Grotesque Visions: The Science of Berlin Dada 9781501369902, 9781501369933, 9781501369926

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New Directions in German Studies

Vol. 32

Series Editor:

IMKE MEYER

Professor of Germanic Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago

Editorial Board: KATHERINE ARENS Professor of Germanic Studies, University of Texas at Austin ROSWITHA BURWICK Distinguished Chair of Modern Foreign Languages Emerita, Scripps College RICHARD ELDRIDGE Charles and Harriett Cox McDowell Professor of Philosophy, Swarthmore College ERIKA FISCHER-LICHTE Professor Emerita of Theater Studies, Freie Universität Berlin CATRIONA MACLEOD Frank Curtis Springer and Gertrude Melcher Springer Professor in the College and the Department of Germanic Studies, University of Chicago STEPHAN SCHINDLER Professor of German and Chair, University of South Florida HEIDI SCHLIPPHACKE Associate Professor of Germanic Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago ANDREW J. WEBBER Professor of Modern German and Comparative Culture, Cambridge University SILKE-MARIA WEINECK Professor of German and Comparative Literature, University of Michigan

DAVID WELLBERY LeRoy T. and Margaret Deffenbaugh Carlson University Professor, University of Chicago SABINE WILKE Joff Hanauer Distinguished Professor for Western Civilization and Professor of German, University of Washington JOHN ZILCOSKY Professor of German and Comparative Literature, University of Toronto

Volumes in the series: 1. Improvisation as Art: Conceptual Challenges, Historical Perspectives by Edgar Landgraf

10. The Poet as Phenomenologist: Rilke and the New Poems by Luke Fischer

2. The German Pícaro and Modernity: Between Underdog and Shape-Shifter by Bernhard Malkmus

11. The Laughter of the Thracian Woman: A Protohistory of Theory by Hans Blumenberg, translated by Spencer Hawkins

3. Citation and Precedent: Conjunctions and Disjunctions of German Law and Literature by Thomas O. Beebee 4. Beyond Discontent: “Sublimation” from Goethe to Lacan by Eckart Goebel 5. From Kafka to Sebald: Modernism and Narrative Form edited by Sabine Wilke 6. Image in Outline: Reading Lou Andreas-Salomé by Gisela Brinker-Gabler 7. Out of Place: German Realism, Displacement, and Modernity by John B. Lyon 8. Thomas Mann in English: A Study in Literary Translation by David Horton 9. The Tragedy of Fatherhood: King Laius and the Politics of Paternity in the West by Silke-Maria Weineck

12. Roma Voices in the GermanSpeaking World by Lorely French 13. Vienna’s Dreams of Europe: Culture and Identity beyond the Nation-State by Katherine Arens 14. Thomas Mann and Shakespeare: Something Rich and Strange edited by Tobias Döring and Ewan Fernie 15. Goethe’s Families of the Heart by Susan E. Gustafson 16. German Aesthetics: Fundamental Concepts from Baumgarten to Adorno edited by J. D. Mininger and Jason Michael Peck 17. Figures of Natality: Reading the Political in the Age of Goethe by Joseph D. O’Neil

18. Readings in the Anthropocene: The Environmental Humanities, German Studies, and Beyond edited by Sabine Wilke and Japhet Johnstone 19. Building Socialism: Architecture and Urbanism in East German Literature, 1955–1973 by Curtis Swope 20. Ghostwriting: W. G. Sebald’s Poetics of History by Richard T. Gray 21. Stereotype and Destiny in Arthur Schnitzler’s Prose: Five PsychoSociological Readings by Marie Kolkenbrock

25. The Lever as Instrument of Reason: Technological Constructions of Knowledge around 1800 by Jocelyn Holland 26. The Fontane Workshop: Manufacturing Realism in the Industrial Age of Print by Petra McGillen 27. Gender, Collaboration, and Authorship in German Culture: Literary Joint Ventures, 1750–1850 edited by Laura Deiulio and John B. Lyon 28. Kafka’s Stereoscopes: The Political Function of a Literary Style by Isak Winkel Holm

22. Sissi’s World: The Empress Elisabeth in Memory and Myth edited by Maura E. Hametz and Heidi Schlipphacke

29. Ambiguous Aggression in German Realism and Beyond: Flirtation, Passive Aggression, Domestic Violence by Barbara N. Nagel

23. Posthumanism in the Age of Humanism: Mind, Matter, and the Life Sciences after Kant edited by Edgar Landgraf, Gabriel Trop, and Leif Weatherby

30. Thomas Bernhard’s Afterlives edited by Stephen Dowden, Gregor Thuswaldner, and Olaf Berwald

24. Staging West German Democracy: Governmental PR Films and the Democratic Imaginary, 1953–1963 by Jan Uelzmann

31. Modernism in Trieste: The Habsburg Mediterranean and the Literary Invention of Europe, 1870–1945 by Salvatore Pappalardo 32. Grotesque Visions: The Science of Berlin Dada by Thomas O. Haakenson

v

Grotesque Visions The Science of Berlin Dada

Thomas O. Haakenson

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2021 Copyright © Thomas O. Haakenson, 2021 Cover design by Andrea Federle-Bucsi Cover image: Hannah Höch, Da Dandy (1919), © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on pp. 220–223 constitute an extension of this copyright page. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any thirdparty websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Haakenson, Thomas O., 1972- author. Title: Grotesque visions / by Thomas O. Haakenson. Description: New York, NY : Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. | Series: New directions in German studies ; vol. 32 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Grotesque Visions focuses on the radical avant-garde interventions of Salomo Friedländer (aka Mynona), Til Brugman, and Hannah Höch as they challenged the questionable practices and evidentiary claims of late-19th- and early-20th-century science. Demonstrating the often excessive measures that pathologists, anthropologists, sexologists, and medical professionals went to present their research in a seemingly unambiguous way, this volume shows how Friedländer/Mynona, Brugman, Höch, and other Berlin-based artists used the artistic grotesque to criticize, satirize, and subvert a variety of forms of supposed scientific objectivity. The volume concludes by examining the exhibition Grotesk!: 130 Jahre Kunst der Frechheit/ Comic Grotesque: Wit and Mockery in German Arts, 1870-1940. In contrast to the ahistorical and amorphous concept informing the exhibition, Thomas O. Haakenson reveals a unique deployment of the artistic grotesque that targeted specific established and emerging scientific discourses at the turn of the last fin-de-siècle”– Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021004292 (print) | LCCN 2021004293 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501369902 (hardback) | ISBN 9781501369919 (ebook) | ISBN 9781501369926 (pdf) Subjects: LCSH: Grotesque in art. | Grotesque in literature. | Science in art. | Science in literature. | Avant-garde (Aesthetics)–Germany–Berlin–History. | German literature–20th century–History and criticism. | Literature, Experimental–Germany–Berlin–History and criticism. Classification: LCC NX650.G7 H33 2021 (print) | LCC NX650.G7 (ebook) | DDC 700/.415–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021004292 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021004293 ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-6990-2 ePDF: 978-1-5013-6992-6 eBook: 978-1-5013-6991-9 Series: New Directions in German Studies Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

This book is dedicated to my parents, Lila and Travis Haakenson, and to my uncle and aunt, Eugene and Hiede Haakenson. Without them, Grotesque Visions would not have been possible.

ix

Contents

List of Figures A Note on Style and Sources 1 The Return of the Grotesque

x xii 1

2 The Science of Berlin Dada: Salomo Friedländer, Walter Benjamin, and the Grotesque

23

3 The Architectonics of Public Science: “Learning to See” in Rudolf Virchow’s Museum of Pathology

57

4 Sexuality ad oculos: Sigmund Freud and Magnus Hirschfeld Meet Til Brugman’s “Celluloid Children”

89

5 The Optics of Evidence: Photography and Vision in Early Anthropology115 6 Visual Objectivity Meets Impossible Object: Hannah Höch “From an Ethnographic Museum” Photomontages

147

7 Learning to See Grotesquely

179

Coda: Toward a Critique of the Dogma of Visuality

197

Acknowledgments Bibliography Index

220 224 255

Figures

3.1 An exhibition room in the Museum of Pathology at the Charité Hospital in Berlin, circa 1899 58 3.2 A marble bust of Rudolf Virchow in the exhibition rooms at the Charité Hospital in Berlin 60 3.3 Floor plans for the main floor of the Museum of Pathology 73 3.4 Plans of one of the floors of the Museum showing the exact locations of specimens 75 3.5 An aerial view of the location of the Charité Hospital. The Institute of Pathology is located near the middleleft side of the image and is designated by the label “Pathologisches Institut.” The Museum of Pathology is part of this complex and is located directly below the word “Alexander,” designating the Alexander shoreline (“Alexander Ufer”) 76 4.1 A male figure from Magnus Hirschfeld’s Geschlechtsübergänge supposedly displaying the secondary sex characteristics of a female. The flower in the figure’s left hand was drawn in after the photograph was taken, presumably to emphasize his intermediary status 96 5.1 The “Straight-Holder” or “Face Rest” 116 5.2 An example of “bad” posture caused by a poorly designed school desk 126 5.3 An example of “good” posture enabled by a correctly designed school desk 127 5.4 A sample page from Carl W. Dammann’s AnthropologischEthnologisches Album in Photographien129 5.5 The camera and carrying case developed by Gustav Fritsch 131 5.6 Gustav Fritsch’s photographic measuring techniques, as used in an “example of a physiognomic photograph of the German race” 133 5.7 An example of Fritsch’s photographic measuring technique featured in Neumayer’s text. The two sketches demonstrating the technique on the left are accompanied



6.1 6.2

6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6 6.7 6.8 7.1 7.2 7.3

Figures xi by a device on the right to hold the photographic subject in place 134 Hannah Höch, Mutter (“Mother”) (1930) 154 John Heartfield, Zwangslieferantin von Menschenmaterial Nur Mut! Der Staat braucht Arbeitslose und Soldaten! (“Female Forced Supplier of Human-Material Take Courage! The State Needs Unemployed and Soldiers!”) (c. 1930)156 Hannah Höch, Die Süße (“The Sweet One”) (c. 1926) 160 Hannah Höch, Fremde Schönheit (“Strange Beauty”) (1929) 162 Hannah Höch, Denkmal I (“Monument I”) (1924) 163 Hannah Höch, Mischling (“Mixed-Race”) (1924) 166 Hannah Höch, Liebe im Busch (“Love in the Bush”) (1925) 167 Hannah Höch, Trauer (“Sadness”) (1925) 172 Hannah Höch, Denkmal II: Eitelkeit (“Monument II: Vanity”)180 Hannah Höch, Da Dandy (“There [is the] Dandy”) (1919) 192 Hannah Höch, Grotesk (“Grotesque”) (1963) 194

A Note on Style and Sources

English translations are used whenever possible in Grotesque Visions: The Science of Berlin Dada. The original German text is included in notes on occasion because the German is key to the argument made in the text. Any errors in translation or transcription are attributable to the author of Grotesque Visions. Salomo Friedländer’s collected papers at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach, Germany, are cited frequently. These unpublished sources are noted using the abbreviation DLM. The manuscript reference numbers in the notes and in the bibliography correspond to the numbers used in the catalog of the Deutsches Literaturarchiv.

One The Return of the Grotesque

The scenes in Germany would be disturbing to anyone familiar with modern history: angry crowds protesting museums, galleries, and cultural institutions. For many, such demonstrations are undoubtedly reminiscent of the National Socialists’ efforts to eradicate what was labeled “degenerate” music and art. The most unbelievable aspect of the more recent campaign, coordinated by a group calling itself Bürger-warnen-Bürger (“Citizens-Warning-Citizens”), is the fact that these protests were occurring in Frankfurt and in Munich at the dawn of the twenty-first century, not in Nazi Germany. What had caused such outrage and indignation in a unified nation supposedly beyond the reaches of fascist politics? On the surface at least, a display of offensive art led to the formation of protest groups and the outrage of concerned citizens. The exhibit that caused this recent animosity was Grotesk!: 130 Jahre Kunst der Frechheit (“Grotesque!: 130 Years of the Art of Insolence”), which appeared in Germany at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt and the Haus der Kunst in Munich in the spring and summer months of 2003.1 Curators billed the event as a history of a so-called other modernity, an alternative modernity that revealed “seldom observed relationships between the emergence of cabaret and the further development of visual art in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.”2 There was more than a superficial similarity between earlier campaigns in Germany to eliminate undesirable art and the protests against Grotesk!. For one, for the exhibition’s run in Munich curators chose a ­location with historical significance. The Haus der Kunst had been in proximity to the National Socialists’ traveling Entartete Kunst



1 2

Pamela Kort, ed., Grotesk! 130 Jahre Kunst der Frechheit (Munich: Prestel, 2003). Max Hollein and Chris Dercon, “Vorwort,” Grotesk! 130 Jahre Kunst der Frechheit, ed. Pamela Kort (Munich: Prestel, 2003) 7.

2

Grotesque Visions

(“Degenerate Art”) exhibit in 1937.3 It was during its tenure at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, however, where Grotesk! led to demonstrations against such supposedly monstrous, bizarre, and abnormal art. The exhibit, like its Entartete Kunst precursor, apparently had ignited public concern about aesthetic standards and artistic displays in national cultural centers. Individuals from Citizens-Warning-Citizens protested the opening of Grotesk! with posters that read “Nicht so SCHIRN” (“Not so Schirn”) and “Schirn führt irre!!” (“The Schirn misleads!!”). Such announcements played on the German homonyms “schön” (“beautiful”) and the name of the Frankfurt exhibition hall, the Schirn. On the message board, visitors could read postings from supposedly concerned citizens claiming that the art in Grotesk! was “ent-artet” (“de-generate”). Yet something seemed a little off about these twenty-first-century protests. An internet message board for the exhibit included commentaries from “Anonymous Bosch,” a comic reference to the painter Hieronymus Bosch, and “G.W. Göte,” a phonetic play on the name of the famous German writer and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.4 Soon enough the jig was up. Curators of Grotesk! were forced to reveal several weeks after the protests and postings began that the public outrage had been faked; the demonstrations were staged performances. The fake demonstrations, the supposed public outrage, and the use of language similar to that employed in the Nazi’s “degenerate art” campaign received surprisingly limited attention in the German media.5 Several journalists and critics suggested that the lack of interest



The Nazi guide to the exhibition included an important diacritical difference from the event’s title. The guide was titled Entartete “Kunst (“Degenerate ‘Art’”). The distinction was used to emphasize the fact that visitors were part of a select group, a group that understood that what was on display was not really “art.” The use of such competing versions of reality was key to Nazi propaganda. For an excellent discussion of these issues, as well as detailed reproductions of the exhibition and the exhibition guide, see Stephanie Barron, ed., “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (Los Angeles; New York: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Harry N. Abrams, 1991). 4 “Gaestebuch,” Buerger-Warnen-Buerger, April 10, 2003 . The initial comment on “de-generate art” (“ent-artete Kunst”) was posted by “Theobold Tiger” on April 4, 2003 and read: “Endlich finden Menschen in Deutschland wieder den Mut vor solcher, ich möchte schon sagen, ENT-ARTETER Kunst zu warnen. Ich unterstütze diese Mutigen!!! Bleibt nur zu hoffen, dass möglichst viele mündige Bürger dadurch angesprochen werden … (und sich dann selbst überzeugen, was alles so als KUNST bezeichnet wird.” 5 Examples of the media coverage of the protests include: Benedikt Erenz, “Anna Blume forever: Brav! Frankfurs Kunsthalle Schirn versucht sich an der ‘Kunst der Frechheit,’” Die Zeit. April 3, 2003: 38; Ralf Chistofori, “Es ist der Preußen schönstes Ziel, den Russenbär zu lausen,” Der Tagesspiegel. April 6, 3



The Return of the Grotesque 3

was a result of the absence of a coherent definition of the grotesque, one that would support such antics. Scholars such as Geoffrey Galt Harpham already had described the grotesque’s subversive function as a “final obstacle to a universal and internally consistent theory of aesthetics.”6 The organizers of Grotesk! responded in kind, seeking to celebrate the artistic style as indicative of an alternative modernity, one that responded simply with laughter to the threats posed by modern rationality and systematization. Despite this claim, the organizers did not explain the way in which this alternative modernity could function to produce critical responses, to avoid co-option for nefarious means. Put in other words, the curators failed to explain the critical function that this supposed otherness enabled: what was Grotesk! trying to do? Hanne Bergius’s contribution to the exhibition catalog, an essay titled “Dada Grotesk” (“Dada Grotesque”), is exemplary of the exhibit’s narrow, one-dimensional understanding of the grotesque’s dialectical aspirations. Dada, of course, was the short-lived avant-garde art movement founded in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1916, and ending around 1923 in Paris. But Dada’s migration to Berlin and its brief life there as well, resulted in some of the most iconic and most directly political expressions of this confrontational artistic explosion. So it is no surprise that Bergius takes as her example the Dadaists in pre-Nazi Berlin; she suggests artists affiliated with the group were trying to develop a new form of existence through the use of ironic play. As the actual exhibit demonstrated and Bergius’s essay unintentionally revealed however, the use of irony as a critical device was a key but underexamined aspect of situating the artistic grotesque as “the other of modernity.” Bergius suggests that members of the avant-garde Berlin Dada group used the grotesque to demonstrate a postmodern potential in modern art, celebrating irony as itself the telos of this unique form of aesthetic engagement: “Irony holds the multiple outbursts of ambivalent conflicts in abeyance and makes possible new grotesque mixed-forms and hybrid-processes of the arts.”7 While irony might be described as a



6



7

2003 ; Gottfried Knapp, “Von Bock zu Böcklin: Die Ausstellung, Grotesk’ in Frankfurt sucht nach der ‘Kunst der Frechheit’,” Süddeutsche Zeitung n.d. April 2003: 13; Sandra Trauner, “Frankfurter Schirn zeigt Ausstellung über Groteskes in der Kunst,” Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger, March 26, 2003 , April 10, 2003. Geoffrey G. Harpham, On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982) 35. The German reads as follows: “Ironie hält vielfach die aufbrechenden Ambivalenzkonflikte in der Schwebe und ermöglicht neue groteske Mischformen und Hybridverfahren der Künste” (Bergius 2003: 147). See also Bergius, “Dada Grotesk” 72.

4

Grotesque Visions

certain form of artistic creativity, it also involves elements of critical and reflective engagement. Irony refers to an incongruity between expectations and reality, a rhetorical or aesthetic device in which an initial appeal to the acculturated expectations of the viewing or reading subject turns into a mockery of these expectations. Normally, these expectations function to make the unpredictable world appear predictable.8 Irony can reveal, however, the tenuousness of the expectations and the false promise of predictability. As a result, irony can be an important way in which to identify, parody, and subvert acculturated expectations. In her essay, Bergius suggests that irony enables the artistic grotesque, but unfortunately does not go far enough. She fails to explain the grotesque’s critical function in significant detail. The critical potential of the grotesque employed by several figures in Grotesk!, as well as other artists and intellectuals not discussed in the exhibit, depends upon the use of irony contextually and historically. While the grotesque may assume the appearance of detached playfulness, such detachment remains, as the early twentieth-century artist Salomo Friedländer suggests, “only a sharp means by which to scare us out of the ugliness that we already hold for beautiful, true, holy, and pure because we have become used to it.”9 By ignoring the grotesque’s constitutive conditions of production, dissemination, and distribution, critics and theorists fail to appreciate the efficacy and the reflective power of the artistic grotesque. Irony too easily spills over into the superficial or the offensive rather than a demand that the viewer or reader critically examine the constitutive conditions of the grotesque, as well as her or his acculturated expectations, of her or his own judgments. In the only reference to the grotesque in his Kritik der Urteilskraft (“Critique of Judgment”), Immanuel Kant warns of a danger to understanding related to the grotesque. This warning takes the form of a mere aside:

“Irony,” Collins English Dictionary, ed. Marian Makins (Glasgow: Harper-­Collins, 1991) 771–2. Irony is defined as follows: “1. the humorous or mildly sarcastic use of words to imply the opposite of what they normally mean. 2. an instance of this, used to draw attention to some incongruity or irrationality. 3. incongruity between what is expected to be and what actually is, or a situation or result showing such incongruity …” Emphases added. 9 Mynona [a.k.a. Salomo Friedländer], “Grotesk. Beitrag zur Mappe ‘Köpfe’ von Werner Heuser,” Der Querschnitt (1921): 55. The German reads as follows: “es ist ihm nur ein scharfes Mittel, um uns auch noch aus dem Hässlichen aufzuschrecken, das wir deswegen schon für schön, wahr, heilig und rein halten, weil wir uns daran gewöhnt haben.” 8



The Return of the Grotesque 5 … where only a free play of our presentational powers is to be sustained (though under condition that the understanding suffers no offense), as in the case of pleasure gardens, room decoration, all sorts of tasteful utensils, and so on, any regularity that has an air of constraint is [to be] avoided as much as possible. That is why the English taste in gardens, or the baroque taste in furniture, carries the imagination’s freedom very far, even to the verge of the grotesque, because it is precisely in this divorce from any constraint of a rule that the case is posited where taste can show its greatest perfection in designs made by the imagination.10

Kant encourages the “free play” of the imagination in order to improve upon “presentational powers,” the ability to make the empirical world comprehensible to a thinking subject. At the same time, however, he cautions against a certain type of “free play” of these presentational powers. He suggests that the free play of the subject’s presentational powers is to be allowed, even encouraged, as long as that the subject’s understanding (Verstand) suffers “no offense.” The subject reaches the limit of their presentational powers when confronted with the grotesque. But why would Kant go to such lengths to encourage and simultaneously to limit the freedom of the imagination? What is the threat contained in the subject’s presentational powers and manifested in the subject’s encounter at “the verge of the grotesque”? The imagination represents for Kant a danger zone. If the subject is able to conjure up fanciful images, these images must in turn validate the “greatest perfection” of taste. That is, these fanciful images must prove the universal rule of the judgment of taste that is the focus of Kant’s study. An imagination carried away with itself, as it were, too engrossed in free play to recognize the function such presentations play in preparing empirical sense perceptions for understanding, threatens to undermine the universal applicability of the judgment of taste and,

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1987) 93. The German text reads as follows: “wo nur ein freies Spiel der Vorstellungskräfte (doch unter der Bedingung, daß der Verstand dabei keinen Anstoß leide) unterhalten werden soll, in Lustgärten, Stubenverzierung, allerlei geschmackvollem Geräte u. dgl., wird die Regelmäßigkeit, die sich als Zwang ankündigt, so viel möglich vermieden; daher der englische Geschmack in Gärten, der Barockgeschmack an Möbeln, die Freiheit der Einbildungskraft wohl eher bis zur Annäherung zum Grotesken treibt, und in dieser Absonderung von allem Zwange der Regel eben den Fall setzt, wo der Geschmack in Entwürfen der Einbildungskraft seine größte Vollkommenheit zeigen kann.” Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam, 2001) 131.

10

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Grotesque Visions

with it, the critical system of which it is an integral part. It is at the junction where the imagination’s “free play” reaches the limits of acceptability that Kant situates the grotesque, a style that appears just beyond the limit, beyond “the verge” of the acceptable forms that imagination’s freedom might take. Kant’s late eighteenth-century attempt to explain aesthetic judgments in light of a desire for universal truths continues to inform our modern-day discussions of art and culture. Kant suggests that the imagination prepares objects of sense perception for interpretation by the mind, a process that was for him key to understanding how individual claims about the beauty or sublimity of the objects of perception could be made into claims recognized universally as true. The approach to aesthetics championed by Kant, an approach dependent upon a rational and transcendental subject, has proven to be quite difficult to realize in quotidian practice, however. Like early twentieth-century critical theorists such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and Siegfried Kracauer, who paid homage to Kant’s aesthetic theory, the Berlin-based, German-Jewish philosopher Salomo Friedländer too was interested in the grotesque. But for Friedländer, this interest had to do with its humorous style as well as with the grotesque as a critical artistic practice. In a story titled “Kant und die sieben Narren” (“Kant and the Seven Fools”), Friedländer subtly reveals his critical use of the grotesque as well as his devotion to Kantian philosophy. In the tale, Friedländer takes to task numerous intellectuals: Arthur Schopenhauer, Wilhelm Wundt, Henri Bergson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and others. These individuals are not referenced strictly for the content of their scholarship. Rather, these figures are symbols of what Friedländer saw as the errors of philosophy and empirical science. In a particularly telling excerpt from the story, Kant, a quasi-detective on a mission to find and to reveal incorrect metaphysical theories, challenges Nietzsche’s understanding of a nature supposedly free of reason. In order to ask Nietzsche for an explanation, however, Kant requires the physical intervention of nearby guards for reasons described in a passage from the text worth quoting at length: “I would like a word,” Kant interrupted [Nietzsche’s] grandiose soliloquy. But the guards had to obtain Nietzsche’s silence quite arduously by force; they removed large pieces of fat from Nietzsche’s ears, which he had stopped up in order not to hear any opposing claims. Kant was now able to cross-examine Nietzsche, who finally was silenced and could listen, in the following manner: … “You employ nature neither as vulgar as the materialists and the naturalists from Democritus to Feuerbach;



The Return of the Grotesque 7 nor as theologically-aesthetic as do Spinoza and Goethe, whose Dionysism, to use your vocabulary, was mixed with reason; but on the contrary naked as the devil, the anti-Christ, correct, and whom you honor as your god—have I understood?” “Perfectly,” Nietzsche mumbled, seeming to admire [Kant’s intelligence]. “Unfortunately,” pitied Kant, “you have, colleague, you have not understood me. I, my dearest, take what you call the ascetic ideal, reason, the truth, by the scruff of the neck and stick it, the lofty Platonic nose, into the middle of sensorial experience. And it is not only something in theory, but on the contrary also practically-morally by which I force the heavenly ethic to become earthly science and not least to force it into intelligibility until for the first time the sensorial quota would be fulfilled. Reason exists completely empty without nature, as you supposedly experience it, but nature remains fully blind without reason. Without reason you could not make your Dionysus out of nature. Devalue the rational ideas ins naturale, then you must accentuate [nature] rationally, if you take away the accent from reason. If one uses Christianrational and hyper-rational powers in order to assume [those] of nature, of life, and of the body instead of the soul and of God, then one is as a result coerced, by the existing devil if Dionysus should come from him, to bring reason as well. Or else you make an error in your own field. If only you had understood me!”11

11

Salomo Friedländer, “Kant und die Sieben Narren,” Unpublished essay, DLM (69.867), 13–14. Emphasis added. The original German reads as follows: “Ich bitte ums Wort,” unterbrach Kant diese grandiose Suada. Aber die Wärter mussten Nietzsches Schweigen erst mühselig erzwingen; sie entfernten riesige Stücke Fette aus Nietzsches Ohren, die er sich verstopft hatte, um keine Gegenreden zu hören. Kant aber ließ sich jetzt, wo Nietzsche endlich verstummt war und zuhören konnte, folgendermaßen vernehmen: … ‘Sie nehmen sich der Natur nicht so vulgär an wie die Materialisten und Naturalisten von Demokrit bis Feuerbach; auch nicht so theologisch-ästhetisch wie Spinoza und Goethe, deren Dionysismus, um Ihre Vokabel zu gebrauchen, noch rationalistisch versetzt war; sondern nackt wie der Teufel, der Antichrist, nicht wahr, und den werten Sie zu Ihrem Gotte um – hab’ ich verstanden?’ ‘Perfekt,’ murmelte Nietzsche und schien bewundert. ‘Leider,’ bedauerte Kant, ‘haben Sie, Kollege, mich nicht verstanden. Ich, mein sehr Lieber, nahm das, was Sie das asketische Ideal nennen, die Vernunft, die Wahrheit beim Wickel und steckte ihr die hochvornehme platonische Nase mitten in die sinnliche Erfahrung hinein. Und zwar nicht etwa nur in der Theorie, sondern auch praktisch-moralisch, indem ich die himmelnde Ethik zwang, irdische Wissenschaft zu werden und nicht eher ins Intelligible zu dringen, als bis zuerst einmal das sensuale [sic] Pensum erledigt wäre. Mag Vernunft ohne Natur, wie Sie es erlebten, völlig hohl sein; so bleibt Natur ohne Vernunft vollends blind. Ohne Vernunft können Sie aus der Natur

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Replicating a strategy described in the Greek myth of Odysseus, Nietzsche stuffs his ears in Friedländer’s story in order not to hear. For Odysseus’s oarsmen, the lure of the music of the Sirens is a mortal threat, an aural seduction so strong that it would compel them to heed their bodies instead of their minds, to be unable to overcome through reason the sensorial temptation to row toward the Sirens and into deadly rocks. To prevent such a catastrophe, Odysseus commands the oarsmen to stuff their ears with wax.12 For the character of Nietzsche in Friedländer’s tale, however, the relation of corporeal seduction and rational mastery of nature is inverted. Nietzsche has stuffed his ears to avoid hearing a rational explanation that would force him to recognize the errors in his own understanding of the cognitive foundations of sense perception, to avoid hearing Kant’s claim that Nietzsche too easily conflates subjective experience and objective nature. What does Friedländer’s inversion of the oft-repeated myth of Odysseus reveal today? For one, it certainly shows Friedländer’s concern with Nietzsche’s supposed oversights as well as his devotion to Kantian philosophy. It also demonstrates the continued need to think dialectically. Any attempt to abandon reason under the auspices of embracing “real nature” fails to recognize the perceptual acculturation that influences such engagements. Friedländer turned to the artistic tradition of the grotesque in his writings and in dialogue with fellow Berlin Dadaists to address these concerns. The grotesque, it turns out, was a popular point of reference in early twentieth-century Germany. The term “grotesque,” associated since the sixteenth century with the artistic combination of natural forms and monstrous figures, is often used today as a synonym for the ludicrous or the bizarre. A surprising number of intellectuals writing about the grotesque in the early twentieth century, however, did so by focusing on the figure of Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin, of course, was the star of a number of Groteskfilme,

nicht ihre Dionysien machen. Werten Sie das rationale Ideal ins naturale um, so müssen Sie die der Ratio geraubte Glorie der Natur verleihen, Sie müssen die Natur rational akzentuieren, wenn Sie der Ratio den Akzent wegnehmen. Wenn man die christlich-rationalen und hyperrationalen Kräfte verwendet, um sich der Natur, des Lebens und Leibes anstatt der Seele und Gottes anzunehmen, dann ist man konsequenterweise genötigt, dem bisherigen Teufel, wenn aus ihm Dionysos werden soll, auch Vernunft beizubringen. Sonst irren Sie auf Ihrem eigenen Gebiete. Hätten Sie mich nur verstanden!’ 12 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “Excursus I: Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment,” Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1994) 43–80. Horkheimer and Adorno formulate Odysseus’s strategy in the context of a “deception in sacrifice”: “The self rescues itself from dissolution into blind nature, whose claim is constantly proclaimed in sacrifice. But it is still imprisoned in the natural context as an organism that tries to assert itself against the organic” (54).



The Return of the Grotesque 9

and these “grotesque films” or so-called slapstick comedies, proved commercially and critically successful in Europe and the United States. Individuals such as Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Theodor W. Adorno embraced Chaplin’s juxtaposition of humor and estrangement as a critique of modernity. These men, and other intellectuals as well, saw in the grotesque style something quite different from the merely amusing or the humorously strange. The grotesque, it seems, could be not only comical but also critical. Lesser known among intellectuals of the period is Friedländer, who took Mynona, an inversion of the German word for anonymous (i.e., Anonym), as his pseudonym in order to disassociate himself from his philosophical and artistic work. Friedländer described himself as a synthesis of Immanuel Kant, the philosopher, and Chaplin, the clown. He proved successful in separating himself from his scholarly and artistic work, but not due to the reasons he intended. Rather, his writings remain relatively ignored and, to a great extent, unpublished. Despite his relative obscurity, Friedländer inspired numerous artists in early twentieth-century Berlin. He and his Berlin Dada colleagues utilized the grotesque as a critique not simply of modernity, but more specifically of the empirical sciences associated with modern rationality. Friedländer’s effort to use the artistic style of the grotesque to engage modern science was no simple laughing matter, at least insofar as laughter as criticism could be juxtaposed to amusement as mere complacency. Two of the most widely referenced studies of the grotesque in the twentieth century are those of Mikhail Bakhtin and Wolfgang Kayser. Bakhtin and Kayser emphasize particular manifestations of the style, the comical and demonic aspects respectively. They do so in order to highlight not only the way in which the grotesque is used for political purposes or toward epistemologically transformative ends but also to reveal that the grotesque must be understood in historically specific contexts. Bakhtin refers to what he calls “grotesque realism” in his 1965 study Rabelais and His World.13 The concept of grotesque realism represents Bakhtin’s effort to recover the critical potential of François Rabelais’s works and is based upon individual participation in religious carnival, the celebration before the fasting associated with Lent.14 Bakhtin, of course, is motivated not simply by religious issues but rather by a concern with his own historical and political context—namely, the influence of Stalinism on Russian art and culture.15 It is important to highlight the role of the body

The first English translation of the Russian text appeared in 1968. Bakhtin 7. 15 Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986) 11–12. 13 14

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in Bakhtin’s study as well. For Bakhtin, the concept of grotesque realism reveals, in a literary context, unacceptable displays and uses of the body. He notes that, because of his emphasis on the body, Rabelais himself was accused of “biologism” and a “coarse physiologism,” rather than understood as a critic of systematized reason and knowledge.16 Bakhtin thereby reveals in his own study a concern with the grotesque and its relationship to historically specific understandings of the human form. Bakhtin does not discuss in great length the knowledge of the human body against which the grotesque responds, however.17 He reverts instead to Rabelais’s texts in order to legitimate the critical potential of “grotesque realism.” The concept of the grotesque Bakhtin suggests with his idea of grotesque realism nevertheless would seem to require an opposing—if implicit—type of knowledge. While Rabelais’s corpus provides an explicit framework for Bakhtin’s theory of grotesque realism as a strategy of resistance, the idea of grotesque realism is itself only comprehensible through an examination of the distinction between what counts as legitimate knowledge about the body and what must be considered as belonging to the realm of fantasy. In the words of Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, “the grotesque tends to operate as a critique of a dominant ideology which has already set the terms.”18 To understand the modern grotesque and its potential as a strategy of artistic intervention then, it is vital to understand the terms of debate and the knowledge that the structure or style of the grotesque opposes. In contrast to Bakhtin, Wolfgang Kayser describes Rabelais as a figure of only minor importance and claims explicitly that the modern grotesque is a response to anthropological and natural scientific concepts.19 His discussion of Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez’s Las Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984) 68–9. 17 Bakhtin devotes significant attention to comparing what he describes as the “new bodily canon” as opposed to the “grotesque body,” but does so to explain the individual versus the collective body, not to refute disciplinary-specific knowledge about the body. Bakhtin, “The Grotesque Image of the Body” 303–67. 18 Stallybrass and White 43. Emphasis added. 19 Wolfgang Kayser, Das Groteske in Malerei und Dichtung (Rowohlt: Reinbeck bei ­Hamburg, 1960) 12, 20, 41, 49, 113–14, and 120. Bakhtin focuses on another German theorist of the grotesque, G. Schneegans, in his study. These individuals are by no means the only theorists of the grotesque in the twentieth century. Others not mentioned in detail here due to considerations of space would include Frances K. Barasch, The Grotesque: A Study in Meanings (The Hague: Mouton, 1971); Julie Kristeva, Power of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980); Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, Modernity (New York: Routledge, 1995); Philip Thomson, The Grotesque (London: Methuen, 1972); and Philip Thompson, The Grotesque in German Poetry, 1880–1933 (Melbourne: Hawthorne Press, 1975). 16



The Return of the Grotesque 11

Meninas (“Ladies in Waiting”) reveals Kayser’s concern with modern scientific perceptions.20 The painting is also the focus of Michel Foucault’s introduction in his The Order of Things. Foucault suggests that the image embodies a transition in perspective from the Renaissance to the Classical epistemes. For Foucault, the painting is a visual metaphor for an epistemological transformation. Gilles Deleuze explains that Foucault’s interest in “the visual”—in contrast to written statements— should be understood in terms of an “irreducibility” that precedes and exceeds language. Deleuze dismisses the critique of Foucault’s ahistorical understanding of visual perception as insignificant because of the supposed benefits of Foucault’s unique methodology.21 As such, Las Meninas serves as a (visual) metaphor for Foucault and not an artifact of historically particular ways of seeing. Unlike Foucault, Kayser reads the image literally as an artistic representation of the grotesque. Kayser suggests that the dwarf in the image is by modern scientific standards “mißgebildet”—literally, misdeveloped. While Kayser’s terminology is very problematic, he uses the example to demonstrate the historically specific understandings of the grotesque and the supposed naturalness or unnaturalness of the human form. The presence in the image of a young princess and a midget, both of whom are members of the royal household, suggests that what is deemed grotesque might best be understood as part of—not external to—the existing world, including that world’s social and political hierarchies.22 Kayser explains in his 1960 text Das Groteske in Malerei und Dichtung (“The Grotesque in Painting and Poetry”) the influence of modern science on perceptions of the grotesque. Kayser’s text is a slightly revised form of a study published originally in 1957 under the title Das Groteske: Seine Gestaltung in Malerei und Dichtung (“The Grotesque: Its Form in Painting and Poetry”).23 The minor revisions in the later work, however,

Las Meninas is currently in the collection of the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid, Spain. A high-resolution version of the painting along with additional information about Valezquez can be viewed at https://www. museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/art-work/las-meninas/9fdc7800-9ade48b0-ab8b-edee94ea877f. 21 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001) 49–50. Deleuze suggests that the “irreducibility of the visible” is understandable in the face of Foucault’s methodological insights, in which “the primacy of statements” is juxtaposed to the ability of the visible to contest them. 22 Kayser, Groteske in Malerei und Dichtung 12. 23 Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, trans. Ulrich Weisstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963). This is the translation of a 1957 German text. The author knows of no English translation of the passages inserted into the 1960 German addition or a translation of that text in its entirety into English. 20

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prove to be of major importance. In the 1960 text, Kayser emphasizes not only the quotidian and sensory perceptual dimensions of the grotesque, as he had done in his earlier study, but also affiliates the modern manifestations of the phenomena with the development of empirical scientific concepts in the nineteenth century. Kayser indicates that there is a particular epistemological and even disciplinary knowledge of the human body against which the grotesque must be understood. Kayser explains the disciplinary-specific approach to modern understandings of the grotesque through an examination of three epochs in which, he claims, the structure of the grotesque has found its most powerful expression. These three periods are the sixteenth century (or “the Baroque age”), the period between the Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) and the Romantic movements and, lastly, “the modern period” (die Moderne), a time that Kayser associates primarily with the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and a word that he uses as synonymous with Modernism.24 Kayser’s periodization is made possible by analyses of a number of artistic creations as well as through a four-part definition of the grotesque.25 The three periods Kayser associates with the grotesque and the four-part definition, however, are confusing for a number of reasons. Kayser devotes significantly more attention in his study to analyses of the modern phenomena in comparison to the other periods but does not explain the reasons for the disproportionate investment. He is unclear as to the specific connections between earlier manifestations of the grotesque and those in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. He fails to demonstrate how the particular moments of crises associated with the grotesque inform artistic activity or, for that matter, how artistic activity informs these moments of crises.26 And finally, Kayser continually associates the

Kayser, Groteske in Malerei und Dichtung 95, 136, 140. Kayser includes individuals such as Thomas Mann and groups such as the Surrealists that others might associate with, respectively, Expressionism or the avant-garde. Kayser’s structural definition of the grotesque is thus in sharp contrast to studies based on historically delimited art movements. 25 Kayser, Groteske in Malerei und Dichtung 136–9. Kayser’s four-part definition is as follows: (1) The grotesque is the alienated world, (2) the grotesque is the form of the “It,” (3) the forms of the grotesque are a play with the absurd and, finally, (4) the form of the grotesque is the attempt to exorcise and to invoke (“zu bannen und zu beschwören”) the demonic in the world. 26 Scholars such as Wilson Yates have interpreted Kayser’s discussion of the demonic mistakenly as a “negative” aspect of the grotesque. The simultaneous use of the verbs “bannen” (“to banish” or “to exorcise”) and “beschwören” (“to call up” or “to invoke”) demonstrate that Kayser views the demonic aspect of the grotesque as neither positive or negative, but rather a metaphysical dimension that exposes the failure of current or emergent systems of knowledge. 24



The Return of the Grotesque 13

grotesque with artistic production despite also indicating that technical instruments such as the microscope allow for views into otherwise hidden organic worlds—“der Blick in sonst verborgene organische Welten” (“the view into otherwise hidden, organic worlds”)—where new types of grotesque might be found.27 Perhaps no other aspect of Kayser’s study seems in need of further examination than the explanation he gives for why the grotesque became particularly important during the modern period. The modern period found the motivations for its engagement with the grotesque in an area noticeably beyond the purview of traditional literary and art-historical studies: Modern [art] combated the worth of anthropological and the competence of natural scientific concepts with which the nineteenth century sought its syntheses. The forms of the grotesque are the strongest and most obvious resistance against any rationalism and against any systematics of thought; it was an absurdity in itself when the Surrealists tried to develop a system out of [the grotesque].28 Kayser associates the grotesque in the sixteenth century with a fixation on immediate experience, and suggests that the style becomes important during the transition from the Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) to the Romantic periods as a result of a general and conscious attack on Enlightenment reason and its systems of knowledge. It is only in the modern period, however, that the grotesque reveals a conscious rejection of systems of knowledge associated with particular disciplines— anthropology—and particular epistemological configurations—natural science. Here Kayser goes even further. He does not simply associate the modern period with anthropological and natural scientific developments but accuses the Surrealists of paradoxically trying to use the grotesque—a style that implicitly refuses systematization—as a systematic attack against modern scientific thinking. Yet Kayser explains neither how the epistemological transformation he associates with anthropological and natural scientific concepts becomes part of quotidian

Kayser, Groteske in Malerei und Dichtung 135–6. Kayser, Groteske in Malerei und Dichtung 140. The original German reads as follows: “Die Moderne bekämpfte die Geltung der anthropologischen und die Zuständigkeit der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffe, mit denen das 19. Jahrhundert seine Synthesen versucht hatte. Die Gestaltungen des Grotesken sind der lauteste und sinnfälligste Widerspruch gegen jeden Rationalismus und gegen jede Systematik des Denkens; es war eine Absurdität in sich selber, wenn der Surrealismus versuchte, daraus ein System zu entwickeln.”

