Art Brut manipulated by Ideologies: The Prinzhorn/Heidelberg Collection in the NS (National Socialist/Nazi) Era

Hans Prinzhorn • The Collection in the NS Era
The Heidelberg Collection in the NS Era


The National Socialists were not the first to use the artistic works of hospital patients as a vehicle for their ideologies. Already in the early Twenties the Hamburg psychiatrist and clinic director Professor Wilhelm Weygandt collected "the art of the insane" for use as defamatory evidence. This was the period after the lost war, in which people planned the annihilation of psychiatric patients in their minds, for they were regarded as "mentally dead" and thus as useless "empty human shells" (Binding/Hoche). Contrary to Hans Prinzhorn's courageous step of attributing not only aesthetic but also existential verity to such works and their authors, Weygandt interpreted everything that was unaccustomed, confused or deformed in these pictures as signs of hopeless "insanity". And he collected this "art of the insane" with the purpose of declaring the artists of the avant-garde -- the futurists, expressionists, Dadaists and members of the Bauhaus -- as degenerate, demented or schizophrenic. His proof for this was their outward resemblance. Astonishingly, none of his colleagues contradicted him.
After the seizure of power by the National Socialists, this system of comparing pictures so as to cast the avant-garde in a pathological light was used not only in publications, but also exhibitions: the first occasion, according to Christian Zuschlag, was in Erlangen, 1933, when drawings by children and the mentally ill were hung next to selected modern works from the Mannheimer Kunsthalle ("Mannheim's Chamber of Horrors"). Similarly, after the opening of the "Degenerate Art" exhibition in Munich, 1937, plans were made to heighten the propaganda effect at the future stages of the touring exhibition by making such pathologising comparisons.
The director of the Heidelberg Psychiatric Department, Karl Wilmanns, who had lent his categorical support to the collection, was discharged in 1933, not least because he had underlined the psychogenic origin of Hitler's temporary blindness during the First World War. His successor, Carl Schneider, played a key part in the Action T 4 as senior researcher. The action was responsible for the systematic extermination of the patients who had been stamped as "incurable". He soon recognised the practical side of the Collection, and in 1938 complied with the request of the Central Reich Propaganda Office for loans for the "Degenerate Art" exhibition. The concept that Weygandt had devise - without any objection from his colleagues - now received the official seal of approval from art politics. The aim was to place bothersome artists in the same mental framework that was being set up for euthanasia, and in that way to "dispose" of them.
What criteria were used for chosing the pictures from Heidelberg? Schneider and the former Austrian law student and SA man, Hartmut Pistauer, who was an expert and the temporary director of the vilifying exhibition, had already agreed in autumn 1937 on a selection of pictures that related in either form or content to pictures by modern artists. These allowed them to prove - empirically, as it were - the madness of the artists. According to the visual rhetoric of the newly printed "Exhibition Guide", the modern artists were "mentally ill" or degenerate; their works were compared with four from the Heidelberg Collection, and made to appear equally "crazy" - if not even "crazier" and even more "inept".
It is virtually impossible now to reconstruct the actual hanging of the "insane" and "degenerate" artworks, despite the lively response of the press at the time. Likewise the actual exhibits are largely unknown. All we know are the details of a preliminary selection that was sent to Berlin, but which was not required there and soon after returned (along with a number of folders of work from the Psychiatric Hospital in Munich), accompanied by a partial list of returns dating from June 1938. The seventy or so works that were returned show that evidently the main intention was to contrast the "insane" with the modern artists and demonstrate their superior "ability". Thus for instance the numerous seascapes by Clemens von Oertzen ("Orth"), with their strong lines done in rich watercolours, and the ambitious oil paintings of Else Blankenhorn were planned as counter-examples to the "barbaric" techniques of the modern movement. The pious "Crucifixion in the Park" by Franz Bühler ("Pohl") was presumably meant to contrast with the blasphemies of the Expressionists (such as Max Beckmann's "Descent from the Cross" in his portfolio "Faces" from 1919). Much the same applies to the miniatures of Hermann Mebes, who produced a fine medley of symbols with his brush strokes. The pencil drawing Inv. No. 244 from a series of wire-like, tangled linear forms may have been intended to contrast with Paul Klee's "Zwitschermaschine" [Chirping Machine].
A great variety of portraits were chosen to damn their "degenerate" counterparts. In some cases they accord with the academic canon, in others they are rendered simplistically, as in Else Blankenhorn's somewhat expressionist portrait of a woman. At least 17 works were taken from the oeuvre of the former draughtsman Joseph Schneller ("Sell"), whose precision works could be "enlisted" for many uses. These included several drawings from what he termed his "sadistic life work", as well as collages, landscapes, townscapes and architectural views. The rich assortment chosen from Schneller's works indicates, incidentally, that the disparaging intentions transformed unexpectedly into an appreciation of the works. Also included in the preliminary selection were works by the wood carver Karl Grenzel ("Brendel") and the architect and painter Paul Goesch, three of whose pictures were confiscated shortly beforehand at the Mannheimer Kunsthalle in 1937.
While numerous artists were fleeing abroad, the "Degenerate Art" exhibition enjoyed a successful tour around the Reich. Only in recent years have the twelve stages of the exhibition been researched and documented: Berlin, Leipzig, Düsseldorf, Salzburg, Hamburg, Stettin, Weimar, Vienna, Frankfurt/Main, Chemnitz, Waldenburg, Halle. The last was April 1941. By and large the concept of the exhibition met with great approval from the populace, for it touched on traditional fears of modern art. The exhibition "concentrated", as Walter Grasskamp writes, those "fears and reservations which have long since characterised the reaction of the middle classes to modern art - if in a more civil but by no means more conciliatory manner. These reactions have remained alive ... because anxieties about modern art were not a specific syndrome of National Socialism, but simply acted then as a spectacular parade ground for its propaganda."
In a talk by Carl Schneider requested for the Düsseldorf stage of the tour in 1937, on the occasion of its first anniversary, the psychiatrist attempted to give the reasons behind the project. In the final analysis, his rambling expositions boiled down to the demand for the annihilation of all that is compulsive and uncontrollable. This is already made quite clear by the somewhat subtle violence of his psychiatric approach. The doctor attributed, for instance, the "successful cure" of a "schizophrenic artist" who had "already produced pathological works" to the following measures: "We (did) the opposite to what ... Lombroso, Prinzhorn and others had done. Instead of saving the woman's morbid works we destroyed them, and guided her while she went about her normal, self-allotted tasks."
Schneider bases the "biological" kinship between "degenerate" artists and "madmen" on the notion that only a person who is biologically related to his model could possibly copy it. He furnishes his proof simply by finding similarities between artistic products and the "unequivocal" signs of pathology: "anxiety pleasure", "horror", "voluptuousness", "chaos", "grotesque faces", "scrawls", "revulsion", "greed", "lack of inner contour", "indulgence" - all compulsive urges that are to be eradicated in order that the "faithful, industrious, disciplined, decent, reasoning, self-sacrificing, sincere and honourable person" may come into being.
The Collection remained untouched during the period of National Socialism, for it was useful illustrative material.
Some of the artists whose works were represented in the Collection were murdered: the wrought ironwork specialist Franz Karl Bühler ("Pohl") was placed on the first convoy from the psychiatric hospital in Emmending to Grafeneck in April 1940. Paul Goesch, the architect and painter who prior to his death was interned in Teupitz, was murdered in Hartheim an der Donau. Josef Grebing, businessman from Magdeburg, was transferred from Wiesloch to an unnamed institute and killed. The jobber Johann Faulhaber from Mannheim, also interned in Wiesloch, was likewise transferred and killed.
Their drawings, letters and writings, mostly dating from the early Twenties, have been preserved by the Prinzhorn Collection as a memory trace. They allow life stories to be vividly reconstructed, to produce the first remembrances of the individual "euthanised" patients. Yet remembrance is not simply a matter of interpreting historical trails and keeping watch over them, but also of perceiving present-day outrages without side-stepping them, looking away and remaining silent (Fritz Stern). The Collection is committed to this critical, remembering stance.

