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Citing Sander L. Gilman from the chapter "Race, Madness, and Politics" in the book "The Drawing Center's Drawing Paper, Volume 7: The Prinzhorn Collection" The avant-garde's use of the outsider as a mask was a commonplace by the 1920s. In Germany, however, there was a parallel development in the creation of a mask for the quintessential outsider in that society, the Jew. As has been discussed, the theories of degeneration advanced by the French psychiatrist Bénédict-Augustin Morel, honed on Darwin's view of the development of species, led to the labeling of many somatic pathologies and psychopathologies as “degenerate.” They were explained by the “decline” of the group afflicted because of its inability to compete successfully in society. This was, of course, a means of labeling perceived differences in outsider groups as both pathological and immutable. Thus the idea of inherent differences among races is slowly replaced in the nineteenth century by the idea that it is somatic characteristics that differentiate these groups. In other words: "We are healthy; they are sick." As we have seen, many different diseases were ascribed to the Jews, but the label that most effectively summarized the perception of the Jews in Germany was "crazy." Belief that the Jew was generally predisposed to mental illness became a commonplace throughout the early twentieth century. This myth, unlike the self-constructed myth of the artist as mad, had a very specific set of consequences in the real world. First, the Jews themselves became convinced of the slur's validity because it was embedded in a scientific (and therefore reliable) dogma. Second, there was now a plausible rationale for isolating Jews from society. The ghetto was no more, but the asylum could serve as a surrogate ghetto in which to put these "crazy" Jews. Here the myth had a pragmatic consequence in associating two outsiders, the insane and the Jew. Such views are not on the fringe of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century medicine. They stand at the center of "liberal" German science. Krafft-Ebing, after all, represented the left-liberal political tradition within German and American medicine. But the association of Jews and madness became so powerful that it defined the perception of the Jew within yet another context: the role that the Jew was seen to play in the world of the arts. For many complicated reasons, German Jews were perceived as dominating the artistic and literary avant-garde in Germany from the close of the nineteenth century.” Part of the reason for this was indeed the presence of highly visible German- Jewish artists (or artists labeled by the anti-Semitic press as Jewish) such as the impressionist Max Liebermann. There were, however, equally well-known non-Jewish impressionist such as Wilhelm von Uhde, and it is clear that the perception of the avant-garde as predominantly “Jewish” was partially owing to the cultural outsider status shared by the Jew and the avant-garde. The irony of course is that many Jews, for example the conductor Hermann Levi, played a major role in the conservative aesthetic tradition of Wilhelminian Germany, yet conservatism was never perceived as “Jewish.” When the expressionists began to adopt their role as “mad,” the association of the Jew, the artist, and the mad was complete. What was initially a pose or theory became part of the political program of German anti-Semitism. In 1924, in the Landsberg prison in Bavaria, the leader of a failed coup d'état against the young Weimar Republic dictated his political philosophy. Adolf Hitler added Bolshevism to the equation of Jews, artists, and the mad since the revolution in Russia was seen by the German right wing as the most recent success of the international Jewish conspiracy: Even before the turn of the century an element began to intrude into our art which up to that time could be regarded as entirely foreign and unknown. To be sure, even in earlier times there were occasional aberrations of taste, but such cases were rather artistic derailments, to which posterity could attribute at least a certain historical value, than products no longer of an artistic degeneration, but of a spiritual degeneration that had reached the point of destroying the spirit. In them the political collapse. which later became more visible, was culturally indicated. Art Bolshevism is the only possible cultural form and spiritual expression of Bolshevism as a whole. Anyone to whom this seems strange need only subject the art of the happily Bolshevized states to an examination, and, to his horror, he will be confronted by the morbid excrescences of insane and degenerate men, with which, since the turn of the century, we have become familiar under the collective concepts of cubism and dadaism, as the official and recognized art of those states. Even in the short period of the Bavarian Republic of Councils, this phenomenon appeared. Even here it could be scen that all the official posters, propagandist drawings in the newspapers, etc., bore the imprint. not only of political but of cultural decay. No more than a political collapse of the present magnitude would have been conceivable sixty years ago was a cultural collapse such as began to manifest itself in futurist