27 28

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culture, nor what modern artists hope to achieve with their use of the grotesque, nor, finally, what particular aspects of anthropological and natural scientific knowledge, in conjunction with the overall systematizing function, are in question in the modern manifestations of the grotesque. Friedländer and his Berlin Dada colleagues were not the only early twentieth-century figures to try and address such issues. Here the concept of the modern “expert” becomes increasingly important. Take, for example, the work of Siegfried Kracauer. Kracauer’s unique invocation of physiognomic expertise in his writings represents a somewhat consciously antithetical approach to that field’s disciplinary contours in the 1920s and 1930s. As Frederic J. Schwartz makes clear, physiognomy traditionally “posits and seeks to trace the organic intertwining of body and character, the mutual dependence of the psyche and flesh which share the same life.”29 Kracauer’s physiognomy is radically different; it is, in essence, a reading of surface fragments for their own value rather than for these fragments’ revelation of a totality. If the fragments of modernity revealed anything to Kracauer, it was that in modernity there was only the alienation, the fragmentation, of the masses themselves. In at least one instance Kracauer’s colleague, Walter Benjamin, will describe the “expert” in an essay titled “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in relation to the film star Chaplin.30 Key to understanding this reference is what Keya Ganguly describes, with Benjamin in mind, as an “historically attentive discussion of his project.”31 To recontextualize Benjamin’s references means neither to forget Benjamin’s own orientation toward a revolutionary Marxism nor his focus on analyzing changing social relations engendered by capitalism. For these reasons, Chaplin was a key figure for many early twentieth-century intellectuals. Sabine Hake describes Chaplin’s reception in Germany as belated and conflicted, but sees in this lateness and ambiguity the very essence of Chaplin’s effectiveness in revealing the “fragmented, self-reflective quality” of modernity with which he is associated.32 Kracauer would describe Chaplin as a figure whose

Frederic J. Schwartz, Blind Spots: Critical Theory in the History of Art in Twentieth-Century Germany (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2005) 138. 30 The title and content of Benjamin’s essay are discussed in detail in the following chapters. See footnote 58 in Chapter 2 for a list of the various versions of this essay. 31 Keya Ganguly, “Profane Illuminations and the Everyday,” Cultural Studies 18.2/3 (March/May 2004): 261. 32 Sabine Hake, “Chaplin Reception in Weimar Germany,” New German Critique 51, Spec. issue on Weimar Mass Culture (Autumn, 1990): 88. 29



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name embodied “the promise of happiness” for the masses,33 but whose comedic films nevertheless could “throw into relief the flow of life from which they detach themselves.”34 Even with the advent of sound in cinema, Kracauer claims, Chaplin retained a critical edge: “When first incorporating the spoken word, Chaplin aimed at corroding it.”35 Adorno, for his part, saw Chaplin and his grotesques as exemplary of a critical type of enjoyment. In Dialektik der Aufklärung (“Dialectic of Enlightenment”), Max Horkheimer and Adorno would describe laughter in “false society” as a “parody of humanity”: “In the false society laughter is a disease which has attacked happiness and is drawing it into its worthless totality.”36 In contrast, as John MacKay notes, Adorno saw Chaplin as embodying “an alternative conception of laughter, of a critical laughter soberly aware of its own affinities to domination.”37 Adorno describes Chaplin as a figure who can reveal through his grotesques the alienation of humanity from nature: Nature, so pitilessly suppressed by the process of becoming an adult, is, like that language [common to the clown and to children], irrecoverable by adults … Its loss demands silence, and especially in the face of Chaplin.38 Perhaps no other figure saw Chaplin’s grotesques as revolutionary as did Benjamin, who explains that Chaplin “directed himself toward both the most international and most revolutionary effect of the masses— laughter.”39 For Benjamin, Chaplin served a particularly subversive, modern function, a function Benjamin would clarify in his discussion of

Siegfried Kracauer, “Chaplin in Berlin (1931),” Zeitgenosse Chaplin, ed. Klaus Kreimeier (Berlin: Oberbaumverlag, 1987) 114. 34 Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997) 73. 35 Kracauer, Theory of Film 107. 36 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1994) 141. 37 John MacKay, “Chaplin Times Two: Translator’s Introduction,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 9.1 (1996): 57. 38 Theodor W. Adorno, “Chaplin Times Two,” trans. John Mackay, The Yale Journal of Criticism 9.1 (1996): 59. The article appeared originally as “Chaplin in Malibu,” Neue Rundschau 3 (1964) and was republished, with the essay “Kierkegaard prophesies Chaplin,” in Ohne Leitbild (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969) 89–93. 39 Walter Benjamin, “A Look at Chaplin,” trans. John Mackay, The Yale Journal of Criticism 9.2 (1996): 311. The essay originally appeared as “Rückblick auf Chaplin,” Die literarische Welt 6 (August 2, 1929): 2. 33

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Chaplin’s Groteskfilme (“grotesque films,” sometimes translated as “slapstick comedies”). The mass audience reacts to Chaplin’s Groteskfilme in what Benjamin describes as a progressive manner. Benjamin juxtaposes this progressive response to a reactionary one, and uses the idea of expert knowledge as the basis to explain the distinction: Mechanical reproduction of art changes the reaction of the masses toward art. The reactionary attitude toward a Picasso painting changes into the progressive reaction toward a Chaplin movie. The progressive reaction is characterized by the direct, intimate fusion of visual and emotional enjoyment with the orientation of the expert. Such a fusion is of great social significance. The greater the decrease in the social significance of an art form, the sharper the distinction between criticism and enjoyment by the public.40 The social significance Benjamin refers to here is, of course, the function of an art form in a classed-based society. That the public can engage grotesque films “like an expert” analyzing the works of Pablo Picasso reveals the revolutionary potential of mass media for a new type of politics. Certain visual forms—Benjamin’s example is painting—traditionally have been “in no position to present an object for simultaneous collective experience” because of the very nature of the medium.41 Film, however, allows for the simultaneous contemplation of the object by a large public and thereby produces a transformation in the reception of visual culture as such. Put another way, the objects of visual culture reveal the modes of perception indicative of a particular period. That numerous members of the public have access to film suggests for Benjamin more about the potential use of such media for mass politics and less about the political nature of expert knowledge. Benjamin’s focus on social relations through a history of modes of perception suggests a need to rethink how class antagonisms might be reconfigured in new, potentially revolutionary cultural terrain. The mass audience cannot “organize and control themselves in their reception”; the public lacks not only the art historian’s training but also, traditionally, access to certain art forms. The public’s reactionary response to the Picasso painting indicates the decline of painting in social terms. That is, the social significance of painting has decreased. The masses view films “with the orientation of the expert” because films have the potential to translate visual information into immediate emotional

Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968) 234. 41 Benjamin 234. 40



The Return of the Grotesque 17

enjoyment. Thus, Benjamin finds a revolutionary potential in the mass audience’s modes of viewing insofar as this mode of viewing is produced by the masses themselves, not for them by art-historical experts. Or, as Esther Leslie explains, audiences “become experts, because they critically measure film against the daily reality that they experience and because they learn to assimilate new scenarios of potential social and physical ordering.”42 To compare Benjamin’s analogical use of the expert in his discussions of the public’s visual perception with disciplinary-specific notions of expertise is, in effect, to compare apples and blue orchids. Clearly an understanding of the critical potential of the grotesque depends upon an awareness of certain historically specific ideas about the human body as well as an understanding of the subversive potential of this artistic style. If he was neither as detached artistically as Kayser nor as politically engaged as Benjamin, Friedländer was nevertheless subversive in his own right. Rather than adhere to a particular political philosophy, he was much more concerned with the status of science, in general, and disciplinary knowledge, in particular. He targeted in his philosophical and artistic texts modern scientific fields such as pathological anatomy and anthropology. He claimed that these fields relied on a “speculative empiricism” that extrapolated unverifiable truths from empirical phenomena. Like Bakhtin and Kayser, Friedländer was aware of the critical potential of the grotesque. Like Benjamin and his colleagues, Friedländer was inspired by Chaplin. Although Friedländer never achieved the success of any of these other figures, he did develop a unique understanding of the critical potential of the grotesque that is still useful today. While the relationship between scientists and artists in the following study may appear at first glance to be selective, there are a number of factors that explicitly connect the disciplinary knowledge produced with the artists examined here. Not only was the city of Berlin the site of many of the following activities, both scientific and artistic, but quotidian encounters with empirical scientific knowledge in that city connected these figures even further. Adolf Bastian and Rudolf Virchow, key figures in anthropology, were both involved with museum displays for the public, involvements and displays that are addressed in detail in the following chapters. Key to these discussions was the fact that, as a politician, Virchow was also actively involved in educational reform in Germany and promoted the instruction of natural science in public classrooms.

Esther Leslie, Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (London and Sterling, VA: Pluto Press, 2000) 149.

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In spite of the extraordinary measures to which anthropologists, s­ exologists, medical scientists, and anatomical pathologists would go to create institutional or museum environments in which they could present their research in a seemingly unambiguous way, artists affiliated with Berlin Dada such as Friedländer, Til Brugman, and Hannah Höch engaged and challenged through the artistic grotesque the representations and quotidian understanding supported by these discourses. Their artistic creations became tactics of appropriation of specialized knowledge, challenges to modern science’s “speculative empiricism.” According to Friedländer’s criticisms of Albert Einstein and Einstein’s understanding of light as tiny particles (i.e., photons) rather than merely waves, modern science ignored perceptual reality—in particular, visual reality—in order to create “facts.” For Friedländer, modern empirical scientists based their supposed facts on a misunderstanding of sensory perceptions.43 “Speculative empiricism” was, in other words, the use of the empirically given to speculate and to create supposed facts that were not based on what Friedländer and his collaborators understood as reality. Science clearly was of interest to certain Berlin Dadaists. Friedländer’s medical-scientific training led him to write a short story titled “Eines Kindes Heldentat” (“The Heroic Deed of a Child”) that challenged the knowledge presented in anatomical-pathological displays. While Höch, as a female German citizen, had fewer possibilities than her male contemporaries to benefit from science’s pedagogical reforms, she nevertheless did attend the Kunstgewerbe Schule (“Fine Arts School”) in the Charlottenburg district of Berlin. The museum reforms of the 1920s, discussed briefly in Grotesque Visions, involved institutions with which she was rather intimately familiar. She also employed images of a number of scientific and anthropological artifacts in her photomontages, artifacts that were undoubtedly brought to Berlin by Franz Boas, a protégée of both Bastian and Virchow. In addition, Höch and Brugman would visit in 1931 Magnus Hirschfeld’s Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (“Institute of Sexology”) in the Tiergarten district of Berlin. Hirschfeld was a student of Virchow’s and incorporated Virchow’s concerns with scientific visibility in his sexological research, including connecting two of the four areas of his Institute’s activities with the field explicitly: sexual anthropology and sexual ethnology. Brugman parodied Hirschfeld and his Institute in her grotesque “Warenhaus der Liebe” (“Department Store of Love”), a story examined in the following study as well.

For an excellent—and brief—discussion of Einstein’s theory of photons see Brian Greene, “One Hundred Years of Uncertainty,” The New York Times, April 8, 2005, A27.

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The following pages demonstrate that not only was the intense activity around the grotesque in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries due to the quotidian dependence of the style but also that ­concerns over the proper functioning of optical perception and the public display of visual evidence generated profound and wide-ranging transformations in the way in which knowledge about the human body was disseminated. In other words, this study also showcases the production of empirical scientific knowledge, the ways in which science gave way—but contentiously so—to new knowledge about the body. As the case studies of anthropology, sexology, medical science, and anatomical pathology in Berlin demonstrate, such knowledge required a standardization of perception about the body, both in terms of what was to be visually identifiable as a normal human body as well as in terms of the way in which standards of optical assessment could be taught and learned. The artistic grotesques examined here challenged particular aspects of that standardized optical experience and synecdochically the scientific knowledge produced. These artistic efforts are grotesque visions in the most positive sense of that phrase. Today, when advances in biotechnology, genetics, and computer technology appear as attempts to master nature or warning signs to return to it, it seems humanity itself reveals the problems of that very distinction. Perceptions are acculturated, according to Friedländer’s and his Berlin Dada colleagues’ ideas about and use of the grotesque, but they are also enabled by human biology and physiology; neither artworks nor scientific observations can ignore the roles that each of these elements play. Far from being merely amusing irony or simply ridiculously fantastic, the grotesque enables a type of laughter simultaneously corporeal and critical. The following study is dedicated to the use of this dangerous aesthetic device to rethink acculturated expectations, to challenge human perception as well as empirical science through a free play of the imagination—to show that laughing, indeed, still matters. Grotesque Visions: The Science of Berlin Dada intersperses chapters on science’s development of optical objectivity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with chapters devoted more explicitly to various Berlin Dada artists’ critiques of these evidentiary efforts. The structure is meant to do two things. First, the structure of Grotesque Visions is meant to showcase the emergence of what advocates such as Rudolf Virchow and Magnus Hirschfeld described as sehen lernen—a “learning to see”—that was directed as much at the public’s perception of scientific visual evidence as it was at detailing how such evidence could be produced disciplinarily. Second, the structure of the present study is meant to showcase the ways in which various avant-garde artists advocated a “grotesque vision” to challenge not only the dissemination of

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science’s supposed visual evidence but also the conflation of such an optical orientation with the “truth.” To these ends, Chapter 2 provides a key foundation for the idea of a “grotesque vision” advocated by certain Berlin Dadaists—and, specifically in this chapter, the German-Jewish philosopher and writer Salomo Friedländer. Friedländer’s philosophical and aesthetic exploration of the grotesque as a means to challenge the visual certitude of empirical science is key to understanding Grotesque Visions as well as The Science of Berlin Dada. Yet his work is relatively and surprisingly underrepresented in scholarship on Dada. To rectify this significant omission, this chapter examines a variety of texts, many of which are not published in English and some of which are accessible, unpublished and in German, only at Friedländer’s literary archive in Marbach, Germany. To explain further the scientific evidentiary optics that underlie Friedländer’s avant-garde interventions, Chapter 3 explores the protocols for professional and public displays advocated by the well-known scientist and politician, Rudolf Virchow, at his partially publicly accessible Institut für Pathologie (“Institute of Pathology”) in Berlin. Virchow’s enthusiastic encouragement that the lay public “learn to see” scientific evidence in a particular way was not embraced by everyone. Chapter 4 explores the grotesque literary engagements of Til Brugman, a Dutch avant-garde writer intimately affiliated with Berlin Dada, and her criticisms of such reductive empirical optical claims—reductive claims, this chapter makes clear, that were promoted in various ways by the neurologist turned psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and Virchow’s protégé, the medical doctor turned sexologist, Magnus Hirschfeld. Chapter 5 turns to the ways in which Virchow’s idea of “sehen lernen” also influenced the field of anthropology. More specifically, the chapter examines the changing protocols for and meanings given to photographic evidence in the Berliner Gesellschaft für Ethnologie, Anthropologie, and Urgeschichte (“Berlin Society for Ethnology, Anthropology, and Prehistory”). Juxtaposed to these historical developments in scientific evidentiary optics, Hannah Höch’s “impossible objects” serve as a radically beautiful critical counterpart. Höch’s work, and the approximately twenty photomontages from Aus einem ethnographischen Museum (“From an Ethnographic Museum”), serve as the focus of Chapter 6. Chapter 7 represents the conclusion to some of the key lines of inquiry, both aesthetic and scientific, in Grotesque Visions. The coda that follows is an examination of aesthetic-philosophical concerns with the idea Theodor W. Adorno so eloquently described as the “Dogma der Anschaulichkeit”—the “dogma of visuality”—in the modern age. Adorno’s concern with this “dogma of visuality,” and debates surrounding this idea, address some of the foundational ideas examined in Grotesque Visions



The Return of the Grotesque 21

from a slightly different perspective, as it were. More specifically, the coda addresses the idea of an “imagination” and the need to subject the imagination to historical and to critical reflection. The Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant for his part described the imagination as Einbildungskraft (“imagination” but implying the “power of the imagination”), a description that the Berlin Dadaist Hannah Höch contrasted with the idea of Phantasie (“imagination” as “fantasy” or “escape”). The Berlin Dada artists that are the focus of Grotesque Visions make clear that only by contextualizing the idea of “imagination” historically and critically can it truly become an imagined yet inclusive space of creative reflection. Grotesque Vision: The Science of Berlin Dada reveals a unique deployment of the artistic grotesque—specifically in relationship to scientific practices and evidentiary claims—at the turn of the last fin de siècle. There is science to learn. There are serious empirical claims. But there is also art to explore. Humorous literary texts to enjoy. With all this in mind, I hope this study will encourage the reader to learn not simply to see critically but also to see grotesquely.

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Two The Science of Berlin Dada: Salomo Friedländer, Walter Benjamin, and the Grotesque

In the early twentieth century, the German author and philosopher Salomo Friedländer produced several texts that collectively outlined what he believed were important clarifications of and revisions to the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant.1 “Modern people,” Friedländer declared, had become “ashamedly more or less entirely the slaves of things,” of objects.2 Some scholars have suggested that Friedländer’s work as both a philosopher and as an artist during this period belies a separation from his previous Kantian leanings.3 Others, however, have argued that Friedländer’s aesthetic engagements were extensions of his revisions of Kantian philosophy, claiming that the German-Jewish writer had developed “a serious philosophical program that he had conceived over a period of twenty-five years” and that his artistic efforts attempted to “illustrate what theory was unable to accomplish.”4 Friedländer’s writings during the early twentieth century—his





1



2



3



4

This chapter was originally published in slightly altered form as “‘The Merely Illusory Paradise of Habits’: Walter Benjamin, Salomo Friedländer, and the Grotesque” in New German Critique, 106, Vol. 36, pp. 119–47. (c) 2009, New German Critique, Inc. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyright holder, and the present publisher, Duke University Press. www.dukeupress.edu According to documents and manuscripts in his archive, Friedländer had been interested in Kant’s writings even prior to publishing his dissertation in 1902 on what he believed was Arthur Schopenhauer’s mistaken interpretation of Kritik der reinen Vernunft (“Critique of Pure Reason”). S[alomo] Friedländer, “Goethe contra Newton,” Die Aktion 23–4 (1911): 722. The original German reads as follows: “Die Modernen sind, mehr oder minder verschämt, lediglich Sklawen der Dinge.” Cf. Richard Sheppard, rev. of Fasching als Logik: Über Salomo Friedländer / Mynona, by Lisbeth Exner, Journal of European Studies 27.106 (1997): 241. Jack Zipes, “Salomo Friedländer: The Anonymous Jew. Laughing Philosopher,” The Operated Jew: Two Tales of Anti-Semitism (New York and London: Routledge, 1991) 113, 121.

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philosophical pronouncements as well as his literary grotesques—were revisions of Kant’s mature critical system, revisions targeted at the increasingly normative standards of sensory knowledge employed in modern empirical scientific practice. These revisions were inspired in no small part by a philosophical challenge to modern empirical sense physiology made possible by Friedländer’s unique reading of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s early nineteenth-century work on vision. Situated in its proper historical and intellectual context, Friedländer’s early twentieth-century corpus thus should be understood as part of an effort to incorporate the diversity of human sensory experiences into a Kantian-influenced theory of knowledge, a theory of knowledge critical of perceptual standardization and the consequent devaluation of unique aesthetic experience. To appreciate Friedländer’s unique artistic mission as well as his invocation of Kantian philosophy fully, it is key to understand the philosopher-artist’s unique relationship to the work of Goethe. Friedländer found in Goethe’s theory of color, in which color was postulated as a result of varying degrees of lightness and darkness, the kernel of a radical critique of empirical scientific practice. While such a polar understanding of color would be dismissed by empirical sense physiologists as fundamentally flawed, Goethe’s ideas provided a solution for Friedländer to the problem of subjective certainty. Through Goethe’s theory of perception, Friedländer sought to incorporate the immediate nature of sensory knowledge into a new theory of human experience, a critical philosophical system heavily indebted to Kant. Friedländer sought to realize his philosophical revisions, and in particular his understanding of the function of the Kantian imagination, in his parodies and short stories, or Grotesken (“grotesques”). While Friedländer was by no means the only intellectual figure of his age concerned with subjective sensory experiences, his model is one that deals extensively with the combination of science, optics, and art. A comparison of the work of Friedländer, the philosopher-artist, with that of Walter Benjamin, the cultural critic, reveals the limits and the potentials in these authors’ attempts to recover and to celebrate the diversity of human experience in the face of a perceptual conformism advocated by modern empirical science. No other body of writing attests more directly to Friedländer’s innovative syntheses than the mostly unpublished textbooks the philosopher-artist wrote during the 1920s and 1930s. This series of Fragelehrbücher (“textbooks” or “question-and-answer handbooks”) was intended for a wide audience. In these texts, written in the form of Socratic dialogues, Friedländer attempts to outline a more embracing approach toward natural and human diversity, one critical of modern



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science’s reductive (mis)representation of the empirical world—what he described dismissively as a “speculative empiricism.”

Empirical Optics and Literary Strategies

Friedländer’s literary grotesques often attempt to challenge subjective certainty based primarily on the visual assessment of empirical objects. According to Friedländer, assumptions based on supposedly common visual truths serve as the foundation for claims that, he felt, could not be substantiated based on the empirical objects themselves. In short, empirical science reduced the dialectical relationship between subject and object by ignoring the limitations and assumptions of individual subjective perception. While Friedländer thematized the limits of a reductive scientific vision in such stories as “Eines Kindes Heldentat” (“The Heroic Deeds of a Child”), he implicitly sought to utilize his understanding of Kant’s ideas about empirical perceptions and cognitive processes to encourage the reader to challenge the visual practices of the empirical sciences. For Friedländer, the challenge was to make immediate sensory information simultaneously the constitutive foundation for the transcendent Kantian subject as well as the basis for affirming all individual human experiences. Friedländer strove to recognize the importance of the empirical world while challenging the reductive approach to empirical objects found in certain modern scientific practices. Sebastian Zeidler, in an analysis of one of Friedländer’s contemporaries, Carl Einstein, describes such challenges as the desubjectivation of experience: At the most general level, [Carl] Einstein’s project was directed against what he believed—with [Friedrich] Nietzsche, [Henri] Bergson, and others—to be a certain kind of identity politics in modernity: a model of subjecthood that turned on a concept of subjective experience as identification. This was a politics that assumed, first, that a subject was fundamentally an unchanging self-identical kernel to which a set of properties was attached: properties which would then change over time even as the kernel itself remained unaffected, thus ensuring the seamless temporal continuity of a subjective identity that is here not so much transformed by experiences as it “has” or “makes” them. And it was a politics that assumed, second, and by the same token, that the objects of the phenomenal world were themselves so many identities-with-properties, waiting to be explored by a subject: a subject who, by thus identifying them, would constitute, in one fell swoop and ever anew in every act of experience, the world as world and himself as subject, and who would thereby possess

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Grotesque Visions this world as his experiential property, for it would be complete only through the synthesizing power of his mind.5

The observing subject experiences items in the empirical world only as objects that reinforce a subjective belief in self-continuity and self-certainty. The world changes; the subject does not. Artworks serve, according to Zeidler’s analysis of Einstein, as compensatory in acts of self-reification through encounters with phenomenal objects: The significance of an art object, in this view, no longer hinges on either a normative canon of beauty or a paradigm of mimetic naturalism. Rather, works of art are models for how the phenomenal world can, or should, be perceived: models for how it is constituted as world, for a subject, in the act of perception. As an epistemological model, a work of art is only gradually, not categorically, distinct from an everyday object. It is distinct from it insofar as it is an object that has been expressly produced in order to be perceived, insofar as its formal constellation facilitates its processing as perceptual knowledge by the viewer. In presenting the phenomenal world as identifiable, in defining experience as knowledge, and the subject as a subject of knowledge, a work of art as epistemological model relieves that subject of the anxiety of perceptual contingency in modernity—and all the more persuasively so since the work itself does not seem to exist in a radically autonomous sphere but rather offers but a sublimated version of everyday experience.6 Zeidler’s assessment of the function of art as compensatory, as one of the means by which the subject is relieved of the burden of perceptual contingency that he or she associates with modernity, depends upon the conflation of the subject’s perception and the artwork’s status as epistemological model.7 Such a conflation does not allow for artworks, be they visual or literary, that function to create a critical reflection on the conditions of perception. In contrast, Friedländer sought to combine his philosophical diagnosis of the problem of the “insidious ideology of subjective identity maintenance” with an artistic solution.8 He focused on short, satirical, sometimes absurd tales to produce experiences for

5



6 7



8

Sebastian Zeidler, “Introduction,” October, spec. issue “Carl Einstein. A Special Issue” (2004): 4. Zeidler 5. Emphases in original. Cf. Crary, Suspensions. Crary provides a detailed discussion of efforts to overcome the visual plentitude of modernity in service of scientific and popular projects. Zeidler 5.



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the subject through the imagination, experiences in which the subject was constituted by necessity as a reflective and critical producer of these perceptions.9 The grotesque “Eines Kindes Heldentat” (“A Child’s Heroic Deed”) exemplifies Friedländer’s synthesis of philosophical and artistic ­engagement, a synthesis made possible by his interest in the work of Kant. The implicit object of Friedländer’s attack in the tale was probably Rudolf Virchow and Virchow’s pathological museum in Berlin, given the fact that Friedländer lived in the city when the story was written, and that Friedländer had studied medical science and dentistry.10 The artist-­philosopher knew the optical requirements for proper ­medical-scientific assessment and the techniques for proper preservation and display of pathological specimens. Such techniques and requirements neglected the critical approach to human perception of the empirical world as outlined in Kant’s philosophy. “A Child’s Heroic Deed” is more than the story of a boy born in the shape of a red hedgehog.11 The short grotesque, published in 1913 under the pseudonym Mynona, is a critical engagement with the pervasive interest in and public display of the anatomically pathological. In the story, Friedländer describes the disappointment of a young couple after the birth of their eagerly anticipated infant. The child, apparently otherwise quite healthy, is morphologically deformed, a Mißgeburt (“freak”—literally, “mis” plus “born”) that resembles a red hedgehog. While the parents are devastated by the birth of the unusual offspring, the director of a nearby museum of natural curiosities hears of the new arrival with great interest. The director visits the family, and regrettably relates that if the red hedgehog were dead, there may have been hope for a happy ending. The educated envoy clarifies: he is the proprietor of a museum where such creatures are labeled and displayed scientifically, apparently for purposes of professional research and public education. With his business aspirations frustrated, the director departs the forlorn family. Hopeful, the red hedgehog follows and queries the museum owner as to the conditions of the specimens in his institution. The director assures the bestial boy that, as a new addition to his museological mission, the “curious lad” would be preserved in only the freshest of Spiritus (“spirits”). The red hedgehog is told, furthermore,

Zeidler 5. Friedländer’s target could have been “freak shows” such as Castan’s ­Panopticum, but the label to be placed on the display jar in his story indicates that the object is to be placed in a scientific museum rather than amid such spectacular Völkerschauen. 11 Mynona (Salomo Friedländer), “Eines Kindes Heldentat,” Rosa: Die schöne Schutzmannsfrau (Leipzig: Weißer Bücher, 1913) 78–81.  9 10

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that he would be displayed in a proper manner with the label “Abortion VIII, Class B, Example 454.”12 The creature, upon learning of the opportunity to return good fortune to his destitute parents, offers to sell himself to the museum. Mother and father are more than willing to accept the offer of their family’s undesired addition and relish the extra incentive of a cash payment in return for what they had believed to be a rather cruel joke of nature. The red hedgehog submerges himself in a jar of preservative solution provided by his parents and is shipped to the museum director to end the tale. In many respects, the protagonist of Friedländer’s story embodies the common definition of the grotesque. The creature is, after all, a human who resembles a hedgehog, simultaneously an animal and a boy. The sensorial engagement thematized in the tale, however, is key both to understanding how this polarity could be used as a critical strategy as well as to understanding Friedländer’s synthesis of art and philosophy. By presenting combinations of tragedy and humor in “A Child’s Heroic Deed,” Friedländer seeks to force readers through the act of reading to reflect upon the acculturated quotidian standards of viewing and observing, and also to propose a philosophically ambitious questioning of the modern production of knowledge in fields such as anatomical pathology and sexual science. Friedländer’s grotesque calls into question the motivations of parents who would submit their offspring for display as well as the real purposes of museums and research institutions that profit from the dead rather than strive to heal the living. Readers are left to assume that the red hedgehog has committed suicide with the blessing of his parents and with the encouragement of the museum director. There are several tragic aspects of the tale: a child selling itself to make money for its family, the parents’ cruelty and greed, the museum director’s morbid search for dead “freaks” in implicit opposition to demanding better conditions for individuals living with anatomical differences. These tragic elements contrast to fantastic and humorous aspects of the story: the newborn resembles a red hedgehog, the child grows at a rapid rate (i.e., he can walk and talk quite quickly), and Friedländer reveals that the real (if ironic) message of the story is that twins should “grow together at their bums.” The humorous and fantastic elements act to disengage resistant readers’ acculturated responses while the tragic elements simultaneously expose the moral message of the tale. In other words, readers are not given a “realistic” representation of the world in which “bad” parents and medical scientists are punished, but one in which uninhibited parents choose greed over familial bonds, apparently respectable doctors

Mynona 81.

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exploit the deformed, and offspring, who look like misshapen animals, sell themselves for exhibition. Through provocative stories such as “A Child’s Heroic Deed,” Friedländer renders suspect the acculturated perceptual and corporal norms of his age. The logical presuppositions of modern sense physiology and the misguided research intentions of scientific activities in the early twentieth century served as the primary targets of many of his tales. His short, critical stories were a means to cause and to emphasize subjective responses that would defamiliarize readers’ ideas about normal and abnormal bodies, ideas often reinforced in the popular displays of scientific fields like anthropology, pathological anatomy, and sexual science. Through the use of comfortable, familiar settings—a family home, for example—Friedländer compelled his readers to be less resistant to the critical messages in his tales, messages that sought to reveal the biases and logical fallacies of the day. By inserting fantastic elements or unusual juxtapositions, Friedländer sought to compel readers to use their aesthetic experiences as critical devices. In particular, through his play of traditional narrative techniques and unanticipated aspects, Friedländer hoped to employ the Kantian imagination (i.e., Einbildungskraft) as a site for the examination of human norms and exclusions. Here the imagination is not used as a shorthand for the ability to fantasize about a better world, but rather as a concept that has a distinct, Kantian function—the imagination is the zone of cognitive mediations between corporeal sensations and the existing categories of the understanding, such as human or animal, hedgehog or farm hog, and so forth. Friedländer’s tale emphasizes the fantastic to this end: Not to speak to a sentimentalized idea of humanity but rather to invigorate readers’ apparently complacent cognitive capacities to reflect upon the very idea of humanness, of what constitutes “the human.” As “A Child’s Heroic Deed” suggests, visitors to museums of natural curiosities discern little of the human dimensions of anatomical difference from the displays within these facilities. Indeed, such presentations reinforce, among other things, the belief in observing subjects’ own corporeal normalcy. Friedländer’s literary technique exploits this corporeal and experiential incommensurability: his hedgehog-like child has the intellectual capacity of a human adult. Through such fantastic elements in his tales, he demands that readers reflect on aesthetic and perceptual norms, and experientially compels readers to reflect on the constitutive presuppositions of normal human corporeality rather than the infinite forms of human difference.13

Cf. Timothy O. Benson, Raoul Hausmann and Berlin Dada, Studies in the Fine Arts (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Research Press, 1987). Benson argues that Friedländer’s philosophy was key in formulating the Berlin Dadaists’ ideas of the “new man” and of the “new community.”

13

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Kant and the Matter of Perception

Friedländer indicated that a proper modern philosophy depended upon knowledge from both empirical sense perceptions and a priori cognitive faculties. Kant was Friedländer’s model, and both men use the concept of aether, in different ways, as part of their philosophical systems. In Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, Kant describes aether as an invisible yet material substance, as the “matter of light.”14 In Kritik der Urteilskraft (“Critique of Judgment”), Kant situates aether as a supra-sensible and omnipresent substance: “… the aether that the more recent physicists have discussed … [as] an elastic fluid that permeates all other kinds of matter [Materie] (it is thoroughly mingled with them) …”15 In a passage from the same text but in language oriented more explicitly toward quotidian applications, Kant explains the substance of aether through a comparison of visible colors and aural tones: If following [Leonhard] Euler, we assume that colors are vibrations [pulsus] of the aether in uniform temporal sequence, as, in the case of sound, tones are such vibrations of the air, and if we assume—what is most important (and which, after all, I do not doubt at all)—that the mind perceives not only, by sense, the effect that these vibrations have on the excitement of the organ, but also, by reflection, the regular play of the impressions (and hence the form in the connection of different presentations), then color and tone would not be mere sensations but would already be the formal determination of the manifold in these, in which case they could even by themselves be considered beauties.16 Kant connects through the concept of aether sense stimulations—the “excitement of the organ”—with the reflective synthesizing function of cognition—the “regular play of the impressions.” Sound waves and aether serve as the means by which immediate sense impressions are filtered through the reflection of the understanding. In other words, sound waves and aether communicate materially sense perceptions to a priori cognitive faculties, and thereby are the empirical foundations for aesthetic judgments.

Kant, Critique of Judgment 222 fn. 25. Kant, Critique of Judgment 361. 16 Kant, Critique of Judgment 69–70. Pluhar indicates in a footnote that Kant’s parenthetical disclaimer—“(and which, after all, I do not doubt at all)”—indicated originally that Kant did indeed doubt the theory of the relation between sense perception and reflection embodied by sound waves and aether. 14 15



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In the fifty theses that comprise “Vom Weltäther. Nach Immanuel Kant und Ernst Marcus” (“On World Aether. According to Immanuel Kant and Ernst Marcus”), Friedländer uses the concept of aether to develop a materialist theory of perception.17 In thesis five, Friedländer states that “the sense of touch is not certainty, and the world only seen is nothing more than a mirror image.”18 Focusing on aether’s role in the transmission of information from the empirical world to the subject, Friedländer postulates in thesis twelve a rather radical theory of sensation: “There are no immaterial perceptions.”19 He clarifies in thesis fifteen that his material theory of sense perception is to be understood as a dynamic relation between aether, the invisible substance that Kant claimed occupied all empty space, and the Körperwelt, or the “world of [visible] bodies.”20 Aether is the invisible material through which the subject looks to discern the flickering glow of distant stars. The invisible space between stars and the Earth is filled with aether, as Friedländer clarifies in thesis twenty-three: Empty space could not compel our organism to perceive. But we perceive spaces that appear empty, the space behind the surface of a mirror or the space between the eye and stars. It follows that our organism must contain a world aether that compels us to perceive when combined with that [aether] external to our bodies. It follows that sense perceptions could not occur without this aether. As stated previously, aether is weightless, penetrable, unable to be obstructed, and inexhaustible.21 By connecting sense perception and the invisible but seemingly omnipresent substance of aether, Friedländer is able to rethink the function of the sensorial encounter. He extends the role of the invisible conduit

Salomo Friedländer, “Vom Weltäther: Nach Immanuel Kant und Ernst Marcus,” unpublished manuscript, DLM 60.883. 18 Friedländer 1. The original German reads as follows: “Tastbarkeit ist nicht Sichtbarkeit, und die nur gesehene Welt ist nicht wirklicher als ein Spiegelbild.” 19 Friedländer 2. The original German reads as follows: “Es gibt keine immateriellen Wahrnehmungen.” 20 Friedländer 2. 21 Friedländer 2. The German original reads as follows: “ Leerer Raum könnte unseren Organismus nicht zur Wahrnehmung reizen. Wir nehmen aber doch Räume wahr, die leer scheinen, z. B. den Raum hinter der Spiegelfläche oder den Raum zwischen Auge und Sternen. Folglich muß in unserem Organismus der Weltäther enthalten sein, der, mit dem außerorganischen verbunden, zur Wahrnehmung gereizt wird. Folglich können die sinnlichen Empfindungen ohne diesen Äther nicht ins Spiel gesetzt werden. Der Äther ist, wie gesagt, unwägbar, durchdringend, unsperrbar, unerschöpfbar.” 17

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in thesis twenty to suggest that all material bodies simply are appearances of this strange substance,22 and claims in the concluding theses that the physical processes of the body and the material thoughts of the mind are all evidence of the existence of aether: We perceive our body discontinuously as a complicated combination of fluid and fast component parts and of the most variable appendages. In aether in contrast the unity, the cooperation of these parts, is contained constantly. The ontological presence of aether allows for the cooperation of so many complicated organic parts. The external senses dissolve this unity so that heterogeneous parts like bones, meat, muscles, skin, nerves, cells, blood, etc., appear before us.—Will is the power of the “I” to make itself into the effect of physical processes.23 Aether explains the functioning of bodily organs and senses as well as the “magical effectiveness” of the will. The subject’s will has a very important function for Friedländer. It is the subjective power to constitute the unified (physical) self. Aether is omnipresent and invisible yet also the foundation that enables this perceived unity. Sense perceptions in actuality apprehend only disunity and fragmentation. A reflective process associated with the will for Friedländer enables the subject to realize the unity of his or her world—both in terms of the physical self and the physical world—through sense perception. In other words, the unity of the world is an act of overcoming the immediacy of sense impressions that conceive of the world as discontinuous; this overcoming is made possible by the omnipotent presence of the substance of aether. As his engagement with aether suggests, Kantian aesthetics were highly important for Friedländer’s project. His understanding of aesthetic judgment as outlined in Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft is demonstrated in several texts.24 These texts show Friedländer’s basic Friedländer 2. Friedländer 6. The German original reads as follows: “Wir nehmen unseren Leib in einer komplizierten Zusammensetzung aus flüssigen und festen Bestandteilen und den verschiedensten Gliedern diskontinuierlich war. Im Äther jedoch ist die Einheit, der Zusammenwirkung dieser Teile kontinuierlich enthalten. Dem Zusammenwirken so vieler komplizierter organischer Bestandteile liegt die ätherische Ur-Erscheinung einfach zugrunde. Die äußeren Sinne zersetzen diese Einheit, so dass nun heterogene Stücke wie Knochen, Fleisch, Muskeln, Haut, Nerven, Zellen, Blut etc. vor uns auftreten.—Der Wille ist die Kraft des Ich, sich selbst zur Ursache physischer Wirkungen zumachen.” 24 Friedländer’s papers at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach contain marked and annotated copies of several of Kant’s text. For example: Immanuel Kant, Critique der Urtheilskraft, 2nd ed. (Berlin: F. [T.] Lagarde, 1793). 22 23



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conviction that the Kantian philosophical system is the correct framework for examining and for guiding human behavior. For Friedländer, aesthetic judgments are unique within the Kantian system in that they evidence through corporeal and subjective phenomena the universal laws of the judgments of taste. It is through the synthesizing function of the imagination in particular that the universality of the laws of aesthetic judgment can be demonstrated. The imagination makes manifest the positive ideals of truth and goodness as well as the negative ideals of confusion and evil. The imagination, a realization of the disinterested interestedness of Kantian aesthetics, acts as the medium bridging reason and the empirical world for Friedländer. The imagination calls into question knowledge claims based on immediate sensorial experience of the empirical world or artistic aspirations to naturalism or l’art pour l’art.25 The goal of using the imagination as part of a critical artistic strategy (i.e., the grotesque) was to demonstrate the fundamental unity of humanity in spite of perceived differences. In “Kant als Magier” (“Kant as Magician”), for example, Friedländer suggests that the imagination occupies the space between active and passive forms of consciousness: The most important difference of Kantian philosophy is that of the active and the passive consciousness. The passive consciousness is purely sensual, the active purely conceptual; between both mediates the imagination, and to every experience these three must work together. Perception without a concept remains blind; a concept without perception empty.26 Empirical sense perception (empirische Anschauung) is equated with a passive consciousness, while active consciousness is equated with subjective conceptual ability (Begriff). Friedländer repeats the mantra on numerous occasions and in his criticism of philosophers, scientists, and

Salomo Friedlaender, “Kant für Künstler,” unpublished manuscript, DLM 61.612, 2, 4. Several copies of the manuscript found in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv are dated 1934. The German original read as follows: “positiven Ideale der Wahrheit und Güte, die negativen des unabsichtlichen und beabsichtigten Irrtums und der Bosheit.” 26 S[alomo] Friedländer - Mynona, “Kant als Magier,” DLM 61.616, 1. The German original reads as follows: “ Die allerwichtigste Unterscheidung der Kantischen Philosophie ist diejenige des aktiven vom passiven Bewußtsein. Das passive Bewußtsein ist rein sinnlich, das aktive rein begrifflich; zwischen den Beiden vermittelt die Phantasie, und zu jeder Erfahrung müssen diese drei zusammen wirken. Anschauung ohne Begriff bliebe blind; Begriff ohne Anschauung hohl.” 25

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artists: “He [the philosopher / scientist / artist] will learn to recognize that sense perception without a concept remains blind.”27 In short, all empirical sense perceptions require perceiving subjects, and vice versa. While this formulation may seem banal, Friedländer suggested that it presented a radical criticism of empirical science. The key issue for him was the fact that the imagination acts as a bridge between the ability to encounter objects in the empirical world (i.e., passive consciousness) and the integration of these objects into the subject’s existing understanding (i.e., active consciousness). In Friedländer’s other texts, such as “Kant for Artists,” the imagination functions as “ein kontemplatives Wachsein,” a “contemplative state of alertness” that reveals the acculturated limitations of subjective perceptions and, by default, confirms the unity of humanity in these differences of perceptions.28 Taken together, Friedländer’s various texts and comments on the imagination suggest that it has a synthesizing role within the Kantian philosophical system. This synthesizing function occurs only at the intersection of sensory perceptions and reflections on the limits of these perceptions, only through an awareness of the distinction between empirical objects and subjective understanding. In the Kantian system, the experience of the world is only possible through the cognitive framework employed in perceiving it. Friedländer suggests that the imagination unifies these two apparently separate understandings of the world in and through the act of experience itself; grotesques reveal most effectively the relationship between empirical sense perceptions and cognitive limits. Despite his emphasis, Friedländer remains nevertheless critical of what he deems its inappropriate use: the imagination is used incorrectly when it fails to engender the kind of aesthetic judgment that would force a reflection upon the universal laws of humanity. He will employ the idea of Phantasie, translated as “imagination” or “fantasy,” to refer

Friedländer, “Kant für Künstler” 7. The original German reads as follows: “Er wird einsehen lernen, daß Anschauung ohne Begriff blind bleibt.” 28 Friedländer, “Kant für Künstler” 6. The text contains the following key passage: “Aesthetic imagination is not an artistic paradise; on the contrary, without all the socially acceptable perfume, a work of wide-awake rational, neither cooking or for that slightly cooled, on the contrary continually wide-awake rational enthusiasm. It is, without all inflammatory or anaesthetic, only a higher degree of fresh stimulation, a contemplative state of alertness.” The original German reads as follows: “Die ästhetische Phantasie ist kein künstliches Paradies; sondern, ohne alles Salonparfüm, Werk der hellwach nüchternen, weder kochenden noch daher leicht erkaltenden, sondern kontinuierlichen hellwach nüchternen Begeisterung. Sie ist, ohne alle Aufpeitschung oder Betäubung, nur ein höherer Grad der frischen Belebung, ein kontemplatives Wachsein.” 27



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to the correct use of the imagination as a subjective faculty enabling critical reflection. In so doing, Friedländer equates the imagination with a mirror that does not “reveal full humanity, but on the contrary only grimaces; the Romantic spice becomes nourishment.”29 The artist-philosopher here uses the concept Fratzen, translated literally as “grimace” but often also as “grotesque,” to refer to the confrontation of the subject with the limits of his or her own judgment. For Friedländer, these limits constitute humanity itself.30 According to Friedländer, Vernunft (“reason”) is the foundation for all metaphysics. Art, like science and ethics, has its own autonomy within the Kantian philosophical system because of the relationship between aesthetic judgments and reason: As it is since Kant, in science with the rule of eternal laws of nature, in ethics with the presence of all natural heteronomy, Naturalism also began at that time to escape from art. One calls reason the genius of humanity. This genius is increasingly independent, increasingly active … This autonomy of reason, this freedom toward its own law, its most inner primary foundation is known according to a mystical secret. But we see nothing of this secret from our autonomy; rather just the opposite—we first recognize the possibility of this autonomy [as] the darkness following reclining “transcendent” secrets.31

Friedländer, “Kant für Künstler” 6. A similar use of Fratzen also occurs in Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft and his earlier Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen. In contrast to Friedländer, however, Kant seeks to situate Fratzen in terms of the proof of the supranatural existence of humankind. Human beings are confronted through aesthetic phenomena such as the sublime with the limits of their power of understanding. They demonstrate at these very limits a reflective power of judgment that supersedes their corporeality and their morality. The limits of aesthetic judgment mark the beginnings of humanity’s supra-sensible moral authority in Kantian philosophy. 31 S. Friedländer, “Über Ästhetik,” DLM Z 6298, n.p. The German original reads as follows: “Wie es seit Kant in der Wissenschaft mit der Herrschaft eiwger [sic] Naturgesetze, in der Ethik mit aller naturalistischen Heteronomie vorbei ist; so beginnt seitdem auch der Naturalismus aus der Kunst zuentweichen [sic]. Die Vernunft nannte Jemand das Genie der Menschheit. Dieses Genie wird immer selbständiger, immer aktiver … Gewiß ist auch diese Autonomie der Vernunft, diese Freiheit zum eigenen Gesetz, seinem innersten Urgrunde nach ein mystisches Geheimnis. Aber wir konstatieren nicht etwa von diesem Geheimnisse aus unsere Autonomie; sondern im Gegenteil erkennen wir erst vermöge dieser Autonomie die Finsternis des Jenseits ihrer liegenden ‘transzendenten’ Gehimnisses [sic].” 29 30

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Invoking Kant’s belief in a universal law of aesthetic judgment, Friedländer aligns himself with the idea of a “purposiveness without a purpose” that reveals the universal nature of all aesthetic judgments.32 Autonomy in art is not revealed directly. Artistic autonomy can be achieved neither through the form nor through the content of the work of art. For Friedländer, the universal reason that constitutes the autonomy of aesthetic judgment and that is increasingly revealed in the detachment of art from mimetic imperatives is not contained within the work of art. Such a claim is radical given the extent to which Friedländer is often placed amid the anarchic or the communistic impulses of Dada, especially in Berlin.33 Friedländer was not interested in an art that made its form nor its content into the impulse of revolutionary change. Rather, his Kantian predispositions led him to view the revolutionary possibility of art as indirectly realized through influences of the art object in terms of preexisting cognitive faculties. As a result, the real contribution of art to social change could occur only at the level of cognitive reflection on the a priori limitations of perception, a reflection that could only occur insofar as art influenced the imagination and, indirectly, the subject’s ability to question the norms and standards of perceptions.

