International Association Against Psychiatric Assault
Spechtweg 1, 4125 Riehen, Switzerland
Spechtweg 1, 4125 Riehen, Switzerland
The association is a Human Rights organization that opposes psychiatric coercion and aims to abolish psychiatric coercive measures altogether, promoting the fundamental rights of self-determination, liberty, and human dignity.
Authoritarian revisionism in Heidelberg psychiatry:
the legacy of Hans Prinzhorn and Carl Schneider
How a psychiatrist's reaction to the Dada exhibitions in the First World War led to the Nazis' medically based mass murders in the Second World War. The true story of the infamous "Prinzhorn" collection at the Heidelberg University and the purpose it served.
Foreword
It is now one hundred years since Hans Prinzhorn published his book "Bildnerei der Geisteskranken" ("pictorial products of the mentally ill") in 1922. High time then, to take stock of the trail of destruction left by this concept of medicalising and therefore pathologising works of art. The hegemonic narrative is that insane "outsider art" was discovered by this German psychiatrist who collected the works in the Heidelberg University Hospital at which he worked and disclosed their existence by publishing this groundbreaking book that made these works and their influence known to the world.
When we came across a recent version of this cliché written by Guardian journalist Charlie English, we, the International Association Against Psychiatric Assault, decided that it was time to publish a different view of this event, based both on knowledge of the facts and its chronology and aimed at restoring human dignity to the victims.
We refute the mystification of "art and madness" by showing the significance of Hans Prinzhorn for the Nazi specific concept of "degenerate art". Prinzhorn was an ideological precursor of systematic medical mass murder (which in turn was an important waypost of the Shoah).
In 1916 during World War I, the first Dada exhibition took place in Switzerland. "The first great anti-art-movement, Dadaism or Dada, was a revolt against the culture and values that had caused the carnage of the First World War. The movement quickly evolved into an anarchist form of avant-garde art whose aim was to undermine the value system of the ruling organisation that had allowed the war to happen, including the art institution, which they saw as inseparable from the socio-political status quo."1 Several of the exhibitors, Hans Arp, Hans Richter, Walter Serner and Ferdinand Hardekopf contributed works while they were incarcerated in the Kilchberg psychiatric sanatorium.2 Of course, it can be argued that they were "mentally ill"3, but it should also be remembered that several of them were not Swiss citizens and their stay in a mental institution offered them asylum from having to return to their countries and certain forced conscription.
The background of the Dada exhibitions and perhaps other new art movements in the first years of the 20th century (Cubism, Futurism, Negro art, etc.4) is the reason for the reaction of authoritarian Heidelberg revisionism in the form of the Prinzhorn book, a reaction that defines the collection acquired in the psychiatric department of the University of Heidelberg. This is a diagnostic slander of the authors of the works in clinical-psychiatric terms. Prinzhorn wrote a letter in 1919 asking all institutions to send him works produced by their inmates. He thus took advantage of the common practice in psychiatric institutions throughout Germany, including Heidelberg, for psychiatrists to take possession of these works, who included them in the medical records as clinical evidence to support their psychiatric diagnoses. This was comparable to the looting by the colonial masters. Prinzhorn not only illegally collected5 these works (i.e. he did NOT buy/pay for the works) for a "museum of pathological art"6 or "his longed-for museum of pathological art"7, but also did NOT regard them as works of art. Charlie English writes about this, but it becomes even clearer in the clinical term Prinzhorn gives to the title of his book: "Bildnerei". It means something like "pictorial products".
The consequences:
A) The fact that the development of Dadaism had a profound impact on German art and poetry in the 1910s and 1920s allows only one conclusion: Dadaism was a real challenge to 20th century art and especially poetry, as it went against the traditional styles and values characteristic8 of traditional art and poetry in the social order, even if the Dadaists only experimented for about a decade. Nevertheless, Dadaist influences continued to be felt in the literary movements of the 20th century for a long time.
