent to a country mansion to be gassed with carbon monoxide. The euthanasia program had begun earlier with the killing of children identified by midwives as suffering from "certain conditions, including 'idiocy and mongolism' (especially cases involving blindness and deafness); microencephaly; severe or progressive hydrocephalus"; or physical "malformations of any kind"; some were condemned because their parents were Jewish. About 6,000 babies were murdered, either by injection or, often, starvation. As journalist and arts editor English reveals in an absorbing contribution to the horrific history of Nazi Germany, the program that began in 1939 was complicated by Hitler's fraught connection to art. Rejected for admission to Vienna's stodgy Academy of Fine Arts in 1907, Hitler portrayed himself as an artist for the rest of his life, and he saw art as a potent cultural force. Not surprisingly, he vilified modernist artists--such as Max Ernst, Paul Klee, and Egon Schiele--who exalted the irrational, primitive, and mad. As a prominent theme in modernist art, insanity found a champion in the psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn, a leading intellectual in the 1920s who saw striking works among his own mental patients. Collecting samples from asylums, he published Artistry of the Mentally Ill, a volume celebrated by modernists. Many of the artists Prinzhorn discovered--men Hitler damned as "degenerates and lunatics"--became victims in the euthanasia program, which the author trenchantly brings to life. A revelatory look at the "gangplank for the Holocaust." Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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. Excerpted from The Gallery of Miracles and Madness: Insanity, Modernism, and Hitler's War on Art by Charlie English All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.