Bettina Brand-Claussen
Literatur:
Bettina Brand-Claussen, Das "Museum für pahtologische Kunst" in Heidelberg. Von den Anfängen bis 1945, in: Wahnsinnige Schönheit, Prinzhorn-Sammlung, Ausstellungskatalog Osnabrück, Kulturhistorisches Museum, Heidelberg 1997, S. 6-23.

Dies., Prinzhorns "Bildnerei der Geisteskranken". Ein spätexpressionistisches Manifest, in: Vision und Revision einer Entdeckung, hg. von Bettina Brand-Claussen und Inge Jádi, Katalog zur Eröffnungsausstellung, Heidelberg, Sammlung Prinzhorn, 2001, S. 11-31.

Dies., Häßlich, falsch, krank. "Irrenkunst" und "irre" Kunst zwischen Wilhelm Weygandt und Carl Schneider, in: Psychiatrische Forschung und NS-"Euthanasie", Beiträge zu einer Gedenkveranstaltung an der Psychiatrischen Universitätsklinik Heidelberg, hg. von Christoph Mundt/ Gerrit Hohendorf/ Maike Rotzoll, Heidelberg 2001, S. 265-320.

Maike Rotzoll/ Bettina Brand-Claussen/ Gerrit Hohendorf, Carl Schneider, die Bildersammlung, die Künstler und der Mord, in: Wahn Welt Bild, Die Sammlung Prinzhorn - Beiträge zur Mueumseröffnung, hg. von Thomas Fuchs/ Bettina Brand-Claussen/ Christoph Mundt/ Inge Jádi, Berlin u.a. 2002 (= Heidelberger Jahrbücher, 2002/XLVI), S. 41-64.