Goethe’s Vision

If Kant provided the systemic philosophy for Friedländer’s marriage of art and knowledge, it was Goethe who provided the necessary optical reorientation. Friedländer’s relationship to him, unlike his relationship to Kant, was not one of systemic reproduction and revision, however. On the contrary, Friedländer was skeptical of the accuracy of Goethe’s natural philosophy.34 Friedländer claimed to have identified an important weakness in Goethe’s work: “For Goethe, the creative subject orients itself outwardly to such an extent, toward the [art] work, toward differences, that he [Goethe] never brought it [the subject] to absolute

Kant, Critique of Judgment 63. Kant describes the possibility of a unification of understanding and imagination in terms of a judgment of taste (as opposed to a judgment of reason) as evidence of the act of cognition in general: “unity in the relation [between cognitive powers] in the subject can reveal itself only through sensation. This sensation, whose universal communicability a judgment of taste postulates, is the quickening of the two powers (imagination and understanding) to an activity that is indeterminate but, as a result of the prompting of a given presentation, nonetheless accordant: the activity required for cognition in general.” 33 Cf. Benson. 34 Crary, Techniques 69. Crary suggests that Goethe’s theory of colors had implications that had little to do with empirical accuracy. 32



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self-reflection.”35 The perceiving subject in Goethe’s text was focused on the external world and on differentiation, and thus the subject was unable to reflect accurately on his or her own constitutive limitations. Despite such concerns, Friedländer found in Goethe’s Zur Farbenlehre (“Toward a Theory of Colors”) what he believed was the key to a more accurate means of incorporating subjective sense perceptions into Kantian philosophy. Lisbeth Exner claims that Friedländer, in his early work, already employed Goethe as “the representative of a program contrary to the method of experimental science and the decreasingly unified lived experience of the world.”36 Goethe’s seemingly idealistic emphasis on contemplative perception, what Karl Robert Mandelkow describes as a “sphere of immediate sense impression and immediate spiritual perception,” encouraged Friedländer to develop his own optical understanding.37 In contrast to Goethe, however, for Friedländer the immediate nature of sense impressions and perceptions was to be situated in the context of a systemic and critical Kantian system. Goethe based his theory on the idea that color is the result of a mixture of lightness and darkness; it is this mixture of apparent differences that provides the thematic focus for Friedländer’s rethinking of sense perception within a Kantian philosophical framework. This rethinking must be understood in light of competing theories of sense perception in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, most of which had argued that, from an empirical point of view, Goethe’s understanding of color perception was inaccurate.38 In “Moderner Sieg der Goethischen Farbenlehre” (“Modern Victory of Goethe’s Theory of Colors”), however, Friedländer situates the apparent inaccuracy of Goethe’s theory of color perception in the context of a critique of scientific research into sensory phenomena.39 Although Goethe’s early nineteenth-century understanding of color as the product of various degrees of lightness and

Salomo Friedländer, Schöpferische Indifferenz (Munich: Georg Müller, 1918) 120–1. The original German reads as follows: “Das schöpferische Subjekt richtete sich bei Goethe so sehr nach aussen, aufs Werk, aufs Unterscheiden, dass er es nie bis zur absoluten Selbstbesinnung brachte.” 36 Lisbeth Exner, Fasching als Logik: Über Salomo Friedländer (Munich: Belleville, 1996) 219. The original German reads as follows: “Vertreter eines Gegenprogramms zu den wissenschaftlichen Experimentiermethoden und der immer weniger als einheitlich erlebten Erfahrung der Welt in Dienst.” 37 Mandelkow qtd. in Exner 219. The original German reads as follows: “Bereich des unmittelbar sinnlichen Eindrucks und der unmittelbar geistigen Anschauung.” 38 Exner 220. 39 Salomo Friedländer, “Moderner Sieg der Goethischen Farbenlehre,” unpublished manuscript, DLM 60.870. 35

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darkness was seen as increasingly untenable empirically, it nevertheless proved inspirational for Friedländer in that it explained symbolically the duality of the modern world through a revelation of the polarity of the sensible or the visible (i.e., such as colors) and the supra-sensible or the invisible (i.e., darkness and lightness provide the constitutive materials that create the various, visible colors). Friedländer would describe this productive polarity in his Schöpferische Indifferenz (“Creative Indifference”) as a parallel constitutive of visual perception itself, a seeing “in which not only a priori differences of light but also the opposition between light and darkness is initially identical.”40 In other words, the perception of colors in Friedländer’s interpretation of Goethe’s theory was not based simply on the empirical existence of differences of light but on a more profound, ontological difference. The difference between lightness and darkness—and not simply their combination—is what made color possible. Hence, the constitutive difference enabling the existence of colors needed to be understood as uniqueness, a productive dis-identity, and a creative nothingness that was seen as color by the perceiving subject: Take for example the ability to see. Dynamically, it is eternally available, but its pole, its negation and its position keep themselves imprisoned like wrestlers with identical power; its neutral dimension does not yet function polar voluntarily, to the benefit of one [opposing pole], to the disadvantage of the other. What is missing is the personal magnetism that here attracts, there repels … Here is neither position nor negation, no decision lacks indifference but rather its polar function, each differentiated representation lacks its neutral dimension. Darkness stands opposed to light but does not show itself to the observing glance. But this inanimate glance is already [a] look, already [a] neutralization of lightness and darkness. This nothingness from [the perspective of] the glance and the eye works slowly forth from its original, unique and—in comparison to each oppositional force—superior power, precisely through its pull and push, and slowly developed, begins its differentiation entirely and completely.41 Friedländer, Schöpferische Indifferenz 210. The original German reads as follows: “in dem nicht nur die Lichtunterschiede, sondern auch der Gegensatz zwischen Licht und Finsternis ursprünglich identisch sind.” 41 Friedländer, Schöpferische Indifferenz 84. The German original reads as follows: “Nehmen wir als Beispiel das Sehvermögen. Dynamisch ist es ewig vorhanden, aber seine Pole, seine Negation und seine Position, halten sich wie Ringer mit gleichen Kräften gefangen; seine neutrale Grösse funktioniert noch nicht willkürlich polar zugunsten des Einen, zum Nachteil des Andern [sic]. Es fehlt noch der 40



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The product of the mixture of the fundamental opposites of lightness and darkness creates color, but color posited as a “nothingness” by Friedländer, a neither this nor that, that results from a priori differences. Like every differentiated representation that fails to grasp the commonality differentiating it from what it is not, color too is an experience made possible only by the perceiving subject’s blindness as to the constitutive poles of color perception. Color, like representation, is an ontological mixing that is produced by an encounter with implicit polar opposites—lightness and darkness. Such opposites cannot be seen with “the look or the eye” but can be grasped philosophically as retroactive and productive ontological differences. Goethe’s theory of colors was part of what has been described as the origins of a fundamental transformation of sense perception in the nineteenth century.42 This transformation resulted from the increasingly popular understanding of sense perceptions as embodied by a perceiving subject rather than as produced on or in the subject by external factors or forces. As a result, the body of the human subject and its physiological processes became the primary focus of nineteenth-century sciences of empirical sense perception. Writing early in the nineteenth century, Goethe describes the human subject as the producer of physiological sensations; the sensations are not produced solely by objects external to the human body (i.e., light waves) nor explained in terms of the inherent visibility of the objects of perception (i.e., their Anschaulichkeit). Rather, Goethe’s work marks a historical transition in theories of perception toward what he describes as “physiological” colors: Let the observer look steadfastly on a small colored object and let it be taken away after a time while his eyes remain unmoved; the spectrum of another color will then be visible on the white plane … it arises from an image which now belongs to the eye.43

persönliche Magnetismus, der hier anzieht, dort abstösst … Hier ist eben noch weder Position noch Negation, es fehlt jede Entscheidung, nicht Indifferenz, aber ihre polare Funktion; es fehlt jede differenzierte Repräsentation ihrer neutralen Grösse. Finsternis steht gegen Licht, und noch zeigt sich kein sehender Blick. Aber dieser unerschlossene Blick ist doch bereits Blick, doch schon Neutralisation von Licht und Finsternis. Dieses Nichts von Blick und Auge arbeitet langsam seine ursprüngliche, ganz eigne und jenen Gegengewalten überlegene Kraft, gerade unter deren Zerren und Pressen hervor, und, langsam vorbereitet, entzündet sich seine Differenzierung reich und rund.” 42 Crary, Techniques 67–96. 43 Goethe qtd. in Crary, Techniques 68–9. Crary has added the emphasis here. See also Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours, trans. Charles Eastlake (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1970) 21.

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Goethe locates the production of color in the corporeality of the human subject, in the eye itself, rather than in the objects of perception. He suggests that the colors of the spectrum emerge as a result of a transition from darkness to lightness and reverse, the result of a physiological process. The process is contained within an unmoving eye that sees changes in color when confronted with the removal of an object. This process of the production of color now “belongs to the eye”; it occurs within the corporeality and physiology of the human body. Empirical objects may be perceived, but perception is not reducible to the entities of the empirical world. Perception must include a focus on the body of the perceiving subject. The a priori distinction between the sense perceptions of the viewing subject and the objects of the external world, implicit in Goethe’s Zur Farbenlehre, would be eliminated increasingly in the course of the development of empirical sense physiology in the nineteenth century. Jonathan Crary traces the increasing conflation of empirical objects and subjective perception in the work of Johannes Müller and Hermann von Helmholtz, in particular. In Helmholtz’s work, for example, the distinction between internal and external perceptions would be eliminated in order to establish a theory of direct correlation between objects of perception and the learned accumulation of sensorial acuity.44 Crary describes the conflation as an attempt to “establish regular but non-mimetic relations between sensations and external objects and events.”45 In contrast to mid and late nineteenth-century sense physiologists, Friedländer’s return in the early twentieth century to Goethe’s theory of colors indicates an emphasis on human experience as produced by sensorial and cognitive synthesis. In order to make possible the recuperation of what was already considered a failed theory of sense perception in the nineteenth century, Friedländer locates in Goethe’s theory of colors a critique of the scientific conflation of the empirical object and the cognitive processes of the perceiving subject. Friedländer claims in his “Modern Victory of Goethe’s Theory of Colors” that “colors differentiate themselves not through the Newtonian tendency toward the ordering of waves but, on the contrary, only through a cyclical index of tensions.”46 Based upon a criticism of the work of Newton, Friedländer

Cf. Michael Heidelberger, “Innen und Aussen [sic] in der Wahrnehmung: Zwei Auffassungen des 19. Jahrhunderts (und Was Daraus Wurde),” Video Ergo Sum: Repräsentation nach innen und außen zwischen Kunst- und Neurowissenschaft, eds. Olaf Breidbach and Karl Clausberg. INTERFACE-Reihe 4 (Hamburg: n.p., 1999) 147–57. 45 Crary, Techniques 91 fn. 56. 46 Friedländer, “Moderner Sieg” 3. The original German reads as follows: “Allemal unterscheiden sich die Farben nicht die Newtonische Wellenanlagen Anordnung [??], sondern immer nur durch zyklischen Spannungsindex.” 44



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uses Goethe to critique the dependence upon mathematical calculations of light waves and to reach his own conclusions about the empirical reality of perception. It is to this end that Friedländer criticizes in Newton’s theory of waves a mathematical substitution for the corporeal experience of perception: One never sees Goethe’s light because it is not a simply mathematical light beam, but on the contrary is dual, a clear difference, a duet, and a marriage, parents that have colors as children. And symbolically this is exemplary for all of culture. In every respect, not only in that of physical colors, culture deals with significant problems of difference, such as with social, sexual, theoretical, practical, and artistic differences. Polarity is [thus] a constitutive phenomenon.47 Goethe’s theory of colors provides, in contrast to Newton’s theory of optics, a conceptual foundation for Friedländer’s revised understanding of empirical experience within an explicitly Kantian philosophical framework. At stake for Friedländer in Goethe’s theory of colors then was not the literal accuracy of the theory but rather the symbolic polarity implied in its contrasts. As Hans Blüher notes, Friedländer carried a prism with him to prove to skeptics the validity of what he claimed was the duality evidenced in Goethe’s theory of colors48 If darkness and light were the polar extremes that made all color possible according to Goethe, for Friedländer this distinction meant that all modern life was dependent upon polar opposites, often with only one of these poles being visible to the naked eye, but always constitutively related to the invisible, cognitive conditions of subjective understanding. Friedländer explained this contrast and his understanding of the prism in a review or Eduard Raehlmann’s essay on Goethe’s theory of colors published in the journal of the Goethe society. The review, published in Der Sturm, was titled “Das Prisma und Goethes Farbenlehre”

Friedländer, “Moderner Sieg” 3. The original German reads as follows: “Man sieht das Goethesche Licht immer noch nicht, weil es keine simple mathematische Strahllinie, sondern dual ist, eine klare Differenz, ein Duett, eine Ehe, ein Elternpaar, das die Farbe zu Kindern hat. Und dies ist beispielhaft symbolisch für die gesamte Kultur. In jedweder Hinsicht, nicht nur in farbenphysikalischer, hat die Kultur mit lauter Problemen des Unterscheidens zu tun, mit solchen des Sozialen, des Sexuellen, mit Theoretischen, praktischen, und künstlerischen Differenzen. Polarität ist Urphänomen.” 48 Blüher qtd. in Exner 220. 47

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(“The Prism and Goethe’s Theory of Colors”).49 Contrasting Goethe’s theory to Newton’s, Friedländer seeks to explain the implication of the theory of polar opposites at the heart of perception: One takes a prism in hand and during daylight looks at a mullion and transom. The colored borders, temporarily isolated and separated through the window panes (preferably frosted glass), turn somewhat yellow above, [and] blue below, if one skillfully rotates the prism and [the] borders approach each other together in a green middle as a result, one has in front of him the visible spectral continuum.50 The prism changes lightness and darkness into colors. It shows simultaneously the constitution of difference (i.e., the colors), the fact that these colors are polar opposites (i.e., lightness and darkness), and that these colors are part of a unity (i.e., the spectrum). Differentiation is a process of perception, but one that requires a fundamental unity in order to perceive difference. Goethe’s understanding of the perception of color thus had broader implications for Friedländer: Goethe’s struggle against Newton is the struggle of a deep monism that one understands must be reconciled with oppositional dimensions, against a shallow, comfortable, that is only able to overcome the same types of nuances. Therefore, Goethe’s theory of colors is the most fruitful, difficult to follow, immeasurably meaningful work. The light- and color-opposition is as significant as that of magnetism, of electricity, of sex, of acoustics—as that of difference in general.51

Dr. S[alomo] Friedländer, “Das Prisma und Goethes Farbenlehre,” Sturm (1917/18): 141–2. 50 Friedländer, “Das Prisma” 142. The original German reads as follows: “Man nehme ein Prisma zur Hand und schaue bei Tageslicht ein Fensterkreuz an. Die farbigen Ränder, einstweilen isoliert und durch die Fensterscheibe (am besten Milchglas) unterbrochen, oben etwa gelblich, unten bläulich, rinnen, wenn man das Prisma geschickt dreht und dadurch die Ränder einander nähert, in einer grünlichen Mitte zusammen, und man hat das scheinbar kontinuierliche Spektrum vor sich.” 51 Friedländer, “Das Prisma” 142. The original German reads as follows: “Goethes Kampf gegen Newton ist der Kampf eines tieferen Monismus, der noch mit entgegengesetzten Größen zu rechnen versteht, gegen einen seichteren, bequemeren, der nur gleichartig Nüanciertes zu bewältigen vermag. Daher ist die Farbenlehre Goethes fruchtbarstes, folgenschwerstes, unermesslich vorbedeutungsvolles Werk. Der Licht- oder Farbengegensatz ist so wesentlich wie der magnetische, der elektrische, der sexuale, der akustische—wie die Differenz überhaupt.” 49



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The opposition of light and of color is not simply contrasted to other possible differences but is a testament to Goethe’s significance as a philosopher. Goethe locates in the perception of color the use of differences to create perceived subjective unity. These differences include not only more technical concepts such as magnetism and electricity but also cultural constructs such as sexuality and sounds. Friedländer’s claims of “creative indifference” and “polar opposites” are thus claims of the constitutive unity of humanity through perceived differences. Based on his engagement with Goethe’s Zur Farbenlehre, Friedländer develops an understanding of the grotesque as an artistic style able to expose logical contradictions in empirical science and capable of revealing, through the style’s juxtaposition of opposites, the fundamental unity of the sensual and the rational-cognitive subject. In Schwarz—Weiß—Rot. Deutschlands Sieg über England unter Goethes Farben (“Black—White—Red. Germany’s Victory over England under Goethe’s Colors”), Friedländer incorporates Goethe’s understanding of optics into a critique not only of Newton’s theory of light waves but also of the social and national biases of science. Friedländer situates the critique in nationalistic terms, as a victory of reflective German science over reductive English empiricism. Exner suggests that the nationalism in Friedländer’s “Black—White—Red” might have been an attempt to bypass censorship.52 That is, German authorities may have been less likely to prevent the publication of a text that, on the surface at least, appears patriotic, even nationalistic—and, thus, a celebration of German science over and above that of its English variant. The criticism of scientific practices is foundational to the tale’s grotesque critique, however, both implicitly in the juxtaposition of Goethe’s German science to Newton’s English program as well as explicitly with the colors of the Prussian flag—black, white, red—and their association with the supposedly accurate theory of sense perception. In other words, science is a realm of knowledge influenced by political and social considerations; science is not unquestionable truth.

The Grotesque: Art Meets Science

In the only text he published on the concept, a short essay appearing for the first time in 1919 under the title “Mynona” and later under the title “Grotesk” (“Grotesque”), Friedländer describes the grotesque’s primary function as that of forcing the acculturated observer or reader to reflect upon the way in which her or his sensorial predispositions are constructed. The publication of the essay using two different titles—

Exner 227.

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indeed, Friedländer’s own use of his pseudonym as the title for one version of the essay—indicates not only the material limitations confronting the writer. Often broke, he sought to secure funds by publishing essays several times, but using different titles each time. His pseudonym and the two titles for the “Grotesque” essay also reveal, however, the way in which Friedländer sought to use a multiplicity of perspectives in his own work as well as to encourage his readers to do the same. The indistinguishability of his personae from his art—Mynona the pseudonym and “Mynona” the essay—was an extension of his desire to achieve an ambiguity of self and an ambiguity of effects. Humor was one device Friedländer used consistently to create ambiguity. For the philosopher-artist, humor is not understood as the ability to “luxuriate” in ugliness and the unattractive. Rather, humor is, for the artist-philosopher, “only a sharp means by which to scare us out of ugliness that we already hold for beautiful, true, holy, and pure because we have become used to it.”53 That is, humor has a critical function for Friedländer when deployed in service of a grotesque challenge to prevailing corporeal norms and standards of perception. The grotesque humorist was a clown, but a clown with a critical mission. Indeed, Friedländer described himself as a synthesis between Kant und clown, often referring specifically to the silent film star and “clown” Charlie Chaplin as the paradigmatic example of the comic side of this unusual coupling. The reference to Chaplin is striking, especially given the function that he served for many thinkers during the early twentieth century, including the cultural critic Walter Benjamin. Chaplin’s films are evidence of what Esther Leslie explains is a key aspect of Benjamin’s thinking: “The products of any present moment are contained in proto-form in preceding technologies. Future developments in art, human evolution and technology are predicted and almost realized in new forms.”54 For Benjamin, Chaplin’s slapstick comedies—his Groteskfilme (literally, “grotesque films”)—seek the same effects that the avant-garde artists associated with the earlier Dada movement wanted to achieve. Whereas Benjamin’s work has distinctly teleological overtones, such issues did not influence Friedländer.55 Max Pensky suggests that

Mynona, “Grotesk. Beitrag zur Mappe ‘Köpfe’ von Werner Heuser,” Der Querschnitt (1921) 55. The original German reads as follows: “es ist … nur ein scharfes Mittel, um uns auch noch aus dem Hässlichen aufzuschrecken, das wir deswegen schon für schön, wahr, heilig und rein halten, weil wir uns daran gewöhnt haben.” 54 Leslie 137. 55 Cf. Leslie 130–2. Leslie notes the repeated efforts by Max Horkheimer and those affiliated with the Zeitschritf für Sozialforschung to silence Benjamin’s Marxist political leanings, most notably in the various versions of the essay “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” in part because of the piece’s teleological orientation. 53



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Benjamin sought to overcome “subjective individuality through intoxication,” as his work on Surrealism in particular suggests. His goal, Pensky indicates, is to return to “Erfahrung, to the wholeness of experience” lost in modernity and within capitalism.56 The result of this return to the “wholeness of experience” ultimately would set the stage for an overthrow of the existing order of things. Friedländer’s project, in comparison, demonstrates less concern with political transformation and more concern with the influence of the “immediate visual perception” associated with empirical science. Nowhere is this distinction between the two early twentieth-century intellectuals apparent than in the use of metaphors in their discussions of the grotesque. In “Kleine Geschichte der Photographie” (“A Short History of Photography”), Benjamin describes the idea of an optical unconscious in relation to immediately discernible visual perceptions: It is a different nature which speaks to the camera than speaks to the eye: so different that in place of a space consciously woven together by a man on the spot there enters a space held together unconsciously … Concern with structure, cell forms, the improvement of medicine through these techniques [of time lapses and enlargements]: the camera is ultimately more closely related to these than to the moody landscape or the soulful portrait. At the same time, however, photography opens up in this material the physiognomic aspects of the world of images, which reside in the smallest details, clear and yet hidden enough to have found shelter in daydreams. Now, however, large and formulatable as they have grown, they are to establish the difference between technology and magic as a thoroughly historical variable.57

Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1993) 189–90. 57 Walter Benjamin, “A Short History of Photography,” Classic Essays on Photography, ed. Alan Trachtenberg (New Haven, CT: Leete’s Island Books, 1980) 202–3. This translation appeared originally in Artforum 15 (February 1977). A different, earlier English translation of Benjamin’s essay, one that is truer to the original, appeared in “One Way Street” and Other Writings (London: NLB / Verso, 1979). This translation, republished in 1999, reads as follows: “For it is another nature which speaks to the camera rather than to the eye: ‘other’ above all in the sense that a space informed by human consciousness gives way to a space informed by the unconscious … Details of structure, cellular tissue, with which technology and medicine are normally concerned—all this is, in its origins, more native to the camera than the atmospheric landscape or the soulful portrait. Yet at the same time, photography reveals in this material physiognomic aspects, image worlds, which dwell in the smallest things—meaningful yet covert enough to find a hiding place in waking dreams, but which, enlarged and capable of 56

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Through an emphasis on the camera’s relation to technological innovation rather than to an art-historical tradition, Benjamin suggests that the photographic image contains traces of a present but unperceived material world, a world evidenced in the physiognomic details contained in the image. Indeed, photography marks the changes in art, evolution, and technology. The photograph embodies the epistemology of the age of the scientist in technical, mechanical form, and provides a phenomenology—and object—that demonstrates the historical transformations in what might otherwise be the intangible changes of human perception. In drafting the first of what would be at least three versions of the essay “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit” (“The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”), Benjamin sought to explain further the concept of an optical unconscious with reference to Chaplin’s Groteskfilme.58 The grotesque for Benjamin is understood as synonymous with slapstick. He uses the reference to reveal the foundational relationship at the heart of the concept

formulation, make the difference between technology and magic visible as a thoroughly historical variable.” Benjamin, “Little History of P ­ hotography,” Walter  Benjamin: Selected Writings. Volume 2. 1927–1934 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999) 510–12. The original German of “Kleine Geschichte der Photographie” reads as follows: “Es ist ja eine andere Natur, welche zur Kamera als welche zum Auge spricht; anders vor allem so, daß an die Stelle eines vom Menschen mit Bewußtsein durchwirkten Raums ein unbewußt durchwirkter tritt … Strukturbeschaffenheiten, Zellgewebe, mit denen Technik, Medizin zu rechnen pflegen—all dies ist der Kamera ursprünglich verwandter als die stimmungsvolle Landschaft oder das seelenvolle Porträt. Zugleich aber eröffnet die Photographie in diesem Material die physiognomischen Aspekte von Bildwelten, welche im Kleinsten wohnen, deutbar und verborgen genug, um in Wachträumen Unterschlupf gefunden zu haben, nun aber, groß und formulierbar wie sie geworden sind, die Differenz von Technik und Magie als durch und durch historische Variable ersichtlich zu machen.” Benjamin, “Kleine Geschichte der Photographie,” Angelus Novus. Ausgewählte Schriften 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1966) 232–3. 58 Cf. Leslie 130–1. Benjamin composed the first version of the essay in Paris in 1935. The second version of the text, a revision and expansion by seven pages, was published in slightly altered form in French in the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung in May of 1936. There is also a third version of the essay, produced sometime between 1936 and 1939, which has been published in English: Walter Benjamin, Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. 1935–1938, vol. 3, Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, eds. (Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2002) 122. The third version often is mistakenly considered the second version. In addition, “Das Kunstwerk” appeared in a shortened French version in 1936 as “L’Oeuvre d’art à l’époque de sa reproduction mécanisée.”



The Science of Berlin Dada 47

of the optical consciousness, a juxtaposition of immediate sensory experience and unacknowledged historical continuity. That is, Dada artists had sought the same effects that Chaplin produced in his films— laughter, humor, and sometimes shock. Benjamin revised the essay and produced two additional versions of the text, in no small part due to pressures from his colleagues as well as from publishers.59 There is a slight but significant changed use of the grotesque from the first to the second version of the essay. In the first version of “The Work of Art” essay, Benjamin extends the discussion of penetrated reality with his analysis of Groteskfilme.60 This early draft of “The Work of Art,” a version he felt was not complete, reveals Benjamin as a cultural critic who is struggling to overcome the pervasiveness of acculturated sensory perceptions, who is seeking a means to dislodge the perceiving subject from the norms and standards of perception he or she often unconsciously employs. In his assessment of the mass reception of painting versus film, Benjamin speaks of the scandal produced by the public display of judgment (Urteil) in the presence of the work of art. The technical reproducibility of the artwork changes the subject’s relation to art. While the public reacts progressively to Groteskfilme, it responds “aus einem rückständigen [Verhältnis],” in an antiquated or reactionary manner, to Pablo Picasso’s cubist paintings.61 Progress here is not positive. The progressive reaction is uncritical, an immediate and internal connection with the opinions of professional reviewers, a learned and acculturated standard of visual perception, that does not recognize the teleology of Technik: The enormous amount of grotesque happenings that at the moment are consumed in film are a drastic indication of the danger that threatens humanity out of the repressions that civilization brings with it. The American grotesque films and the films from Disney bring about a therapeutic explosion of the unconscious.62 The popularity of the Groteskfilme, much like that of Disney films, suggests for Benjamin a collective repression that both founds and results

61 62 59 60

Leslie 130–3. Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk (erste Fassung)” 459–62. Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk (erste Fassung)” 460. Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk (erste Fassung)” 462. The original German reads as follows: “ Die ungeheuren Massen grotesken Geschehens, die zur Zeit im Film konsumiert werden, sind ein drastisches Anzeichen der Gefahren, die der Menschheit aus den Verdrängungen drohen, die die Zivilisation mit sich bringt. Die amerikanischen Groteskfilme und die Filme Disneys bewirken eine therapeutische Sprengung des Unbewusstsein.”

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from the process of civilization, from the chaos of modernity. Echoing and simultaneously reinterpreting the theory of collective repression found in Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic assessments of the origin of society, Benjamin suggests that the release of this collective repression occurs in the form of a mass-produced imperative to respond to media such as film—by their very nature are conducive to a “simultaneous collective experience”—in a certain, uncritical fashion: Although paintings began to be publicly exhibited in galleries and salons, there was no way for the masses to organize and control themselves in their reception. Thus the same public which responds in a progressive manner toward a grotesque film, is bound to respond in a reactionary manner to surrealism.63 The Groteskfilme and the Disney movies are two types of film that have capitalized on this collective need for release, and that use formulaic techniques to induce—even to anticipate—the viewing subject’s response. Benjamin’s ultimate goal in situating the grotesque in relation to this mass release is to locate a model of critical reception in the production of an otherwise complacent audience, a public easily appeased by formulaic cinematic techniques, that choose films that star well-known actors and whose aesthetic merits are judged based on the reviews written by critics. The passage on Groteskfilme and Surrealist painting is altered in the second version of Benjamin’s essay.64 In this version, Benjamin turns after his discussion of the surgeon and the magician / medical practitioner immediately to a discussion of the masses’ reception of film. His discussion of film remains, but the emphasis is now on the distinction

Benjamin, “The Work of Art” 235. Cf. Ganguly 255–70; Schwartz 37–101. The significance of this passage in Benjamin’s text has been the subject of much debate and discussion. More recent engagements include Ganguly’s assertion that Benjamin’s reading of surrealism and the quotidian focus of the text should be seen in light of more “historical attentive discussions of his project” (261). In particular, Ganguly sees as key in the essay Benjamin’s continued Marxist affiliations and the way his engagement speaks against a reductive poststructuralist appropriation. Schwartz, in contrast, argues for an understanding of Benjamin’s invocation of surrealism, as well as the figures of the surgeon and cameraman, in terms of typography and the idea of a “prompt language”: “the form of visual communication adequate to the new conditions of attention, perception, and thought” in modernity (48). Needless to say, such a reformulation of Benjamin’s ideas are called into question by Ganguly’s criticism of poststructuralism and the associated celebration of “the ineffability of cultural margins and the oppositionality of subjective modes of being” (255).

63 64



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between optical and tactile reception. He speaks specifically of the “human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history”—a phrase that recalls the science of optical physiology but introduces a historical dimension noticeably absent in the empirical theories that dominated the discipline at the time Benjamin wrote his text.65 He argues against a theory of perception that acts “by [merely] optical means,” suggesting that “habit determines to a large extent even optical reception.” He seeks, however, to argue against the reducibility of optical perception to the empirical world, suggesting rather a process of reflective judgment—an “optical unconscious”—that functions to make perception understandable in a quotidian, spatial context—and, perhaps most importantly, as the product of historical developments and changes in Technik. Benjamin’s theory of optics in the second version of the text thus introduces explicitly the historical mutability of human optical perception in an effort to develop a holistic theory of subjective experience, to appropriate the optical from the realm of the immediate and to secure, in teleological fashion, the present and future critical potential of the viewer as subject. In the second version, Benjamin uses architecture as his example in order to clarify the available means to appropriate optical phenomena: Buildings are appropriated in a two-fold manner: by use and by perception—or, rather, by touch and sight. Such appropriation cannot be understood in terms of the attentive concentration of a tourist before a famous building. On the tactile side there is no counterpart to contemplation on the optical side. Tactile appropriation is accomplished not so much by attention as by habit … For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history cannot be solved by optical means, that is, by contemplation, alone. They are mastered gradually by habit, under the guidance of tactile appropriation.66 In his earlier effort to explain the formulaic and complicit aspects of Groteskfilme, Benjamin is less concerned to explain the critical potential

Benjamin, “The Work of Art” 236. The original German reads as follows: “in geschichtlichen Wendezeiten dem menschlichen Wahrnehmungsapparat.” Benjamin also suggests that cinema reveals the relationship between artistic and scientific uses of photography: “Actually, of a screened behavior item which is neatly brought out in a certain situation, like a muscle of a body, it is difficult to say which is more fascinating, its artistic value or its value for science.” 66 Benjamin, “The Work of Art” 240. 65

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of the physiological and physical responses to these films—laughter, humor, and sometimes shock—and more concerned with identifying the technological limits that confront and acculturate the viewing masses. That is, he is more concerned with Groteskfilme as a genre that fabricates and engenders—indeed, commodifies—the viewing public’s emotional response. In order to resituate the grotesque—that is, how to situate Groteskfilme as possible sites of critical reception—Benjamin resorts in the second version of the essay to a dependence upon the spatial conditions of optical experience to ground his critical model of subjective perception. Groteskfilme are for Benjamin in the first incarnation of “The Work of Art” essay a genre in which the comedic elements initiate a sensorial response that can be “sold” to those viewers wanting to laugh, to be humored, to be shocked. In situating Chaplin as an heir to Dada, Benjamin thus emphasizes one way to understand Groteskfilme: these films are a product of their age and thus reveal the historical development of human perception within capitalism. This requires Benjamin to posit theoretically, if implicitly, a lost critical corporeality for the viewing subject, one to which he or she can return to in order to “unlearn” the habits of tactile and optical perception exploited, used, and commodified in mass culture. This emphasis on aesthetic sensuousness, a sensuous perception, is the foundation of what Leslie describes as Benjamin’s “anthropological materialism” and what some, including Theodor W. Adorno, criticize as a “positivism that takes its measure from the human body.”67 The understanding of optical perception, whose critical appropriative possibilities Benjamin establishes through habits associated with the tactile and quotidian encounters of architectural structures, also informs his understanding of Dada expressed in the second version of the artwork essay. In the text, he suggests the Dadaists “attached much less importance to the sales value of their work than to its uselessness for contemplative immersion.”68 Dadaism—a misnomer in itself, if the Dadaist program is to be understood as anti-programmatic—is associated with other art forms in that, Benjamin suggests, it too sought to achieve “effects which could be fully obtained only with a changed technical standard.” Changed technical standards enable, in other words, the emergence of new art forms whose very effects are dependent upon the advances that make them possible. Dada is not perceived as critical, but rather as the result of historical inevitability. The early “extravagances and crudities” as well as the “barbarisms” of Dada are

Leslie 150–1. Benjamin, “The Work of Art” 237.

67 68



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associated with the “effects which the public today seeks in the film.”69 Benjamin thereby connects the attempt at the destruction of the aura of art as embodied in Dada creations—“reproductions of the very means of production”—with an attempt to make contemplation and evaluation impossible. Dada is a precursor to the Chaplin film: “The Dadaists attached much less importance to the sales value of their work than to its uselessness for contemplative immersion.”70 In Dada performances and Chaplin’s Groteskfilme, there is no time for critical reflection. Indeed, the Dada painting or poem produces synesthesia: “the work of the art of the Dadaists … hit the spectator like a bullet, it happened to him, thus acquiring a tactile quality.”71 Only the eccentric is at home amid such uncritical, sensorial confusion.72 Benjamin recovers the critical potential of Dada only in the movement’s teleological relation to later technologies: Chaplin “has his place” in the connection between modern Groteskfilme and the eccentrics of an earlier age.73 Friedländer, the self-described synthesis of Kant and Chaplin, had an understanding of the grotesque radically different from that of Benjamin. Friedländer found a possible moment of critical reflection in the very immediacy and corporeality of the subject’s response to the grotesque. His approach depended upon a Kantian model in which empirical perception (i.e., empirische Anschauung) engenders communicability between the imagination (i.e., Einbildungskraft) and the understanding (i.e., Verstand). Friedländer thus sought the critical potential of the grotesque not by situating it historically and teleologically, but rather in the very immediacy of sense perceptions themselves. For Friedländer, the grotesque seeks to disengage, through parody and satire, the habituation of sense perception in the immediate in order to acknowledge the infinite variety of human perceptual engagements with the empirical world. Friedländer’s grotesques seek to expose in the immediate present what Benjamin’s optical unconscious suggests can remain only implicit in perception, but which is unfolded teleologically. Similar to Benjamin, Friedländer sought in art the models and the realization of a critical sensorial engagement, even in the collective

Benjamin, “The Work of Art” 237. Benjamin, “The Work of Art” 237. Emphasis added. 71 Benjamin, “The Work of Art” 238. Benjamin also cites Georges Duhamel in this negative similarity between Dada and film: “I can no longer think what I want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images” (Duhamel qtd. in Benjamin, “The Work of Art” 238. 72 Benjamin, “The Work of Art” 238. Benjamin describes the lost critical reflection in his discussion of Dada in terms of an ability “to take time for contemplation and evaluation.” 73 Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk (erste Fassung)” 462. 69 70

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context of much of the modern subject’s perceptual experiences. In Friedländer’s hands, however, the grotesque becomes the very means to reintroduce in the immediate moment the importance of both sensorial engagement and cognitive reflection, a duality mourned through the allegorical figures of the magician, the medical practitioner, and the surgeon in Benjamin’s “The Work of Art” essay and recovered only in recognizing the teleological development of Technik.

Conclusion

Friedländer addresses the grotesque most explicitly in a contribution published in the journal Der Eigene (“The Individual”) in 1919 under the title “Mynona.”74 The text was republished in 1921 in the journal Der Querschnitt (“The Cross-Section”) under the title “Grotesk. Beitrag zur Mappe ‘Köpfe’ von Werner Heuser” (“Grotesque: Contribution to the Portfolio ‘Heads’ From Werner Heuser”).75 In the brief essay, Friedländer insists that the grotesque, which may be associated with strange, bizarre, and fantastic forms, should be understood in dialectical opposition to prevailing aesthetic standards: In order that one be able to feel and to judge something as ornamental, disfigured, contorted, as unusual, abnormal, ugly, it must stand out from the normal pattern, what we view and value as beautiful, orderly, right, proportioned; it must contrast against [these normal patterns] … Therefore it is important not to confuse real norms with habits of natural instinct, obligatory correctness, exemplarity, such as [these are] perfected in logic and mathematics.76 Friedländer emphasizes a distinction between learned forms of habit, of customs of knowledge, and what he describes as true knowledge. The grotesque humorist is able, through his art, to force the modern subject

Salomo Friedländer, “Mynona,” Der Einzige 1.27–8 (1919): 326–7. Mynona, “Grotesk” 54–5. 76 Friedländer qtd. in Manfred Kuxdorf, Der Schriftsteller Salomo Friedländer / Mynona: Kommentator einer Epoche. Eine Monographie (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1990) 62. The German original reads as follows: “Damit man aber etwas als verzerrt, entstellt, verrenkt, als seltsam, anormal, hässlich empfinde und beurteile, muss es sich von einem normalen Muster abheben, das wir als schön, ordentlich, richtig, proportioniert, ansehen und einschätzen; es muss dagegen kontrastieren … Deshalb ist es wichtig, das gesetzlich Richtige, Musterhafte, wie es in der Logik und Mathematik präzisiert wird, die echte Norm, nicht mit den Gewohnheiten der natürlichen Instinkte zu vermengen.” 74 75



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to call into question sensory perceptions based on habit and to thereby reveal this secret, more authentic truth: He [the grotesque humorist] angers and shocks the almost unexterminable philistine in us who, out of forgetfulness, unfathomably feels good in the middle of the caricature of real life, through which he exaggerates caricature itself into the grotesque, until it is possible to drive him out of the merely illusory paradise of habits and to get [him] at least near suspicion: The real, which is hence so easily falsified because it is known and verified internally but is externally imperceptible, and because most spiritually rich people have far more trust for that which they can see, hear, taste, smell and touch than they do for themselves in the most internal sense, which is the foundational form of paradise.77 Through the questioning of knowledge based on habit, even those habits which determine seemingly immediate sensory impressions, the grotesque humorist encourages the modern subject to question judgments not only of aesthetics but also of logic and reason. The grotesque humorist, in other words, uses his or her medium to engender a contemplative and critical engagement with habituated sensorial responses to the empirical world. Friedländer not only focused on the use of the artistic grotesque to engender critical perception. He also drafted the series of Fragelehrbücher (“textbooks” or “question-and-answer handbooks”) in the 1920s and 1930s to help make this aspect of Kantian philosophy readily applicable at the quotidian by experts and lay figures alike. The title of the first published work from this series, Kant für Kinder (“Kant for Kids”), suggests that the texts were intended for children. The various manuscripts indicate that as Friedländer developed the project further, however, the goal was to return a broad cross-section of

Friedländer qtd. in Kuxdorf 63. The original German reads as follows: “ Er (der groteske Humorist) ärgert und chockiert [sic] den fast unausrottbaren Philister in uns, der sich, aus Vergesslichkeit, mitten in der Karikatur des echten Lebens ahnungslos wohlfühlt, dadurch, dass er die Karikatur bis in das Groteske eben übertreibt, solange, bis es gelingt, ihn aus dem nur gewähnten Paradies seiner Gewöhnlichkeiten zu vertreiben und ihm das echten wenigstens in der Ahnung nahezulegen: das echte, das so leicht deswegen geleugnet wird, weil es zwar innerlich gewiss und bestimmt, äusserlich aber nicht wahrnehmbar ist, und weil die geistreichsten Menschen weit mehr Vertrauen zu dem haben, was sie sehen, hören, schmecken, riechen und tasten können, als zu sich selber im allerinnerlichsten Sinn, der das urmusterhafte Paradies bedeutet.”

77

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society—philosophers, scientists, and artists—to the foundational texts of Kant’s critical philosophy.78 Despite the novelty of his Kantian revisions, and what he believed was the urgency with which a return to Kant was necessary in 1920s and 1930s Germany, Friedländer remained for the most part unsuccessful in his efforts to publish his scholarship on the Enlightenment philosopher. In a letter dated June 4, 1923 to the author and film critic Siegfried Kracauer, Friedländer appealed to Kracauer’s influence in both the newspaper- and book-publishing industries. According to the note, Friedländer apparently had sent several “Probe-Skizzen” (“preliminary excerpts”) from his book manuscript, “Kant für Kinder,” to the Reichsministerium (“Ministry of the Interior”). He included these same excerpts in the letter to Kracauer as a result of a conversation with a mutual friend (Frau Hifuld or Hituld). Friedländer asked if the well-known critic, Kracauer, would be willing to publish a review of the materials in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and also be able to recommend a book publisher for the manuscript. Although the letter does not explain Friedländer’s intentions in sending the excerpts to the Ministry, given the breadth of the Kantian focus of his output in the 1920s and 1930s, it appears that he desired to secure much-needed financial support for his artistic and critical work through producing a series of handbooks on various aspects of Kantian philosophy for the German public. While no record remains of either the Ministry’s or of Kracauer’s replies, Friedländer’s unique understanding and use of the grotesque did provide inspiration for

Three of his “question-and-answer” texts were published in the 1920s and 1930s: Kant für Kinder (1924), Kantechismus der Magie (1925), and Kant gegen Einstein (1932). Other manuscripts that appear to be part of the series remain preserved but unpublished among Friedländer’s materials at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach, Germany, including “Kant für Künstler” and “Philosophisches Fragenlehrbuch nach Kants kleinen Schriften.” Still other published and unpublished texts and fragments appear to have some relationship to this constellation of critical revisions, although whether Friedländer envisioned these materials as part of his Kantian project is unclear: “Immanuel Kant als Magier,” “Der Mensch als subjective kopernikanische Sonne,” “Kant / Marx. Imaginärer Dialog zwischen Kurt Hiller und Mynona,” “Kantholizismus,” “Kant und die sieben Narren,” multiple versions of a text with some derivation of the title “Polaristischer Kommentar zu Kants Kritik d[er] r[einen] [Vernunft],” “Über Ästhetik,” “Ernst Marcus als Kritiker Kants,” “Gut und Böse. Fragelehrbuch zum Unterricht in den Elementen des Vernunftsglaubens nach Kant,” “Nochmal der Fall Humanismus,” “Vom Weltäther: Nach Immanuel Kant und Ernst Marcus,” and “KANT—Allgemeine THEORIE, Exzerpt.”

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other artists.79 As the synthesis of Kant, the philosopher, and Chaplin, the clown, Friedländer was a grotesque humorist par excellence. If his artistic and philosophical investigations did not prove to be financially lucrative, such an economic failure perhaps testifies, to paraphrase Benjamin, to the accuracy of his insights in the age of aesthetic and perceptual standardization.

As discussed in the chapter ahead, at least two of his colleagues—Brugman and Höch—explored the potential of his idea of the grotesque with particular emphasis on the optical field, additional efforts to force the visual observer of modern science and art to use an uncultured eye to unlearn acculturated strategies of visual assessment.

