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"

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the conclusion that Hitler, the failed Austrian watercolorist, saw the glorification of patients such as Wialfli 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.

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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),

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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 Nolde— 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 July 1937 is juxtaposed with Herzfelde’s expressionistic call for the art of the mentally ill to be

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recognized as valid.” The Nazis took the equation of artist = mad = Jew as a program of action. The museums were stripped of this “degenerate” art, some of which was sold at auction during 1939 in Lucerne and some of which was simply destroyed. The Nazis did not create the categories of “degenerate” and “healthy” art. It was the seventeenth- century critic Giovanni Pietro Bellori, in an attack on Vasari and Michelangelo, who first used Machiavelli's label “corruzione” to describe art. Friedrich Schlegel, the German Romantic critic, in his lectures on Greek poetry, labeled the works he did not favor as “degenerate.” But it was only in the nineteenth century, following the work of the medical anthropologist Bénédict-Augustin Morel (1857) and Max Nordau’s popular book Degeneration, that the medical category of the “pathological” was linked with the artistic category of the “degenerate.” By the time the Nazis used the term in their 1937 exhibition had become a fixture in any discussion of the avant-garde. They simply appropriated the contrast of “healthy” and “degenerate” and placed into each category those works of art that the audience, no matter what its aesthetic predilections, would have expected. The “healthy”

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(1857) and Max Nordau’s popular book Degeneration, tnat the meaical Category of tne patnuiugical was linked with the artistic category of the “degenerate.” By the time the Nazis used the term in their 1937 exhibition had become a fixture in any discussion of the avant-garde. They simply appropriated the contrast of “healthy” and “degenerate” and placed into each category those works of art that the audience, no matter what its aesthetic predilections, would have expected. The “healthy” was the traditional: the “degenerate” was the avant-garde. Each group wore its label with a certain smug satisfaction. Each group thus defined itself negatively.

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 plitical officer of the newly purged Heidelberg

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Gross were dismissed. Wiilmanns successor was Vall OCNNelUel, 42 miciiwer UI Ute ivaci party teva 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 Prinzhorn'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 hafore World War I which Schneider cites as his proof of the corruption of the avant-garde,

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healthy society. Again it is the metaphor of the mad as artists as articulated by Wieland Merztelde before World War | 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 Prinzhorn 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.

All sentences of the chapter "Race, Madness, and Politics" in the book "The Drawing Center's Drawing Paper, Volume 7: The Prinzhorn Collection" can be read here. The original publication see here, page 35 - 41.