Against this demolition of traditional boundaries, Heidelberg University Psychiatry, with Hans Prinzhorn's collection "Bildnerei der Geisteskranken" ("pictorial products of the mentally ill"), medically labeled the artists as "mentally ill" based on psychiatric diagnoses, reinforcing the notion of pathologisation of art that originated at the end of 19th century. Art was thus no longer judged, or rather condemned, according to the work, but rather according to the supposedly "sick" mental state of the artists. We call this authoritarian revisionism. Heidelberg University is guilty of reacting to the liberation of art through Dadaism with this authoritarian revisionism, thus revising this groundbreaking step for the modernising art of the 20th century. The "cathedral of reason", the university and its psychiatry, initiated defining art as a disease by assigning it to the madness of the insane. This initiative continues to this day, as artists are still discriminated against as "artists who are different"9 if they come from or have already been interned in asylums and/or psychiatric institutions. Wilmanns and Prinzhorn intended to use the works of art which they had acquired in psychiatric institutions in bad faith, i.e. looted art, to establish the Psychopathological Museum in Heidelberg, which indeed was opened on 13 September 2001.10
"...if the Führer had not put a stop to it".11
B) This basic structure was further developed in the next step from 1933: "ill" became "degenerate" ("entartet"). In German, the word has a special meaning due to the formative part of the word: "art", which is often not understood in other languages.
In German the word „art“ is in a biological context a basic unit of classification and a taxonomic rank of an organism. By using the word „entartet“, it not only defines a human illness, but worse, excludes a person from being part of the human race. The moral taboo of murder had thus been broken for persons who are defamed in this way. It marked the ideological preparation of exterminationist exclusion, first through forced sterilisation and marriage bans, then from 1939/40 through murder in gas chambers, which was exported to the gas murder factories in occupied Poland in 1942. From 1941, the centrally organised murders were transferred directly to the psychiatric prisons and continued through death by starvation until 1948/49.12
C) The logical consequence of this radical exclusion was then openly expressed by Carl Schneider, Karl Wilmann's successor as chief physician of Heidelberg University Psychiatry. In his lecture published by the "Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten" (Archive for Psychiatry and Neurological Diseases) in 1939, he described the objective that modern art and the creators of this art should meet the same fate as he executed on the mentally ill shortly afterwards, i.e. their murder. As with the insane, he would select them beforehand: the painter Otto Dix was specified! Then he would have them murdered in the same way, in order to then dissect their brains and to be able to present them as exhibits to his students in the lecture hall of the university psychiatry department, exactly where today the so-called "Prinzhorn Collection" is displayed, mocking its victims and demonstrating the hegemony and diagnostic power of psychiatry.
D) This basic ideological structure was not broken after 1949, only the killing stopped. It continued unchanged in "Art and Delusion" and is still the basis of exhibitions such as the 2005 "Biennale meine Welt" at the Museum "Junge Kunst" in Frankfurt-Oder.13
That Charlie English actively collaborated with the Prinzhorn Collection for his book "The Gallery of Miracles and Madness" can then no longer come as a surprise, especially since he titles the fourth part of his book "Euthanasia". This very word was used in the language of the doctor-Nazis to cover up murder and we tirelessly demanded to stop using it in our publication on 17.2.2009. Our appeal:14
Help make the perfect Nazi murders imperfect by....
1) ...getting the Nazi jargon "euthanasia" (= physician-assisted suicide) banned from language use when it refers to the systematic medical mass murder from 1939 to 1949. The Nazis used the word "euthanasia" to cynically imply that it was the victims themselves who wished to die. Whenever you use this term, the victims are once again degraded, even in this present day. When you use this word for the systematic medical mass murder from 1939 to 1949, you help to reproduce the doctors' Nazi ideology, expressing solidarity with the perpetrators and participate in the attempt to cover up their guilt….
Conclusion:
We deplore the absence of a declaration of solidarity by the art world with the persecuted artists in psychiatry. Unfortunately, the art world has thus yet to take this step. In contrast, the Parisian students were exemplary when they demonstrated in solidarity against the expulsion of Daniel Cohn-Bendit by the De Gaulle government in 1968 with the slogan: We are all German Jews.
A similar reaction is missing, because Lucy Wasensteiner's 2019 book The Twentieth Century German Art Exhibition: Answering Degenerate Art in 1930s London15 about the 1939 London exhibition also precisely misses this point. Here, too, reference is made only to the "proper" art of the time, while the art of the alleged "insane and mentally ill" continues to go unmentioned, a discrimination, despite being threatened with murder and manslaughter, or being persecuted, imprisoned and mistreated.