79

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Three The Architectonics of Public Science: “Learning to See” in Rudolf Virchow’s Museum of Pathology*

We … learn definitively, that the operation of light takes place in the interior of the human body, and that it is a mere superficial [peripherisches] organ of the human body—not in fact the brain, but the eye itself—which experiences this operation. We learn that this photography [Photographiren] is, in fact, not a mental operation, but a chemical procedure, which is perfected by the co-operation of certain vital processes, and that, in reality, we do not see external objects, but the pictures of our eye.1 Rudolf Virchow *



1

Since 1998, but possibly as early as 1981, the museum has been known as the B ­ erlin Medical Historical Museum. For clarity, the facility is called throughout the text the Museum of Pathology. A version of this chapter appears as “The Architectonics of Public Science: German Identity and the Berlin Museum of Pathology,” Representations of German Identity, eds. Deborah Ascher Barnstone and Thomas O. Haakenson, German Visual Culture Series (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013) 79–101. The author would like to thank Laurel Plapp and her colleagues at Peter Lang for permission to reproduce this slightly revised version of the text in the present volume. Rudolf Virchow, The Freedom of Science in the Modern State: A Discourse Delivered at the Third General Meeting of the Fiftieth Conference of the German Association of Naturalists and Physicians at Munich on the 22nd of September, 1877 (London: John Murray, 1878) 11. The quote appears in Virchow’s original German text as follows: “Wir erfahren damit ganz bestimmt, wie im Innern des menschlichen Körpers selbst die Einwirkung des Lichtes stattfindet und wie ein mehr peripherisches Organ des menschlichen Körpers, nicht etwa das Gehirn, sondern das Auge es ist, welches diese Einwirkung erfährt. Wir erfahren damit, dass dieses Photographiren nicht etwa eine geistige Operation ist, sondern ein chemischer Vorgang, der sich unter Zuhilfenahme gewisser Lebensvorgänge vollzieht, und dass wir in Wirklichkeit nicht die äusseren Dinge sehen, sondern die Bilder unseres Auges.” Die Freiheit der Wissenschaft im modernen Staat. Rede gehalten in der dritten allgemeinen Sitzung der fünfzigsten Versammlung deutscher Naturforscher und Aerzte zu München am 22. September 1877 (Berlin: Verlag von Wiegandt, Hempel & Parey, 1877) 9.

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This chapter is about objects and observers, about what people see and how they see it.2 It is an effort to understand materially how pathology and perception coincided in a historical time and place, how changes in the understanding of vision—“we do not see external objects, but the pictures of our eye”—influenced the way in which scientists in Imperial and Weimar Berlin presented pathological specimens and the means by which the public could question these visual presentations and the science involved. An examination of such collections and displays not only demonstrates what James Clifford has described as the use of collecting as “a strategy for the deployment of a possessive self, culture, and authenticity,” but also reveals the productive failures inherent in modern spectatorship.3 The photograph of a nearly empty exhibition room in an early twentieth-century museum of pathology encapsulates in symbolic fashion a general shift in representational practices at the fin de siècle (Figure 3.1). The image shows a concern with the objects of display as well as an awareness of the individual optical abilities needed to see these evidentiary objects correctly. This latter point is manifest in the unusual lighting and angle of the photograph. Indeed, perhaps the most troubling part of the image is that the photographer did not appear to be

Figure 3.1  An exhibition room in the Museum of Pathology at the Charité Hospital in Berlin, circa 1899. Image courtesy of Das Archiv der Berlin-Branden­ burgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.



2 3

Cf. Crary 5–6. Clifford 218.



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prepared—technically nor cognitively—to account for the excess natural light streaming in from the numerous windows at the far end of the image. In addition, the angles suggest that the photographer did not comprehend fully the fact that the camera would represent the space as obtuse. A long table juts from underneath the bottom center of the image and exacerbates the peculiar angles of the heavy supports in the room’s ceiling. These architectural traces in the image increase the viewer’s impression that the camera is on the verge of collapsing. The apparent errors of lighting and angle collide as the glass of numerous empty iron display cabinets reflects and amplifies the natural light in the photographic space, causing the cases to appear larger as they approach the camera’s lens. In short, the image appears to be a bad photograph. And, in a sense, it is. Unless it is viewed correctly. Upon further examination, it becomes clear that it is neither the camera’s lens nor the observer’s perspective from which the viewer is to understand the representation. Rather, the focus of the photographic image is a marble bust on a pedestal in the center of the composition, a figure whose profile is visible, framed by the window behind it (Figure 3.2). Natural light, in a gesture reminiscent of religious imagery, suggests that the architectural and display techniques in the photographed space have transcended the world of appearances. Through the emphasis on and location of the marble bust, the image demands that the viewer see the specimens in the museum the way that the marble bust sees them. In short, the photograph is a tribute to a way of visually assessing the displays and display cases as if from the perspective of the mysterious carved head. And what does the mysterious carved head reveal, exactly? If the observer only sees the pictures of her or his eye and not the empirical objects of the external world, how can the observer be sure that she or he sees a misshapen object and not a “chemical operation” influenced by “certain vital processes,” not her or his own deformed visual “photograph”? To answer this question is to engage techniques of observation, to be sure, but not only from the perspective of the trained specialist. The techniques of observation made popular in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries were not only the rules of expert engagement but influenced the nonspecialist observer as well. This chapter showcases an attempted synthesis of expert scientific observation and public acculturation using one particular example. The chapter is the story of that mysterious carved head: the cellular pathologist and elected official Rudolf Virchow.4

4

Cf. Crary 14. Crary locates the transformation in visual experience he describes primarily between 1810 and 1840. His concept of the observer, given the scope of his own text, however, is meant to be applicable to the entire, so-called long nineteenth century.

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Figure 3.2 A marble bust of Rudolf Virchow in the exhibition rooms at the Charité Hospital in Berlin. Image courtesy of Das Archiv der Berlin-Branden­ burgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.



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Perhaps no other figure in the Germany of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries embodied concerns over pathological specimens and human visual understanding better than Virchow.5 Berlin more than any other city is marked by his labors, often quite literally: from the city’s sewer system, which he demanded be built, to the museums and monuments erected in his honor. The role of architectural space and display techniques in the popularization of scientific knowledge, a type of scientific popularization exemplified by the Museum of Pathology of the Charité Hospital in Berlin, Germany, is the focus of the next several pages.6 Both Angela Matyssek and Constantin Goschler have emphasized in recent scholarship the particular function of vision with respect to Virchow’s research, a vision that was trained to see (i.e.,



5



6

Virchow completed his medical degree from the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin in 1843 with a Latin thesis, De rheumate praesertim Cornea (“On Rheumatic Disease, Particularly of the Cornea”). He was appointed a company surgeon at the Charité Hospital in Berlin that same year. He published a paper in 1845 that dealt with two reported cases of leukemia, a text that helped establish his reputation as a scientist. After a promotion to Prosektor at the Charité, he and a colleague, Benno Reinhardt, began publishing the journal Archive für pathologische Anatomie und Physiologie, und für klinische Medizin (“Archives for Pathological Anatomy and Physiology, and for Clinical Medicine”). Virchow was appointed to the first chair established in Germany devoted to pathological anatomy at the University of Würzburg in 1849. He returned to Berlin in 1856 to accept a professorship in pathological anatomy and to head the Institute of Pathology. In 1859, he published Die Cellularpathologie in ihrer Begründung auf physiologischer und pathologischer Gewebelehre (“Cellular Pathology as Based upon Physiological and Pathological Histology”), a groundbreaking study in which he declared that omnis cellula e cellula (“every cell is derived from a [preexisting] cell”). Virchow had borrowed the concept from the work of Robert Remak, a German neo-anatomist, and took as his own the Latin phrase coined in 1825 by François Vincent Raispail. Nevertheless, the published work, a series of twenty lectures that Virchow had given in 1858, established cellular pathology as a significant field of scientific research. Cf. Helen Longino, The Fate of Knowledge (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002) 37; Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990) 62. Longino examines consensus formation in her work on the objectivity of science secured through “the social character of inquiry” (Science 62). Although Longino focuses often implicitly on discussions internal to scientific communities, her work emphasizes the “situatedness” of scientists: “an adequate representation of scientific practices must situate scientists in their communities and situate those communities in the larger and partially overlapping communities of clients, funders, consumers, and citizens that sustain them” (Fate 37). Because Thomas Schnalke, current director of the Museum of Pathology, has noted that the facility was funded through official appropriations, I take Longino’s emphasis on “partially overlapping communities” to be exemplified physically by the Museum, a place where the nonspecialist public could encounter specialized knowledge made available through official support.

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Sehen) rather than to look (i.e., Schauen).7 This chapter focuses on Virchow’s understanding of learned visual perception, of “sehen lernen,” in the context of the physical and optical conditions required for such perception, what the title of this chapter refers to as the architectonics of public science.8 To examine the site and sight of Virchow’s Museum of Pathology, this chapter is divided into three parts. First, background information helps situate Virchow’s role in the facility’s realization. Although the establishment of such a museum had been discussed for some time,

Cf. Constantin Goschler, Rudolf Virchow: Mediziner—Anthropologe—Politiker (Cologne: Böhlau, 2002) 206–7. Goschler examines the distinction between “Sehen” and “Schauen” in his examination of Virchow. 8 The term “architectonics” refers to several related aspects of the organization of the space in relation to the Institute of Pathology: the geographic location of the buildings, the architectural structures of the complex, and the display techniques used in the buildings. These three aspects of the space of the Institute are connected insofar as the display techniques sought to exploit the architectural and geographic dimensions of the Institute, and the architectural and geographic specificities of the structure were selected initially for their ability to aid in the processes of optical assessment. The word “space” emphasizes the enactment of resistant or alternative readings of these optical invocations. Cf. Roger Cooter and Stephen Pumfrey, “Separate Spheres and Public Places: Reflections on the History of Science Popularization and Science in Popular Culture,” History of Science 32 (1994): 237–67; Sophie Forgan, “The Architecture of Display: Museums, Universities and Objects in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” History of Science 32 (1994): 139–62. Cooter and Pumfrey suggest the idea of popularization “sets up symmetry between two discourses, acknowledges transformation, and grants reciprocity” (256). They provide a comprehensive assessment of the issues at stake in the concept of popularization, emphasizing the need to explore “the interactions between élite science and popular culture” (240); they caution, however, against conflating “the social explication of science and the elaboration of its popular dissemination and cultivation” lest science itself be reduced to social activity. In the context of museology, Forgan notes that much work on museums tends to focus on displays or contents rather than situating the museum “per se as a site of scientific activity” (140; emphasis in original). Much work on popularization that might fall under the rubric of cultural studies of science has been based primarily on analyses of texts (i.e., personal letters, newsletters, biographies, and autobiographies) or of venues where scientific research in the strict sense does not occur (i.e., cafes and professional societies). In contrast and in light of the work of Cooter and Pumfrey and of Forgan, this chapter seeks to situate physical space itself as a site for the production of scientific knowledge as well as the means with which the lay community can interact, accept, or challenge such knowledge as it is undergoing consensus formation within the scientific community. Cf. Andreas Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung im 19. Jahrhundert: bürgerliche Kultur, naturwissenschaftliche Bildung und die deutsche Öffentlichkeit; 1848–1914 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1998). Daum provides an excellent historical overview of the popularization of scientific knowledge during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 7



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Virchow’s professional and public influence made the structure a reality just prior to the fin de siècle. Second, the text focuses on the specific architectural features and display techniques of the new facility, a structure that was part of the complex to be erected as the new home for the Institute of Pathology on the grounds of the Charité Hospital. Third and finally, the chapter utilizes this museological and architectural excavation of the Museum to point to methodological limits in scholarship on the history of the popularization of scientific knowledge in general and the visual culture of the scientific museum in particular.9 The primary targets of critical concern here are Michel Foucault and Jonathan Crary, both of whom focus to varying degrees on the relationships between pathology and optics. The concern with their work, and the scholarship it has produced, has less to do with the evidentiary debates among scientists or how they preserved specimens—that is, rather than describing and writing the history of the types of evidence science produced. Rather, the concern is that the genealogical approaches that Foucault and Crary use neither enable a full understanding of how a venue like the Museum of Pathology sought to acculturate the public into the visual ideology of empirical science, nor to appreciate the productive ways in which Virchow succeeded—and also failed—in this enterprise.

Science as Public Knowledge

On June 27, 1899, and after decades of rigorous personal and professional effort, the highly esteemed politician and scientist Virchow gave a keynote address that officially opened the first of three buildings that would comprise the new home of the Charité Hospital’s Institute of Pathology in Berlin. The Institute, founded in 1856, was—and still is—a center for research into pathological phenomena and one that Virchow, who had been a key figure in the establishment of the field of cellular pathology, quickly made world-renowned.10 The second facility, the main building

  9 Cf. Turner, Collins and Evans, and Gorman. The issue of expertise has become the focus of much recent discussion in the history and the philosophy of scientific knowledge. While in Germany the concept of Kulturträger more readily explains the role of someone like Virchow as a “carrier of culture and knowledge” in both professional and public arenas, the concept of the “expert” is used here to help situate this argument in the context of the current debates. 10 Cf. Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, 4th ed. (New York: Zone Books, 1998) 207. Canguilhem describes Virchow’s concept of pathology as “physiology with obstacles” (207). Virchow’s early work on cellular pathology influenced his understanding of anatomical pathology considerably. Virchow’s belief that morphological anomalies were the result of cellular developmental pathologies became the justification for his Museum of Pathology. In short, Virchow felt that informing the public of the function of cellular growth and development through the Museum’s displays was the best means to ensure lay understanding of the cellular origins of anatomical pathologies.

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of the new Institute known as the Lehr- und Forschungebäude (“Instruction- and Research-Building”), was to be devoted to research programs and to the teaching of future medical scientists. This second structure was completed in 1905. The final building, the Obduktionsgebäude (“Autopsy Building”), was opened only slightly later in 1906 and was to be the site of thousands of future postmortem examinations. Understood in its historical context, the Museum and the expanded Institute represent a rather radical political and social enterprise in the Berlin of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Virchow died four years after delivering the address at the opening of the Museum.11 He nevertheless had been able to see the completion of what he believed to be the most important building of the three structures comprising the Institute of Pathology.12 The Museum was a completely new addition and was to house arguably the world’s most impressive collection of preserved pathological specimens.13 It would also be a venue whose structure and content promised to facilitate lay engagement with specialized scientific knowledge.14 The opening of

Virchow died on September 5, 1902. Cf. Rudolf Virchow, “The Founding of the Berlin University and the Transition from the Philosophic to the Scientific Age,” The Smithsonian Report for 1894 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1896) 692. Virchow described on August 3, 1893 the importance of the establishment of museums for professional and public understanding of the natural sciences: “Nowadays the scholar is called upon to be an investigator, and the demands made upon instruction have increased to so great an extent that the academic course of studies is arranged with a view not only of initiating the student into the methods of investigation, but also of affording him the opportunity of practicing them.” 13 Cf. Peter Krietsch and Manfred Dietel, Pathologisch-Anatomisches Cabinet: vom Virchow-Museum zum Berliner Medizinhistorischen Museum in der Charité (Berlin and Vienna: Blackwell Wissenschafts-Verlag, 1996) 113–21; Cay-Rüdiger Prüll, “Das Pathologisch-Anatomische Museum,” Theater der Natur und Kunst —Theatrum Naturae et Artis. Wunderkammern des Wissens, eds. Horst Bredekamp, Jochen Brünning, and Cornelia Weber (Berlin: Humboldt-Universitätand Henschel Verlag in der Dornier Medienholding, 2000) 107–12. Prüll notes that the basis of the collection, which contained approximately 23,600 specimens when the Museum was opened in 1899, came from an anatomical theater that was established in 1713. Krietsch and Dietel point out that the collection was expanded in 1831 to include anatomical-pathological specimens after the appointment of a Krankenhauspathologe (“medical pathologist”) at the Charité and as a result of laws allowing the donation of preparations to the facility for educational and professional-developmental purposes (17). 14 Cf. Virchow qtd. In Krietsch and Dietel 5. Virchow insisted that, despite having its own structure, the Museum was part of—and not a facility separate from— the new Institute of Pathology: “Das Project für diesen Neubau geht dahin, das Institut neben das neue Museum, nicht bloss in gleicher Flucht, sondern auch in directer räumlicher Verbindung, zu errichten. In Wirklichkeit handelt es sich also nicht um die Gründung zweier getrennter Anstalten, sondern um die Herstellung derselben in benachbarten und zusammenhängenden, aber doch gesonderten Gebäuden” (emphases in original). 11

12



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this new structure demonstrates Virchow’s efforts to reduce the distinction between clinical and laboratory medicine.15 In the Eröffnungsrede (“Opening Address”) Virchow spoke of the potential significance of the facility with respect to the public reception of medical-scientific research and in contrast to the type of engagement enabled by the popular press:16 For the first time on this occasion a plan’s potential is realized and that on behalf of the High Ministry which conceived of this plan: Namely the possibility for entrance into the Institute for the general public. Today, where through the universal dispersion of the press, the circulation of literary publications the public is made aware in a certain way on a daily basis of the progress of [medical science]—and naturally also the regressions that are also always there—one can hardly meet in general gatherings where one would like to say something completely new such that it would not have already been shared in some worldly form or another. The difference between us and them, what the general press offers, is based only in security, on the evidence itself with which, we offer here, absolute familiarity and the general ability to represent it in an understandable way. What was missing and what always weighed heavy on my heart was the immediate visual perception [of the evidence itself].17

Virchow’s success in this endeavor reveal the inaccuracy of Foucault’s insights in the context of early twentieth-century Berlin, a point that is addressed in greater detail later in this book, especially in the chapter titled “Learning to See Grotesquely.” 16 Rudolf Virchow, Die Eröffnung des Pathologischen Museums der Königl. Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin am 27. Juni 1899, Berlin 1899 (Berlin: August Hirschwald, 1899). 17 Virchow qtd. in Krietsch and Dietel 2–3. Emphasis in original. The original ­German reads as follows: “ein Vorhaben … [das] zum ersten Mal bei dieser ­Gelegenheit in den Vordergrund getreten ist und das seitens des Hohen Ministeriums bereitwillig mit in den Plan aufgenommen ist: nämlich die Zugänglichkeit der Anstalt auch für das grosse Publicum. Heute, wo durch die allgemeine Verbreitung der Presse, die Ausdehnung der literarischen Publicationen das Publicum gewissermaasen in der täglichen Kenntniss der Fortschritte der Medicin erhalten wird - natürlich auch der Rückschritte die sind ja auch immer dabei -, kann man eigentlich in keine grössere Gesellschaft von Menschen treten, wo man sowas so vollständig Neues vortragen könnte, dass es nicht schon in irgend einer Form der Welt mitgetheilt wäre. Der Unterschied zwischen uns und dem, was die allgemeine Presse bietet, beruht nur in der Sicherheit, in der Evidenz dessen, was wir vortragen, in der vollkommenen Kenntniss desselben und in der grösseren Befähigung, es verständlich darzustellen. Was dazu fehlte und was mir immer sehr am Herzen lag, das war die unmittelbare Anschauung [des Beweises].” 15

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Virchow’s speech explicitly contrasted the potential of the new facility with the public perception of and interest in the medical sciences as evidenced in the popular press. He indicated that the Museum would provide a physical venue for him and his colleagues to display the advancements in their research and to share their evidence with the public. The facility thereby secured the reputation of science against the threat of sensationalism. Virchow felt that stories about unsuccessful experiments and evidentiary debates should remain internal to scientific communities. He and his proponents could engage in scientific discussions in the lecture halls of the Institute while still presenting certain evidence to the curious public. The Museum thus would enable, according to Virchow, the “unmittelbare Anschauung,” the “immediate visual perception,” of scientific evidence by both medical students and curious citizens alike.18 More than just another public event, the Museum’s opening was an indication for Virchow that years of campaigning and innumerable appearances had already begun to produce their just results.19 The

Cf. Henning Schmidgen, “Pictures, Preparations, and Living Processes: An Archaeology of the Physiological Gazes in the 19th Century,” Colloquium 2002 / 2003, Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte. Berlin, October 15, 2002; Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum der Charité (Berlin: Charité, 2000). Schmidgen discusses the concept of unmittelbare Anschauung in his as-yet unpublished essay. A flyer for the Museum from 2000 describes the visual emphasis with respect to medical students but further on (i.e., not in the following quote) also applied to the public: “Sie [die pathologische Sammlung] war aus der bis heute richtigen und vom Institut für Pathologie vertretenen Ansicht Virchows entstanden, man könne eines der wichtigsten Grundlagenfächer des Medizinstudiums, die Pathologie, nur dann optimal lehren, wenn für jeden Zweck und zu jeder Zeit ein umfangriches, dreidimensionales Anschauungsmaterial zu Verfügung stehe.” 19 Cf. Krietsch and Dietel 72; Virchow, “Founding” 694. Virchow had been interested in opening a public museum that would display his collection for some time, perhaps even as early as his appointment as Prosektor of the Institute of Pathology in 1856. Johannes Müller, who made significant contributions to the field of physiological optics and whose work is not without relevance for the current text, was the first person considered for the post but, due to professional obligations, recommended Virchow instead. Virchow would describe his own philosophy of life years later as more than reducible to cellular phenomena, in part due to the work of Müller: “Only since we know that life means cell activity, and since we can see the living being in the cell and force it to submit to experimentation—knowledge which the world owes primarily to our own Johannes Müller and his school—no one speaks of vital force. But this knowledge does not finally solve the question about the nature of life any more than the question about the nature of the human mind is answered by the proof that mental activity is connected with nerve substance” (“Founding” 694). 18



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public could gain access to scientific objects and irrefutable evidence in the exhibition space. Virchow had emphasized during a public address at the Royal Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin on August 3, 1893, the need for such sensory engagement: On all sides the conviction was evidently taking root that the natural sciences can be understood only by the observation of nature herself, and that the effective combination of science and tangible objects requires provisions on a large scale, such as can be afforded by museums, collections, laboratories, institutes. This conviction became particularly strong when it was realized that experimentation is the most important means of forcing nature to reveal the essence, causes, and development of a phenomenon.20 For Virchow, public and professional access to “tangible objects” would be the best means by which to “observe nature herself” and, via experimentation, to force nature to reveal the laws of biological development. The Museum’s opening cannot be understood by focusing solely on Virchow’s intentions, however. The facility, as Virchow’s comments suggest, owed its existence to among other things a slow but palpable transformation in public acceptance of experimental science, to a citizenry that increasingly demanded to be educated in proper strategies of observation and, finally, to the type of scholarly rigor and demand for empirical evidence that the keynote speaker seemingly personified.21 As a politician Virchow sought to help Germany’s citizens understand the important relationship between proper scientific research and national progress through his work on curricula reform committees and such projects as the installation of a sewer system in the city of

Virchow, “Founding” 692. Cf. Alexis Joachimides, Die Museumsreformbewegung in Deutschland und die Entstehung des modernen Museums 1880–1940 (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 2001); Susan Köstering, Natur zum Anschauen: Das Naturkundemuseum des deutschen Kaiserreiches 1871–1914 ([n.p.]: Böhlau, 2003); H. Glenn Penny, Objects of Culture: Ethnology and Ethnographic Museums in Imperial Germany (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); and Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism Imperial Germany. Although limited primary sources remain from the Institute’s archives, these various studies provide extensive literature on the public’s increasing engagement with and interest in science in Germany during this period.

20 21

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Berlin.22 He had become the world’s foremost expert on ­ cellular pathology and one of the most highly esteemed with respect to ­anatomical-pathological phenomena.23 The success of his scientific activities allowed for a combination of specialized knowledge and public authority. His desire for a venue in which to display and to promote the experimental method in pathology enabled thousands of visitors to witness for themselves the supposed effects of abnormal biological development in displays assembled from over 23,600 pickled fetuses and misshapen human skeletons. Given the intense discussions of evolutionary theory in the late nineteenth century, it is easy to assume that many lay citizens saw these specimens as further proof of the degeneration of the human species tout court. Virchow’s criticisms of what he perceived to be the speculative nature of Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory, however, had influenced increasingly German science and public attitudes during the period. Virchow was not concerned about the plausibility of evolution per se but rather with the way in which Darwin’s theory encouraged “unscientific speculation” about the transformation of species and the susceptibility of humans to apparently uncontrollable malformations.24 In contrast to figures like Max Nordau and Cesare Lombroso, who had been in contact with him, Virchow often implicitly if not explicitly

See, for example, the tremendous amount of work Virchow did, efforts that many others have since detailed, with respect to such late nineteenth-century activities as the study of hair, eye, and skin color. As far as politics were concerned, Virchow had developed his liberal political views during the early phases of his academic and medical training. He began publishing historical essays in 1844, the first titled Zur Geschichte des Carthauses in Schivelbein (“Toward the History of the Carthauses in Schivelbein”). He was appointed in 1848 to investigate an outbreak of typhus fever in Upper Silesia. While his report criticized primarily the government, it was only upon his return to Berlin in 1856 that Virchow would become involved actively with a number of explicitly political affairs. He was elected to the Berlin City Council in 1859, to the Prussian Diet in 1861, to the German Reichstag from 1880 to 1893, and founded the Fortschrittspartei (“Progressive Party”). Incredibly, Virchow held his post on the City Council for over forty years, until his death on September 2, 1902. 23 The famous story of a Belgian girl who supposedly exhibited stigmata and whose case was much discussed among members of the Berlin Society, is an important case in point. 24 Benoit Massin, “From Virchow to Fischer: Physical Anthropology and ‘Modern Race Theories’ in Wilhelmine Germany,” Volkgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr., History of Anthropology 8 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996) 98. 22



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challenged the idea of degeneration.25 He advocated instead what H. Glenn Penny and Matti Bunzl describe as a cosmopolitan framework “that accepted the basic unity of mankind, but saw it expressed in difference rather than sameness.”26 Thus, while some individuals saw anatomical differences as indications of the degeneration of the human species, Virchow did not. He sought to educate members of the public about the role of development in biology; he emphasized the certitude of rigorous experimentation and empirical evidence in lieu of sensationalistic speculation and theoretical abstraction.27 While Virchow’s approach did not avoid hierarchies—the anatomically pathological was still postulated as abnormal—such an approach should not be too readily grouped together with explicitly racist approaches to biology, in general, or with racial hierarchies based on evolution, in particular. In short, Virchow’s concerns with Darwin’s evolutionary theory were focused not simply on the science involved but also on the scientific education of the public.28 Virchow’s concerns with the supposedly improper education of the public about scientific matters are exemplified by his debate with his one-time student and assistant Ernst Haeckel. In many ways Virchow’s

Both Nordau and Lombroso had been in contact with Virchow as letters in his archive testify. See, for example, two letters from Lombroso one dated November 2, 1882, and a second dated September 20, 1883, as well as a note from Nordau written from Paris in 1892. Virchow often spoke against issues that formed the basis for warnings about national or cultural degeneration. For example, in his August 3, 1893 address in the main hall of the Royal Friedrich-Wilhelm University, Virchow spoke out against anti-Semitism: “Even now it is standing baffled before the enigma of anti-Semitism, whose appearance in this time of the equality of rights is inexplicable to everybody, yet which, in spite of its mysteriousness, or perhaps on account of it, fascinates even our cultured youth … The human mind is only too prone to leave the difficult path of well-ordered thinking and to indulge in fanciful musing” (Virchow, “Founding” 694). 26 Matti Bunzl and H. Glenn Penny, “Introduction,” Worldly Provincialism: Germany Anthropology in the Age of Empire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003) 11. 27 Cf. Massin 118. Massin suggests that Virchow’s views even led him to the conclusion that pathological developments might be reversed or prevented through medical-scientific means. 28 Cf. Lynn K. Nyhart, Biology Takes Form: Animal Morphology and the German Universities, 1800–1900 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Alfred E. Kelly, The Descent of Darwin: The Popularization of Darwinism in Germany, 1860–1914 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1981). Nyhart’s is an excellent study of institutional histories of science in Germany. Kelly’s now classic work on Darwinism in Germany should form the basis of any attempt to understand the popularization of evolutionary theory there, even if he often depends upon a passive notion of the nonscientific public. 25

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exchanges with Haeckel in the late 1870s and early 1880s indicated the profound problem that development posed for many scientists in Germany, especially prior to the so-called rediscovery of Mendelian genetics.29 The well-known exchange between the two began during the Congress of German Naturalists and Physicians in Munich in September 1877.30 Ernst Haeckel’s address before the Congress of German Naturalists and Physicians took place on September 18 with the title, Die heutige Entwicklungslehre im Verhältnisse zur Gesammtwissenschaft (“The Modern Doctrine of Evolution in Relation to General Science”).31 In this initial address, Haeckel was concerned primarily with what he called the Seele (“Soul”) in animate and inanimate nature, a concept that he had developed in an 1866 book. Haeckel spoke in favor of the theory of evolution, claiming that exact or experimental proofs were only applicable to part of science. He claimed that in certain sciences, such as morphology, it was appropriate to adopt the “historical-philosophical” method because organisms could only be understood in their evolutionary history. To that end, he cited a number of disciplines—history, archeology, and linguistics—that actually provided the proof of evolutionary theory’s correctness. Perhaps not obvious, given this description, the main theme of Haeckel’s address in reality was education. He claimed that children should be taught more than facts. They should be encouraged to ask the question, “Wie ist das entstanden?” (“How did that emerge/ come into being?”). Students would learn to study causes and not simply their results. Consequently, Haeckel claimed that evolution, which he believed explained the transformation of species through natural selection, must be taught in the schools in Germany in relation to a number of fields—cosmogeny, geology, biology, anthropology, and linguistics.32 These demands were met with significant criticism, notably from Haeckel’s one-time mentor.

Cf. Jonathan Harwood, Styles of Scientific Thought: The German Genetics Community; 1900–1933 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). Harwood provides a concise history of the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics in Germany. 30 Cf. Ernst Haeckel, Die heutige Entwickelungslehre im Verhältnisse zur Gesamtwissenschaft. Vortrag in der ersten öffentlichen Sitzung der fünfzigsten Versammlung Deutscher Naturforscher und Aerzte zu München am 18. September 1877 (Stuttgart: E. Schweizerbart’sche Verlagshandlung; E. Koch, 1878); Ernst Haeckel, Freedom in Science and Teaching, introd. T. H. Huxley (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1879); Virchow, Freedom, Virchow, Freiheit. A brief summary of the events follows for the uninitiated reader. 31 There is to the author’s knowledge no English translation of Haeckel’s initial address to the Conference. The 1879 translation is an edited version that includes Haeckel’s response to Virchow’s (later) speech at the event. 32 Haeckel, “Entwicklungslehre” 5. 29



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Virchow’s address was delivered extemporaneously a few days later, on September 22, and contained many of the concerns and conclusions he repeated in writing the introduction for the 1878 English translation. Interestingly, Virchow did not hear some of the earlier talks given at the event—including Haeckel’s speech—because he arrived after the conference had begun. Virchow obtained a written copy, however. Haeckel’s speech to the Congress, while one of Virchow’s primary objects of criticism, was by no means the only one. Virchow also criticized a paper presented at the conference by the Swiss botanist Karl Wilhelm von Nägeli on September 20 titled Über die Schranken der naturwissenschaftlichen Erkenntniss (“On the Limits of Knowledge in the Natural Sciences”) and another, by the German pathologist and bacteriologist Edwin Klebs, titled Über die Umgestaltung der medecinischen Anschauungen in den letzten drei Jahrhunderten (“On the Transformation of Our Views of Medicine in the Last Three Centuries”). On the surface, it was a difference of opinion between Virchow and Haeckel—and, to some extent, the other targets of the former’s extemporaneous criticisms—as to whether or not they and their colleagues should openly (i.e., in front of the lay public) discuss unproven scientific hypotheses as well as their current unverified research findings.33 On a more fundamental level, however, it demonstrated the bind that still confronted many practitioners of the experimental method in Germany, particularly prior to the fin de siècle. On the one hand, researchers were pressed to secure national and public support for their enterprise. On the other hand, scientists also needed to question existing research and pose tentative or unproven hypotheses without undermining the public’s and the nation’s perception that the discourse of science was a discourse of truth.34 These two aspects of the scientific enterprise met with another contradiction in German society during the second half of the nineteenth century: the government guaranteed freedom of scientific inquiry but often limited what could be taught in public classrooms. Thus, while Article 20 of the Prussian Charter, adopted as Paragraph

Cf. John R. Baker, The Controversy on Freedom in Science in the Nineteenth Century (n.p.: Society for Freedom in Science, 1962); W. Breitenbach, “Kleine Mitteilungen. Hermann Müller-Lippstadt und der biologische Unterricht,” Kleine Mitteilungen (n.d.) 43–8. Although the debate is often mentioned in passing, few scholars have made it the focus of their analyses, with the exceptions of Baker and Breitenbach. 34 Vivisection, for example, was a particularly contentious topic. Virchow gave an address on the topic and the dangers that the anti-vivisection movement posed to scientific inquiry to this end. Cf. Hubert Bretschneider, Der Streit um die Vivisektion im 19. Jahrhundert: Verlauf—Argumente—Ergebnisse (Stuttgart: G. Fischer, 1962). 33

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152 of the Code of the German Empire, declared unequivocally that “Die Wissenschaft und ihre Lehre ist frei” (“Science and Its Doctrines Are Free”), the Culture Minister Adalbert Falk forbade the teaching of natural history (which included biology) in public classrooms beginning in 1879 in response to the so-called Müller–Lippstadt Affair.35 The new Museum of Pathology thus became an important space for Virchow to realize what he conceived of as beneficial relationships among scientific specialists and lay citizens; the Museum worked toward this goal architectonically by inducing medical students and curious visitors to see scientific evidence correctly.

The Architectonics of Public Science

The structure of the Museum of Pathology demonstrated the way in which geographical location and display techniques served Virchow’s purposes. The architectural plans for the three new structures of the Institute of Pathology consciously divided research areas from those accessible to the lay public (Figure 3.3). The research rooms of the Institute were nevertheless to be connected to the Museum through an enclosed walkway extending from street level to the top of the ground floor.36 The design was not meant to hide information from the Museum’s visitors, according to Virchow, but rather sought to facilitate student use of the Museum as well as to enable the public presentation of research materials in a way that the lay community was most ready to appreciate given contemporary German pedagogical orientations toward natural scientific phenomena in general and the experimental

Hermann Müller, Oberlehrer (“head teacher”) at the Realschule in Lippstadt, had discussed Darwin’s evolutionary theory and three sections from Carus Sterne’s Werden und Vergehen, a text on the role of carbon in organic contexts, among students in the Unterprima (“lower level class”). The passage from Sterne that Falk and others find so offensive rhetorically mimicked the Bible: “Ein moderner Chemiker, welcher die Gesichichte der Schöpfung in seine geliebte Zeichensprache übersetzen wollte, dürfte nicht wie Faust beginnen: Am Anfang war das Wort, oder der Sinn, oder die Kraft,—‘er kann die Kraft allein so hoch unmöglich schätzen’—und mit einem Male Licht erblickend, würder er ausrufen: Am Anfang war der Kohlenstoff mit seinen merkwürdigen inneren Kräften.” Sterne qtd. in Irmtraut Scheele, Von Lüben bis Schmeil: Die Entwicklung von der Schulnaturgeschichte zum Biologieunterricht zwischen 1830 und 1933, Wissenschaftshistorische Studien 1 (Berlin: Dietrich Reime Verlag, 1981) 100. 36 Virchow qtd. in O. Israel, “XI. Das pathologische Museum der Königlichen Friedrich Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin,” Berliner klinische Wochenschrift 41 (October 14, 1901): 1048. The original German reads as follows: “durch einen verdeckten Gang in der Höhe des Erdgeschosses verbunden werden.” 35



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Figure 3.3  Floor plans for the main floor of the Museum of Pathology. Image courtesy of Das Archiv der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.

method in particular.37 Through the objects and structures Virchow sought to discourage the lay but scientifically curious public from engaging in controversial research topics that were themselves still debated extensively by trained researchers within the scientific community. At the same time, curious citizens were invited to become more familiar with advances in medical-scientific research and the means by which evidence was preserved, displayed, and analyzed. Despite Virchow’s early concern with presenting scientific information to an untrained public, he did so in the case of the Museum of Pathology for two reasons. First, he and other scientists could control what was presented and how it was presented. Second, one of the primary objectives of the displays was to familiarize the lay visitor with the experimental techniques of Virchow’s cellular and anatomical pathology. In other words, the Museum was about both the objects

Cf. Virchow, “Eröffnung 7; Angela Matyssek, Das Pathologische Museum. Geschichte einer wissenschaftlichen Sammlung um 1900 (Darmstadt: Steinkopff, 2002) 114.

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displayed and the means by which scientific knowledge about the objects could be proven empirically. The displayed specimens implied phenomenologically to the unaided eye a causal relation between the invisible operations of cellular pathologies and the very visible anatomical pathologies.38 A belief in an immediate visual perception was key in Virchow’s understanding of how the Museum might serve to educate the public and also to empower science with respect to this relation. The immediate visual perception was made possible by an architectonics emphasizing natural lighting and by displays incorporating reflective or transparent technologies. Virchow had described the architectural plans of the Institute for the first time in a speech in 1896.39 In total, the Institute’s three buildings and walkways were to occupy more than 49,600 square meters of space. The facility was to contain 2,000 square meters of viewing surface in its planned cases and cupboards, 600 square meters of which were for the exhibition displays, the Schausammlung. In addition, the Institute would have a lecture room with 250 places for sitting and 50 places for standing for students of the medical sciences.40 The Museum, much like the areas reserved for the instruction of students of the medical sciences, was a structure whose architecture belied Virchow’s unique approach to empirical science, an approach that would become even clearer in later published editions of the architectural plans of the Institute. During his address in 1899, three years after his initial speech about the structure, Virchow introduced those assembled to architectural plans for the new Museum. The schematics included a full frontal, cross-sectional view of the building as well as the layouts of the Erdgeschoss (“Ground Floor”) and two of the other floors above ground (the architectural plans of the basement were apparently not reprinted, nor were those for the fourth and fifth floors).41 While these plans and the accompanying ledger demonstrated the detail with which the location of the displays as well as the access to natural light had been incorporated into the Museum architecture itself, it was only slightly later, in 1901, that Virchow published a version of the plans that showed the actual location of individual specimens in relation to the new structure

Cf. Christine Brecht and Sybilla Nikolow, “Displaying the Invisible: Volkskrankheiten on Exhibition in Imperial Germany,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biology and Biomedical Sciences 31.4 (2000): 511–30. 39 Israel 1048. 40 Israel 1048. 41 In Germany, the first floor of the building is actually what in the U.S. is considered the second. The Erdgeschoss is equivalent to ground level, or the first floor in U.S. parlance. The Erstes Stockwerk (literally, the “first floor”) is equivalent to the second floor, the Zweites Stockwerk (literally, the “second Story”) is synonymous with the third floor in the U.S., and so forth. 38



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Figure 3.4  Plans of one of the floors of the Museum showing the exact locations of specimens. Image courtesy of Das Archiv der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.

(Figure 3.4). These more detailed plans demonstrated even further the meticulous attention paid not only to the location and optical accessibility of the specimens but also to the spatial thematic narrative that Virchow felt would best ensure a correct understanding of the medical-­ scientific issues involved, even as the lay public engaged these specimens and issues for the first time.42

Matyssek 141–58. Virchow’s address, “Das neue Pathologische Museum der Universität zu Berlin, Berlin 1901” (“The New Museum of Pathology of the University of Berlin, Berlin 1901”), as well as detailed display layout and accompanying section, “Zur Erklärung der beigegebenen Grundrisse” (“To Clarify the Accompanying Floor Plans”), are reprinted in Matyssek’s study.

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In the text that accompanied the 1901 plans, Virchow clarified the layout of the specimens in relation to shelving, the shelving in relation to the building, and the building itself in relation to the nearby banks of the Spree River that traversed the city of Berlin.43 Taking for granted the fact that the ordering of floors from the bottom to the top was the most logical narrative route given the visitor’s anticipated entry on the Museum’s ground floor and near the river, Virchow began with the city’s own geography as the point of departure for his textual journey through the logic of the Museum’s displays (Figure 3.5).44 With the river’s shoreline as his anchoring point, Virchow explained the combination of letters and Arabic and Roman numerals—A is nearest the shoreline and therefore at the front the building; the ground floor is labeled Roman numeral I—as an effort to ease one’s orientation (“Zur Erleichterung der Orientierung”) in the architectural space of the Museum.45

Figure 3.5  An aerial view of the location of the Charité Hospital. The Institute of Pathology is located near the middle-left side of the image and is designated by the label “Pathologisches Institut.” The Museum of Pathology is part of this complex and is located directly below the word “Alexander,” designating the Alexander shoreline (“Alexander Ufer”). Image courtesy of Das Archiv der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.

Matyssek 153; Krietsch and Dietel 60. In the speech, Virchow describes the body of water nearest the Museum as the Alexander–Ufer while a later map from 1945, reprinted in Krietsch and Dietel, shows the river nearest the Museum with the label Humboldthafen. 44 Virchow had noted in a number of statements his reason for separating the (public) entrance to the Museum from the entrance to the Institute’s lecture hall and autopsy rooms for students of medical science at the Charité. 45 Matyssek 153. 43



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While it might be tempting to explain Virchow’s Museum in terms of Michel Foucault’s examination of the discourse of medical science in his Birth of the Clinic, the emphasis on space in the Museum needs to be understood as not only epistemologically significant but also popularly oriented. That is, Virchow not only detailed the architectural and display schematics of the Museum, he also specified which rooms would be appropriate for public viewing. The implication of such a distinction was not only that Virchow sought further to organize the lay visitor’s interaction with the objects of scientific knowledge but also that he deemed particular specimens more suitable for the lay public for very specific reasons. Rooms A and B on the first floor, the first area deemed suitable for lay viewing, contained displays of malformed bones, animal illnesses, diseased livers, skeletons of twins exhibiting abnormal development, and other pathological anomalies in humans and animals. The second set of publicly accessible rooms, A, B, and C on the second floor, dealt more with specific illnesses such as tuberculosis, syphilis, and tropical diseases, but also made room for Virchow’s impressive collection of skulls, including those which exhibited such pathological anomalies as microcephaly and hydrocephaly. The order of the displays implied that the pathological abnormalities on display in the lower level of the building could be explained through a “higher” knowledge—not in the biblical but in the Enlightenment sense. That is, advances in science had allowed Virchow and his colleagues to explain the physically visible developmental abnormalities on the first floor as a result of the advanced, cellular approach demonstrated on the second. Such an understanding was enabled only through learned forms of visual assessment, a higher form of optical engagement associated with mental activity. As a result, it is no surprise that skulls were displayed on the second floor. Virchow believed that it was not the brain but the eye that served as the locus for processing visual information; the limitations of optical processes required mental training. The skulls on display attested to Virchow’s own belief, as indicated in the epigraph to this chapter, that the brain— and synecdochically the skull, which housed it—was a more advanced and higher level of knowledge than could be gathered from peripheral organs such as the eye alone. The eye, as the display order demonstrated, needed to be trained how to see scientific evidence correctly. Even as Virchow emphasized the role of cells invisible to the naked eye in the process of normal as well as pathological development, he abided by a strategy that other scientists of the time increasingly employed, what Cristine Brecht and Sybilla Nikolow describe in their discussion of Robert Koch as effort to render the invisible visible through the museum’s spatial narrative, to make the brain teach the eye how to see.46 Brecht and Nikolow 511–30.

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Overall, the public displays in Virchow’s museum reveal as much breadth and depth as the actual research and pedagogical activities of the Institute’s professors and students. Nevertheless, Virchow used geography as a rhetorical strategy to clarify the reasons for the separation of the Charité Hospital and the public Museum. The entrance to the Museum on the Alexander Harbor shoreline did not enable the public to have access to the rest of the Charité. The hospital’s students were able to enter the Museum and the lecture hall of the Institute via a different entrance on the hospital grounds themselves. While the structure may appear commonplace today, the spatial organization had a particular function for Virchow. He further assured those assembled for his 1901 address that unprepared lay visitors would not encounter pathological phenomena or research projects in progress that they—nor the students or medical scientists—were prepared to explain in a definitive way. Virchow’s Museum employed numerous orienting mechanisms, from the detailed architectural plans to the use of geographic features specific to the Museum site, from particular placements of windows to the ordering of the specimens. None of the mechanisms was as important to Virchow, however, as the relationship between lighting and the objects on display. In order that medical students could gain the most possible number of simultaneous microscopic viewings of particular types of cellular specimens, an exceptionally large amount of continuous flat surface space was designed into the Demonstrationssaal (“demonstration hall”) of the Institute. In the hall, an area built adjacent to the Institute’s Hörsaal (“lecture room”), students could thus gain access to microscopes in large numbers. Only by reducing the window columns to the smallest possible width could Virchow’s new Institute enable students in such quantity to do so.47 Indeed, the room contained five long tables for the display of microscopic preparations as well as over ten thousand preparations in their respective cabinets.48 Israel 1048. Cf. Goschler 208–9. Goschler describes the technique of a “mikroskopische Eisenbahn” (“microscopic railway”) in his discussion of the plans for the Institute of Pathology. The technique required long tables around which students could sit. Microscopes were rotated around the table through the use of gullies, wheels, and rails. Goschler notes that “[a]uf diese Weise konnten in einer Sitzung 140 Studenten die Objekte betrachten” (208). Franz von Rinecker (1811–83) and Rudolf Kölliker (1817–1905) perfected the technique. Goschler suggests that the technique demonstrates the material and intellectual connections enabled by microscopic research in various cities—in this case, a connection between researchers located in Würzburg and Berlin. Virchow had worked with Rinecker and Kölliker in Würzburg from 1849 to 1856 and was the director of the Pathological Institute there from 1853 to 1856. Virchow was also concerned, however, with whether or not his students saw colors correctly, and with what he believed was a weakening of natural vision through dependence on instruments (i.e., “die natürliche Fähigkeit des Auges [würde] als Folge der Verbesserung optischer Instrumente geschwächt”).