and cubist works since 1900 thinkable. Sixty years ago an exhibition of so-called dadaistic “experiences” would have seemed simply impossible and its organizers would have ended up in the madhouse, while today they even preside over art associations. This plague could not appear at that time, because neither would public opinion have tolerated it nor the state calmly look on. For it is the business of the state, in other words, of its leaders, to prevent a people from being driven into the arms of spiritual madness. And this is where such a development would some day inevitably end. For on the day when this type of art really corresponded to the generat view of things, one of the gravest transformations of humanity would have occurred: the regressive development of the human mind would have begun and the end would be scarcely conceivable. Once we pass the development of our cultural life in the last twenty-five years in review from this standpoint. we shall be horrified to see how far we are already engaged in this regression. Everywhere we encounter seeds which represent the beginnings of parasitic growths which must sooner or later be the ruin of our culture. In them, too, we can recognize the symptoms of decay of a slowly rotting world. Woe to the peoples who can no longer master this disease!“ Hitler thus enters and shapes the dialogue concerning the artist as outsider. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that Hitler, the failed Austrian watercolorist, saw the glorification of patients such as Wolfli or indeed the entire interest in the art of the insane as proof of the “crazy” direction the avant-garde had taken. While there is no direct evidence that Hitler read Prinzhorn’s work, he would have been exposed to its central thesis through reviews and polemics published in a wide range of sources, including the newspapers of the far right. Hans Prinzhorn’s work, published two years before Hitler completed his own, could well have served as a catalyst for these views. The irony is that Prinzhorn's book reflects the political conservatism associated with his mentors, Ludwig Klages, the philosopher, and the conservative Munich art historian Conrad Fielder. Both stressed the “intuitive” nature of creativity and perception; both tied their theories to the politics of the day. For example, Prinzhorn stresses the “tribal” identity of each of his patients. August Klotz, for example, is described as having the typical persona of the Swabian. Like many conservatives, Prinzhorn flirted with the Nazis. Indeed, because of his death in June of 1933, it is quite impossible to judge what his long-range response to them would have been. Prinzhorn’s support of the Nazi state, like that of many of the intellectual conservatives who, at first, rejoiced at its “stability,” might well not have been welcomed by the Nazis in the long run. Had Mein Kampf remained merely the political platform of a group of cranks, the interest that Hitler showed in the state of German art would have become an unimportant footnote to any reading of the historical context of Prinzhorn’s work. But on 30 January 1933 Hitler was asked to form a new government, and by the end of that spring he had turned Germany into a Nazi state. In the mid-1930s there was a purge of Jews from all state and academic functions, including the few Jewish museum directors and teachers at the various universities and art academies. Gallery directors began to arrange shows that contrasted the “degenerate” art of the “Jewish” avant-garde with the “healthy” art of German conservatism. In Nuremberg the director of the city art museum arranged a show he called the “horror chamber of art.”" In Chemnitz, where the director of the museum was fired by the Nazis, Dr. Wilhelm Rudiger arranged a similar show under the title: "Art Which Does Not Speak to Our Soul." But these regional shows were but previews for the massive exhibition "Degenerate 'Art"' staged by Joseph Goebbels's Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda on 30 June 1937. Adolf Ziegler put together a show of 750 objects in rooms in the anthropological museum in Munich (officially designated "the city of the movement"). Among the artists "exhibited" were Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (25 paintings), Emil Nolde (26 paintings), Otto Muller (13 paintings), Franz Marc, and Lionel Feininger, as well as Mondrian, Kandinsky, Lissitzky, and Marc Chagall. What is striking about this exhibition is that it employed a basically ethnological approach. It did not consider the paintings "works of art" but rather representative of the atavistic nature of the Jewish avant-garde. (Even though many of the artist represented—such as NoIde—were not Jewish, their role in the avant-garde enabled the Nazis to label them as such.) The catalogue accompanying the exhibit used the comparative approach to illustrate the degeneracy represented by the works of art. African masks were used to show the "racial" identity of the avant-garde as identical to blacks. But most important, the art of the avant-garde is related to the art of the mentally ill. And the prime witnesses called for the prosecution were Adolf Hitler and Wieland Herzfelde. Hitler's programmatic statement at the opening of the "Hall of German Art" in Munich on 19 ul 1937 is "uxta osed with Herzfclde's ex ressionistic call for the art of the mentally ill to be recoznized as valid. The