As a way to address this ongoing discrimination and finally disprove the myth of art and madness, we, IAAPA, propose an exhibition in a prominent location only of works of art by authors who remain anonymous, a wild mixture of authors who were suppressed in coercive psychiatry and by psychiatrists. For either modernism, like Dada, breaks with the boundaries of conventionality and normality in art, including anti-art, and abolishes these boundaries, or it clings to the idea that "mental illness" can show itself in "pictorial products" („Geisteskrankheit“ in "Bildnerei") - Prinzhorn's choice of words - that excludes from art the works by those imprisoned and slandered in the psychiatric wards.
And of course, the collection of looted art in the lecture hall of the murderers in Heidelberg must finally be freed from the medical clutches of psychiatry and transferred to the museum "Haus des Eigensinns" until it can be handed over to its rightful owners, the heirs of the authors.16
© Hagai Aviel, Tel Aviv, Israel, avielhagai@gmail.com
© René Talbot, Berlin, Germany, r.talbot@berlin.de
Also published here in the Mad in America blog:
https://www.madinamerica.com/2022/03/looting-outsider-art-psychiatry
--------------------------------------------------------------------
1 https://www.daskreativeuniversum.de/dadaismus-dada-merkmale
2 https://www.sanatorium-kilchberg.ch/site/assets/files/1603/rueckblick_dada_ich_und_ueber_m_ich_23_06_16.pdf
3 By his own admission, Hans Richter was grateful for the rest of his life to be medically slandered with the psychiatric illness "juvenile imbecility"!
4 All the art movements mentioned several times in Carl Schneider's lecture, for more details see footnote No. 11.
5 Expert opinion Prof Peter Raue: https://www.dissidentart.de/eigensinn/ungekuerztergutachten.htm
6 This is what Charlie English quotes in The Gallery of Miracles and Madness on page 25 from Hans Prinzhorn's circular letter in June 1919
7 The The Gallery of Miracles and Madness by Charlie English, page 43
8 See, for example, Kurt Schwitters "Sonata in Urlauten": https://www.dissidentenfunk.de/archiv/s0504/audio/lo/t04.mp3
also: https://youtu.be/l8OzOUGe5f8 and https://youtu.be/1qLKu3R8no4
and Dadaism and German Poetry essay https://www.proessay.com/dadaism-and-german-poetry-essay
9 See video of the opening of the exhibition "Bennale my world" on 13.3.2005: https://youtu.be/0lMauyX51z4?t=1636
10 https://web.archive.org/web/20170509215044/http://www.autonomes-zentrum.org/ai/prinzhornprotest.html
11 Quote from "Entartete Kunst und Irrenkunst" (Degenerate Art and Mad Art), the speech by Carl Schneider, head of the Heidelberg University Psychiatric Clinic, who succeeded Wilmanns as head of the Psychiatric Clinic in Heidelberg and whose collection was headed by Hans Prinzhorn, held on 19 March 1939, published in Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten, page 164, 1939 - Springer https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01814830
In the speech he refers, among other things, to the paintings by Otto Dix, but also to texts by Schwitters. Degenerate artists and mentally ill artists have in common, he says, that they are exempt from work and that their work is promoted by communists and Jews, and this endangers the Nordic true artists. Then he reports on his notorious findings from work therapy (for which he is also so revered by Klaus Dörner in Klassische Texte neu gelesen, in Psychiatrische Praxis 13 (1986), pp. 112-114: Carl Schneider, "the theorist who, in terms of scientific theory, could hardly be surpassed in the 20th century..."). One can get the schizophrenic artist to produce normal work through appropriate medical care - by destroying his works and leading him to a normal profession. The full text of the speech is documented here: https://ww.iaapa.de/schneiders_speech.pdf
12 Heinz Faulstich, Starvation in Psychiatry 1914-1949
13 See video of the opening of the exhibition: https://youtu.be/0lMauyX51z4?t=1636
14 English: https://www.iaapa.de/8_demands.htm German: https://www.iaapa.de/8_demands.htm#dt
15 https://www.amazon.com/Twentieth-Exhibition-Routledge-Research-Exhibitions/dp/1032094605
16 See the 7th demand: http://www.iaapa.de/8_demands.htm
the legacy of Hans Prinzhorn and Carl Schneider
How a psychiatrist's reaction to the Dada exhibitions in the First World War led to the Nazis' medically based mass murders in the Second World War. The true story of the infamous "Prinzhorn" collection at the Heidelberg University and the purpose it served.