47 48



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The communal nature of mass microscopic viewing thus necessitated an architectural manipulation of space and light to facilitate the supposedly unmediated visual accessibility of the particular specimens in question. Inside the Museum manipulated natural light also would prove fundamental to a correct visual experience of the pathological specimens. Although electrical lighting was introduced in all rooms except for the lecture hall, Virchow demanded that the buildings themselves be able to receive freely natural light from all sides. The location of the Institute in general and the Museum in particular was chosen to prevent “eine Verdunkelung durch Nachbarbauten.”49 That is, the structures were positioned in close proximity to the banks of the Spree River to avoid the shadows produced from any buildings erected in the future, shadows that might reduce the natural light necessary for the correct viewing of the exhibitions and displays of the Institute and its Museum. Glass in both windows and displays provided another means by which to manipulate light in order to produce the best possible conditions to examine the collected specimens with optical acuity. Many of the display cases were made primarily of glass with only minimal use of iron for support. Here the German belies the emphasis on glass as an instrument of encasement and transparency, as these cabinets were “aus eisernen Rahmen aufgebaut und von allen Seiten verglast.”50 Mirrored glass was even used in some display cabinets as well as in those cases with dark wood shelving in order to help compensate for supposedly insufficient light. Whenever possible, however, wood of a mild hue was chosen, especially for the shelves of display cabinets. Paint, much like glass, was important as well in the creation of a supposed immediate visual perception. The walls in the entire Institute were painted ivory, and the ceilings were painted white. The colors were chosen because they eliminated to the greatest possible degree the absorption of natural light necessary for correct visual assessment of the objects on display. Paint or colorant was also used in some instances on the specimens themselves, supposedly in order to facilitate the best possible likeness of the preserved objects to their natural and living counterparts.51

Israel 1049. Israel 1050. Emphasis added. The verb “verglasen” means “to glaze,” but here is used to signify something like “enclosed” or “encapsulated in glass.” 51 Cf. Israel 1050–52; Thomas Schnalke, interview with the author, December 3, 2002. Israel discusses the work of Kaiserling and Melnikow-Raswedenko. Personal conversations with the current director of the Museum, Thomas Schnalke, indicate that Iris van Husen is at present working on a history of the preservation technologies used in Virchow’s specimens. Thus, the issue is not addressed at length in this chapter. 49 50

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It was the non-microscopic objects themselves that were to demonstrate the insightfulness of Virchow’s pathological science and the correctness of its experimental method through an emphasis on the immediate visual perception, a learned way of seeing the causal connections implicitly affirmed by the display objects. These connections were most often between cellular pathology and abnormal morphology. The display objects included such specimens as a “Janus Head,” a name derived from Roman mythology. The display techniques used for such specimens in the Museum were meant to facilitate viewing from all sides. Carl Asmund Rudolphi described in great detail a specimen that may have made its way into the Museum: the skeleton of an abnormally developed seven-month-old fetus born to a weaver [Zeugweber] named Forkel and his “beloved” [Geliebte] Klügeln in October 1794.52 Measurements taken of the specimen indicated the precision with which Rudolphi analyzed it and the extent to which the eyes (all three of them!) of the pathological specimen were examined: Measured from the under surfaces of the flat bottom (?) [Hacke] to the cortex [Scheitel], its length is equal to exactly 14 inches. The greatest width of its chest is 3 inches. The width of its shoulders was 4 inches. It weighed exactly 2 pounds, 3 loth (?) [Loth] and 3 quant (?) [Quanth]. The cornea was transparent, and one could clearly see located on the right side the entirely white-clouded [weiße verdunkelte] crystal lens. On the left side one did not see the crystal lens, but the pupil [was] located close to the cornea. On the right side it [the pupil] was perceptibly disconnected from it [the cornea]. Between the corneas was located a dark gray striped bar, above and below, in which one saw ruddy vesicles climbing down and others going up.53 Peter Krietsch and Manfred Dietel clarify that the specimen must have had two faces, one of which had only one eye and an ear located below the chin of the other (complete) face. Rudolphi describes the particular specimen as “Doppelmißgeb.,” or “double abnormal birth.”54 While the uniqueness of the fetus combined with the exactitude of the measurements provided scientific justification for the initial preservation of the specimen, its encasement in glass demonstrated the way in which Museum visitors were encouraged to subsume their own immediate visual experience of the object to the empirical explanation offered by

Krietsch and Dietel 115–16. Rudolphi qtd. in Krietsch and Dietel 115. 54 Krietsch and Dietel 115. 52 53



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pathological science. The Museum of Pathology encouraged visitors to reconsider speculative or mythological assumptions about pathological anatomical phenomena, such as the belief that individuals born with apparent abnormalities were cursed or the product of a degenerate union. Virchow attempted to use scientific explanations to train lay visitors and medical students alike to see the causal connections between cellular pathology and morphological abnormality, to see anatomical pathologies scientifically.

Critical Public and Artistic Engagement

The preceding discussion of the display techniques and architectural characteristics of the Museum of Pathology demonstrate that the popularization of scientific knowledge in architectonic terms means examining the spatial opportunities for lay engagement. Here, some would argue, Virchow’s idealistic expectations confronted their material and political limits; members of the public expressed their dissatisfaction or frustration with the evidentiary objects and presentations in the Museum. In other words, Virchow’s intentions for displaying his specimens could be quite different from the public’s reception and understanding of these objects. As a result of apparent misunderstandings of the displays as well as concerns with the authority of the science involved, several letters sent to the German Culture Minister indicate that Virchow’s successors wanted to discontinue public viewings.55 Leading figures expressed concern that the Museum’s goal of educating the public how to see objects scientifically, to “sehen lernen,” was giving way to unadulterated Schaulust, a lascivious “desire to look.” Virchow’s most immediate curatorial successor, Johannes Orth, was overwhelmed by the public debate and by fiscal difficulties. As a result, he left a number of preparations unusable, primarily those in the public spaces of the Museum. Cay-Rüdiger Prüll describes how such pressures encouraged Virchow’s would-be protégées to pay increasingly less attention to maintaining the Museum and what Virchow felt was the beneficial relationships among the lay public and the scientific specialists enabled

According to Schnalke and Matyssek, there are no known public letters in the archives of the Museum nor is there any detailed record of (i.e., a guest registry) of who visited the Museum. Prüll has provided the most extensive discussion to date of these (semi)public criticism of the Museum, its contents, and its organization. Numbers provided in Prüll and by others indicate that the Museum was extremely well visited during its first several years: “Die Besucherzahlen waren so hoch, dass jeden Sonntag ein Assistant im Museum Dienst tun musste und bei bedarf Exonate erläuterte; vier Diener waren auf die verschiedenen Säle verteilt” (Prüll 109).

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by the facility. Some displays, left to decay or improperly labeled and organized, began to appear incomprehensible even to the scientifically oriented. Orth, in response, reduced the number of objects displayed in the Museum rather than emphasize its scientific mission. His goal was to decrease public interest and to focus efforts more directly on the scientific activity of the medical students.56 Orth’s successor in 1917, Otto Lubarsch, also reduced the public collection, due not only to the fear that specimens would be destroyed with the onset of the First World War but also to the growing concern in the public’s Schaulust. Others encouraged that attention once again be paid to the public displays. Paul Kraus, for example, expressed discontent over the use of Latin and emphasized that display labels written in German would enable the nonexpert community to appreciate more readily scientific insights about the phenomena.57 Eric Mattern, on behalf of the German War Damages and Bereavement (“Kriegsbeschädigten und Kriegshinterbliebenen”) Committee, wrote in hopes that his group might undertake some restoration projects in the Museum.58 Caretakers such as Robert Rössle, who succeeded Lubarsch in 1928, did reemphasize the importance of the Museum’s public exhibition and even attempted to return many of the items to their proper place and display. Through lengthy delays and bureaucratic obstacles, however, Rössle remained unable to resurrect the Museum’s original structural arrangements. Decreasing attendance and the lack of any detailed historical record of visitors or large-scale public protest, understood in light of the documented initial popularity of the Museum and the value placed upon Virchow’s professional and political contributions to the country, suggest that the public had turned an increasingly indifferent eye to the facility and its displays. Given this milieu, it perhaps should come as no surprise that Rössle failed in his effort to restore the Museum and to thereby return its space to that envisioned by Virchow in the latter’s own architectonics of public science. Visitors to the Museum from its opening in 1901, to its complete or partial inaccessibility due to neglect between 1914 and 1928, and finally to its almost total destruction due to Allied bombing campaigns in 1943 and 1944 witnessed displays of pathological phenomena in ways that were quite different from the ideal conditions Virchow desired. Today the Museum of Pathology, now known as the Berlin Medical Historical Museum of the Charité, is undergoing extensive renovation and restoration, acts that promise to reconfigure further the public’s visual

Prüll 109–10. Prüll 110. 58 Prüll 205. 56 57



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experience of scientific knowledge about pathological phenomena as displayed within the structure. As a result, the architectural and display potential of Virchow’s Museum of Pathology continues to facilitate interaction between scientists and the lay public. The nonexpert and artistic engagement with and criticism of such interaction undoubtedly will continue as well.

Conclusion

Virchow’s concern with cellular and anatomical pathologies extended into the realm of the optical. His political and professional activities compelled him to provide a venue for the interaction between scientists and the lay public. The Museum of Pathology was one of the ways in which Virchow felt scientists could train the public how to see pathological specimens scientifically and developmentally. Such a venue, and Virchow’s efforts on its behalf, points to the continued problems that confront attempts to explain the production of scientific knowledge, especially techniques of observation. These problems, while by no means reducible to the work of any singular figure, are nevertheless indebted to a particular understanding of the relationship between the visual and the pathological in the work of Foucault. Scholars continue to look to Foucault and, in particular, his The Birth of the Clinic, to explain the rise of the medical sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in particular the apparent hegemonic influence of the anatomico-clinical gaze.59 A brief history helps explain a significant absence here. Foucault’s mentor, Georges Canguilhem, had written in his doctoral dissertation of 1943 about the relationship between the normal and the pathological.60 In the widely available edition of this study, which appeared in 1963, Canguilhem cites the work of Virchow.61 In a text published that same year, Foucault’s Naissance de la Clinique, Virchow’s name is absent completely.62 Foucault’s oversight is not simply a historiographical one, however. His selective use of materials to chart a genealogy of pathology renders the application of his methodology and his discussion of the historical transformation of the clinical method and the anatomico-clinical gaze highly suspect. This

Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (New York: Vintage, 1994). 60 Canguilhem 25. The dissertation was reissued in 1950. 61 Cf. fn. 10. This book included an essay published for the first time (“Section Two. New Reflections on the Normal and the Pathological,” 113–287) together with the dissertation (“Section One. Essay on Some Problems concerning the Normal and the Pathological”) under the title Le Normal et la pathologique. The text appeared in English in 1978 as The Normal and the Pathological. 62 Cf. fn. 59. This text, of course, was published in English in 1973. 59

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selectivity is exemplified in his excluding Virchow altogether from his work, despite Canguilhem’s inclusion of the renowned German scientist. Authors such as Lisa Cartwright have sought to explain Foucault’s textual selectivity as part of his focus on “clinical, and not laboratory, medicine.” However, individuals such as Virchow were involved in a number of projects that sought to educate the public in the tradition of German Bildung, to bridge the apparent separation of clinical and laboratory activity. In other words, Foucault’s suggestion that medical science constitutes a hegemonic discourse of truth requires a clear difference between “practices confined to experimentation and those with more direct ties to the public sphere.”63 The problems that result from such a separation of experimentation and the public sphere—lack of subjective agency, for example, or the participation and power of the public in certain scientific ventures—become especially troubling in an examination of Virchow’s work. Medical science did not produce a monolithic discourse of control in the Berlin of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Museum of Pathology reveals the need to consider the context of optical engagement when discussing techniques of observation, in terms of both the national intellectual traditions involved as well as the individual differences preserved at the quotidian. Virchow felt a need to educate the public as to the ways to understand ideas scientifically, if not because of his supposed socialism and humanitarianism than much more pragmatically to secure widespread support for the methods of empirical science. In short, the facility and Virchow’s architectonics of public science demonstrate that the observer always operated under the conditions made available in particular places and at particular historical moments, whether this observer was an established scholar or a curious member of the lay public. What, then, is revealed by the mysterious carved head represented in the photograph discussed in the beginning of this chapter? One point certainly would be that the errors and limitations of Foucault’s approach to medical science continue to be reproduced in contemporary scholarship on visual culture. In his work Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Jonathan Crary provides what for all intents and purposes is a corrective to traditional art-historical studies of representation and to “typical” historical accounts of the development of the photograph and of film. Crary combines numerous texts and technologies to explain “a new valuation of visual experience” in the early nineteenth century, one that was based

Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995) 11.

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on “an unprecedented mobility and exchangeability, abstracted from any founding site or referent.”64 In other words, vision is located neither in the apparatus nor in the anatomy, but in strategies of visual engagements, in techniques of the observer. Because of his indebtedness to Foucaultian genealogy in general, and Foucault’s early and pessimistic assessment of empirical science and its relationship to the subject in particular, Crary’s study confronts an insurmountable obstacle. That is, Crary devalues individual engagements within this new “visual experience,” a visual experience that he suggests is synonymous with a disembodied nineteenth-century observer: Obviously there was no single nineteenth-century observer, no example that can be located empirically. What I want to do, however, is suggest some of the conditions and forces that defined what an observer was in the nineteenth century … What is not addressed in this study are the marginal and local forms by which dominant practices of vision were resisted, deflected, or imperfectly constituted.65 If Crary’s assemblage of texts and technologies allows him to grasp the immense changes in visual culture that occurred during the nineteenth century, it nevertheless fails to tell the whole story, as he indicates. One of the primary reasons for this failure is the fact that he conflates intellectual traditions from across vast geographical and disciplinary terrains, a conflation that is made tenable supposedly by a selective and genealogical approach. German intellectuals such as Johannes Müller and Hermann von Helmholtz could conduct experiments on themselves and use the results to justify their supposedly universal findings. Crary fails to elaborate on this particular practice, a result of these figures and others having achieved a level of intellectual and public notoriety as embodiments of a distinctly German notion of Bildung.66 To understand accurately the techniques of observation, it thus is vital to understand that these optical orientations were not simply the result of historical

Crary, Techniques 14. Crary, Techniques 7. Emphasis in original. 66 In commenting on earlier drafts of this chapter, Lorraine Daston has suggested that the term Kulturträger, literally a “carrier of culture,” might be more appropriate than the term expert when referring to German science during the nineteenth period precisely because of the culturally specific notion of Bildung, translated as “education” but often understood as referring to a particular stage of advanced spiritual and intellectual development. Lorraine Daston, email to the author, November 3, 2002. 64 65

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and disciplinary forces but were also demands not only placed upon trained specialists but also on nonspecialist observers as well. In other words, Virchow’s desire to display his specimens for professional as well as public spectators demonstrates not only his efforts to employ techniques of observation. Analyzing the sites and sights of Virchow’s cellular and pathological anatomy also reveal the unique possibilities that existed for the resistance to or the appropriation of techniques of observation in the Berlin of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Resistance to what Crary describes as the dominant practices of vision are key in writing an accurate history of the techniques of observation. His claim that he cannot address “the marginal and local forms by which dominant practices of vision were resisted, deflected, or imperfectly constituted” requires a consideration of what, exactly, his purportedly historical examination reveals. Crary provides only a textual history of techniques retroactively viewed as the most important. Situated in their rightful historical context, many of these techniques are discussed and written about more than they are enacted; these techniques are nowhere embodied yet, paradoxically, supposedly operative everywhere. Virchow opened the Museum despite his resistance to certain types of scientific popularization and to nonexpert engagement with scientific research. His intention was to bring the public into contact with the ways in which scientists themselves were being trained optically to assess, to research, and to explain nature’s anatomical mysteries. His belief in an “immediate visual perception” did not depend, at least from his perspective, on the use of technologies. In fact, he was highly critical of the modern dependence on visual aids such as the microscope that would do the work of the trained scientific eye. His use of materials such as glass and paint along with his detailed architectural and geographic planning nevertheless evidence the extent to which his own belief in immediate visual perception depended upon an architectonics that acted to acculturate visually medical students and curious citizens. The visual experience of science as exemplified in the discussion of the Museum provides another way to think about strategies of engagement and exchange in the context of scientific popularization, and a way to think about how specific historical observers visually experienced pathological specimens and scientific expectations. The frustrations and limitations visitors faced in the course of the Museum’s early twentieth-century history enabled these untrained observers to inspect evidence put forth in the name of pathological research, to question the larger issue of the responsibility of scientists to the general public, and to signal their doubt about the validity of the knowledge produced by



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emphasizing Schaulust over “sehen lernen,” sensationalism over education. The architectonics of public science thus require a consideration of the materiality of visual encounters to understand not only the disciplinary and nationally specific techniques of observation but also the resistance to these increasingly dominant norms of optical acculturation on the part of the nonspecialist.

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Four Sexuality ad oculos: Sigmund Freud and Magnus Hirschfeld Meet Til Brugman’s “Celluloid Children”

In his efforts to open a research facility dedicated to the scientific study of sex, one of the most significant problems that confronted Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld, the German pioneer of Sexologie (“sexology” or “sexual science”), was to determine exactly what constituted sexual practices. Already in 1908, Hirschfeld had claimed that a future sexual science might comprise a dizzying variety of research areas: sexual anatomy, sexual chemistry, sexual attraction / physiology, sexual psychology, sexual evolution, comparative sexual biology, sexual hygiene including sexual enlightenment, sexual prophylaxes (i.e., treatments for sexually transmitted diseases), sexual politics, sexual legislation, sexual ethics, sexual ethnology, sexual variations, and sexual pathology. Hirschfeld provided a more condensed program when, in 1919, he opened the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (“Institute for Sexual Science”) in Berlin’s Tiergarten district. Reminiscent of the architectural and sociopolitical display strategies of Rudolph Virchow’s Institut für Pathologie (“Institute for Pathology”), which had opened nearby just twenty years earlier, Hirschfeld wrote that his facility too would have a research institute as well as a division dedicated to practical medicine. This division was similar to that between private research and public access as set forth in Virchow’s institute, where some of the structure’s sections were reserved for medical professionals while nonscientific visitors had access to the facility’s impressive collection of anatomical-pathological specimens in the public museum. In Hirschfeld’s center, however, the public would have access to individual treatment in the facility’s medical offices as well as to public displays in the building’s large foyer.1 The location of

1

Magnus Hirschfeld, “B. Das Institut für Sexualwissenschaft,” Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen 1 (1908): 570–88; Herrn, “Einleitung” 13. The research institute would have four divisions: sexual biology, sexual pathology, sexual sociology, and sexual ethnology. Likewise, the practical medical activity of the Institute would be divided into four units: marriage and professional advice, psychopathic conditions and nervous illnesses, sexual illnesses of the soul (i.e., mental disorders) that led to impotence and disruption of the sex drive, and physical sexual illnesses (i.e., gender disorders and diseases of the skin, hair, and cosmetic).

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the Institute’s exhibition of its empirical scientific evidence emphasized Hirschfeld’s belief that there existed visibly discernible markers of sexual orientation that any visitor could see. Like Virchow’s own faith in his lay visitors’ optical abilities, Hirschfeld’s belief that the public could encounter specialized scientific knowledge and “sehen lernen” (“learn to see”) was indebted to medical science and the related, emerging professional discipline of anthropology.2 Hirschfeld’s colleague Ferdinand von Reitzenstein is the most explicit example of this synthesis of anthropology and medical science in service of a publicly and politically viable Sexologie. More specifically, von Reitzenstein’s research offered one of the most appealing ways for the Institute to combine public understanding of empirical scientific knowledge with the political and social goals of Hirschfeld’s sexual science. Von Reitzenstein had served as editor for a revised edition— the eleventh—of Max Bartels and Herman Heinrich Ploss’s influential study Das Weib in der Natur- und Völkerkunde (“Woman; an Historical Gynecological and Anthropological Compendium”).3 As a result of that work and others, von Reitzenstein was a well-known figure by the time he began his affiliation with the Institute. In 1922, he reported on his desire to establish two new departments, one devoted to the eugenics of mother and child, and a second that he would oversee directly, described as an anthropological-ethnological division. Under the auspices of these and other research areas, von Reitzenstein helped transform the walls of the newly established Institute for Sexual Science into a space where assembled fetishes became epistemological facts, where anthropological otherness and German identity coincided in the name of a visual politics of sexuality. The emphasis on visible morphological markers of biological developmental difference had become a promised paradigm for Hirschfeld



2



3

Rainer Herrn, “Einleitung zu Theorie und Praxis,” unpublished manuscript (2004) 4–5. In 1927, Karl Giese, the Institute’s librarian and archivist, would indicate that the facility actually was intended to house five research departments to research the entirety of human sexual life (Liebesleben): biology, ethnology, culture, medicine, and forensics. Iwan Bloch, who had written one of the formative studies on sexuality in the early twentieth century and with whom Hirschfeld was quite familiar, indicated in 1909 an even broader disciplinary range for a (future) science of sexuality: Sexual science would be a “Wissenschaft vom Menschen, in der und zu der sich alle anderen Wissenschaften vereinen, die allgemeine Biologie, die Anthropologie und Völkerkunde, die Philosophie und Psychologie, die Medizin, die Geschichte der Literatur und diejenige der Kultur in ihrem ganzen Umfange” (Bloch as qtd. in Herrn 5). Bartels had been the first curator of the photographic collection of the Berlin Society.



Freud & Hirschfeld Meet Brugman’s “Celluloid Children” 91

and his associates in explaining to the public the different-but-equal status of nonnormative forms of sexual expression. Not only was the anthropological research of figures like von Reitzenstein employed in the photographs and displays in the Institute to this end, but Hirschfeld also promoted a developmental biological approach in his 1926 five-volume study Geschlechtskunde (“Study of Sex”), one that situated the fetish as a corporeal extension rather than a mere cultural artifact. The Institute’s collection of fetishes supposedly provided proof for Hirschfeld’s theory that there existed visible corporeal manifestations of nonnormative sexuality that resulted from intermediate biological development. Hirschfeld theorized that these corporeal markers might extend even beyond the limits of the physical body, thus explaining in biological developmental terms the role of the fetish for European sexuality. Indeed, much of the epistemological work of the Institute was dedicated to reorienting national understandings of the German body through anthropological analogy. Empirically speaking, the images and artifacts of anthropological otherness seemed to make possible the sexually nonnormative German body through recourse to the fetish as a surface-indicator of otherwise unseen biological difference. Not all the members of the public who visited Hirschfeld’s Institute were enamored with his ideas about sexual orientation nor with the influence of von Reitzenstein and others on the Institute’s displays. After a visit in the early 1930s, the Dutch author Til Brugman wrote “The Department Store of Love,” a short grotesque in which she challenged Hirschfeld’s sexual science by suggesting that the fetish as epistemological fact was equivalent to representational hyperbole. Much like Salomo Friedländer’s concern with the speculative nature of empirical science in general, Brugman saw in Hirschfeld’s use of the fetish a conflation of empirical reality and epistemological speculation.4 Brugman’s short satire demonstrates a concern that German sexual science had sacrificed human interest in the name of political instrumentality and objectifying methodology. Like the work of Walter Benjamin or Siegfried Kracauer, Til Brugman’s less well-known literary corpus deserves critical attention. Esther Leslie reevaluates Benjamin’s scholarship because, as she describes it, the “work is still of interest if its strategies and insights can be of use for analysis and action today.”5 While Brugman is less explicitly concerned than Benjamin and Kracauer with the role of technology and its



4



5

The German Liebe might also be translated as “sex” given the context in which the term is used in Brugman’s story. For purposes of consistency, however, the more commonly used translation “love” prevails throughout the chapter. Leslie viii–ix.

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influence on human perception, she nonetheless examines in her short tale the effects of empirical science’s techniques of representation and display in the context of the larger epistemological function these visual tactics have. Thus, Brugman’s literary engagement provides a practical application of a grotesque vision with continued reverberations, a grotesque meant to shock the uncritical viewing public into assuming the role of critical observers—a valuable strategy whether the object inducing our optical conformism be scientific displays, genetic maps, or electromagnetic images.

Magnus Hirschfeld’s Sexuality ad oculos

In the work of Hirschfeld, we find a repeated emphasis on a learned scientific visibility—a need to “sehen lernen.” Explicitly denouncing subjective perception in favor of a supposed visual objectivity, Hirschfeld promoted a focus on photographs in order to achieve the optically and empirically verifiable, a focus he learned from Friedrich Daniel von Recklinghausen, a pathological anatomist and student of Rudolf Virchow: “Observe, gentlemen, observe!”—my teacher, Baron von Recklinghausen from the University of Straßburg concluded almost every class session with these words. He showed himself with these words, whose content was embodied in flesh and blood by the wise man himself, as a real student of [Rudolf] Virchow’s and that direction which in the first decades of the last century realized its main focus … instead of on theoretical speculations in exact investigations. Not yellow parchment, not dead letters, [but] living nature itself should be the singular source of the knowledge of nature.6 Hirschfeld, celebrating the transformations in nineteenth-century natural science, claimed that the truth could be found through direct obser-



6

Hirschfeld as qtd. in Herrn 8; Magnus Hirschfeld, “Ursachen und Wesen des Uranismus,” Jahrbuch für sexuelle Zwischenstufen V (1903): 2–4. The original German reads as follows: “‘Beobachten, meine Herren, beobachten!’ mit diesen Worten begann und schloß mein Lehrer, Freiherr von Recklinghausen, von der Universität Straßburg, fast jede Unterrichtsstunde. Er zeigt sich mit diesen Worten, deren Inhalt dem geistvollen Mann ganz in Fleisch und Blut übergegangen war, als echter Schüler Virchows und jener Richtung, welche in den ersten Jahrzehnten des letzten Jahrhunderts ihr Hauptaugenmerk darauf richtete … anstelle theoretischer Erwägungen exakte Ermittlungen zu setzen. Nicht vergilbte Pergamente, nicht der tote Buchstabe, die lebendige Natur selbst sollte die einzige Quelle der Naturkenntnis sein.”



Freud & Hirschfeld Meet Brugman’s “Celluloid Children” 93

vation of the empirical world. Abandoning the “yellowing parchment” and the “dead letters” of natural philosophy, Hirschfeld emphasized visual engagement with the objects of nature. Echoing the approach of Virchow, Hirschfeld believed that such an optical orientation nevertheless required a learned form of visual perception. To observe—beobachten—was not simply to look, but rather to see in a particular and learned way. In many ways, the visual “readability” of evidence was not only part of Hirschfeld’s scientific and political activities but also their constitutive possibility.7 Hirschfeld attempted to demonstrate using medical-scientific knowledge that the biological origins of sexuality manifested themselves morphologically, as—or as extensions of—the surface of the human body. One of the goals of Hirschfeld’s campaign was to prove scientifically that same-sex sexual activities were the results of biological—and, hence, natural—development and therefore should be legalized. The ability to see differences in biological ­development that otherwise remained invisible was key to decreasing political and public concern with the supposed hidden threat of the sexual other or the secret hermaphrodite. Like Virchow, Hirschfeld had a particular biological rather than historical-evolutionary understanding of human change. As such, morphological differences were not indicators of a hierarchy of inherent intellectual abilities or cultural advancement. Rather, morphological characteristics could explain differences in sexuality that resulted from (an unplanned cessation or interruption of) the biological developmental laws of nature. The private as well as the professional observer could, according to Hirschfeld’s approach, bring her or his knowledge of these laws to a learned visual assessment of the intermediary developmental stages that constituted Zwischenstufen (“between stages”). In short, Hirschfeld’s Zwischenstufen constituted a theory of the morphology of sexual identity. Hirschfeld’s published studies as well as his plans for the Institute for Sexual Science attest to his goal to make the biology of sexual identity morphologically visible. Hirschfeld’s theory of Zwischenstufen was a key component in his activities, as well as cause for much debate among supporters and



7

Herrn, “Einleitung” 4. Herrn describes Hirschfeld’s activities in similar terms: “Durch die alle Bereiche umfassende Ausrichtung der Medizin an den Naturwissenschaften im 19. Jahrhundert, wurden ausschließlich mit naturwissenschaftlichen Methoden gewonnene Ergebnisse als ‘objektive’ (wahr) anerkannt. Die fachliche wie politische Akzeptanz von Hirschfelds wissenschaftlichen Befunden war die Grundvoraussetzung für ihre Nutzung für sexualreformerische Ziele” (4).

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detractors alike. It is the relationship between the visible and the biological-developmental in the schema that suggested a presupposed incompleteness or abnormality of which individuals such as Til Brugman were extremely critical. According to Hirschfeld’s theory, there were Zwischenstufen—intermediate stages of biological development—separating men and women in all aspects of physical and mental life. Certain men and women evidenced morphologically that they or their sexuality were the result of a cessation or an interruption in the normal process of biological development. That is, individuals who were “intermediates” displayed specific corporeal characteristics. Homosexuals were included in this group; male homosexuals displayed, according to Rainer Herrn’s assessment of Hirschfeld’s theory, “corporeal signs of femininity” while female homosexuals displayed those of masculinity.8 For Hirschfeld, biological development determined sexual and gender expression; he claimed famously that “the sexual behavior of the homosexual is biologically determined.”9 In Hirschfeld’s schema, sexuality was a result of biological development. Much like Virchow, Hirschfeld located the key to irrefutable scientific knowledge in the ability to discern visibly these various developmental stages. Two of Hirschfeld’s book-length publications in particular reveal the role of learned perception in situating differences in sexuality and gender expression as a result of biological development otherwise invisible to the unaided eye. Geschlechtsübergänge (“Sex Intermediates”), published for the first time in 1905 but reissued eight years later in an unaltered second edition, and the five-volume magnum opus Geschlechtskunde, the first volume of which Hirschfeld published in 1926, both attest to Hirschfeld’s emphasis on the learned form of visual assessment necessary for the political success of his professional and public science. One of the most explicit examples of Hirschfeld’s emphasis on visual forms of scientific knowledge is the use of the photographs and sketches in Geschlechtsübergänge.10 He emphasized even at this early stage the professional medical nature of his observations and the resultant conclusion that “taken in very strong scientific terms, one is not able in this sense to speak of man and woman, but on the contrary



Rainer Herrn, “Sammlung, Archiv, und Bibliothek,” unpublished manuscript 2004, 20. 9 Hirschfeld qtd. in Baumgardt 19. The original German reads as follows: “das Sexualverhalten der Homosexuellen [ist] biologisch determiniert.” 10 Rainer Herrn, “Magnus Hirschfeld, Geschlechts-Übergänge; Magnus Hirschfeld, Naturgesetze der Liebe,” unpublished essay, 2004. 8



Freud & Hirschfeld Meet Brugman’s “Celluloid Children” 95

only of people that are for the most part male or for the most part female.”11 Importantly, the study included in its final section a carefully chosen collection of photographs. The content of Geschlechtsübergänge demonstrates not only the professional medical nature of the volume but also Hirschfeld’s supposedly scientific use of photographs as visual support for his theory of the Zwischenstufen. Many of the images in this early study incorporated props and photographic techniques to emphasize the presumed intermediary nature of the biological sex of the photographed subjects. Image nineteen, for example, is a figure that displays the development of secondary female sex characteristics, including enlarged breasts (i.e., gynaecomastia). The figure is not photographed in a scientific studio, however, but standing naked on a stairway with his back to the wall and facing the camera (Figure 4.1). The image was taken apparently in an outdoor setting. The figure is not shown standing completely upright, however, as might be expected if the image had been taken according to suggested anthropological techniques promoted by individuals such as Gustav Fritsch. Rather, the figure has placed his right arm behind his back, and uses it to lean against the wall behind him. His right leg is bent, and he appears to be placing the weight of his body solely on his left leg. He holds away from his body in his left

11

Hirschfeld qtd. in Herrn, “Magnus” 11; Hirschfeld, Geschlechtsübergänge 18. The original German reads as follows: “[s]ehr streng wissenschaftlich genommen, dürfte man in diesem Sinne gar nicht von Mann und Weib sprechen, sondern nur von Menschen, die größtenteils männlich oder größtenteils weiblich sind.” The images in Geschlechtsübergänge, appearing well into Hirschfeld’s turn toward politics but before the realization of the Institute for Sexual Science, demonstrate his conflation of the biology of sexuality with morphological characteristics visibly discernible on the surface of the body. The text included in final published form a lecture Hirschfeld had given at the seventy-sixth Naturforscherversammlung (“Meeting of Nature Researchers”) in Breslau titled “Übergänge zwischen dem männlichen und weiblichen Geschlecht” (“Transitions between Male and Female Sex”), which appeared in the journal Monatsschrift für Harnkrankheiten und sexuelle Hygiene (“The Monthly Journal for Urinary Illnesses and Sexual Hygiene”) in 1904. Hirschfeld had taken two examples of “between stages” to show to the audience during a speech to the assembly of nature researchers, a text that formed the first section of Geschlechtsübergänge. It is unclear, however, if Hirschfeld took living subjects or photographic representation with him to demonstrate his scientific observational techniques. Also to be found in Geschlechtsübergänge were two other essays that had been published in the Monatsschrift: “Ein Fall irrtümlicher Geschlechtsbestimmung (erreur de sexe)” (“A Case of Mistaken Sexual Determination (error of sex)” and “Ein seltener Fall von Hermaphroditismus” (“A Seldom-Seen Case of Hermaphrodism).”

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Figure 4.1  A male figure from Magnus Hirschfeld’s Geschlechtsübergänge supposedly displaying the secondary sex characteristics of a female. The flower in the figure’s left hand was drawn in after the photograph was taken, presumably to emphasize his intermediary status. Image courtesy of the Magnus-Hirschfeld-­ Gessellschaft.



Freud & Hirschfeld Meet Brugman’s “Celluloid Children” 97

hand a flower that has been drawn in by Hirschfeld or an associate in order to make empirical reality further conform in this photographic representation to the theory of the Zwischenstufen. The posture, in conjunction with the rigged plane comprising the lower half of the image produced by the uneven steps, accentuates the figure’s left hip, which juts left away from the center of gravity. At first glance the figure’s left hip looks extremely rounded in comparison to his right hip, an indication of female sexual characteristics in the male body. Upon closer inspection, however, it becomes unclear the exact degree to which the figure’s asymmetrical shape is due to biological developmental issues or to photographic techniques. Such use of photographic artifice is at the heart of Siegfried Kracauer’s analysis of photography. In the introduction to Theory of Film, Kracauer cautions against the type of photography associated with portraiture, a tradition developed within painting but extended to film. Kracauer’s critical engagement with this tradition emphasizes the need to maintain a critical stance toward photography as a result of the use of artifice in the production of apparently realistic images. He demands that objects be “photographable,” by which he means that these objects should be recorded by the camera in as natural a way as possible, without costume and make-up, without efforts to reduce the visual specificity of the unique photographic encounter. Benjamin echoes an emphasis on recording empirical reality as it “really” is with the photograph, suggesting specifically the work of August Sander and his Antlitz der Zeit (“Faces of the Time”) as a corrective to the type of artificial portraiture that is the focus of Kracauer’s concerns. Both authors find a revolutionary potential in photography’s ability to record empirical reality as it is, but also caution against—perhaps in as great a measure—the manipulation of this visual reality in the production of the photographic representation.12 For his part, Hirschfeld would not depend on photographic techniques alone to support his claim that such images showed individuals who exhibited intermediate biological development. Rather, he used photographs of non-Germans to support his scientific study of supposed intermediary stages as well. Embodying the concerns of Kracauer and Benjamin with photographic artifice, Hirschfeld depended on the photograph’s unique abilities to represent reality as well as on the mechanical apparatus’s ability to extend the content of the image from its original location. The use of images of non-Europeans in their “natural” habitat contributed additional support not only to Hirschfeld’s

Cf. Kracauer, Theory of Film; Benjamin, “A Short History.”

12

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readings of the abnormal biological development of his European subjects but also to his claims that visible markers of this abnormal development were universal indicators of the accuracy of his theory. If his theory of intermediate developmental stages was based on biology and biology was the study of all human life, one could find among any peoples or any human groups individuals exhibiting intermediary biological stages of development. Thus, image twenty-three in his study was a young indigenous male from the Bismarck Archipelago. The photograph originally appeared in what Hirschfeld describes as an “excellent study” by A. Sokolowsky titled Menschenkunde (“Science of Humanity”). Although the text gives little clarification of the reason for the inclusion of the image or for what types of intermediary biological stage the figure embodies, we can assume from its placement in the volume that the slightly enlarged chest and especially the protruding nipples of the figure are a supposed indication of the development of secondary female sex characteristics within the body of this seemingly male example of a Zwischenstufe. The purpose of the image is difficult to discern without textual explanation, however, because the figure is photographed from just below the chest and upwards. He is facing the camera, but looks slightly to the bottom right of the image. In addition, his chest and nipples might simply be explained as the result of photographic angles or lighting conditions, and not as conclusive proof of intermediary biological development. Unlike many of the photographs, here we are not given visual access to the genitals of the photographed figure to demonstrate the seemingly contradictory presence of both a penis and female-like breasts and nipples on a single, presumably male body. Thus, we can only assume that the picture serves to function as a signifier of the universal applicability of Hirschfeld’s theory and not as itself an example for use in acquiring the skills necessary for a learned visual assessment of these supposedly evidentiary objects. An additional set of photographs and sketches in Hirschfeld’s 1905 study included women with excessive facial hair (i.e., feminae barbatae). The topic was of considerable interest to anthropologists in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the archive of the Berlin Society demonstrates. Max Bartels, in particular, contributed a number of photographs and sketches to the Society of these so-called bearded ladies (i.e., Frauenbart). Von Reitzenstein, the anthropologist working at the Institute from 1919 or 1922 to 1925, edited the revised version of Bartels and Ploss’s work on women among primitive peoples. Hirschfeld describes the condition in his Geschlechtsübergänge in light of his Zwischenstufen theory as one of the most common and most readily observable with the naked eye (augenfälligsten). He suggests that a perusal through any newspaper would demonstrate how many women seek assistance in order to remove the (manly) growth of facial hair,



Freud & Hirschfeld Meet Brugman’s “Celluloid Children” 99

implying that their development of this decidedly male secondary sex characteristic by a supposed woman indicates that she is neither male nor female. She is a Zwischenstufe. Hirschfeld notes, in particular, that many homosexual women he knows have to shave on a regular basis to prevent the excessive growth of facial hair; one he knows personally shaves three times a week.13 The images selected for his study represent extreme cases that exhibit even more phenomenal growth of facial hair, including a woman studied by Virchow. Upon closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that the images of these feminae barbatae all contain markers of femininity necessary to accentuate the effects of the supposed manliness of the growth of their facial hair. The Virchow case is a particularly significant example, as it shows not only the constructedness of the photographic inscription of gender but also, intellectual-historically speaking, the extent to which Hirschfeld himself was indebted to anthropology for his research subjects and materials. The woman, Jephthe Akaira, is a Scheinzwitter, an “apparent hermaphrodite.” The photograph Hirschfeld includes shows the figure leaning against a flat surface, as if on a bed, with arms folded behind a slightly turned head. The figure is photographed from approximately mid-torso and up. The image appears to have been taken while the figure was lying down, but the photograph is nevertheless reprinted as if the figure is standing up. We can only assume the figure had been lying down at the time the photograph was taken because her long hair rests on her shoulders rather than hangs straight down, as would be the case if she was photographed standing. The figure wears a white, sleeveless garment that appears to be a dress. The garment also appears lacy or full of ruffles. Her eyes are closed, as if the photographer has caught the subject in a restful dream. Nevertheless, the position in which the figure is lying allows the photographer to capture not only her (excessive) facial hair but also the hair of her underarms and her head. Taken together, the figure’s facial and underarm hair combine with the hair on her head to produce a continuous flow of hair in the image. The assumption that women have long hair is thus frustrated by the way in which this traditional marker of femininity during the period is entangled, literally and metaphorically, with the underarm and, more definitively, the facial hair that serve as markers of masculinity.14 It is as if the figure’s indeterminate gender is expressed

Hirschfeld, Geschlechtsübergänge n.p. (tables XIV, XV, XVI). The fact that the figure is willingly displaying underarm hair suggests a masculine subject position, reminiscent of the recalcitrant “new woman” in Germany at the time. The pictured figure is striking a pose that suggests defiance of gender norms and a willingness to display her underarm hair.

13 14

100 Grotesque Visions by the indistinguishable corporeal origins of her hair. Neither different male or female characteristics nor follicle sources are identified easily in the image. The demonstrations of the supposed scientific objectivity of such visual displays in Geschlechtsübergänge prepared the way for Hirschfeld’s more developed emphasis on learned forms of scientific vision in the Weimar period, embodied most explicitly in comprehensive Geschlechtskunde as well as in the context and structure of the Institute of Sexual Science itself. In the introduction to Geschlechtskunde, Hirschfeld not only emphasizes the need to develop sexual science as a specialized discipline with particular scientific forms of observation. The by-now established father of modern sexual science also refers to the need to translate such specialized knowledge in a form accessible to the lay public, a task that he accomplishes with an annoying didacticism in the volumes themselves: If [August] Forel describes on the title page of his Sexual Questions “a natural scientific psychological, hygienic, and sociological study for the educated,” so I emphasize expressly that I do not only orient myself toward the educated but rather to everyone that it concerns, that means everybody, as there is hardly anyone to whom this science might not be important … that is why I have tried, so far as possible, to write so that all can understand me (what is by all means compatible with the scientific enterprise / scientificity). For all foreign words and discipline-specific jargon I have also included a [common language] German translation.15 Indeed, Hirschfeld’s text is filled with pedagogical, etymological asides to clarify to the uninitiated reader the “common” origins and meanings of unfamiliar terms such as “fetishism” and “bibliophile.” Although he does include these translations explicitly in his text, Hirschfeld nevertheless is unwilling to translate the entirety of his specialized science into the nonscientific language of the German public. Rather, he maintains the specialized language in his texts under the auspices of allowing curious readers to become more familiar with these terms and phrases,

Hirschfeld, Geschlechtskunde n.p. The original German reads as follows: “Wenn [August] Forel seine ‘Sexuelle Frage’ auf dem Titelblatt als ‘Eine naturwissenschaftlich psychologische, hygienische und soziologische Studie für Gebildete’ bezeichnet, so betone ich ausdrücklich, dass ich mich nicht nur an die Gebildeten richte, sondern an alle, die es angeht, also an alle, denn es gibt wohl niemanden, dem dieses Wissen nicht nötig wäre … Darum habe ich mich auch bemüht, möglichst so zu schreiben, daß alle mich verstehen können (was mit Wissenschaftlichkeit durchaus vereinbar ist). Beinahe allen Fremdwörtern und Fachausdrücken habe ich eine deutsche Übersetzung beigegeben.”