Nazis did not create the categories of “degenerate” and
“healthy” art. It was the seventeenth- Hans Prinzhorn had officially left the Heidelberg clinic in 1921 even before the publication of his work on the artistic production of the mentally ill. He was following up the interest of the Heidelberg psychiatrists in psychotropic drugs such as mescaline, when he contracted an illness in the field which led to his premature death in June 1933. His collection, however, remained in the Heidelberg clinic (or at least in its basement). Wilmanns was stripped of his directorship of the clinic in 1933 because of his outspoken anti-Nazi views, and Jewish psychiatrists such as Mayer-Gross were dismissed. Wilmann's successor was Carl Schneider, a member of the Nazi party from 1932 and, after the Nazi seizure of power, the political officer of the newly purged Heidelberg professoriat. Schneider was invited by Goebbels to speak at the opening of the exhibit of "Degenerate 'Art'." His speech, though it was not delivered at the time, was published under the title "Degenerate 'Art' and the Art of the Insane."" Schneider's crudely political statement reified the association of the art of the avant-garde and the art of the insane by simply dismissing Prinzhom's ambiguous but careful use of this material and returning to a pre-Bleulerian view of the "picture salad." Schneider's position was a clear reflection of his understanding of the implications of the Heidelberg approach to the mentally ill. Jaspers had been stripped of his position in 1937, by which time all of the followers of the "Jewish science" of psychoanalysis were exiled from the German scholarly world. Schneider was distancing himself from an area that had come to be labeled as "Jewish." He saw the entire attempt to understand the art of the insane, beginning with the "Jew Lombroso," as part of the Jewish corruption of Western art and science, a process that culminated in Freud and Adler's attempt to explain art as pathological rather than as the healthy expression of a healthy society. Again it is the metaphor of the mad as artists as articulated by Wieland Herzfelde before World War I which Schneider cites as his proof of the corruption of the avant-garde, a corruption exploited by those who wish to destroy the body politic, the Jews, and the Communists. Schneider argued against the definition of art as form, a definition that Prinzhom borrowed from Klages, and stressed the question of whether the art of the mentally ill would ever be perceived as having "successful" form or whether it is a parody of "healthy" art. Schneider denies the insane, like the Jew and the black, any true aesthetic sensibility. The new perception of the insane as unable to communicate on any level permitted the Nazis to begin their first experiment in mass murder, the "euthanasia" of the inmates of the German asylums." Schneider served as one of the most important experts in the sterilization and murder of the mentally ill until the intercession of the Catholic Church in the person of Cardinal von Galen shortly after the program had begun in 1939. The movement from killing the insane to killing Jews was but a short step, because the interchangeability of the mad and the Jews had long been established in the popular mind of Germany.
This histoneat context for Hans Prinzhorn study of the art of the mentally ill spans a series of radical changes in the political, social, and intellectual history of Germany. That study must be read in the light of its context as well as its reception within this web. The flaws that Prinzhorn himself saw in his approach and the veiled political use to which the popularization of the art of the insane was put both colored the structuring of his work. In addition, the shift in the medical and popular understanding of madness, its acceptance as an appropriate alter ego for the artist in Wilhelminian and Weimar Germany, figured in the frightening use to which this material was eventually put. Prinzhorn did not live to see the horror of Nazi Germany and the use that was made of his project, but he certainly sensed the possibility inherent in examining art labeled as the products of the mentally ill. This is one of the reasons he calls his study an examination of the Bildnerei, artistic production, rather than the Kunst, art, of the mentally ill. The Nazis, however, reduced all of the avant-garde to Bildnerei, demoting it from art. Their answer to the question of the creativity of the insane was to deny it, reducing the insane to a subhuman level, denying them the status of members of a "cultural entity," and eventually murdering them. Jews too are seen in this light, as degenerates whose pathology is evident in the madness of their Bildnerei. The supposed inability to create works of art thus assumes a major function in defining the outsider, a position it had held since Hegel's mid-nineteenth-century discussion of the nature of African art. The difference is, of course, that by the 1940s direct measures were taken to excise the "disease" from the "body politic."
Notes:
1. See R. D. Laing, The Divided Self: An Existential Study in Sanity
and Madness (London: Tavistock. 1960), as well as Robert |