Foreword
It is now one hundred years since Hans Prinzhorn published his book "Bildnerei der Geisteskranken" ("pictorial products of the mentally ill") in 1922. High time then, to take stock of the trail of destruction left by this concept of medicalising and therefore pathologising works of art. The hegemonic narrative is that insane "outsider art" was discovered by this German psychiatrist who collected the works in the Heidelberg University Hospital at which he worked and disclosed their existence by publishing this groundbreaking book that made these works and their influence known to the world.
When we came across a recent version of this cliché written by Guardian journalist Charlie English, we, the International Association Against Psychiatric Assault, decided that it was time to publish a different view of this event, based both on knowledge of the facts and its chronology and aimed at restoring human dignity to the victims.
We refute the mystification of "art and madness" by showing the significance of Hans Prinzhorn for the Nazi specific concept of "degenerate art". Prinzhorn was an ideological precursor of systematic medical mass murder (which in turn was an important waypost of the Shoah).
In 1916 during World War I, the first Dada exhibition took place in Switzerland. "The first great anti-art-movement, Dadaism or Dada, was a revolt against the culture and values that had caused the carnage of the First World War. The movement quickly evolved into an anarchist form of avant-garde art whose aim was to undermine the value system of the ruling organisation that had allowed the war to happen, including the art institution, which they saw as inseparable from the socio-political status quo."1 Several of the exhibitors, Hans Arp, Hans Richter, Walter Serner and Ferdinand Hardekopf contributed works while they were incarcerated in the Kilchberg psychiatric sanatorium.2 Of course, it can be argued that they were "mentally ill"3, but it should also be remembered that several of them were not Swiss citizens and their stay in a mental institution offered them asylum from having to return to their countries and certain forced conscription.
The background of the Dada exhibitions and perhaps other new art movements in the first years of the 20th century (Cubism, Futurism, Negro art, etc.4) is the reason for the reaction of authoritarian Heidelberg revisionism in the form of the Prinzhorn book, a reaction that defines the collection acquired in the psychiatric department of the University of Heidelberg. This is a diagnostic slander of the authors of the works in clinical-psychiatric terms. Prinzhorn wrote a letter in 1919 asking all institutions to send him works produced by their inmates. He thus took advantage of the common practice in psychiatric institutions throughout Germany, including Heidelberg, for psychiatrists to take possession of these works, who included them in the medical records as clinical evidence to support their psychiatric diagnoses. This was comparable to the looting by the colonial masters. Prinzhorn not only illegally collected5 these works (i.e. he did NOT buy/pay for the works) for a "museum of pathological art"6 or "his longed-for museum of pathological art"7, but also did NOT regard them as works of art. Charlie English writes about this, but it becomes even clearer in the clinical term Prinzhorn gives to the title of his book: "Bildnerei". It means something like "pictorial products".
The consequences:
A) The fact that the development of Dadaism had a profound impact on German art and poetry in the 1910s and 1920s allows only one conclusion: Dadaism was a real challenge to 20th century art and especially poetry, as it went against the traditional styles and values characteristic8 of traditional art and poetry in the social order, even if the Dadaists only experimented for about a decade. Nevertheless, Dadaist influences continued to be felt in the literary movements of the 20th century for a long time.