15



Freud & Hirschfeld Meet Brugman’s “Celluloid Children” 101

and perhaps use their own developing knowledge to investigate further the (original) meanings of these terms in the theories of other scientists. He does not depend solely upon the intelligence of the reader in the exchange, but rather reassures his uncertain interlocutors that his own academic training in comparative linguistics (vergleichende Sprache) is the enabling factor for the anticipated benefit of his approach to curious scientists as well as members of the lay public. While Geschlechtskunde comprises five volumes that collectively demonstrate Hirschfeld’s supposed mastery of all the existing branches and deviations within sexual science, it is the fourth volume of the study, called simply Bilderteil (“Images Section”), that contains a bewildering variety of visual representations: photographs, sketches, reproductions of paintings, and more. The study in its entirety is meant to outline and to emphasize the visual “readability” of the intermediate stages of biological development, what Hirschfeld described in his earlier work as “the primary types of intermediate stages of sex development visible to the eye” (“die Haupttypen der Geschlechtsübergänge ad oculos”).16 Unlike Virchow and members of the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistory, Hirschfeld did not make distinctions between the various forms of visual representation, however.17 Rather, Hirschfeld extended to the extreme the dictates of Virchow’s emphasis on learned forms of visual assessment. Hirschfeld believed apparently that any representation or display could function as scientific evidence as long as the observer her- or himself had acquired the skills to assess optically the evidence correctly. Hirschfeld’s cooperation with and positive opinion of Ernst Haeckel, in light of Virchow’s and others’ concern with Haeckel’s supposed reckless scientific popularization (see Chapter 3), can perhaps be explained as a result of Hirschfeld’s belief that learned forms of visual assessment were both learnable for and necessary to his political and public cause. Indeed, Hirschfeld occasionally displayed living human specimens in conjunction with photographic or other visual representations in order to demonstrate further the accuracy of his strategies of visual assessment: one needed simply to know how to see the empirically real or the reproduction correctly in order to determine the relevance of the evidence.18 It was with the opening of the Institute of Sexual Science that Hirschfeld’s use of photographs and visual representations took on increasing importance in his attempts to teach the public to see sexuality with the discerning eyes of the scientific expert. Hirschfeld had

Hirschfeld, Geschlechtsübergänge 6. Herrn, “Sammlung” 6. 18 Herrn, “Sammlung” 6. 16 17

102 Grotesque Visions already discussed in 1908, the year he declared the need to develop sexual science as an independent discipline, the use of optical aids that included “thousands” of images of sexual intermediaries (sexueller Zwischenstufen). These photographic and visual representations would take on increasing importance to the field as Hirschfeld sought to secure public and political support through the Institute. The exhibition room of the Institute, first opened in 1921, displayed various anthropological fetishes (i.e., used for worship in so-called primitive cultures) as well as sexual fetishes that had become scientific curiosities. Although Hirschfeld had made a distinction between the archive and the display space in the facility, items displayed in the exhibition space came most often from the Institute’s growing archival collection of objects and photographs, under the supervision of the collection’s director Karl Giese.19 Hirschfeld thought the displays and photographs would make his sexual science visually communicable to a nonscientific public if placed in physical and epistemological proximity to science itself, much like museums erected by other medical scientists during the period: It appeared to me very worthwhile to create an archive of sexual science, a sexual-biological museum, analogous to the phylogenetic institute of [Ernst] Haeckel in Jena or the bacteriological institute of [Louis] Pasteur in Paris. Here one could collect for strict scientific purposes within a discipline-specific library valuable original documents and official papers, as well as pictorial and special data for collective research, data, statistics for comparative folklore or juridical studies, further graphic representations, results of comparative measurements, preparations, photographs, slides, instruments, moulages, sexual symbols, etc.20

Herrn, “Sammlung” 1. Hirschfeld qtd. in Herrn, “Sammlung” 3; Magnus Hirschfeld, “Zur Methodik der Sexualwissenschaft,” Zeitschrift für Sexualwissenschaft 1 (1908): 700–1. The original German reads as follows: “Sehr erstrebenswert erscheint mir die Schaffung eines Archivs für Sexualwissenschaft, eins sexualbiologischen Museums, analog etwa dem phylogenetischen Institut [Ernst] Haeckels in Jena oder dem bakteriologischen Institut [Louis] Pasteurs in Paris. Hier können zu streng wissenschaftlichen Zwecken neben einer Fachbibliothek wertvolle urschriftliche Dokumente und Urkunden gesammelt werden, sowie bildliche und sonstige Unterlagen für Sammelforschungen, Daten, Statistiken für vergleichende Folkloristik und Jurisdiktion, ferner graphische Darstellungen, Resultate vergleichender Messungen, Präparate, Photographien, Diapositive, Moulagen, Instrumente, sexuelle Symbole, usw., usw …”

19 20



Freud & Hirschfeld Meet Brugman’s “Celluloid Children” 103

While Hirschfeld acknowledged the influence of individuals such as Haeckel and Pasteur in the public display of his scientific enterprise, he was the first sexual scientist to use photographs to support his ­medical-scientific claims.21 Hirschfeld used the visual evidence made available to large audiences at the Institute to support his published studies of intermediary development. In the first volume of Geschlechtskunde, Hirschfeld claimed that he—and the trained observer—could locate a distinct sexual type, including the intermediary types referred to as “Urnings” as a result of the work of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, from the morphological surface of the body alone as represented in the photographic image:22 Already in my [essay] “Urning People” I could bring a row of images (for example comparisons of the relationship between the shoulders to the pelvis by male, female, and Urning types) that showed with all clarity that with homosexuals there exists a particular sexual type from which it is entirely impossible [to claim] that he has inherited his condition.23 Hirschfeld had published his presupposition already in the Geschlechtsübergänge, stating that he could locate through visual representations the main types of sexually indeterminate individuals (Geschlechtsübergänge) ad oculos, or “by sight.” For Hirschfeld, the Institute’s displays and the variety of media images displayed in his Geschlechtskunde were an attempt to demonstrate that anyone could learn to see any medium scientifically, if she or he only knew what to see.

Herrn suggests that Hirschfeld does not cite Virchow’s Pathological Museum (nor Lombroso’s Museum for Psychiatry and Criminology in Turin) because Hirschfeld was interested in de-pathologizing (and decriminalizing) sexual practices. It is nevertheless the case that the public turn of Hirschfeld’s science is undoubtedly indebted to the political-scientific successes of and cautionary public science espoused by Virchow. 22 Cf. Manfred Baumgardt, “Berlin, ein Zentrum der entstehenden Sexualwissenschaft und die Vorläufer der Homosexuellen-Bewegung,” Eldorado: Homosexuelle Frauen und Männer in Berlin 1850–1950: Geschichte, Alltag und Kultur (Berlin: Rosa Winkel Verlag, 1992) 13–16. 23 Hirschfeld qtd. in Herrn, “Sammlung” 5; Hirschfeld, Geschlechtskunde 567. “Schon in meinem ‘urnischen Menschen’ konnte ich eine Reihe von Abbildungen bringen (beispielsweise Gegenüberstellungen über das Verhältnis der Schultern zum Beckengürtel beim männlichen, weiblichen und urnischen Typus), die mit aller Klarheit zeigten, dass bei den Homosexuellen ein bestimmter Sexualtypus vorhanden ist, von dem es gänzlich ausgeschlossen ist, dass er erworben sein kann.” 21

104 Grotesque Visions The Institute was a significant resource for materials used in the instruction of the scientific vision necessary for the optical assessment of Zwischenstufen for professional researchers as well as members of the lay public. The photographic collection of the Institute was reported to be significant, containing over 6,000 photographs and over 3,000 microscopic preparations.24 Some of the photographs in the collection were obtained from anthropologists affiliated with the Institute or familiar with Hirschfeld’s work.25 The first and only archivist of the Institute’s visual materials was Karl Giese, who served in the role from 1924 until the Institute was closed in 1933 at the hands of the National Socialists. Supposedly part of the charge of the Institute’s employees during the Weimar years also was the development of first-class photographic apparatuses, presumably to be used in producing additional images. The services of the Walter Talbot Firm were secured in order to provide photographs as well. Important among these visual instruction aids in the Institute was the assemblage of quotidian ethnological artifacts Hirschfeld and others had collected as a means of educating the public visually about sexual practices. Von Reitzenstein included such objects in a special exhibit held in Dresden in 1924. Taken together, the photographic and display objects constitute significant Anschauungsmaterial, or “visual display material,” and would allow professional scientists and members of the public to witness first-hand instruments and techniques for healthy sexual living.26 Indeed, not only was there a high demand from established scholars for tours of the Institute. Giese conducted from 1924 to at least 1930 tours on Saturday afternoons beginning at 5:30 p.m. for curious members of the lay public as well.27 No other aspect of Hirschfeld’s work nor of the Institute’s emphasis on trained forms of visual assessment speaks more directly to these ambitions than the so-called Zwischenstufenwand (“wall of intermediary stages”). The wall was filled with photographs of individuals who expressed corporeally various intermediate stages of biological development between normal masculine-male and feminine-female. The collection consisted of initially sixteen prominently displayed posters, each containing four photographs with accompanying text that identified various forms of intermediate biological development and, thus, sexual identity as well. This orderly display, however, was soon turned disorderly as images were added to the Zwischenstufenwand in a way Herrn, “Sammlung” 8. Herrn, “Sammlung” 20. Hernn notes that Hirschfeld received photographs from Ernst Haeckel, for example. 26 Herrn, “Sammlung” 7. 27 Herrn, “Sammlung” 29. 24 25



Freud & Hirschfeld Meet Brugman’s “Celluloid Children” 105

that did not reflect the chronological proximity of the supposed intermediary developmental stages. That is, new pictures were added to the wall in a hodgepodge fashion without regard for the construction of a visual narrative of biological development from supposedly most incomplete to supposedly most complete. A colleague of Hirschfeld who worked in the Institute, Ludwig LevyLenz, would describe the archival collection and the display materials in an way that demonstrates why the focus of the visual markers of sexual and gender biological difference became problematic for people like the writer Til Brugman: The Museum of the Institute was one of most unique sights in the world. Here were among others, thousands of photographs to view, images of sexual criminals, of neurotics, mentally disturbed individuals, pictures of absurd sexual practices, perversities, of methods and tools for such purposes, images of prostitutes, photos of homosexuals, transvestites, lesbians, exhibitionists, sadists, masochists, pimps, kleptomaniacs, and many, many others. Short and succinct, what was brought together here was really a labyrinth of human miseries and confusions! We had an infinite number of objects that had served as sexual fetishes. A collection of roughly one hundred pairs of ladies’ Chevreau shoes, in all colors, heels, and from these a few that could be laced above the upper thigh. In the same Museum there was a cabinet with braids and bundles of hair that a single braid-cutter had cut off and kept. From an undergarment fetishist (Wäsche-Fetischisten) we inherited an assortment of the most beautiful, expensive, delicate and intimate pieces of underclothing that have ever been worn.28

Lenz-Ludwig as qtd. in Herrn, “Sammlung” 11–12. Ludwig Levy-Lenz, Erinnerungen eines Sexual-Arztes (Baden-Baden: n.p., 1954) 372–5. The original German reads as follows: “Das Museum des Instituts war eine in der Welt einzig dastehende Sehenswürdigkeit. Hier waren u.a. Tausende von Fotografien zu sehen, Bilder von Sexualverbrechern, von Neurotikern, Geistesgestörten, Bilder von abwegigen sexuellen Gewohnheiten, Perversitäten, von Mitteln und Werkzeugen hierzu, Prostituertenaufnahmen, Fotos von Homosexuellen, Transvestiten, Lesbierinnen, Exhibitionisten, Sadisten, Masochisten, Zuhältern, Kleptomanen und vielen, vielen anderen … Kurz und gut, was hier zusammengetragen war gleich einem Labyrinth menschlicher Leidenschaften und Verirrungen! Wir besaßen eine Unzahl von Gegenständen, die als Sexualfetische gedient hatten: Eine Sammlung von rund hundert Paar hohen Damen-Chevreau-Schuhen in allen Farben, Stiefel, von denen einige bis weit über die Oberschenkel zu schnüren waren. Im gleichen Museumsraum stand ein Ausstellungsschrank mit Zöpfen und Haarbündeln, die ein einziger Zopfabschneider abgeschnitten und aufgewahrt hatte. Von einem Wäsche-Fetischisten erbten wir eine Auswahl der schönsten, reichhaltigsten, delikatesten und intimsten Wäschestücke, die jemals getragen wurden.”

28

106 Grotesque Visions Emphasizing the sensationalistic and exhibitionistic nature of the Institute’s displays, Levy-Lenz reveals the diversity of materials collected and displayed together under the auspices of research in the name of sexual science. Til Brugman’s “Department Store of Love” sought to produce a similar description of Hirschfeld’s facility, albeit with a critical, grotesque edge.

The Department Store of Love

Throughout “Department Store of Love,” Brugman’s narrator discusses the desires of a number of visitors to her facility. The first customer is a commander in the military, a high deputy of the government who was given a “determining impression” from a chamber pot in “the most delicate days” of his youth. According to the narrator, the official had attempted to suppress unsuccessfully his inclination to live permanently and openly with the object. Other guests include a sixty-yearold woman who wants to wear used military riding pants, and an old man who desires rubber children’s bottoms, one to dress and undress, and the other without accessories. Also among the curious guests to the Department Store of Love is a female kleptomaniac who is also a gymnast, thus making her able to hide stolen goods on her person in a most impressive and occasionally provocative fashion. The needy customers and the exceptional demand force the unique store to close early on most days, suggesting the owners are not capitalists involved solely for the sake of extensive profit. Such realistic references in combination with fantastic and comical elements—typical of the grotesque style— are meant to distance the reader in order to prepare her or him to reflect on the critique contained in the text’s overall thematic structure. What appears at first a wholesale embrace of capitalism in the Department Store is, in reality, a challenge to science’s supposed objectivity. The owners feel indebted not to capitalism but rather to science for their success and worldwide popularity. They acknowledge explicitly the impact of science on their enterprise: “We looked happily at each other … all of our ideas that science found also were transplanted uninhibited into reality.”29 The owners suggest that their store has allowed science’s abstract concepts and typologies to find material expression in everyday life. Such a claim depends implicitly upon the subtle critique that science itself is abstracted from reality. Thus, the

Til Brugman, “Das Warenhaus der Liebe,” Das vertippte Zebra: Lyrik und Prosa, ed. Marion Brandt (Berlin: Hoho Verlag Christine Hoffmann, 1995) 79. Unless otherwise noted, all translations of Brugman’s text are the author’s. The original German reads as follows: “Wir sahen uns beglückt an. … alles unsere Idee, was die Wissenschaft gefunden [sic] auch ungehemmt in Wirklichkeit umzusetzen.”

29



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challenge can be seen in embryonic form in the irony of the comment that science has enabled the public expression of the fetishistic desires of the store’s clientele. To develop further her challenge to sexual science, Brugman connects scientific discourses suggestively with sexual and military fantasies in the text. The narrator describes a peculiar series of events that threaten not only the existence of the Department Store but also its clientele. A parade to celebrate the business’s success is dispersed by “disruptive military hordes” in a passage that provides us with a glimpse of some of the other fantastic elements of the grotesque style: And if they—the baffled crowds—did not want to do what was demanded then the army used force. Suddenly a wild screeching began, and each was concerned solely with burying his love object … to save it. The disruptive military hordes demanded everyone stop and hand in their love objects. And if they did not want to do so, then the army used force. The military group set up bonfires, broke everything that they could put their hands on, stepped on objects of the most tender love with their feet. They choked belches from the body of a woman and trampled glands that lay around. Screams of misery flew here and there. People fled, protected their little rubber bottoms and hid themselves with their gramophone horns in the earth. Trombones were taken away before the melody was even finished; frightened, a boy buried underneath his outstretched body a bald head that meant everything in the world to him. The noise was deafening.30 The military threat represented in the literary scenario paralleled actual events that occurred in Berlin in May of 1933 when National Socialists

Brugman 79–80. The original German reads as follows: “Nun fing plötzlich ein wüstes Gekreische an, und jeder war mit einem Mal nur noch darauf bedacht, sein Liebeszeug zu verbergen … zu retten. Denn die hereinbrechenden Militär-Horden forderten alle auf, ihre Liebesobjekte sofort abzugeben. Und wenn sie nicht wollten, die verdutzten Menschen, dann gebrauche das Heer Gewalt. Die Mannschaften errichteten Scheiterhaufen, brachen kaputt, was sie in die Hand bekommen, traten mit Füßen, was soeben noch Gegenstand der zartesten Liebe gewesen. Sie würgten der Dame das Rülpsen aus dem Leibe und zertrampelten die herumliegenden Drüsen. Elende Schreie flogen hin und her. Die Menschen flehten, schützten ihre Gummi-Popöchen und verkrochen sich mit ihrem Grammophonhorn in die Erde. Posaunen wurden weggerissen, bevor noch die Melodie zu Ende geblasen war, ein Jüngling barg unter seinem hingestreckten Körper ängstlich eine Glatze, die ihm alles in der Welt bedeutete. Das Jammern brachte einen um.”

30

108 Grotesque Visions looted and burned Hirschfeld’s Institute of Sexual Science. The event in Brugman’s story, however, produces a much different outcome. The narrator of Brugman’s tale approaches the military hordes’ leader, who was ironically enough the first customer of the Department Store of Love. The narrator confronts the military official, a high deputy of the government and a commander, and demands to know why he earlier bought a chamber pot to satisfy his own desires and now wants to close the store and prevent others from realizing similar personal pleasures. He can only reply that he has been ordered to close the store to preserve the old, authentic, good birth—“die alte, authentische, gute Geburt.” No matter what happiness he or others might find through the auspices of the Department Store of Love, such happiness cannot solve the problems of the modern nation-state. He asks the narrator rhetorically: “Can we for instance fight war with this happiness? If everyone as he pleases shoots his semen wherever he wants instead of putting children in the world. The state wants ovaries … not okaries.”31 Brugman’s narrator, engaging the military commander’s insistence that war and nonreproductive sexual happiness are incommensurable, suggests more than pacifism. Rather, alluding to the declining German birth rate as the issue for military intervention, Brugman implicitly connects increasingly restrictive social and political ideology of the time with questions of gender and sexual liberty. That is, the individual who would “shoot his sperm wherever he wants” without regard for the need for reproductive sexuality jeopardizes not only the birth rate but also the ability of the state to wage war. As a solution to the dilemma raised by the military commander, Brugman’s narrator suggests using celluloid to produce soldiers and, hence, to satisfy both the state’s need for reproductive sexuality and the Department Store of Love’s customers’ desires for their fetish objects: “We could bring immediately 1,000,000 million [a million million] celluloid-children into the five parts of the world.”32 The military commander readily accepts the narrator’s alternative solution to the state’s demand for reproductive sexuality. The two co-owners already have produced the celluloid children, we find out, as a “small surprise for the League of Nations.”33 The celluloid children, much like the photographic images used in Magnus Hirschfeld’s typological studies of

Brugman 80. The original German reads as follows: “Können wir mit diesem Glück etwas Krieg führen? Wenn jeder, wie er will, herumspermatiziert, statt Kinder in die Welt zu setzen. Staat will Ovarien … nicht Okarinen.” 32 Brugman 81. The original German reads as follows: “Wir lassen gleichzeitig in den fünf Weltteilen 1.000.000 Millionen Zelluloidkinder zur Welt kommen.” 33 Brugman 81. The original German reads as follows: “eine kleine Überraschung für den Völkerbund.” 31



Freud & Hirschfeld Meet Brugman’s “Celluloid Children” 109

sexual and gender deviancy, become equivalent to real human beings in Brugman’s story. While the conflation of the real and celluloid by the military is made explicit, the conflation by science is introduced indirectly. The two discourses are united through a circumvention of reproductive sexuality in order to satisfy the reproductive demands of the modern military state. It is the fetishistic substitution not of love objects on the part of the store’s clientele explicitly but rather of celluloid reproductions and phenomenal substitutes for reality by the German state— and, implicitly, Hirschfeld’s and his colleagues’ sexual science—that are the focus of Brugman’s grotesque critique. The role of vision and subjective misunderstanding of the visible inform the basic dilemma at the heart of the Freudian fetish. In his discussion of the fetish, Sigmund Freud reminds us that the fetish is “not a substitute for any chance penis, but for a particular and quite special penis that had become extremely important in early childhood but had later been lost.”34 In a strange elision, Freud himself appears to attribute a penis to the figure who does not have one. Emphasizing the specificity of a penis that in fact does not exist, Freud immediately follows the previous statement with a clarification: “To put it plainly, the fetish is a substitute for the woman’s (the mother’s) penis that the little boy once believed in and—for reasons familiar to us—does not want to give up.”35 Freud’s clarification suggests that the fetish is not substituted for the penis, but rather for a belief in the penis—in a particular penis that is only later discovered to be nonexistent. The distinction between the fetish as substitute for a missing object and the fetish as substitute for the belief that the object existed is significant, and has repercussions for understanding Brugman’s ironic use of the fetish versus Hirschfeld’s willful substitution of reality and representation in his sexual science. Freud reveals that it is not the missing penis that is the problem, but rather the belief that the mother once had

Sigmund Freud, “Fetishism,” The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey, vol. 21 (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1929) 152. Strachey points out in the introduction to this English translation of Freud’s essay that the Austrian psychoanalyst had produced several different views and texts on fetishism beginning in 1905—the same year Hirschfeld began contemplating the role of the fetish in his own, more materialist, vein. I am using the translation of Freud’s 1927 essay, which represents one of the most complete views of the topic of ­fetishism in the context of the psychoanalyst’s corpus. 35 Freud 152–3. The German original reads as follows: “Um es klarer zu sagen, der Fetisch ist der Ersatz für den Phallus [384] des Weibes (der Mutter), an den das Knäblein geglaubt hat und auf den es—wir wissen warum—nicht verzichten will.” 34

110 Grotesque Visions a penis that represents the dilemma for the little boy: “for if a woman had been castrated, then his own possession of a penis was in danger.”36 The fetish, then, is not used to substitute for the mother’s missing organ, but rather is the object-choice the boy (later) makes in order to function as if the “fright of castration at the sight of a female genital” does not bother him; he disavows (Verleugnung) what he sees—i.e., a vagina—and employs a fetish in order to adapt to this all-too-frightening empirical reality.37 By taking a fetish as his object-choice, the boy is able to maintain his original belief even if it has been revealed to be a belief in something that does not exist. The use of the fetish as a substitute for empirical reality suggests one mechanism for understanding the way in which the literal object— the anthropological fetish—can act psychically as an epistemological replacement. Prior to the traumatic encounter and the discovery of the mother’s lack of a penis, it appears as if the boy in Freud’s text assumes that he and his mother have the same genital morphology (i.e., the boy has the same genitals as his mother, they have organs that are identical). The boy does not yet know what other genital possibilities might exist (i.e., he does not know what female or male genital organs are). In a chronological ambiguity in Freud’s treatment of the fetish, then, the boy must assert his own self-conscious knowledge prior to realizing the fact that women—and, in particular, his mother—have female genitals. It is only in making the conscious connection that all females have female genitals that he is forced to “take on” a fetish in order to inaugurate and to maintain his (later, sexual) desire for biological women. If, in fact, the boy does not equate being female with having female genitals at this early stage of his life, what are we to make of Freud’s insistence that it is only in taking on the fetish that the boy is “saved” from becoming homosexual? Clearly the boy does not equate desire with genital identity, and Freud incorrectly privileges temporally the role of the psyche over that of the social in the formation of sexual object-choice, rendering his further elaboration of the function of the fetish slightly suspect. In contrast to this conversion from anthropological object to epistemological fact in the inverted temporality of psychic phenomena, Hirschfeld developed a theory of the fetish that emphasized its material and social dimensions. In short, in his sexual science, the fetish becomes a literal—rather than psychic—extension of the sexual subject.

Freud 153. The German original reads as follows: “denn wenn das Weib kastriert ist, ist sein eigener Penisbesitz bedroht.” 37 Freud 154. The German original reads as follows: “Der Kastrationsschreck beim Anblick des weiblichen Genitales.” 36



Freud & Hirschfeld Meet Brugman’s “Celluloid Children” 111

Conclusion

It was the Institute’s collection of sexual and so-called primitive fetish objects in conjunction with the research within the facility that most clearly demonstrates the surface-conflation of epistemological and anthropological otherness. These artifacts, when applied in the context of German subjects, became key in promoting the supposedly scientific insight that there existed visible, external substitutes for incomplete biological development. Physical characteristics or “markers” of sexual identity were indistinguishable from the use of fetishes as expressions of the biological “in-between-ness” of individual sexual development. Hirschfeld would write in 1926 that the relationship between secondary sex characteristics and what he described as “anti-fetishes” (i.e., a disdain for supposedly normal sexual or gender attributes such as male facial hair or female breasts) proved that sexuality was biologically determined and that the fetish substituted for the incompleteness of an individual’s sexual development.38 It is in this context that Hirschfeld increasingly promoted the importance of scientific photography for the Institute, including suggesting in 1919 the need to develop a department devoted explicitly to scientific photography and cinema as well as an archive to contain these images in combination with a collection of cultural artifacts that served as fetishes for European and non-European groups.39 The anthropological approach enabled a broad array of public campaigns in the effort to render normal the apparently different sexual practices of Hirschfeld’s fetishistic European subjects. Due to its members’ belief in the fungibility of visible, morphological features and the biology of sexual development, the Institute became involved in a 1921 contest sponsored by the Ärztliche Gesellschaft für Sexualwissenschaft und Eugenik (“Medical Society for Sexual Science and Eugenic”). The contest challenged participants to submit an essay defending a

Hirschfeld, Geschlechtskunde 80. Hirschfeld claimed that the fetishist’s focus on secondary sex characteristics and what he described as “anti-fetishism” were both attempts to compensate for a lack of normal sexual development: “Es ist beachtenswert, daß sich in beiden geschilderten Fällen bei sonst völlig normalsexuell empfindenden Personen der Fetischhaß auf sekundäre Geschlechtscharaktere wie die Brüste des Weibes und den Bart des Mannes erstreckt, die im allgemeinen als besonders typische Geschlechtszeichen angesehen werden, welche für die normale Geschlechtsanlockung daher vornehmlich in Frage kommen. Gerade dieser Umstand läßt weitgehende Rückschlüsse auf die psychosexuelle Eigenindividualität dieser antifetischistisch eingestellten Persönlichkeiten zu, und zwar nach der Richtung, dass sie selber keine Volltypen ihres Geschlechts sind” (80). 39 Hirschfeld, “B. Das Institut für Sexualwissenschaft”; Herrn, “Einleitung” 13. 38

112 Grotesque Visions particular response to the question, “Sprechen anatomische Grundlagen für das Angebotensein der Homosexualität?” (“Do anatomical foundations speak for the possible existence of homosexuality?”). The Medical Society encouraged essay writers to explain the biology of sexuality in terms of visible manifestations of sexual orientation. The surface of the German body, extended epistemologically to include the fetish, found in the anthropological fetish an indicator of visible difference. Much like the denial of coevalness that Johannes Fabian associates with anthropology’s necessary presupposition of discontinuity despite the temporal proximity of its research subjects, Hirschfeld and his colleagues employed the fetish to establish an anthropological discontinuity among European citizens that rendered sexology’s research subjects epistemologically coherent.40 Freud’s theory of fetishism lends itself to Brugman’s story in a way that not only demonstrates the sophistication of the Dutch author’s artistic engagement with science but also reveals an important difference in her deployment of the fetish object. For Freud, the fetish is not a substitute for the penis, but rather a substitute for the male child’s belief that the mother has a penis. That is, it is not the penis that is protected, not the real that is being replaced, but rather the male child’s belief—his ego—that is fortified. Indeed, Brugman’s invocation of celluloid children for military recruits demonstrates that the army in her tale willingly confuses a belief in the real for the real itself. By placing the military debate in the context of a discussion of sexual practices, however, Brugman opens up the question as to the role of the fetish within the reproductive sciences themselves. Brugman’s short story suggests for us modern subjects a unique framework for understanding the roles of science and technology in our lives, and specifically how these epistemological and material practices alter our own, ever-transforming sense of self and other. Brugman’s “The Department Store of Love” reveals in the symbolic and literal metonymies of the fetish and of the celluloid-subjects not only a way for us to analyze our contemporary relationships to scientific insights and technological developments but also to express our skepticism about how these forces change the world in which we live. Much like the work of Benjamin, who proposed an approach to assessing the tasks that modern cultural forms pose for the “human apparatus of perception at the turning points of history,” Brugman demonstrates a concern with the way in which a perceptual conformism influences our

Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983) 25–35.

40



Freud & Hirschfeld Meet Brugman’s “Celluloid Children” 113

engagements with—or passivity in the face of—ideologically suspect images and displays.41 Benjamin, attempting to grasp the complex effects of modern technologies and techniques on human sensory perception, wrote a review critical of the objectifying “methods of visual illustration” (Veranschaulichungsmethoden) found in a 1920s Berlin nutrition exhibit.42 Through its displays of various dietary guidelines and suggested meals, the nutrition exhibition assumed a scientific authority that made any critical claims on the part of the participant-public suspect in the face of apparently objective facts. Benjamin found the ruse of this objectivity in the displays themselves, in the Veranschaulichungsmethoden that supposedly demonstrated the objectivity and insight of the exhibition’s displays even as these methods of visual illustration constituted objectivity itself. There was no transcendental truth to be found in a good breakfast. The exhibition simply presents another moment for Benjamin in which the development of Technik—in German, a term that refers both to “technology” as well as “technique”—could apparently influence the content of public thought through predetermined visual cues, cues that lead to sensorially predetermined—and uncritical— responses. The public, in short, was supposed to bow at the altar of the display, a display which simultaneously constituted the reason for the public’s uncritical reception of the exhibition as well as produced the appearance of unanimous agreement and scientific objectivity.43 In Brugman’s short story, we find an emphasis on the human use of Technik—both the use of fetish objects to appease various human desires as well as the use of celluloid to alter the understanding of what constituted human reality. The celluloid children of Brugman’s tale—the Zelluloidkinder—suggest that it is not so much the fetish that is a psychic extension of the human subject but rather that the human subject itself can be read as an extension of the fetish. That is, Brugman focuses on the material rather than psychic attachment to the fetish through the setting of the department store. Displacing the subject-centered focus on the fetish indicative of psychoanalytic interpretations, Brugman suggests that our uncritical attachment to material forms of modern

Benjamin, “Work of Art” 240. Walter Benjamin,“Jahrmarkt des Essens. Epilog zur Berliner Ernährungsausstellung.” Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 11 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980) 527–32. 43 Michael Hau has described the extensive relationships among Lebensreformbewegungen (“life reform movements”), scientific ideas, and public practices in the context of debates over objectivity and the human body. Cf. Michael Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty: A Social History, 1890–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). 41 42

114 Grotesque Visions culture alters the very understanding of not only what constitutes good data for scientific research but also what constitutes the human subject her- or himself. Figured as a precursor to our own contemporary fixation on cyborgs and robots as literal replacements for human subjects, Brugman’s grotesque presents a literary use of the fetish that reveals the specificity of the human body in the early phases of its apparent mechanical extendibility.

Five The Optics of Evidence: Photography and Vision in Early Anthropology

Beginning in the 1880s, the ophthalmologist and occasional anthropologist Hermann Cohn recommended enthusiastically to the public a frightening instrument that resembled something of a torture device.1 Cohn extolled the benefits of the mechanism, which he used on his own children and which was called variously a “Straight-Holder” or “FaceRest” (Figure 5.1). Teachers and parents were encouraged to use the instrument in Germany’s public classrooms as well as in their private studies in an effort to prevent the vision of the nation’s younger generations from deteriorating as a result of lazy posture or inadequately designed desks. Although Cohn’s textual descriptions and examples were not racialized explicitly, the accompanying images were: Darkskinned, half-clothed individuals sat slouching at school desks while other, light-skinned students dressed in fine European attire demonstrated the poses and postures Cohn recommended. Taken together, the text and the accompanying representations reveal more than the use of racialized imagery in the construction of national ideas of normal health and intellectual propensity. They also indicate the extent to which the increasing professionalization of anthropology was connected to a standardization of vision. Cohn reached many of his conclusions about visual deterioration by studying the human anthropological subjects and “medical curiosities” displayed in many of Germany’s zoos, Völkerschauen (“Exhibits of Peoples / Races”), and amusement houses. His examinations of the optical abilities of these anthropological others caused Cohn to worry about



1

Hermann Cohn, The Hygiene of the Eye in Schools (London: Simpkin, Marshall and Company; Birmingham and Leicester: The Midland Educational Company, 1882). A note of caution: Hermann (Ludwig) Cohn is not the well-known neo-Kantian philosopher Hermann Cohen, who also wrote during the same period.

116 Grotesque Visions

Figure 5.1  The “Straight-Holder” or “Face Rest.” Image courtesy of Das Archiv der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.

the visual acuity of the nation as well as of anthropological scientists. Indeed, Cohn often questioned whether his research conducted on supposedly exotic others was accurate given that he, too, suffered from what he believed might be particularly European optical predispositions. Even as a scientifically trained researcher, Cohn questioned his ability to see colors and distances as accurately as his interned research subjects. Cohn’s desire to preserve and to develop the optical acuity of Germany’s young citizens was an extension of this concern with the vision of aspiring German scientists.2 He and many others felt that the professional status and visual certitude of anthropology could be secured most readily by teaching future generations how to sehen lernen, to “learn to see.”3



2



3

Cf. Andrew Zimmerman, “Looking beyond History: The Optics of German Anthropology and the Critique of Humanism,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 32.3 (September 2001): 385–411. Rudolf Virchow—anthropologist, pathologist, and politician—used the phrase in both public and pedagogical contexts.



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Recent scholars have emphasized that the history of anthropology in Germany is significantly different from that in Britain, France, or the U.S. George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer identified the need already in the mid-1980s to provide a detailed history of the emergence of the ethnographic method within various national contexts. Ethnography, they argue, is a method that emerged as anthropologists became “more specialized in their methods and remarkably diffuse in their interests.”4 Scholars at the beginning of the twenty-first century have begun to write the history of that transition in Germany, shedding light on the emphasis on Anthropologie and its fundamental inseparability from Ethnologie, terms often translated respectively as physical anthropology and ethnology or cultural anthropology.5 Academics such as Andrew Zimmerman, H. Glenn Penny, Matti Bunzl, and others thus have sought to accomplish two objectives with their attention to the particularities of German anthropology. First, they seek to disentangle it, especially its manifestations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from an equation with racist eugenics in general and of National Socialism in particular. Secondly, these scholars emphasize the uniqueness of the German academic and colonial contexts. Thus, despite much of the work done on anthropology, ethnography, and the relationship of these practices to the “other,” the German example shows something unique: an early and continued emphasis with the physical and physiological aspects of visual observation. If, as Talal Asad reminds us, the story of anthropology and colonialism “is part of a larger narrative which has a rich array of characters and situations but a simple plot,” the unique history of anthropology in German provides the opportunity to identify similarities and differences of particular value for contemporary scholarship.6



George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer, Anthropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986): 18. 5 The concept of “anthropology” is used in this study to refer to the entire field of Anthropologie and not differentiating it from Ethnologie. The terms are not distinguished because (1.) there continues to be extensive debate about how readily distinguishable they were in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany, and (2.) the argument of this chapter is that the fields of Anthropologie and Ethnologie can only be separated—and even then, often in name only—once the fields become associated with particular professional training and particular academic credentials in Germany in the 1910s. Medical-scientific training, with its emphasis on empirical observation and assessment, provided the foundation of both disciplines in the German context, as discussed in the text in greater detail. 6 Talal Asad, “Afterword: From the History of Colonial Anthropology to the Anthropology of Western Hegemony,” Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr., History of Anthropology 7 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991) 314. 4

118 Grotesque Visions Debates among members of the Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie and Urgeschichte (“Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistory”) as well as in arguments played out in the Society’s publications, the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie (“Journal of Ethnology”) and the Verhandlungen der Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte (“Proceedings of the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistory”) set the stage for understanding the developing field’s optical orientation.7 The first section of the chapter addresses the prevalence of research into human vision in the emerging discipline by focusing on the debates between Cohn and Alarik Frithiof Holmgren. In the second part, the focus is on the publication of Carl W. Dammann’s Anthropologisch-Ethnologisches Album in Photographien … Herausgegeben mit Unterstützung aus den Sammlungen der Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie, und Urgeschichte (“Anthropological-Ethnological Album in Photographs … Published with Support from the Collection of the Berlin Society of Anthropology, Ethnology, and Prehistory”) and the historically proximate schemas developed by individuals such as Gustav Fritsch for the presumably objective inscription of anthropological evidence into the photographic image. The third portion of this chapter examines the development of the Berlin Society’s photographic archive in light of the concerns with visual information and suggests that the rhetorical and symbolic function of the archive became increasingly crucial. The foray into anthropological optics and subjects is concluded with a brief discussion of the importance of the resultant “shadow archive” for the young discipline. Taken together, these various historical developments demonstrate the tenuous use of sensory knowledge in empirical scientific practice, and reveal the ways in which hierarchies of vision produced both professional scientists and anthropological abjection. German anthropology produced professional subjectivities that carried on a tradition that emphasized the immediacy of visual information, and exposed the unique means for and strategies of critical engagement that such continuity provided.

Vision Research in Anthropology

The changing role of vision provides a valuable way to examine the similarities and differences among various national contexts during anthropology’s emergence as an academic discipline. The forms, locations, and debates about visual evidence are key to understanding the field’s development, as James Clifford reminds us. The appearance of



7

Throughout the remainder of the text the Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie and Urgeschichte will be referenced as the “Berlin Society.”



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the professional ethnographer-anthropologist in the late nineteenth century not only established the distinct scientific authority of the discipline but also emphasized the need to acquire knowledge of Western anthropology’s research subjects quickly. Clifford suggests that “the new style of representation depended on institutional and methodological innovations circumventing the obstacles to rapid knowledge of other cultures.” He locates six particular developments that enabled this new and rapid gleaning of cultural essences from visual surfaces: the public and professional validation of the ethnographic fieldworker, the use of indigenous languages without mastery, the power of observation, the use of theoretical abstractions, the thematic focus on particular institutions, and, finally, synchronic representations.8 While these various developments are discernible in the case of German anthropology, their manifestations reveal unique, corporeal concerns with optical processes. During the early phases of the development of anthropology as a professional scientific discipline in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, researchers were concerned not just with the physical, anthropological issues of the human form but also with the human optical apparatus.9 Vision studies proved troubling for anthropologists as they became aware of the failures of their own vision, as the example of Cohn demonstrates. These scholars realized that they could not depend upon their or their colleagues’ inherent optical acuity as a means of producing visual evidence. The concern with vision was not abated by deference to a widely accepted ethnographic method after the turn of the century, but rather was displaced by a continued emphasis on the physical aspects of anthropological observation. Even the most skilled observer of a supposedly inferior race had different optical abilities, and thus lacked the ability to see scientifically. Rather than situate objectivity as a disembodied ideal for anthropology, the



8



9

James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Art, and Literature (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press) 30–2. Although there are a number of texts that demonstrate the study of vision within anthropology in Germany during the period, due to spatial considerations take, for example, that Rudolf Martin included a section on the physical constitution of the eye in his influential 1914 textbook on anthropology. Cf. Rudolf Martin, “System der physischen Anthropologie,” Korrespondenz-Blatt der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte 38 (1907) 105–19; Rudolf Martin, Lehrbuch der Anthropologie in systematischer Darstellung (Jena, Germany: Gustav Fischer, 1914). Several other textbooks on German anthropology, including those examined that were published post-World War Two, have sections devoted to the physical structure of the eye as well, often under the rubric of explaining the optical acuity of various groups evolutionarily.

120 Grotesque Visions product of what Clifford, Marcus, and others associate with the rise of the ethnographic method, anthropologists struggled with the flaws of their own human vision as part of the discipline’s professionalization. In other words, anthropologists were not concerned with creating objective representations via a new, supposedly more objective ethnographic method, but rather in presenting to the public and to other professionals their studies as if the anthropologists themselves had no subjective influence on the resultant data, a necessary precondition to the establishment of the profession as a science. An analysis of this professional posturing validates to some extent Asad’s suggestion that an anthropology of Western imperial power reveals not only subordination of indigenous peoples but also “the radically altered form and terrain of conflict inaugurated by [imperialism]—new political languages, new powers, new social groups, new desires and fears, and new subjectivities.”10 In an application of Asad’s insight, it becomes apparent that the problem of vision in German anthropology shows more about the researchers’ emergent professional anxieties than it does about the scientific accuracy of their research. The concerns the field’s practitioners had with vision were resolved, from their perspectives at least, through the physical superiority of the European anthropologist and the creation of a repository of their scientific authority in the form of a photographic archive. The history of vision in anthropology is inseparable from the use of visual media like photography in the discipline. Historical accounts of the use of photographs in anthropology generally are based upon a series of supposedly key developments. Despite initial positive reception of photographic evidence in the early to mid nineteenth century, by the second half of the period figures such as T. H. Huxley and John Lamprey in England (in 1869) as well as Fritsch in Germany (in 1875) introduced criteria to instruct as to the correct ways to produce photographic images for anthropological use.11 The photograph and other supposedly nonsubjective inscription devices initially provided hope that a form of mechanical objectivity—objectivity based on mechanical devices and thus “certified free of human interference”—might

Asad 322. Frank Spencer, “Some Notes on the Attempt to Apply Photography to Anthropometry during the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Anthropology and Photography 1860–1920, ed. Elizabeth Edwards (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press; London: The Royal Anthropological Institute) 99. Lamprey’s system had been discussed in the Berlin Society in 1869. Cf. Elizabeth Edwards, “The Image as Anthropological Document. Photographic ‘Types’: The Pursuit of Method,” Visual Anthropology 3.2–3 (1990): 253.

10 11



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alleviate the concerns with anthropologists’ own vision.12 Continued debates at the fin de siècle about the photograph, however, indicate that the problem of vision within German anthropology persisted. As anthropology became a publicly and institutionally recognized profession, anthropologists sought to use other, nonmechanical means to standardize their strategies of visual assessment in order to secure their positions as trained scientific experts among their colleagues as well as among members of the German citizenry.13 These developments by no means made the photograph insignificant in anthropological research; they simply made the photograph more than an immediate representation of visual truths. One of the key transformations in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century visual culture in Germany involves the emphasis on vision as a means to communicate supposedly objective, immediate information. Many German anthropologists, to this end, had conducted research into physiological optics, presented their research findings in anthropological journals and at the meetings of anthropological societies, and often were invested personally and financially in the use of photographs for research purposes. This investment posed a problem, however. As many anthropologists demonstrated in their work, vision was not a stable means by which to assess objectively scientific evidence, but rather was variable, malleable and, worst of all, supposedly

H. Glenn Penny, “Bastian’s Museum: On the Limits of Empiricism and the Transformation of German Ethnology,” H. Glenn Penny and Matti Bunzl, Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003): 111. These transformations coincide with the development of diffusionism—also known as cultural-historical anthropology and associated with the idea of Kulturkreise. Diffusionism was a school of thought that represented a departure from the liberal anthropological tradition of anthropology as practiced by Virchow and Bastian. Following Penny, it can be defined as “a shift from psychology and the human mind to the analysis of groups, their behavior, and their ‘cultural traits.’ These ‘traits,’ which might range from the kinds of weapons a group preferred (e.g., spears over bows) to the kinds of monuments they built, could be used to sketch out particular Kulturkreise, or cultural areas … Diffusionism was based on an assumption that similarities of culture ‘could only be explained by direct transmission from one people to another’ … ” (11). To this end, diffusionism should be seen as part of the professionalization of anthropology in the early twentieth century rather than simply as a theoretical shift. 12 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, “The Image of Objectivity,” Seeing Science, Spec. issue of Representations 40 (Autumn 1992): 81–128. On the concept of objectivity and its transformations see Lorraine Daston, “Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective,” The Science Studies Reader, ed. Mario Biagioli (New York and London: Routledge, 1999) 110–23. 13

122 Grotesque Visions prone to degenerative effects.14 In other words, vision was problematic for these anthropologists not just as an object of their research but in their roles as professional subjects as well. Understood contextually and historically, how German anthropologists dealt with the problems of vision intimately associated with their research practices reveals the difficult and often paradoxical standardization of the visual perception of anthropological objects, a standardization that simultaneously displaced nagging questions about the certitude of anthropologists’ subjective optical assessments as well as the mechanical objectivity of the photographic image.15 As the discussions and publications of the Berlin Society demonstrate, if anthropologists were concerned with the objectivity of visual representations they were also concerned with the function and accuracy of human vision. One of the areas in which this concern expressed itself was in discussions of the perception of color. An exemplary figure in this respect is Cohn. Cohn had been involved actively in debates in the late nineteenth century over color vision as well as what environmental factors might contribute to the development of degenerative diseases of the eye. He exchanged a series of contentious papers with the Swedish physiologist Holmgren, part of the larger debates in physiological optics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries between Hermann von Helmholtz and Ewald Hering and their respective followers.16 Holmgren had gained a reputation in physiological optics through his studies with Helmholtz and Emil Heinrich Du Bois-Reymond in 1869 and 1870. Holmgren famously claimed that a color-blind engine driver had caused a railway accident in Lagerlunda, Sweden, in April 1876. Although the engine driver (conveniently?) died in the accident,

The term “degenerative” is used here to describe a biological condition that demonstrates physical evidence of a change in an organism, in this case in the ability of the eye to process information. Some scholars, such as Hermann Cohn, will imply a relationship between optical abilities and racial characteristics. I am not concerned with charting a history of degeneracy in the present chapter, however, nor with exploring the larger social implications often discussed under the auspices of the era’s fascination with degeneracy theory. 15 Cf. Alexis Joachimides, Die Museumsreformbewegung in Deutschland und die Entstehung des modernen Museums 1880–1940 (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst, 1996); Irmtraut Scheele, Von Lüben bis Schmeil: Die Entwicklung der Schulnaturgeschichte zum Biologieunterricht zwischen 1930 und 1933 (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1981); and Andrew Zimmerman, “Science and Schaulust in the Berlin Museum of Ethnology,” Wissenschaft und Öffentlichkeit in Berlin, 1870–1930 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2000) 65–88. 16 Cf. R. Steven Turner, In the Mind’s Eye: Vision and the Helmholtz-Hering Controversy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). 14



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Holmgren conducted research on over two hundred fifty railway employees and caused something of a scandal when he revealed that thirteen of the employees had some form of color blindness. The Swedish government authorized color-vision tests for railway and shipping personnel by the end of the year. Cohn, for his part, was primarily concerned with color vision in so-called Naturvölker (“primitive peoples”) and examined individuals displayed in the Berlin Zoological Garden.17 Unable to overcome adequately the language barriers that prevented him from compiling exact data, Cohn questioned whether or not his semi-willing research objects in fact saw colors differently, or perhaps were simply not able to express these differences to him because of his inability to understand their language. Intimately connected to his research ambitions was the problem of his own inability to understand those he studied. He would even go so far as to suggest that the inmates in the Zoological Garden could see colors with greater accuracy and perhaps greater variety than the average German. This tendency to view the corporeality of the anthropological other as different from that of the German anthropologist continued well into the twentieth century. It also reveals the inaccuracy of assumptions that the turn toward ethnography required immersion in a context far removed from the outposts of Europe’s supposedly more advanced civilizations. Traveling shows and photographs literally brought so-called primitive peoples to German anthropologists for study. The ethnographic encounter with the other occurred in the Germany of the late nineteenth century often in the anthropologist’s own backyard, or at least at his (and, rarely, her) local zoo.