Against this demolition of traditional boundaries, Heidelberg University Psychiatry, with Hans Prinzhorn's collection "Bildnerei der Geisteskranken" ("pictorial products of the mentally ill"), medically labeled the artists as "mentally ill" based on psychiatric diagnoses, reinforcing the notion of pathologisation of art that originated at the end of 19th century. Art was thus no longer judged, or rather condemned, according to the work, but rather according to the supposedly "sick" mental state of the artists. We call this authoritarian revisionism. Heidelberg University is guilty of reacting to the liberation of art through Dadaism with this authoritarian revisionism, thus revising this groundbreaking step for the modernising art of the 20th century. The "cathedral of reason", the university and its psychiatry, initiated defining art as a disease by assigning it to the madness of the insane. This initiative continues to this day, as artists are still discriminated against as "artists who are different"9 if they come from or have already been interned in asylums and/or psychiatric institutions. Wilmanns and Prinzhorn intended to use the works of art which they had acquired in psychiatric institutions in bad faith, i.e. looted art, to establish the Psychopathological Museum in Heidelberg, which indeed was opened on 13 September 2001.10
"...if the Führer had not put a stop to it".11
B) This basic structure was further developed in the next step from 1933: "ill" became "degenerate" ("entartet"). In German, the word has a special meaning due to the formative part of the word: "art", which is often not understood in other languages.
In German the word „art“ is in a biological context a basic unit of classification and a taxonomic rank of an organism. By using the word „entartet“, it not only defines a human illness, but worse, excludes a person from being part of the human race. The moral taboo of murder had thus been broken for persons who are defamed in this way. It marked the ideological preparation of exterminationist exclusion, first through forced sterilisation and marriage bans, then from 1939/40 through murder in gas chambers, which was exported to the gas murder factories in occupied Poland in 1942. From 1941, the centrally organised murders were transferred directly to the psychiatric prisons and continued through death by starvation until 1948/49.12
C) The logical consequence of this radical exclusion was then openly expressed by Carl Schneider, Karl Wilmann's successor as chief physician of Heidelberg University Psychiatry. In his lecture published by the "Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten" (Archive for Psychiatry and Neurological Diseases) in 1939, he described the objective that modern art and the creators of this art should meet the same fate as he executed on the mentally ill shortly afterwards, i.e. their murder. As with the insane, he would select them beforehand: the painter Otto Dix was specified! Then he would have them murdered in the same way, in order to then dissect their brains and to be able to present them as exhibits to his students in the lecture hall of the university psychiatry department, exactly where today the so-called "Prinzhorn Collection" is displayed, mocking its victims and demonstrating the hegemony and diagnostic power of psychiatry.
D) This basic ideological structure was not broken after 1949, only the killing stopped. It continued unchanged in "Art and Delusion" and is still the basis of exhibitions such as the 2005 "Biennale meine Welt" at the Museum "Junge Kunst" in Frankfurt-Oder.13
That Charlie English actively collaborated with the Prinzhorn Collection for his book "The Gallery of Miracles and Madness" can then no longer come as a surprise, especially since he titles the fourth part of his book "Euthanasia". This very word was used in the language of the doctor-Nazis to cover up murder and we tirelessly demanded to stop using it in our publication on 17.2.2009. Our appeal:14
Help make the perfect Nazi murders imperfect by....
1) ...getting the Nazi jargon "euthanasia" (= physician-assisted suicide) banned from language use when it refers to the systematic medical mass murder from 1939 to 1949. The Nazis used the word "euthanasia" to cynically imply that it was the victims themselves who wished to die. Whenever you use this term, the victims are once again degraded, even in this present day. When you use this word for the systematic medical mass murder from 1939 to 1949, you help to reproduce the doctors' Nazi ideology, expressing solidarity with the perpetrators and participate in the attempt to cover up their guilt….
Conclusion:
We deplore the absence of a declaration of solidarity by the art world with the persecuted artists in psychiatry. Unfortunately, the art world has thus yet to take this step. In contrast, the Parisian students were exemplary when they demonstrated in solidarity against the expulsion of Daniel Cohn-Bendit by the De Gaulle government in 1968 with the slogan: We are all German Jews.
A similar reaction is missing, because Lucy Wasensteiner's 2019 book The Twentieth Century German Art Exhibition: Answering Degenerate Art in 1930s London15 about the 1939 London exhibition also precisely misses this point. Here, too, reference is made only to the "proper" art of the time, while the art of the alleged "insane and mentally ill" continues to go unmentioned, a discrimination, despite being threatened with murder and manslaughter, or being persecuted, imprisoned and mistreated.
As a way to address this ongoing discrimination and finally disprove the myth of art and madness, we, IAAPA, propose an exhibition in a prominent location only of works of art by authors who remain anonymous, a wild mixture of authors who were suppressed in coercive psychiatry and by psychiatrists. For either modernism, like Dada, breaks with the boundaries of conventionality and normality in art, including anti-art, and abolishes these boundaries, or it clings to the idea that "mental illness" can show itself in "pictorial products" („Geisteskrankheit“ in "Bildnerei") - Prinzhorn's choice of words - that excludes from art the works by those imprisoned and slandered in the psychiatric wards.
And of course, the collection of looted art in the lecture hall of the murderers in Heidelberg must finally be freed from the medical clutches of psychiatry and transferred to the museum "Haus des Eigensinns" until it can be handed over to its rightful owners, the heirs of the authors.16
© Hagai Aviel, Tel Aviv, Israel, avielhagai@gmail.com
© René Talbot, Berlin, Germany, r.talbot@berlin.de
Also published here in the Mad in America blog:
https://www.madinamerica.com/2022/03/looting-outsider-art-psychiatry
--------------------------------------------------------------------
1 https://www.daskreativeuniversum.de/dadaismus-dada-merkmale
2 https://www.sanatorium-kilchberg.ch/site/assets/files/1603/rueckblick_dada_ich_und_ueber_m_ich_23_06_16.pdf
3 By his own admission, Hans Richter was grateful for the rest of his life to be medically slandered with the psychiatric illness "juvenile imbecility"!
4 All the art movements mentioned several times in Carl Schneider's lecture, for more details see footnote No. 11.
5 Expert opinion Prof Peter Raue: https://www.dissidentart.de/eigensinn/ungekuerztergutachten.htm
6 This is what Charlie English quotes in The Gallery of Miracles and Madness on page 25 from Hans Prinzhorn's circular letter in June 1919
7 The The Gallery of Miracles and Madness by Charlie English, page 43
8 See, for example, Kurt Schwitters "Sonata in Urlauten": https://www.dissidentenfunk.de/archiv/s0504/audio/lo/t04.mp3
also: https://youtu.be/l8OzOUGe5f8 and https://youtu.be/1qLKu3R8no4
and Dadaism and German Poetry essay https://www.proessay.com/dadaism-and-german-poetry-essay
9 See video of the opening of the exhibition "Bennale my world" on 13.3.2005: https://youtu.be/0lMauyX51z4?t=1636
10 https://web.archive.org/web/20170509215044/http://www.autonomes-zentrum.org/ai/prinzhornprotest.html
11 Quote from "Entartete Kunst und Irrenkunst" (Degenerate Art and Mad Art), the speech by Carl Schneider, head of the Heidelberg University Psychiatric Clinic, who succeeded Wilmanns as head of the Psychiatric Clinic in Heidelberg and whose collection was headed by Hans Prinzhorn, held on 19 March 1939, published in Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten, page 164, 1939 - Springer https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF01814830
In the speech he refers, among other things, to the paintings by Otto Dix, but also to texts by Schwitters. Degenerate artists and mentally ill artists have in common, he says, that they are exempt from work and that their work is promoted by communists and Jews, and this endangers the Nordic true artists. Then he reports on his notorious findings from work therapy (for which he is also so revered by Klaus Dörner in Klassische Texte neu gelesen, in Psychiatrische Praxis 13 (1986), pp. 112-114: Carl Schneider, "the theorist who, in terms of scientific theory, could hardly be surpassed in the 20th century..."). One can get the schizophrenic artist to produce normal work through appropriate medical care - by destroying his works and leading him to a normal profession. The full text of the speech is documented here: https://ww.iaapa.de/schneiders_speech.pdf
12 Heinz Faulstich, Starvation in Psychiatry 1914-1949
13 See video of the opening of the exhibition: https://youtu.be/0lMauyX51z4?t=1636
14 English: https://www.iaapa.de/8_demands.htm German: https://www.iaapa.de/8_demands.htm#dt
15 https://www.amazon.com/Twentieth-Exhibition-Routledge-Research-Exhibitions/dp/1032094605
16 See the 7th demand: http://www.iaapa.de/8_demands.htm