Cohn 31. Cohn declares how impressed he is with the visual acuity of the “Nubians” during one such study at the Zoological Garden in Breslau. Because he locates visual acuity in the brain and not in the eye itself, however, he postulates that mental training of school children in Germany will enable them to see better and to distinguish colors with as great a degree as the “Nubians.” That is, German students can learn to see colors better. Cf. Hugo Magnus, “Die Erziehung des Farbensinns,” Verhandlung der Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte (July 20, 1878): 288–9. According to Magnus, Cohn also apparently claimed that female students saw colors more distinctly than their male counterparts, a distinction that Magnus claimed was due to the fact that women worked more often with colorful objects, a fact that also explained the lower percentage of German women with color blindness. Magnus also extended Cohn’s concerns to blame the degenerated eyesight of (male) Germans on the poor optical conditions of the classroom, a fact he connected to the public transportation issue: “Erwägen wir nun, dass gerade aus diesen Schulen das Eisenbahnpersonal sich hauptsächlich recrutiert, so ist der Wunsch, hier eine bessere Erziehung des Farbensinnes hervorzurufen, gewiss ein berechtigter” (288–9).

17

124 Grotesque Visions Cohn was by no means alone in his interest in studying the color perception of so-called primitives, nor was he the only anthropologist to question whether the vision of the other was different, if language restrictions prevented any accurate tabulation of data, or whether German vision might be inferior to that of the non-Europeans.18 These concerns with vision and language are indicative of the general anxiety of aspiring anthropologists at the time. The German case is of particular interest, however, not only because of the early emphasis on empirical observation among German anthropologists but also because these concerns were tied directly to the nation’s overall physical and optical abilities. In a response to a letter on the topics of color blindness in the German classroom, the cofounder of the Berlin Society, Virchow, declared that he would greet enthusiastically any attempts to teach the nation’s youth to see colors with greater acuity. His reason, according to transcripts published in the Verhandlungen, had to do with the education of the nations’ future scientists: For years he [Virchow] busied himself with the task of developing the eyes of young medical scientists, unfortunately with limited success. He required of the new students in each semester practical exercises with colors, because he knew that most of our young men were not in the position to describe the most common of colors with certainty. It was an exception, that a young medical scientist could immediately specify whether red was shaded in black, in blue or in brown, yellow in gray, white or in green. This optical helplessness was very unfortunate, and a majority of this was not based on color blindness but on the contrary unfamiliarity with colors and a lack of exercises. These would bow before education. A not insignificant complication is surmised from the lack of uniform color tables and, in order to prevent misjudging, the huge lack in our language of expressions for the sharpest classification of particular color nuances. These can only be helped through unified efforts.19

Cf. Richard Andree, “Ueber den Farbensinn der Naturvölker,” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 10 (1878): 323–34; Alfred Kirchhoff, “Ueber Farbensinn und Farbenbezeichnung der Nubier,” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 11 (1879): 397–402; L. Kotelmann, “Die Augen von 22 Kalmücken,” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 16 (1884): 77–84; L. Kotelmann, “Die Augen von 23 Singhalese und 3 Hindus,” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 16 (1884): 165–71; H. Rable-Rückhard, “Zur historischen Entwicklung des Farbensinnes,” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 12 (1880): 210–21. 19 Verhandlung der Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte (July 20, 1878): 289. The German reads as follows: “Seit Jahren beschäftige er [Rudolf Virchow] sich damit, die Augen der jungen Mediciner für die 18



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Virchow’s pessimistic diagnosis of the color-vision problem suggested that the nation’s future medical scientists—a group that constituted over one-third of the Berlin Society’s anthropological membership at the time—were optically challenged. This optical helplessness threatened not only the efficacy of Virchow’s professional pedagogical praxis but also the accuracy of future scientists’ visual assessments of evidentiary objects as well as the ability to communicate the scientific information. While Virchow was concerned with the development of university-level students, Cohn sought to apply his knowledge of physiological optics and color perception to improve the vision of German schoolchildren. Illustrations for his texts and his recommendation of a device called a “Straight-Holder” indicate that his concerns with vision were thematized not only in terms of racist representations (i.e., Black children slumped over desks, white children exhibiting erect posture) but also as efforts at standardizing—and not simply improving—the visual experience of German children in the classroom in as much detail as possible. One of the more profitable results of his work was the development of a school desk that would facilitate instruction and prevent incorrect observational conditions (Figures 5.2 and 5.3). Cohn’s assessment of his own vision in earlier studies, in conjunction with his later work on pedagogical technologies that sought to standardize the optical experience of German schoolchildren, indicates a concern with the variability of human vision. These concerns were indebted to the work of two late nineteenth-century figures influential in physiological optics, Helmholtz and Hering, who had, like many of their colleagues, deduced the optical ability of the well-trained observer through self-experimentation. Vision studies during the nineteenth century increasingly situated the locus of perception in the body of the observing subject. Jonathan Crary has described the transformation as changing “techniques of pathologische Anatomie zu entwickeln, leider mit geringem Erfolge. Er empfehle in jedem Semester von Neuem praktische Uebungen mit Farben, weil er wisse, dass die Mehrzahl unserer jungen Männer ausser Stande sei, die feineren Nuancierungen der gewöhnlichsten Farben mit Sicherheit zu bezeichnen. So sei es eine Ausnahme, dass ein junger Mediciner sofort richtig angebe, ob Roth in Schwarz, in Blau oder in Braun, Gelb in Grau, Weiss oder in Grün schattire. Diese optische Hülflosigkeit sei höchst beklagenswerth, und der grösste Theil derselben beruhe keineswegs auf Farbenblindheit, sondern auf Farbenunkenntniss und Mangel an Uebung. Dem lasse sich sicher durch Erziehung vorbeugen. Eine nicht geringe Erschwerung bilde der Mangel geeigneter Farbentafeln und, wie sich nicht verkennen lasse, der grosse Mangel unserer Sprache an Ausdrücken zur scharfen Bestimmung der einzelnen Farbennuancirungen. Hier könne nur durch vereinte Anstrengung geholfen werden.”

126 Grotesque Visions

Figure 5.2  An example of “bad” posture caused by a poorly designed school desk. Image courtesy of Das Archiv der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.

the observer.”20 What Crary fails to make sufficiently clear, however, is that the figures in his study—individuals such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Müller, Helmholtz, and others—often conducted physiological optical experiments on themselves to draw conclusions for their research. The implicit assumption of these scientists’ work was that only highly educated individuals, members of an elite class, could conduct such self-experimentation correctly. Thus, when German anthropologists attempted to utilize the new “techniques” to examine

Cf. Crary, Techniques 5–6.

20



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Figure 5.3 An example of “good” posture enabled by a correctly designed school desk. Image courtesy of Das Archiv der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.

anthropological others and to make their findings public, these aspiring scientists realized how difficult it would be to establish themselves as authoritative figures. The would-be anthropologist lacked the prestige or institutional credentials necessary for making self-experimentation the foundation of scholarly claims; their visual observations depended upon the various physiological processes and were plagued by the same subjective limitations that might be ascribed to their anthropological research subjects. Studying the optical failings of anthropological others always and inevitably meant confronting the variability of the anthropologist’s and his (or her) colleagues’ own visual abilities; self-assurance about matters of sense perception was not possible. Crary’s assessment of the “techniques of the observer” ignores the extent to which emerging professionals and professions had to struggle to secure scientific recognition and public authority, recognition and authority granted to already established intellectuals.

128 Grotesque Visions Crary has attempted to account to some extent for the process by which individuals recognized aspiring scientific figures and disciplines as authoritative. Identifying the dilemma posed by “a general epistemological uncertainty in which perceptual experience had lost the primal guarantees that once upheld its privileged relation to the foundation of knowledge,” Crary associates the development of a new “empirical truth of vision” with “external techniques of manipulation and stimulation.”21 This new truth occurs in the form of learned strategies of attention rather than in embodied techniques of observation.22 The techniques of the observer become, through pedagogical application, the means to train others how to see attentively and correctly. Late nineteenth-century scientists in Germany thus took schoolchildren as research subjects, in part, in an effort to standardize the viewing techniques that would be required to establish publicly the scientific vision of the professional anthropologist. Such a process of institutionalized acculturation, by which students not only were studied but also learned “how” to see, was the result of the debates over color perception in the 1870s and 1880s. The exchange between Cohn and Holmgren, for example, demonstrates that vision as object and as subjective practice would be an epistemological vexation for anthropologists unless some solution could be found.23 The introduction of an exciting collection of images from Carl W. Dammann promised just that: a definitive and objective visual resource for anthropological research. Photography, it seemed, might guarantee that every anthropologist saw the same thing in the same way. And that German schoolchildren and adults alike would recognize the anthropologist as an authoritative scientist.

Anthropological Visions: From the Album to the Archive

Dammann’s Anthropologisch-Ethnologisches Album in Photographien … Herausgegeben mit Unterstützung aus den Sammlungen der Berliner

Crary, Suspensions 12–13. Cf. Crary, Suspensions 17. Crary describes the concept in vague terms: “Attention thus became an imprecise way of designating the relative capacity of a subject to selectively isolate certain contents of a sensory field at the expense of others in the interests of maintaining an orderly and productive world.” 23 Cf. Cohn 18–21; Hermann Cohn, Die Arbeiten des Herrn Professor Holmgren über Farbenblindheit und seine Kampfesweise (Breslau: Commissionsverlag von E. Morgenstern, 1879) 3; Frithiof Holmgren, “Erläuternde Bemerkungen (in der Cohn’sche Sache),” Upsala Läkarenings Färhandlingar 40[?] (1878–79): 538–99. Cohn would invoke the name of Helmholtz in a later work in order to demonstrate the importance of the oft cited analogy between the photographic camera and the eye to help resolve the epistemological conundrum of the vision question. Cohn declared that the brain and not the eye was the location for the synthesis of visual information. 21 22



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Figure 5.4  A sample page from Carl W. Dammann’s Anthropologisch-Ethnologisches Album in Photographien. Image courtesy of Das Archiv der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.

Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie, und Urgeschichte was published for the first time in 1873.24 Dammann had been commissioned originally by the Berlin Society in 1870 or 1871 to photograph the crew of a ship that belonged to the Sultan of Zanzibar.25 Upon completion, each individual Album contained over 600 albumen prints pasted in groups of six to eighteen on folio-size plates.26 The plates, some fifty, included short, dubious captions for each image (Figure 5.4). The photographer’s brother Frederick saw to it after Dammann’s death in Hamburg in 1874 that the album was completed through the addition of roughly one hundred photographs.27 Dammann outlined early on during the project the difficulty he (and others) faced in photographing the “exotic” subjects in less-than-ideal conditions: The date of the Album is often listed as 1873–4. Elizabeth Edwards, “Some Problems with Photographic Archives: The Case of C. W. Dammann,” Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 13.3 (1982): 258. The crew was primarily of African and Arab descent, thus explaining the Berlin Society’s interest in having them photographed. 26 Albumen prints are made by using wet collodion glass negatives to print on album-coated printing papers. 27 Cf. Edwards, “Some” 259. Frederick Dammann completed the Album through the addition of these photographs in 1876. 24 25

130 Grotesque Visions The task of taking pictures of 20 men although very interesting, was extremely difficult owing to the lack of understanding of photography on the part of the subjects and to the religious scruples which made themselves felt. Added to this was a lack of adaptability, avarice and other unpleasant manifestations which are normally unknown in a photographic studio.28 For Dammann the ideal condition for photographing his subjects was in a studio. Not only burdened by the photographic subjects’ lack of familiarity with the apparatus as well as the inhibitions associated with religious beliefs, the photographer was also forced to utilize equipment that was not built for the kinds of climatic and environmental conditions outside of an atelier. Several scholars have suggested that such issues resulted directly in the development of equipment to produce mechanically objective images. The development was neither direct nor solely reducible to technology. Although his project was constrained by physical and technical issues, Dammann’s Album was positively reviewed and received by members of the Berlin Society. Virchow, chairperson of the Berlin Society at the time, felt it necessary to make a special mention to the assembled members of Dammann’s death in 1874.29 Virchow echoed many of the sentiments of the Berlin Society’s members in acknowledging the extensive respect afforded to Dammann and his undertaking. He called the project a “magnificent photographic work,” a recommendation that influenced both the public popularity of the Album and also continued further, positive reception among scientists. In his review of the work, the anatomy professor Fritsch noted that there had already been six copies (Lieferungen) of this detailed, individually produced reference sold by 1874, and there were apparently two subsequent additions.30 Of considerable interest was the fact that, unlike other similar projects conceived or discussed during the period, the book included photographs of European peoples as well as supposedly exotic others. Because of its comparative approach and the considerable quantity of photographs it contained, the Album was even awarded a bronze medal for special scientific interest at the 1873 Vienna International Exhibition.

Dammann as qtd. in Elizabeth Edwards, “The Image as Anthropological Document. Photographic ‘Types’: The Pursuit of Method,” Visual Anthropology 3.2–3 (1990): 249. 29 “Sitzung von 18. April 1874,” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 6 (1874): 72. All images in the album were made by the collodion process. 30 Gustav Fritsch, “Anthropologisch-ethnologisches Album in Photographien,” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 6 (1874): 68. 28



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The inclusion of supposedly nonscientific photographs and the difficulties Dammann himself described in photographing subjects in non-studio settings nevertheless provided the motivations for various individuals, including Fritsch, to develop new camera technologies or to provide explicit criteria for anthropological photographs (Figure 5.5).31 Fritsch outlined his criteria in a 1875 anthology edited by Georg von Neumayer titled Anleitung zu wissenschaftlichen Beobachtungen auf Reisen. Mit besonderer Rücksicht auf die Bedürfnisse der kaiserlichen Marine (“Instructions on Scientific Observations While Traveling. With Special Consideration to the Needs of the Royal Navy”). Fritsche’s contribution to the volume, “Praktische Gesichtspunkte für die Verwendung zweier dem Reisenden wichtigen technischen Hülfsmittel: das Mikroskop und der photographische Apparat” (“Practical Points of View for the Use of Two Important Technical Means of Assistance to the Traveler: The Microscope and the Photographic Camera”), appeared along with

Figure 5.5  The camera and carrying case developed by Gustav Fritsch. Image courtesy of Das Archiv der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.

Cf. Zimmerman, “Looking” 397. Not only did Fritsch claim that the photograph would serve as a helpful aid in directing perception (Anschauung) out of the unending confusion of incorrect representations associated with other forms of visual representation, he also published an anthropological anatomy textbook in 1905 to assist artists in the realistic representations he advocated. Such a book would help modern artists in particular, according to Fritsch, especially as their creations seemed to require that a viewer have different “eyes” in order not to find the images “discomforting.”

31

132 Grotesque Visions essays written by prominent anthropologists such as Virchow and Adolf Bastian. Fritsch’s efforts to standardize direct visual observation and visual records demonstrate an early effort to overcome one of the key problems aspiring German anthropologists felt plagued the optical orientation of their field: how could researchers, aware of the physical and physiological problems of human vision, use direct or even indirect visual evidence for their claims? In his text, Fritsch described photography, especially in the context of travel reports, as a corrective medium “which as material cessation (Anhalt) makes possible direct perception (Anschauung) for the unacquainted (dem Unkundigen) and at the same time can serve as a corrective for the subjective view of the [anthropological] traveller.”32 He praised the photograph in contrast to earlier travel studies (Reisewerke), suggesting that the possible uses of the photograph had made the latter forms of visual representation “bis zur Lächerlichkeit unbrauchbar”—that is, ridiculously unusable.33 His criteria divided photography into four subdivisions: physiognomic and ethnological, zoological, phytognostic (plant-related), and geognostic (earth-related) and geographic. Physiognomic and ethnological photography were both part of the single category of anthropological photography; geognostic and geographic photographs also comprised their own subdivision. Fritsch focused in great detail on the correct procedures for securing anthropologic photographs and provided a series of detailed sketches to demonstrate these procedures as used on subjects of the “German race” as well as non-Germans (Figures 5.6 and 5.7). Work done by Elizabeth Edwards, Thomas Theye, and others on the Dammann collection has focused on trying to identify the sources of the photographs, an activity that most often means trying to identify through props, photographic particularities, or context the photographic studio where the images were taken.34 Dammann’s photographic collection, some fifteen hundred images, was purchased by the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford in 1901 through the offices of E. B. Tylor and Henry Balfour. Tylor, the father of structural functionalism,

Thomas Theye, “Die Aneignung des Fremden im Bild: Über die Photographie als ‘neues Organ’ and als ‘neues Mittel sinnlicher Wahrnehmung’ der überseeischen Welt im 19. Jahrhundert.” Europa und das Fremde: Die Entwicklung von Wahrnehmungsmustern, Einstellungen und Reaktionsweisen in der Geschichte unserer Kultur, spec. issue of Loccumer Prokololle 11/97, ed. Jörg Calließ (Kirchliche Verwaltungsstelle: Rehburg-Loccum, 1998) 53. 33 Theye 52. 34 Edwards, “Some” 258. 32



Photography and Vision in Early Anthropology 133

Figure 5.6  Gustav Fritsch’s photographic measuring techniques, as used  in an “example of a physiognomic photograph of the German race.” Image courtesy of Das Archiv der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.

added to the professional credibility of photography in general and Dammann’s work in particular with his involvement in securing the album for Oxford. Key to the present study, however, is the fact that the widespread popularity of Dammann’s Album represents a moment when anthropologists, particularly in Berlin, were becoming more critical of the production of photographic images and the subsequent viability of these images for anthropological research. As Fritsch’s criteria demonstrate, anthropologists sought increasingly to define the correct inscription of visual data into the photographic representation as well as to establish anthropologists as professional scientists with the concomitant abilities and training to read these images accurately.

134 Grotesque Visions

Figure 5.7  An example of Fritsch’s photographic measuring technique featured in Neumayer’s text. The two sketches demonstrating the technique on the left are accompanied by a device on the right to hold the photographic subject in place. Image courtesy of Das Archiv der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften.



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Although the Berlin Society had maintained a photographic collection since the group’s inception in 1869, it was only in 1888 that a member—Max Bartels—became custodian of the photographic collection and only at the fin de siècle that Bartels was listed in the Society’s publications by that title.35 Even more surprising given this lengthy history is the fact that the group never cataloged and placed its photographs in a systematized order until Bartels became curator of the collection.36 Bartels’s appointment, and the initial steps toward archiving the group’s collection, coincided with the general trend in a number of disciplines during the period to establish photographic archives as central components in the creation or maintenance of institutional identities. Some scholars have argued that the development of photographic archives attests to the fact that there continued to exist a “lingering prestige of optical empiricism [that] was sufficiently strong to ensure that the terrain of the photographable was still regarded as roughly congruent with that of knowledge in general.”37 Although such a claim equates vision (“the photographable”) with the objectivity of photographs, here referred to as an “optical empiricism,” it rightly suggests a changed relationship between vision and photography during the period as well

Richard Neuhauss, “Die Neuordnung der Photographiesammlung der Berliner Anthropologischen Gesellschaft,” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 40 (1908): 96. Prior to 1902 Bartels appears to have been listed simply as the secretary (“Schriftführer”) of the Society. The first time the phrase “custodian of the photographic collection” (“Kustos der Photosammlung”) was used in conjunction with “Schriftführer” was either 1901 or 1902. Prior to these years, the “Schriftführer” was listed somewhat sporadically in the Verhandlungen der Berlin Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte (“Proceedings of the Berlin Society for Anthropology, Ethnology and Prehistory”), a supplement bound and published in conjunction with the Zeitschrift. Although the Archiv der Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte lists Bartels (1888–1904), Neuhauss (1904–15), Felix von Luschan (1915–24), and Wilhelm Langerhands (1924–42) as the custodians of the photographic collection prior to World War Two, the Zeitschrift indicates that Massiv served for a year as the custodian apparently due to Neuhauss’s absence due to an expedition in 1909. 36 Cf. “Sitzung von 28. April 1906 (‘Sammlung von Photographien’).” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 38 (1906): 394–5. This is the first published reference that provides evidence that Bartels had been trying to systematize and to organize the photographic collection. The author, probably Neuhauss, suggests that Bartels had been trying to organize the collection for some time in order to make the location of specific photographs or photographic themes easier. 37 Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,” October 39 (1986): 373. Sekula notes that “[r]oughly between 1880 and 1910, the archive became the dominant institutional basis for photographic meaning. Increasingly, the photographic archives were seen as central to a bewildering range of empirical disciplines, ranging from art history to military intelligence.” 35

136 Grotesque Visions as the fact that photography could still be a crucial part of the project of such disciplines as anthropology.38 Both Bartels and his curatorial successor, Richard Neuhauss, had had an extensive interest in photography independent of their professional roles as secretaries for the Berlin Society and, later, curators of its photographic collection. In his work, Bartels focused extensively on whether or not so-called native peoples viewed and treated illnesses differently than Germans or Europeans. He expressed a profound interest in the female form as well. Both elements of his research led Bartels to collect an impressive number of photographs, many of which he donated to the Berlin Society in the 1870s and 1880s. Bartels’s initial attempts to catalog and to organize the collection were far from scientific, however, as Neuhauss noted in a report the latter published in 1904: Bartels had skipped entire sequences of numbers (i.e., jumping from 6,599 to 7,000), often used the same numbers several times, and had either not written descriptions of many of the photographs, written on the photographs themselves, or not written anything at all.39 The extensive collection of visual materials and the efforts to systematize them for scientific use failed to validate the photograph as an “objective” medium in its own right; the physical and physiological aspects of observation still plagued Bartels, Neuhauss, and their colleagues. Despite these problems, Neuhauss’s views on photography in many respects paralleled those of Bartels. Like Neuhauss, Bartels was trained as a medical doctor but was himself also a passionate amateur photographer. Not only did Neuhauss build his own cameras, but he also wrote a textbook on the use of microphotography in which he sought to outline the meaning of the medium in the context of the larger problem of photography within scientific research. Neuhauss, reflecting on recent developments in camera technologies, provides a passage in the text worth quoting at length: The photograph was no longer a privilege of the photographic expert nor the especially gifted public. Everyone without particular, previous knowledge could lighten and develop a [photographic] plate. So it did not stop that numerous, contemporary learned and unlearned people took possession of this less often crossed path in order to reap its laurels. Success was then also great for

Cf. Sekula 347, fn. 91. Although no direct evidence exists in the case of the Berlin Society, the rules for cataloging books and photographs that were adopted by many archives had been developed by the Institut International de Bibliographie in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 39 Neuhauss 96–7. 38



Photography and Vision in Early Anthropology 137 the camera maker; innumerable “new” devices shot up like mushrooms from the earth, but the long-awaited photograms (Photogrammes) failed to appear. Books were written in which the meaning of microphotography was raised up the heavens. Whoever infrequently went to examine the accompanying demonstrations however must have believed that the whole thing was completely meaningless. One did not object: first through the newest advances of objectivity and through the introduction of good light filers and the erythrosine plates (Erythrosinplatte) perfect results were made possible. [Robert] Koch proved amply enough what could be achieved with the old, imperfect research aids. The guilt [thus] lies singularly with people and not with the research aids.40

Neuhauss like many of his colleagues in the Berlin Society saw the inability to produce an objective image as a result not of mechanical insufficiencies but of a lack of human knowledge and abilities. That is, the photographer-anthropologist needed to be trained to use the equipment correctly. Neuhauss thus was aware of the dangers of valorizing microphotographs in particular and photographs in general as inherently objective media, and sought in contrast to outline the criteria by which such visual representations could be used for scientific research. By the turn of the century and his appointment as the Berlin Society’s curator and secretary after Bartels’s death in 1904, Neuhauss began



40

Richard Neuhauss, Lehrbuch der Mikrophotographie (Harald Bruhn: Braunschweig, 1890) 241. The German reads as follows: “Das Photographiren war nunmehr kein Privilegium der Fachphotographen und einiger besonders begabter Laien. Jeder konnte ohne genauere Vorkenntnisse eine Platte belichten und entwickeln. So blieb es nicht aus, dass sich zahlreiche Gelehrte und Ungelehrte des Gegenstands bemächtigten, um auf diesem wenig betretenen Gebiete Lorbeeren einzuheimsen. Der Erfolg war denn auch ein grossartiger für den Kameratischler; ungezählte ‚neue’ Apparate schossen wie Pilze aus der Erde, aber die sehnlichst erwarteten Photogramme blieben aus. Man schrieb Bücher, erhob die Bedeutung der Mikrophotographie bis in den Himmel. Wer aber unbegangen die beigegebenen Probeaufnahmen durchmusterte, musste glauben, dass die Sache völlig bedeutungslos sei. Man wende nicht ein: erst durch die allerneuesten Verbessernngen [sic] der Objektive und durch die Einführung guter Lichtfilter und der Erythrosinplatte seien tadellose Resultate möglich geworden. Was sich mit den alten, unvollkommenen Hilfsmitteln leisten lässt, bewies [Robert] Koch zur Genüge. Die Schuld lag einzig an den Menschen und nicht an den Hilfsmitteln.” For a study of the strategies of visual display utilized in the popularization of Koch’s ideas see Christine Brecht and Sybilla Nikolow, “Displaying the Invisible: Volkskrankheiten on Exhibition in Imperial Germany,” Studies in the History and Philosophy of Biology and the Biomedical Sciences 31.4 (2000): 511–30.

138 Grotesque Visions to express a different understanding of the photograph. However, it was one no longer dependent solely upon technical manipulation or explicitly contrasted to public perception but with a nuanced historical dimension indebted to the rise of diffusionism. Beginning in 1908, Neuhauss began to call for stricter lending procedures for the Berlin Society’s photographic collection. His announcement was coupled with a concern for “vanishing races”: With an eye toward the dying out of primitive peoples and the disappearance of all originality a collection such as the present one will become more valuable from year to year; it gives information about many things that already belong to the past. Such rich pictures are for example eminently qualified for the study of the question of the migratory displacements that happened between Indonesia and Oceania … Probably our collection will furnish someday a decisive contribution to the solution of these difficult problems.41 For Neuhauss, the passage of historical time increased the scientific value of the Berlin Society’s photographic collection. Among the possible assistance to anthropological research that the photographic collection could make was in determining the extent of displacement among peoples of various geographical regions. The photographs could be used (comparatively) in (future) research to determine the migrations of peoples in the past. These migrations might be more difficult to isolate in the historical present, but the photograph was a document that captured time as well as objects, and thus could be utilized as a research aid in anthropology regardless of the objectivity of the image. Neuhauss thus represents a paradigmatic shift in thinking in the Berlin Society about the function of photographs: No longer debated as to whether or not they were—or could be—mechanically objective reproductions of reality, the photograph and synecdochically the photographic collection gained value as research aids with the passage of historical time. The supposed vanishing races and their cultural practices could be displaced in the context of anthropological research not simply by

Neuhauss, “Neuordnung” 100. The German reads as follows: “Mit Hinblick auf das Aussterben der Naturvölker und das Schwinden aller Ursprünglichkeit wird eine Sammlung wie die vorliegende von Jahr zu Jahr wertvoller; gibt sie doch über manche Dinge Aufschluß, welche bereits der Vergangenheit angehören. Ein so reichhaltiges Bildmaterial ist beispielsweise hervorragend geeignet zum Studium der Frage, welche Völkerverschiebungen zwischen Indonesien und Oceaninen stattfanden … Vielleicht liefert unsere Sammlung dereinst einen entscheidenden Beitrag zur Lösung dieser schwierigen Probleme.”

41



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photographs themselves but by photographs that had accrued historical value.42 This changed understanding of the photograph, while intimately connected to the gradual shift toward diffusionist theories during the period, demonstrates a rethinking of the relationships among anthropology, vision, and photography in the context of the emerging profession. Not all members of the Berlin Society agreed with Neuhauss’s belief in photographs or the photographic collection as viable material for anthropological research, however. An exchange between Neuhauss and Otto Schlaginhaufen in the mid-1910s demonstrates the continued existence of ambivalent attitudes about photographic representations among the Berlin Society’s members.43 Schlaginhaufen had studied the sensitivity of the skin to pressure in the early 1900s, and sought to develop an objective approach to morphology in the hopes of realizing eugenic goals. He had accompanied a German Naval Expedition to New Guinea from 1907 to 1909 at the request of Felix von Luschan.44 Schlaginhaufen challenged Neuhauss as a result of what he believed was a misinterpretation of his position on photographs. In a review of Schlaginhaufen’s essay “Über die Pygmäenfrage in Neu-Guinea” (“On the Question of the Pygmies in New Guinea”), Neuhauss criticized the lack of photographs in the study and questioned Schlaginhaufen’s dependence instead solely upon the measurement system utilized by fellow anthropologist Rudolf Pöch.45 Neuhauss pointed out that his own work was neither used nor cited by Schlaginhaufen, and that Schlaginhaufen had not taken issue with the geographical dispersal of his research subjects in the various regions of German New Guinea. The latter concern, influenced by the increasing popularity of theories of diffusionism among German anthropologists,

For an opposite claim, that Berlin anthropologists “[in] embracing visual rather than textual practices … embraced what they held to be an atemporal mode of knowledge,” see Zimmerman, “Looking” 389. 43 Schlaginhaufen had utilized Rudolf Pöch’s measurement system, which Pöch later used on Europeans and non-Europeans interned in prisoner-of-war camps. Cf. Andrew D. Evans, “Anthropology at War: Racial Studies of POWS during World War I,” eds. H. Glenn Penny and Matti Bunzl, Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003) 198–229. 44 Rainer Buschmann, “Colonizing Anthropology: Albert Hahl and the Ethnographic Frontier in German New Guinea,” eds. H. Glenn Penny and Matti Bunzl, Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003) 251. 45 Otto Schlaginhaufen, “Über die Pygmäenfrage in Neu-Guinea,” Festschrift der Dozenten der Universität Zürich (1914): 181–201; Rudolf Pöch, “Fälle von Zwergwuchs unter den Kai (Deutsche Neu-Guinea),” Sitzungsbericht der anthropologischen Gesellschaft Wien 8 (1904/1905): 40–1. 42

140 Grotesque Visions suggested that racial mixing had occurred in Schlaginhaufen’s sample population, and that such mixing could not be accounted for under a system of measurement alone. Neuhauss challenged Schlaginhaufen’s polemic that a“[s]imple comparison of photographs and generally held descriptions would never lead to our goal,” and emphasized the importance of photography, particularly with respect to the study of populations in German New Guinea:46 The comparison of photographs in the question of the Pygmies is of exceptional meaning and can not be replaced by mountains of measurements. The habitus of the Pygmy is so unique that one can only gain a correct impression with the aid of the photographic image.47 According to Neuhauss, writing his review of Schlaginhaufen’s study while curator of the Berlin Society’s photographic collection, such reproductions provide an important means for the anthropologist to understand the particular characteristics of such a unique group of physical types as the pygmies. As if marking these words as his final effort to ensure the viability of the photograph as a research aid for anthropologists, Neuhauss died the same year that the review of Schlaginhaufen’s study was published. In his response, published in 1915 in the Zeitschrift, Schlaginhaufen explained that he provided the rebuttal despite what he described as the “regrettable fact” of Neuhauss’s death. The surviving member of the intellectual duel clarified what was for him an important distinction in understanding the viability of the photograph as a research aid, a distinction that could only be understood with reference to photographic reproduction: An additional goal of photography is also that of preparing in certain cases an object through its reproduction for an entirely special observation. But also here there is no work of observation with the photographic image itself, in other words no scientific

Schlaginhaufen as qtd. in Richard Neuhauss, “Die Pygmäefragen in NeuGuinea,” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 45 (1914): 754. The German reads as follows: “Bloße Vergleichung von Photographien und allgemein gehaltenen Beschreibungen wird hier nie zum Ziele führen.” 47 Neuhauss, “ Pygmäenfrage” 754. The German reads as follows: “Nun, die Vergleichung von Photographien ist gerade in der Pygmäenfrage von allergrößter Bedeutung und kann nicht durch Berge von Messungen ersetzt werden. Der Habitus des Pygmäen ist so eigenartig, dass man sich nur nach dem Bilde eine richtige Vorstellung machen kann.” 46



Photography and Vision in Early Anthropology 141 work of any kind is performed. The belief that the photograph circulates as a complete substitute for the direct observation of objects belongs to the realm of mysticism.48

Schlaginhaufen took great pains to make a distinction between the production of the photograph and the direct observation of the photographed object(s). The two moments, he suggested, were quite distinct phases in the production of anthropological knowledge based on visual information. Here, the highly trained anthropologist and not the visual medium was the arbiter of scientific knowledge. Whereas the scientific work of observation could occur in the context of a direct observation, the photograph as a substitute for such observation belonged “to the realm of mysticism.” Schlaginhaufen demonstrated that the training of the anthropologist was the means by which subjective influences in either direct observations or representational objects could be overcome. Schlaginhaufen cautioned that even direct observation required specific techniques in order to ensure the production of scientifically valuable data. While photography could only serve in Schlaginhaufen’s analysis as a “postponement, but not a replacement,” direct observation “by the naked eye” required other precautions: Then all observations that are undertaken only with the “naked eye” without measuring instruments or scales stand to a certain degree under the influence of subjective perception. I will always stand by an early statement I made: “With the improvement of the foundation that the metrics of the descriptive method wrestles from uncertainty, the independence from these influences and the reliability of the results of observation increases.”49

Otto Schlaginhaufen, “Die Stellung der Photographie in der anthropologischen Methodik und die Pygmäenfrage in Neuguinea,” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 46 (1915): 55. The German reads as follows: “Der Nebenzweck der Photographie ist also der, in gewissen Fällen das Objekt durch die Reproduktion zu einer ganz speciellen Beobachtung vorzubereiten. Aber auch hier ist mit der photographischen Aufnahme selbst noch keinerlei Beobachtungsarbeit, also keine wissenschaftliche Arbeit geleistet. Der Glaube derer, die die Photographie als vollwertigen Ersatz für die direkte Beobachtung am Objekt ausgeben, gehört in das Reich des Mystizismus.” 49 Schlaginhaufen, “Stellung” 56. The German reads as follows: “Denn alle Beobachtungen, die nur ‘’vom bloßen Auge’ ohne Messapparate und Skalen vorgenommen werden, stehen bis zu einem gewissen Grad unter dem Einfluß der subjektiven Empfindung. Ich stehe immer noch zu dem früher ausgesprochenen Satz: ‘Mit der Zunahme des Bodens, den die metrische der deskriptiven Methode abringt, wächst die Unabhägigkeit von diesen Einflüssen und die Zuverlässigkeit der Beobachtungsresultate.’” 48

142 Grotesque Visions In a series of phrases that might serve as exemplary for a discussion of the production of aperspectival objectivity, Schlaginhaufen suggested that the use of scales and a metric-descriptive method increased the independence of the visual data from the influences of subjective perception (“Empfindung”).50 He claimed that Neuhauss’s assessment of his earlier published comments were based upon a misunderstanding. Schlaginhaufen did not reject completely the use of photography as a research aid but rather rejected the system of photography and photographic technique proposed by Neuhauss.51 Schlaginhaufen suggested that Neuhauss’s system of inscription of anthropometric data as part of photographic production was insufficient due to the possibility that the latter’s measurement system was not reliable, that there existed an uncertainty of the racial definitions used to isolate a racial population and, finally, that Neuhauss depended upon a limited number of characteristics used to distinguish particular races. These three factors, however, were subsumed fundamentally in Schlaginhaufen’s correction not simply by the dichotomy of photography versus direct observation, but rather by a hierarchy based first and foremost on the need to eliminate subjective perception in the measurement of visual anthropological data. Anthropologists required a series of measurements and recording devices to overcome the inherent limitations and failures of their own, very human vision. Thus, the exchange between Neuhauss and Schlaginhaufen demonstrates the continued concern with the physical and physiological aspects of visual observation, concerns that marked the early phases of anthropology’s development in Germany as a field with direct ties to medical science. While the eyes of the trained anthropologist to interpret these resultant data correctly and institutionally were the only means to produce legitimate scientific knowledge in service of the developing discipline, the researcher’s corporeality still threatened to undermine the most rigorous techniques of observation. As the exchange between Neuhauss and Schlaginhaufen demonstrates, the concerns with anthropological vision and the viability of photography as a research aid in anthropology by no means ended at the fin de siècle. Rather, professionally trained anthropologists delimited actively the appropriate conditions for the production of visual

Daston suggests aperspectival objectivity is “about eliminating individual (or occasionally group, as in the case of national styles or anthropomorphisms) idiosyncracies.” She also notes, importantly for the present argument, that “the essence of aperspectival objectivity is communicability, narrowing the range of genuine knowledge to coincide with that of public knowledge” (Daston 111–12; emphasis added). 51 Schlaginhaufen, “Stellung” 54. 50



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data, data that included the photographs but within a hierarchy of forms of optical information. These conditions of production included training anthropologists and curious members of the public how to observe anthropological objects correctly. That is, professional anthropologists had to undergo detailed training to ensure their ability to become the authoritative subjects needed by their emerging science. The public, too, needed to be made aware that anthropologists saw their evidence with the eyes of scientific experts. None of these precautions eliminated the potential for physical, physiological failure, however, a concern that German anthropologists had had already in the nineteenth century. With the rise of anthropology as a professional discipline, a transformation that included the disciplinary-specific training of professional scientists and also the recognition of such expertise by the lay public, the relationship between vision and the photograph changed. The photographic archive of the Berlin Society not only became a site for the storage, cataloging, and preservation of photographs, but also acted as a rhetorical referent in aspiring anthropologists’ attempts to circumvent the debates about the objectivity of the photographic image. Allan Sekula has suggested that the creation of an archival collection of photographs occurs simultaneously to the creation of a shadow archive, a nonliteral yet referential archive available to the public at large. Key to Sekula’s argument is the development of a “materialist science of the self” during the period, a science he associates with criminology as well as physiognomy and phrenology. This “materialist science of the self” was a science linked to “an everyday nonspecialist empiricism … [that] presumably any observant reader of one of the numerous handbooks and manuals … could master through interpretive codes.”52 Sekula’s claims lend themselves exceptionally well to the debates in the Berlin Society over the role of photography and direct observation in anthropology. The Neuhauss–Schlaginhaufen exchange demonstrates a continued concern with the physical and physiological aspects of direct observation, an emphasis that Sekula notes had to do with the mutability of visual experience, exemplified in Sekula’s model by the activities of public officials such as the police: If we examine the manner in which photography was made useful by the late-nineteenth-century police, we find plentiful evidence of a crisis of faith in optical empiricism. In short, we need to describe the emergence of a truth-apparatus that cannot be adequately reduced to the optical model provided by the camera. The camera is integrated into a large ensemble: a bureaucratic-

Sekula 347.

52

144 Grotesque Visions clerical-statistical system of “intelligence.” This system can be described as a sophisticated form of the archive.53 The creation of a “sophisticated form of the archive” depended upon the physical existence of the photographic archive. The creation of such a collection, however, was accompanied as well by a system of knowledge that included the application of statistics to optical data, the development of bureaucratic procedures, and the supervision made possible by clerical oversight. These factors not directly implied in the archive’s physical assemblage had the effect, according to Sekula’s schema, of allowing for the recognized “inadequacies and limitations of ordinary visual data” while simultaneously allowing for the use of such data in “the integration of the discourses of visual representation and those of the … sciences in the nineteenth century.”54 Among the public means employed by German scientists to extend the archive beyond its physical parameters was the emphasis on the visual encounter in public museums, facilities that both constructed and valorized the direct observation, the immediate visual perception of anthropological objects. Through such venues, alternative—possibly subversive—public experiences of anthropological objects could be directed, tutored, and seemingly defused. Expert vision, situated in opposition to the variable interpretations of individual observers, became enmeshed within a constellation of means to limit the physical and physiological variability of vision: Photographic collections, museum displays, and procedures trained both advocates and amateurs how to see anthropological objects scientifically. These procedures and sites were not radical departures, indicative of the emphasis on a

Sekula 347. Sekula 353. Emphasis in original. Sekula is both invested in and skeptical of Foucault’s suggestion that “the new regulatory science directed at the body in the early nineteenth century” was not simply repressive but also operated “by virtue of a positive therapeutic or reformative channeling of the body” (Sekula 346). Sekula outlines what he describes as the repressive aspect of these sciences in relation to visual representations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Important for the present argument is the fact that Sekula gestures at the end of his essay toward understanding certain forms of modern art as critical engagements with these scientific practices: “Can any connections be traced between the archival mode of photography and the emergence of photographic modernism? To what degree did self-conscious modernist practice accommodate itself to the model of the archive? To what degree did modernists consciously or unconsciously resist or subvert the model of the archive, which tended to relegate the individual photographer to the status of a detail worker, providing fragmentary images for an apparatus beyond his or her control?” (Sekula 374–5).

53 54



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new ethnographic approach in German anthropology, but rather were extensions of the historically medical-scientific predispositions of the field.

Conclusion

German anthropology may continue to bear the weight of its affiliations, both real and imagined, with racist eugenics and with National Socialism. Perhaps some of the most significant contributions that the particular history of anthropology in Germany can make to our contemporary discussions of postcolonialism, imperialism, and globalization are in providing new foci for assessing the way knowledge is produced and used to support certain political agendas, as well as to demonstrate effective methods of critical engagement. Vision is one such focus, not only as an area of research interest but also as a human sensation used in scientific research. Clifford points out in The Predicament of Culture that rapid visual observation was a key aspect of the anthropological sciences during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His analysis, providing an invaluable insight into the history of the field, situates his assessments as concerned with the “postcolonial crisis of ethnographic authority” that results from the development of the discipline, and the separation of ethnography from anthropology.55 He suggests that “before the late nineteenth century the ethnographer and the anthropologist, the describer-translator of custom and the builder of general theories about humanity were distinct.”56 The German situation complicates this division. Certainly, representation in the German case—just as in the English, U.S., and French examples Clifford analyzes—“depended upon institutional and methodological innovations circumventing the obstacles to rapid knowledge of other cultures.”57 However, ethnography and anthropology were not the distinct fields in Germany as in these other national contexts; the empirical turn in anthropology did not occur in Germany to the same extent as in Britain, the U.S., and France because German practitioners in the field already were immersed in the observational demands of empirical science. The German immigrant Franz Boas is a provocative figure in this respect: while his work provides the paradigmatic example for Clifford and George W. Stocking, Jr. (from whom Clifford takes the phrase) of the “intermediate generation” of anthropologists who began to combine the “empirical and theoretical components of anthropological inquiry,” he

Clifford 8. Clifford 28. 57 Clifford 30. 55 56

146 Grotesque Visions was trained as a medical doctor in Germany under the leading scientist of the day, Virchow.58 Like Boas, and Virchow before him, most individuals who engaged in anthropological pursuits in Germany were trained as medical doctors. As a result of the medical emphasis on the body and the physical and physiological aspects of vision, these aspiring anthropologists were concerned not only with the eyes of their research subjects but also with their own visual abilities as researchers. In light of the growth of interest in anthropology as a possible tool for colonial aspirations in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, the desire to develop the field and its permutations as distinct disciplines also increased. But German anthropology remained indebted to medical science for many of its assumptions, methods, and epistemological ambitions. The University of Berlin would begin to grant degrees in anthropology in 1915 and in ethnology in 1922, making these fields academic professions in a fashion somewhat similar to other Western nations. The separation of these academic fields, however, never completely separated German Anthropologie from its physical and optical preoccupations.59

Clifford 28. Cf. Andrew Zimmerman, Anthropology and Antihumanism in Imperial Germany (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001) 45.

58 59

Six Visual Objectivity Meets Impossible Object: Hannah Höch “From an Ethnographic Museum” Photomontages

“In theory everything was solved …”

In a short satire written around 1920 titled “Der Maler” (“The Painter”), the artist Anna Therese Johanne (Hannah) Höch provides a humorous indictment of modern art, German politics, scientific representations, and male privilege. Much like the protagonist of her story, Höch was primarily a visual artist. As a result, it may seem somewhat paradoxical to begin a discussion of her work with an analysis of one of the few written texts she produced. “Der Maler” is, however, a very curious document. Not only does Höch’s story present a covert attack against the sexism that underlay the supposed radicalism of the Berlin Dada movement. It also demonstrates the artist’s early concern with the self-serving complicity of visual representation and scientific objectification.1 In “Der Maler,” Höch describes the plight of a modern painter with the unusual name of Gotthold Himmelreich (“God-Beloved Heavenly-Kingdom”). Forced to wash dishes by his wife, the painter “felt degraded as a man and as a painter” and “suffered under the problematic female soul in the totality of his manhood.”2 Himmelreich becomes



1



2

Cf. Scheele 157–93. Scheele discusses the use of Anschauungsmaterial (“visual aids”) in late nineteenth-century German biology and natural history curricula. Hannah Höch, “The Painter,” Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch, by Maud Lavin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993) 216; Hannah Höch, “Der Maler,” Hannah Höch: Eine Lebenscollage (Berlin: Argon, 1989) 746, 748. The original German reads as follows: “kam sich als Mann, aber auch als Maler, degradiert vor” (746) and “litt also mit der gesamten Mannheit unter der problematischen Seele der Frau” (748).

148 Grotesque Visions determined to overcome through his art the humiliation suffered at the hands of his female companion: Now one day he began to paint a picture. A dark force moved him, because hewas full of dark forces. He wanted to represent, to cube really, the essential likeness between the nature of chives and the female soul. In theory the whole problem was solved. He saw the emptiness that fills both these objects precisely and with total intellectual clarity.3 Invoking psychoanalytic explanations for his wife’s behavior and cubist techniques for his artwork, Himmelreich decided to produce as if “scientifically dissected”4 a painted likeness of his two subjects with the presumptuous title Das Schnittlauch und die Seele des Weibes (ein Vergleich) (“The Chive and the Female Soul [A Comparison]”). In her story, Höch continued on to chronicle the frustrations and self-doubt of Himmelreich as an everyman, a modern male subject as he attempts and ultimately fails to scientifically represent (and thereby control) the “essence” of woman. Much like the character of Himmelreich, German anthropological science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries sought to represent visually the essence of things that, in fact, it could neither fully objectify nor adequately explain.5 Such shortcomings did not stop science. As an example of an artistic intervention into scientific objectification, Höch’s photomontages created in the 1920s and early 1930s



3



4



5

Höch, “Painter” 216; Höch, “Der Maler” 747–8. The original German reads as follows: “Eines Tages nun, begann er, aus irgend einem dunklen Drang heraus, naemlich er war voll von dunklen Drängen, im Bild zu malen, indem er die Wesensgemeinschaft des Schnittlauchs mit der Seele des Weibes vergleichend auf der Leinwand dar … kuben wollen. In der Theorie war bereits alles geloest. Er hatte mit präzisester geistiger Schärfe die Hohlheit entdeckt, die diese beiden Objekte bis obenhin anfüllt.” Ellipses in original. Höch, “Painter” 216; Höch, “Der Maler” 748. The German reads as follows: “wissenschaftlich seziert.” Cf. Zimmerman, Anthropology 62–85. Zimmerman has written eloquently of the fixation of German anthropologists on a static concept of nature even as these same figures attempted to come to grips with the empirical evidence for historical change. Zimmerman has suggested that German anthropologists, in particular, situated the belief in what I have loosely refer to here as “the essence of things” as a contest between classificatory systematizations of a static concept of nature (under the influence of Immanuel Kant) and attention to the empirically evident (under the influence of Friedrich Schelling). Zimmerman situates this contest in light of the humanist ideals of German Bildung and the emergence of evolutionary theories in the late nineteenth century.



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often show a particular concern with modern scientific dependence on vision, particularly as that dependence was manifested in anthropology. She used the medium of photomontage, a hybrid technique combining visual and textual materials, not simply for its shock value or for propagandistic purposes, but to critique the way in which prevailing racial, sexual, and gender expectations affected the evidence produced and used in the name of science. As such, her theory of photomontage was quite different from most art-historical descriptions of the medium. Höch’s use of photomontage, an art form associated with the German word “montieren” (“to assemble or mount”), entailed the “piecing together of photographic and typographic sources, usually cut from the printed mass media.” She never rephotographed her photomontages or manipulated negatives in the darkroom, as did many of the medium’s other early practitioners. Refusing to engage in such “photographic artifice,” she preferred “the evidence of hand cutting to the creation of a seamless image or the mass-production of images.”6 By acknowledging the material limitations of the medium, Höch could make explicit photomontage’s incorporation of different source materials into an arbitrarily constructed new unity.7 As a result, unlike Himmelreich, Höch refused to simply represent objects, but sought rather to invoke a strategy that criticized the illusory nature of visual representation. Höch’s particular concern with the illusory nature of visual representation becomes especially important because the emphasis on visible markers of evolutionary difference, such as proper physiological comportment or physiognomic configuration, was tenable in great part with the aid of the technical manipulation of photography. Höch’s concern with the evolutionary sciences and related anthropological practices are indicated by her collection and use of ethnographic images made available in the photo-illustrated press. In her Weimar era series



6



7

Peter Boswell and Maria Makela, eds., The Photomontages of Hannah Höch (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1996) 2. The most explicit dimension of Höch’s material disruption of an objectivity made possible by an assumed visual unity of the image is unfortunately eliminated in the photographed and cataloged reproductions of her works. That is, the technical reproduction of Höch’s works has obscured the explicit material dimension of critique that the medium enabled (i.e., uneven edges, obviously different sources for the various pieces of the image often glued or taped together, the explicit disharmony of paper textures and shades). Such a unique use of the art form might be considered at odds with Benjamin’s assessment of the (positive) impact of mechanical / technical reproducibility of art works. The photographic and cataloged reproductions nevertheless still demonstrate Höch’s efforts to disrupt the subjective assumption of the objective unity of the image, an assumption that underlies many claims to the scientific legitimacy of representation.

150 Grotesque Visions Aus einem ethnographischen Museum, Höch explored a twofold agenda for the medium of photomontage.8 Her creations were themselves urban ethnographic reports, the results of collecting, scrutinizing, and manipulating the photo-illustrated press, one of the most popular forms of cultural expression during the period.9 She also used photomontage to critique the Western emphasis on visible markers of evolutionary difference, an emphasis that photography was making supposedly objective and, hence, increasingly tenable scientifically.

Photomontage as Visual Critique

As the Aus einem ethnographischen Museum series demonstrates, Höch directed much of her critical artistic energy during the 1920s and 1930s against the visual strategies employed in the representation of supposedly inferior evolutionary others. As such, her use of photomontage was not typical. Naomi Rosenblum, for example, in her 1989 book A World History of Photography, describes photomontage as able to cause “feelings in the spectator that conventional photographic views no longer had the power to evoke.”10 She praises John Heartfield and George Grosz, in particular, for realizing the true potential of the art form. No longer interested in merely shocking viewers, the two artists had begun using the medium during the Weimar years to clarify social and political issues for a primarily working-class audience. Heartfield’s and Grosz’s photomontages were explicitly political. Thus, the messages of these photomontages appealed to the socialist political conscience of certain segments of the population in a way that was, according to Rosenblum’s analysis, more realistic, more pragmatic, and less esoteric. Perhaps not surprisingly, given such a mono-dimensional understanding of the medium, Rosenblum describes Höch’s photomontages as simply “disturbing private fantasies.”11 Similarly, as Maria Makela has



Kristin Makholm, “Film, Portraiture, and Primitivism in the Photomontages of Hannah Höch,” diss. University of Minnesota, 1999, 198–207. Makholm emphasizes the ambiguity of the dates of composition and the make-up of the series. In addition, she notes that the series was not initially conceived of as a coherent project and that the name of the series was used only after several photomontages were completed. Additionally, only some of those photomontages now considered to be part of the series were designated as such when Höch showed them together for the first time under the title Aus einem ethnographischen Museum in her 1934 exhibit in Brno. 9 Cf. Wilhelm Marckwardt, Die Illustrierten der Weimarer Zeit: Publizistische Funktion, ökonomische Entwicklung und inhaltliche Tendenzen (unter Einschluß einer Bibliographie dieses Pressetypus 1918–1932) (Munich: Minerva Publikation, 1982). 10 Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography (New York: Abbeville Press, 1989): 397. 11 Rosenblum 398. 8



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noted, art historian Manuela Hoelterhoff, in an article in Art in America, dismisses Höch as simply a “whimsical observer of social conventions” with “no sense of mission” who created “affecting but not … politically engaged image(s).”12 In Dada: Performance, Poetry, and Art, typical of many of the histories written about the movement, John D. Erickson mentions Höch only as part of a “fringe group” of Berlin Dada, listing her with the qualifier “Hausmann’s girlfriend” and completely omitting her contributions to the Erste Internationale Dada-Messe (“First International Dada Fair”), despite the fact that she had a number of works displayed at the event, including her now hallmark photomontage Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands (“Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany”).13 Höch’s early involvement with Berlin Dada and her formative role in developing the medium of photomontage as artistic critique therefore begs the question as to what the medium’s “real” purpose was, and why art historians have claimed, explicitly or implicitly, that Höch was using it incorrectly? In addition to the sexist undertones of Rosenblum’s, Hoelterhoff’s, and Erickson’s analyses, there are more media-specific considerations at stake, considerations that require understanding the philosophical intentions of Berlin Dada itself. It was during the formation of the Berlin Dada group that Höch became aware of the potentials for photomontage as artistic critique. Shortly after moving from her hometown of Gotha in Thüringen, Höch began a relationship in 1915 with that artist Raoul Hausmann, despite the fact that he was already married and had a daughter. At that time, Hausmann was engaged in the debates over “der neue Mensch” (“the new (hu)man”) and “die neue Gemeinschaft” (“the new community”), and through her assistance as a secretary and correspondence partner, Höch became indirectly involved in these issues as well. During the first few months of their relationship, Hausmann introduced Höch to Salomo Friedländer (a.k.a. Mynona) and his philosophical ideas concerning community formation and “der schöpferische Nichts” (“creative indifference”).14 In addition, it was during a vacation together in 1917 that Höch and Hausmann would supposedly discover the medium of photomontage when they noticed an image on a wall of a soldier

Hoelterhoff qtd. in Maria Makela, “Hannah Höch,” Three Berlin Artists of the Weimar Era: Hannah Höch, Käthe Kollwitz, Jeanne Mammen, ed. Louise R. Noun (Des Moines, IA: Des Moines Art Center, 1994): 13. 13 Boswell and Makela 25. 14 Kristin Makholm, “Chronology,” The Photomontages of Hannah Höch, ed. Peter Boswell and Maria Makela (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1996): 186. 12

152 Grotesque Visions whose head had been cut out from another photograph and pasted in place. Regardless of the validity of such claims of discovery, photomontage was conceived of as one of the most exemplary means by which the Berlin Dadaists felt they could envision a new form of human(ity) and of the human community. Through the use of contemporary materials and everyday objects, Dadaists such as Höch sought to envision how a new Weltanschauung, a new social understanding, might be realized using the visual (and other) cultural objects of the period. In spite of these early Berlin Dada developments, Dawn Ades and Richard Hiepe, among others, have both claimed that the concept of photomontage, or at least the basic idea underlying the medium, has a rather long history. Ades notes that the “[m]anipulation of the photograph is as old as the photograph itself” and suggests an affinity between the concept of photomontage and Fox Talbot’s “photogenic drawing” in the 1830s.15 She does nevertheless credit the Berlin Dadaists with inventing the term “photomontage” in the 1920s, and notes that the group specifically used the photograph as a “ready-made image,” pasting it together with other materials “to form a chaotic, explosive image, a provocative dismembering of reality.”16 Similarly, Hiepe suggests that a daguerreotype from 1851 by Martin E. Lawrence might be considered the first photomontage, but provides a more precise material definition of the medium in contrast to Ades to support his claims: Photomontages are entirely or at least predominantly part of cut outs from photographs and other reproductions consisting of pictorial compositions. From the technical side the limits of photocollage are fluid. These would be … moved through historical and aesthetic grounds.17 In addition to the provocative new material experiments that the medium enabled, the Berlin Dadaists as a group also focused on its artistic-political uniqueness. Makela and Peter Boswell indicate, for example, that Höch and the other Dadaists attempted to distance their

Dawn Ades, Photomontage (London: Thames & Hudson, 1976): 7. Ades 7. 17 Richard Hiepe, Die Fotomontage: Geschichte und Wesen einer Kunstform (Ingolstadt, Germany: Stadt Ingolstadt and Kunstverein Ingolstadt, 1969). The original German reads as follows: “Fotomontagen sind ganz oder zum überwiegenden Teil aus Ausschnitten von Fotografien und anderen Reproduktionen bestehende bildliche Kompositionen. Von der technischen Seite her ist die Grenze zur Fotocollage fließend. Diese wird … durch historische und ästhetische Gründe gezogen”. 15 16



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work from Cubist collages and to emphasize the “mechanical—and proletarian—connotations associated with the term” in using the word photomontage.18 Unlike her Dada colleagues, however, Höch would explore an additional potential for the new medium. A particularly potent example of Höch’s unique use of photomontage (especially in the Aus einem ethnographischen Museum series) is evidenced by her 1930 work Mutter (“Mother”). The image shows not only a concern with gender but also with visual objectification. The photomontage, combining at least three separate photographs or illustrated prints, resembles the style of traditional portraiture (Figure 6.1).19 That is, a figure is posed facing the camera and looks directly at the viewer. Höch’s image, like most portrait-style photographs, shows the seated figure’s face and the top of the body from slightly below the shoulders. The face and the head are the central foci of the image. The upper body of the figure, whose slumped shoulders make her appear exhausted, is placed on a rather vibrant, watercolor background of reds, yellows, and browns. These colors not only emphasize the body’s shadows and slovenly appearance but also highlight the dark and foreboding nature of the tribal mask that has been substituted or, more accurately, placed atop the woman’s face.20 The lips of the original figure are still visible, however, because Höch has cut out the mouth of the mask. In addition, she has also removed the left eye of the tribal mask and replaced it with a photograph or photo-illustrated reproduction of an eye that is slightly larger than seems appropriate for the size of the figure in the image. The right eye of the mask, in contrast, has been left intact, and appears as a slight oval carved into the surface of the mask itself. Just below the mask’s right eye, Höch has cut out a section of the upper cheek, giving the two extremely different eyes of the mask—the photograph of the female eye on the left and the original carved one on the right—a formal balance. The eyes themselves appear equal in stature in the context of the image, suggesting that the figure “sees” the world from the perspective of both the woman and the “primitive” other.

Boswell and Makela 2. Cf. Michael Jennings, “Agriculture, Industry, and the Birth of the Photo-Essay in the Early Weimar Republic,” October 93 (Summer 2000): 23–56. Jennings discusses traditional portraiture with respect to the work of August Sander. 20 Cf. Zimmerman, “Looking.” Zimmerman has provided an extremely provocative account of anthropologists’ concerns in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with shadows and other optical disturbances, disturbances that testified to the technical limits of photography. Zimmerman notes that anthropologists felt these disturbances might threaten the objectivity of their investigations. 18 19

154 Grotesque Visions

Figure 6.1  Hannah Höch, Mutter (“Mother”) (1930). © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

The source of the materials used and their historical significance provides an important context within which to understand Höch’s artistic goals, as (Gertrud) Jula Dech, Maria Makela, and others have demonstrated. For Mutter, Höch had actually taken the body and face of the female figure in her photomontage from a work produced by one of her former Dada colleagues, John Heartfield. Höch nevertheless used the image in a significantly different way than her colleague. Heartfield’s photomontage appeared in the February 1925 issue of the



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Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung (“Workers’ Illustrated Newspaper”) and was titled Zwangslieferantin von Menschenmaterial Nur Mut! Der Staat braucht Arbeitslose und Soldaten (“Female Forced Supplier of Human-Material Take Courage! The State Needs Unemployed and Soldiers!”) (Figure 6.2). With regard to the representation of the female body, Heartfield’s goals were quite different from Höch’s. For one, he had photographed a pregnant proletarian woman in the style of traditional portraiture but shot the image such that the woman’s swollen belly comprised roughly the lower half of the montage. Second, he had placed at the top of the image, just behind the woman’s head, a picture of a wounded (probably dead) soldier. Some scholars have indicated that Heartfield’s work was an explicit attempt to appeal to female citizens who were somehow affiliated with the working class. Maud Lavin, for example, has suggested that Heartfield’s emphasis on the pregnancy of the woman demonstrates that he (and others) felt that the only contribution women could make to the political cause was in the context of reproductive sexuality. Indeed, such a bias was unfortunately commonplace at the time despite the fact that German women had earned the right to participate in political gatherings in 1908 and the right to vote in 1918. It is the mask in Höch’s photomontage that indicates a particularly insightful comparison between Heartfield’s objectification of women and the objectification of ethnographic others by German anthropologists. Makela has suggested that the image of the mask that Höch used was probably from the February 1925 issue of Der Querschnitt (“The Cross-Section”); that image, Makela notes, was a photographic reproduction of a dance mask made by the Kwakiutl Indians and was part of the collection of the Museum für Völkerkunde (“Museum for Ethnology”) in Berlin. It was the scientist Franz Boas, whose primary ethnographic interest was the Kwakiutl Indians and who had acquired “seventy well-documented Kwakiutl pieces, including ‘all the ornaments belonging to one dance’,” who had undoubtedly brought the artifact back to Berlin after one of his expeditions.21 Höch’s use of the

Judith Berman, “‘The Culture as It Appears to the Indian Himself’: Boas, George Hunt, and the Methods of Ethnography,” Volkgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian Ethnography and the German Anthropological Tradition, ed. George W. Stocking, Jr., History of Anthropology 8 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996) 215–16. Berman, in particular, discusses Boaz’s relationship to the Kwakiutl Indians and describes the problematic use of the term “Kwakiutl” by the ethnographer in his writings, whereby he conflated what were more than twenty political divisions of the native peoples of coastal British Columbia, Canada, with the four distinct tribes that might properly be grouped under that name.

21

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Figure 6.2  John Heartfield, Zwangslieferantin von Menschenmaterial Nur Mut! Der Staat braucht Arbeitslose und Soldaten! (“Female Forced Supplier of Human-Material Take Courage! The State Needs Unemployed and Soldiers!”) (c. 1930). © The Heartfield Community of Heirs / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2020.



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Kwakiutl mask thus suggests a connection, in fact a certain allegiance, to one side of a debate within German anthropology at the fin de siècle between physicalists and cosmologists or, in more contemporary terms, between physical anthropology (for some, associated with developmental pathology) and cultural anthropology (which, before the 1920s, had been synonymous with ethnology, defined as “the cultural history of humanity,” and the division with which Boas is often associated).22 Physical anthropologists increasingly felt that, because the mechanism of evolution was at least in part biological, the elimination of difference or its isolation was the only way to ensure racial-evolutionary purity. Like the cultural anthropologists, however, Höch was more concerned with preserving and comparing these incommensurabilities rather than eliminating them and, much in line with some of the philosophical ideas at the heart of Berlin Dada, suggested the foundations for a new form of community based on a simultaneous recognition and validation difference.23 As the result of her appreciation of difference, Höch became increasingly concerned with the attempt to scientifically reinscribe otherness through photographic representation. Her connection of the ethnographic other and the German woman in the Aus einem ethnographischen Museum photomontage series allowed her to utilize and, at the same time, to call into question the photographic representations of supposedly objective gender, racial, and sexual truths. Photographs, as Höch’s photomontages demonstrated, were subjective constructions and delineations of objects; these technically produced representations did not render reality in an objective way, but only reinforced and legitimized existing perceived differences.24 Photographs thus reinscribed visual signifiers in service of a scientifically justifiable elimination of difference (for certain physical anthropologists, in particular). In contrast, photomontage, in the hands of someone like Höch, could preserve visual differences and simultaneously challenge the biases and assumptions that enabled the use of these markers of a supposed otherness as objective, scientific proof in service of eliminating difference. These issues would become increasingly important during the tumultuous later years of the Weimar Republic.

Robert Proctor, “From Anthropologie to Rassenkunde in the German Anthropological Tradition.” Bones, Bodies, Behavior: Essays on Biological Anthropology, ed. George W. Stocking Jr., History of Anthropology 5 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988) 147. 23 See Proctor for a full discussion of the differences between physicalists and cosmologists. 24 Cf. Daston; Galison and Daston. 22

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Seeing Difference Differently

The rise to power of Adolf Hitler and the National Socialists in Germany in the 1930s is often explained in terms of the increased social and political obsessions with racial, sexual, and gender differences. These obsessions, however, had their origins in an earlier milieu. The crises that mark the Weimar Republic not only helped foster these concerns but also created an environment that had personal and professional repercussions for Höch.25 It was during this earlier era that she began to explore the question of Western evolutionary biases in her work. Höch’s use of what Fatimah Tobing Rony has called a “third eye” is key to understanding the artist’s late Weimar photomontage series.26 Rony’s concept, although deployed in the context of very different U.S. and British anthropological traditions, is also relevant for an analysis of Höch’s series.27 Much like the ethnographic others in Rony’s filmic texts, Höch’s photomontages indicate a form of resistance to the objectification of nonwhites and German women in the visual culture of the period, a historical and social era dominated by racist patriarchal heterosexuality.28 Rony has noted that some performers in scientific

Höch had a lesbian relationship to the Dutch writer Til Brugman during the 1920s and 1930s. Cf. Myriam Everard, “‘Man lebt nur einmal in Patchamatac’: Die groteske Welt von Til Brugman, Lebensgefährtin von Hannah Höch,” Da-Da Zwischen Rede zu Hannah Höch, eds. Jula Dech and Ellen Maurer (Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1991); Maud Lavin, “‘Aus einem ethnographischen Museum’: Allegorien moderner Weiblichkeit,” Da-Da Zwischen Rede zu Hannah Höch, eds. Jula Dech and Ellen Maurer (Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1991) 115–26; Ruther Greter Nobes, “Dada im Spannungsfeld patriarchalischer Denkstrukturen,” Da-Da Zwischen Rede zu Hannah Höch, eds. Jula Dech and Ellen Maurer (Berlin: Orlanda Frauenverlag, 1991); Maria Makela, “Grotesque Bodies: Weimar-era Medicine and the Photomontages of Hannah Hoech,” unpublished manuscript, 2001; and Ute Scheub, Verrückt nach Leben: Berliner Szenen in den zwanziger Jahren (Reinbeck bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 2000). 26 Fatimah Tobing Rony, The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). 27 Cf. Proctor; Sabine Jell-Bahlsen, “Ethnology and Fascism in Germany,” Dialectical Anthropology 9 (1985): 313–35; Fritz W. Kramer, “Empathy - Reflections on the History of Ethnology in Pre-Fascist Germany: Herder, Creuzer, Bastian, Bachofen, and Frobenius,” Dialectical Anthropology 9 (1985): 337–47. Proctor and Jell-Bahlsen provide accounts of the distinctly German (and Austrian) engagement with various tendencies in anthropology that are not equivalent to U.S. or British developments in the field. Kramer documents the interesting role of “empathy” in German anthropology, a concept that he suggests had its origin in the works of J. G. Herder and that has not played a significant role in anthropological developments in either Britain or the U.S. 28 Cf. Maria Makela, “The Misogynist Machine: Images of Technology in the Work of Hannah Höch,” Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, ed. Katharina von Ankum (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1997) 106–27; Lavin; and Nobes, in particular. 25



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ethnographic films used a “third eye” to disrupt the “chain of looks” between the implied Western spectator and the ethnographic other. She has explained that the “third eye” is the glance that can induce one to see the very process which creates the internal splitting, to witness the condition which gives rise to [a] double consciousness … [It is] the veil [that] allows for clarity of vision even as it marks the site of socially mediated self-alienation.29 Rony’s concern with identifying a form of resistance inscribed within visual texts themselves, a resistance to the socially mediated self-alienation and filmic representation’s supposed objectivity, finds a paradigmatic photographic parallel in Höch’s photomontage treatment of difference. Höch’s critique of three types of social differentiation—racial, sexual, and gender—is exemplified, for example, in Die Süße (“The Sweet One”), a photomontage she made around 1926 (Figure 6.3). In the image, Höch combined a mask from the former French Congo and the body of an idol figure from the Bushongo tribe with an eye, lips, and the legs of a distinctly modern European woman. The obvious incommensurability of the figure’s right eye with its mask-face indicates a critical strategy of optical disruption: the image literally looks at the viewer with two different eyes. The two-dimensional view, a view reproduced through photography’s dependence on a linear perspective, was, as Andrew Zimmerman has shown, initially a problem for the early German anthropological use of photography. While he and others have described how that view was in fact eventually legitimized as objective, Höch’s photomontage figure, in contrast, challenges such a linear perspective as far from the only legitimate view possible.30 Particularly intriguing about Die Süße is the gender of the figure in the image. In fact, the separate source materials used for the image suggest that the figure’s gender is ambiguous. Nevertheless, in the final image, it is impossible not to conclude, based upon the presence of apparently female legs clad in high heels, shapely and painted lips, a nervous human hand, and an eye that looks upwards and to the right of the image, that the figure is a woman. Given the posture and the direction of the figure’s gaze, it would appear that the photomontage in its totality is a depiction of a stereotypical European female reaction to a male gaze. By separating the corporeal unity of gender from the fetishistic use of gendered parts, Höch suggests that sexuality cannot be

Rony 4. Cf. Lorraine Daston, “Die Kultur der wissenschaftlichen Objektivität,” Naturwissenschaft, Geisteswissenschaft, Kulturwissenschaft: Einheit – Gegensatz – Komplementarität, ed. Otto Gerhard Oexle (Göttingen: Wallstein, 1986) 17–30; Zimmerman, “Optics.”

29 30

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Figure 6.3  Hannah Höch, Die Süße (“The Sweet One”) (c. 1926). © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.



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defined as male desire for the female body (in its totality) or as female desire for the male body. Indeed, the torso in Höch’s seemingly female creation is actually a male statue that has had its penis cut out (or cut off)!31 More than mere castration anxiety, however, the artist’s objectification of the sexualized other mocks the viewer’s acculturated ideas of gender polarities and her or his conflation of sex and gender.32 The construction of gender is made explicit by the use of distinctly female fetish-objects such as long legs in high heels; full, painted lips; and a playful, innocent disinterestedness expressed by the eyes. That is, the figure in Höch’s Die Süße is neither male nor female, but a series of disparate artifacts and objects that are assembled together to appear as if they are—in their totality—female. The illusionary wholeness of gender and the supposedly gendered nature of sexual object-choice (and heterosexuality’s claim to definitive and natural authority) are entirely subjective; thus, sexuality and gender find a provocative object-partner in the ethnographic other in Höch’s creation. As Die Süße demonstrates, the artist’s style and use of various techniques of juxtaposition suggest that her work should be read as a protest against a racist, heterosexist patriarchy that sought to objectify and control sexual expression, the Western female body, and the so-called primitive other during the highly charged eugenic environment of the 1920s.33 Much like Die Süße, in the other approximately eighteen to twenty photomontages comprising the Aus einem ethnographischen Museum series, Höch juxtaposed images of African sculpture, so-called primitive peoples, and images of the New Woman found in German photo-illustrated magazines.34 In such images as Fremde Schönheit (“Strange Beauty”), created in 1929, Höch again used several tactics to destabilize the belief in scientific objectivity associated with the ethnographic photographs and artifacts she employed (Figure 6.4). First, Höch used contrasting shapes and colors or shades of black and white to make evident the fact that the primary figure or figures in the photomontage had been assembled. Second, she posed the object as if it were on a pedestal

Thanks go to Arlene Teraoka, Pat McGurk, Jürgen Laun, and Mirko Hall for noticing the absence of the penis. 32 Cf. Makela, “Grotesque.” Makela suggests that these same issues might also be considered in light of sex-reassignment surgery. 33 Cf. Renate Bridenthal, Anita Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan, eds., When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984). 34 Cf. Patrice Petro, Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). Petro discusses the importance of photo-illustrated magazines for German women in the Weimar Republic. 31

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Figure 6.4  Hannah Höch, Fremde Schönheit (“Strange Beauty”) (1929). © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

solely for the display of the viewer. That is, she overemphasized the staged nature of the figures in her photomontage in order to highlight the often fabricated, never objective images in her source materials. Third, beginning as early as 1919 but taking increasing importance in her work around 1925—just prior to and during her lesbian relationship with Til Brugman—Höch repeatedly pasted an eye or a pair of glasses onto the primary figure in the photomontage. The emphasis on the eyes in the Aus einem ethnographischen Museum series, perhaps the most significant strategy Höch used, is meant to draw attention to the fact that photographs and images in photo-illustrated magazines themselves were structured in advance of the viewer’s engagement. The eyes in Höch’s creations function similarly to Rony’s concept of the “third eye” in that the ocular incongruousness was meant to make the spectator aware of the specific context within which the images were produced and of the conventions that continued to limit the receptive possibilities of the finished work. In other words, the scientist, the photographer or, in Höch’s case, the artist, already had limited the field of representation and circumscribed for the viewer what was depicted. The technique suggests the impossibility of creating an objective photograph or photo-illustrated image. In the photomontage Denkmal I (“Monument I”), made sometime after 1928 and also part of the series, Höch used several of the same techniques (Figure 6.5). She connected the photograph of a stone statue of a Theban goddess and a mask from Gabon she found in the



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Figure 6.5 Hannah Höch, Denkmal I (“Monument I”) (1924). © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

164 Grotesque Visions magazine Der Querschnitt with parts of a photograph showing actress Lilian Harvey and friends at the beach that appeared in a 1928 issue of Berlin Illustrirte Zeitung (BIZ). Höch’s use of racialized and gendered fragments revealed the interconnectedness of the racialized other and the objectified woman as images that, the work suggests, had a very particular purpose in the photo-illustrated press. In fact, in magazines such as BIZ and Der Querschnitt, from which Höch used many images of so-called primitives and tribal sculpture for the series, numerous such articles and photographs appeared. The work of Colin Ross, who would later become actively involved with the National Socialists, is of particular note here, as Maud Lavin has suggested.35 In two essays, in particular, Ross’s patriarchal racism is obvious. The first, appearing in a December 5, 1926 issue of BIZ, was titled “Die Schwarze Köchin ‘Unsere Emilie’ bei uns … und zu Hause” (“The Black Female Cook ‘Our Emily’ with Us … and at Home”). The text was accompanied by two photos: the first was of the Ross family cook clothed in a maid’s uniform in the Ross kitchen, and the second showed the woman, nearly naked, in her own kitchen. The second example, appearing in a 1927 issue of BIZ under the title “Der Schwarze an der Maschine: Ein afrikanisches Problem” (“The Black at the Machine: An African Problem”), conveyed the same belief in evolutionary superiority. That is, the cook lacked modern machinery in her own kitchen because she was incapable of operating the equipment; her incompetence was a mark of a distinctly “African problem”—evolutionary developmental inferiority. Ross’s texts indicate that the relationship between heterosexism and racism was not always easy to delimit. To be sure, however, women as well as sexualized and racialized others did not always passively accept such objectifying representations uncritically, and often instead challenged them through artistic or visual strategies of resistance.

Science, Visual Culture, and Everyday Life

In Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany, Patrice Petro has demonstrated the importance of visual culture and its use by various sectors of the population for sometimes antithetical purposes during the early twentieth century. According to Petro’s analysis, while the material production of visual culture and the material field of reception limited the spectator’s choices—what visual representations are available, where he or she can find the images, whether he or she can afford to buy a movie ticket or a photo-illustrated newspaper—the spectator also experienced some degree of agency in how

Maud Lavin, Cut with the Kitchen Knife: The Weimar Photomontages of Hannah Höch (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1993) 235.

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he or she chose to understand and to use available representations. For artists and spectators like Höch, such limits and the fantasy of transcending the perceived incommensurable racial, sexual, and gender differences represented in many photo-illustrated magazines were key to revealing social prejudices in Germany. Part of Höch’s concern was “the firm boundaries that we human beings so self-assuredly are inclined to erect around everything that is accessible to us.”36 In this respect, Höch’s 1924 photomontage Mischling (“Half-Caste” or “Mixed-Race”) (Figure 6.6) and her 1925 Liebe im Busch (“Love in the Bush”) (Figure 6.7) can be seen as responses to the racist propaganda disseminated in the popular press in regard to the occupation of the Rheinland by Black and mixed-race French soldiers in 1923.37 Höch used available representations found in the illustrated press to create photomontages that proposed a different way of understanding supposed visible racial differences. No longer “Black savages” who were “roaming the Rhineland at will, raping the women, infecting the population with all manner of tropical and venereal diseases,” the African and South American peoples and artifacts represented in Höch’s photomontages attest to the misplaced emphasis on visual markers of difference as indicative of behavior or evolutionary stages of development (i.e., the Black “savage,” the “roaming” hoard).38 Typical of such scientific emphasis on inscriptions of race are two pairs of photographs from the 1913 issue of Zeitschrift für Ethnologie (“Journal for Ethnology”). In one of the images, there is a frontal and a side view of an Aoaquis named Shiriana from Brazil’s Uraricapara River region.39 In the other set of pictures, there is a naked ten-year-old identified as an “Ayumara girl” and photographed from the front and from the side, but this time standing next to a one-meter-high pole for height.40 Both sets of photographs are accompanied by text that provides detailed physical measurements. The description adds narrative and statistical data to supplement the supposed truth of the physical

Makholm, “Chronology” 194. Boswell and Makela 84; Makela, “Hannah Höch” 20; Detlev J. Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The Crisis of Classical Modernity (New York: Hill & Wang, 1989) 59–60. Makela provides an excellent reading accompanying a reproduction of the photomontage Mischling in the Walker Art Center catalog. 38 Boswell and Makela 84. 39 Theodor Koch-Grünberg, “Abschluß meiner Reise durch Nordbrasilien zum Orinoco, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der von mir besuchten Indianerstämme,” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie: Organ der Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie, und Urgeschichte 45 (1913): 456. 40 “Sitzung von 24. Mai 1913,” Zeitschrift für Ethnologie: Organ der Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologie, Ethnologie, und Urgeschichte 45 (1913): 276. 36 37

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Figure 6.6 Hannah Höch, Mischling (“Mixed-Race”) (1924). © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

differences evidenced in the photographs themselves. The images showed “objectively” that not only could racial inferiority be indicated by skin color but, via photographic inscriptions and measuring poles, could be supposedly justified by the shape and the size of the bodies themselves.



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Figure 6.7  Hannah Höch, Liebe im Busch (“Love in the Bush”) (1925). © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.

Höch challenged the validity of such photographic inscriptions of difference. Her combination of images of such so-called primitives and the German New Woman in her photomontages was radically provocative in a society that increasingly viewed visual appearance as proof of evolutionary development and civilization. Even President Friedrich Ebert himself was quick to conflate physical appearance with evolutionary development: the presence of Black and mixed-race soldiers on German soil was “an injury to the laws of European civilization.”41 Too often, however, statements such as these in histories of Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries become part of a protofascist narrative of national self-destruction rather than evidence of claims that were readily reinforced through supposedly unbiased scientific Boswell and Makela 84.

41

168 Grotesque Visions research, and hence used to understand the construction and experience of science’s visual objectivity during the period. Recent scholarship, however, has increasingly attempted to situate attitudes such as Ebert’s in the context of a more accurate history of scientific objectivity in Weimar Germany. In When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany, Renate Bridenthal, Atina Grossmann, Marion Kaplan, and others have traced some of the historical continuities in the social and even political attitudes of the Weimar Republic and of National Socialism: Nazism did not arrive full blown, with promises of war and gas chambers. It came slowly, step by step, draped in the protective coloring of love for country, strong medicine to combat unemployment, and, most importantly … a pledge to restore the traditional family and relieve women of their “double burden” [as housewives and wage-earners].42 The continuity between the two German political eras is evident in the fact that the family and the concomitant (heterosexually defined) gender roles of man and woman as reproductive agents became increasingly important scientific, and eventually political, objects of concern.43 As Gisela Bock noted in her article in the volume, family planning advocates, using the arguments made tenable by eugenics, extolled the importance of what she calls “scientific racism” as opposed to the more traditional and more overt “gut racism”: Based on a polarity between “progress” and “degeneration,” [scientific racism’s] criteria of inferiority had at their centers concepts of “value” and “worthlessness” (Wert und Unwert, Minderwertigkeit and Höherwertigkeit) that were related to the social or racial “body” and its productivity … In 1929, a widely known book, Sterilization on Social and Race Hygienic Grounds, suggested that “the number of degenerate individuals born

Renate Bridenthal, Anita Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan, “Introduction,” When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984) xii. 43 Peukert 3–6. For purposes of clarity I have designated March 23, 1933, the date when the posts of Reich Chancellor and Reich President were amalgamated in the person of the Führer, Adolf Hitler, as the political turning point dividing the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich. There is, needless to say, a protracted debate over exactly when—or even whether—such a clear turning point occurred. See Puekert for a discussion of the debate over the beginning and the end of the Weimar Republic and the official start of the Third Reich. 42



Visual Objectivity Meets Impossible Object 169 depends mainly on the number of degenerate women capable of procreation. Thus the sterilization of degenerate women is, for reasons of racial hygiene, more important than the sterilization of men.”44

The criteria of value and worthlessness were linked specifically to women’s bodies under the guise of scientific racism. While not institutionalized in the late Weimar years to the degree that it would be in Nazi Germany, scientific racism increasingly was used as justification for state intervention into women’s personal lives in particular and the sexual lives of men and women in general. Discussions about reproductive sexuality and evolutionary development, and the threat of a supposed racial degeneration, were not confined to the political press, however, but also made their way into artistic and scientific texts during the period. Many of the avant-garde journals of the 1920s were filled with debates about a so-called German cultural and racial degeneration and the role of the artist in that process. Höch had been an avid reader of these periodicals, as her collection in the Hannah Höch Archive in Berlin demonstrates. Her collection included a number of books and articles written by art commentators and psychiatrists such as Hans Prinzhorn, one of the most influential critics of modern art during the Weimar period. Prinzhorn’s 1922 book Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (“Image-Making by the Mentally Ill”) provided an important and widely accepted “scientific” strategy for subsequent critics of avant-garde and modernist art. In his book, Prinzhorn examined more than 5,000 works by 450 patients to “demonstrate the idea that the art of the insane exhibited certain specific qualities.”45 He also published his findings in several art journals, including a June 3, 1924 article in G: Zeitschriften für Elementare Gestaltung edited by Hans Richter. In the article, a letter response to a reader (M. v. d. R.; presumably the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe) titled “Gestaltung und Gesundheit” (“Form and Health”), Prinzhorn elaborated on the importance of the conclusions in his book in regard to avant-garde and modernist artists:

Gisela Bock, “Racism and Sexism in Nazi Germany: Motherhood, Compulsory Sterilization, and the State,” When Biology Became Destiny: Women in Weimar and Nazi Germany, eds. Renate Bridenthal, Anita Grossmann, and Marion Kaplan (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1984) 274–5. 45 Stephanie Barron, “1937: Modern Art and Politics in Prewar Germany,” “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995): 12. 44

170 Grotesque Visions I have not discovered anything new. One knows that the insane make strange but compelling image-works. I have only interpreted this (tendency) not as the symptom of an illness, but rather as the symptom of a desire for form and asked whether this form is, in the insane, something else than it is said to be in the healthy … The work is not the result of health or sickness, but on the contrary of a form-giving power (Gestaltungskraft)  … Creative instinct forces itself in this way constantly toward purification— as a severe test of strength.46 By denying that he had developed new criteria for evaluating art, Prinzhorn attempted to disguise his rather radical conclusion: that the work of art was not simply a representation of a mental or physical illness, but a “form-giving power” attesting to the artist’s hereditary health or degeneracy. That is, Prinzhorn did not consider the images themselves as something to be analyzed and interpreted so as to find the key to the disorders of the insane. Rather, he suggested that the works were the result of an uncontrollable desire on the part of the artist to manifest his or her (diseased) internal condition in the outer world. The production of the image was not seen as a choice, but as a necessity that was indistinguishable from the degenerate and corrupt Weltanschauung of its producer. Even more frightening was Prinzhorn’s suggestion that the (insane) artist needed to expose the public to his or her creations; the pathological condition of the artist would thereby be allowed to gain strength—and to infect others—by realizing a diseased view of the world in degenerate works of art. The diseased body, in short, forced the artist to expose the public to its condition in order to contaminate “zur Klärung” (“through purification”); the body needed to manifest its pathological predisposition as an external, material reality. Similarly, the work of Paul Schultze-Naumburg became a much quoted, heavily referenced authority in the artistic press in regard to the artist’s role in facilitating German racial and cultural degeneration. In 1925 Schultze-Naumburg published Das ABC des Bauens (“The ABCs of Building”), a scathing critique of the German Bauhaus, an innovative

Hans Prinzhorn, Bildnerei der Geisteskranken; ein Beitrag zur Psychologie und Psychopathologie der Gestaltung (Berlin: Springer, 1923) 41. The original German reads as follows: “Neuentdeckt habe ich garnichts. Daß Irre manchmal wunderliche aber fesselnde Bildwerke machen, wußte man. Nur habe ich dies nicht mehr als Symptom einer Krankheit, sondern als Symptom eines Gestaltungsdranges aufgefaßt und gefragt, ob dieser beim Irren etwas anderes sei als beim Gesunden … Das Werk entsteht nicht aus Gesundheit oder Krankheit, sondern aus Gestaltungskraft … Schöpfersicher Instinkt wird sich hieran stets zur Klärung durchringen—als an einer harten Kraftprobe.”

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and internationally acclaimed school of modern architecture established by Walter Gropius in 1919 as the amalgamation of the Weimar Academy of Fine Arts and the Weimar School of Arts and Crafts. It was in his 1928 book Kunst und Rasse (“Art and Race”), however, that Schultze-Naumburg directed his critical energies toward avant-garde and modern art in general. Using the methods employed by Prinzhorn, Schultze-Naumburg attempted to defame modern and avant-garde artists by juxtaposing their works with photographs of the physically and mentally disabled, thereby “proving” that the artists themselves had hereditary or biological malformations that threatened German racial integrity. That is, the photographs of the disabled, as representations of a supposed visible illness, were equated with so-called degenerate artworks. Through the comparison with the photographs of the disabled, the artworks were to be understood as manifestations of a pathologically developed or developing artistic Weltanschauung. Like Prinzhorn, Schultze-Naumburg equated the actual work of art with the uncontrollable desire of the degenerate artist to externalize his (or her) disorder: it will be initially demonstrated how the relation between the physicality of the artist and his work is one of inextricable dependence, and how impossible it is for him to surpass the conditions of his own corporeality. A recognition, however, of this close relation simultaneously establishes the contrary procedure, which allows us to draw inferences from the artwork (or the judgment of such) to the artist (or the one making the judgment). Thus it is possible to gain information about the racial basis of the population not only from works of the past; rather in regard to the present, too, it is possible to arrive at interpretations of artistic products which explain certain things that would otherwise remain enigmatic.47 The impossibility of degenerate artists to “surpass the conditions of … corporeality” meant that their bodies would, in effect, give them away. Artists would manifest their apparently invisible hereditary or biological corruption by not having a “feeling for the physical beauty in art,” and instead producing abstract, distorted, “unrealistic” objects.48 The degenerate work of art as an object of visual culture became indistinguishable from the diseased corporeality of its creator.

Paul Schultze-Naumburg, “Art and Race,” The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, eds. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994) 496. Emphasis added. 48 Schultze-Naumburg 498. 47

172 Grotesque Visions The conflation of artwork and the health of the artist no doubt led Höch to create Trauer (“Sadness”) in 1925 (Figure 6.8). The image, part of the Aus einem ethnographischen Museum series, combined the photograph of a naked woman from Borneo, a carved-ivory head from the Congo, and the picture of a wooden stool carved in the shape of a wom-

Figure 6.8  Hannah Höch, Trauer (“Sadness”) (1925). © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.



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an’s body and located at the Museum fur Völkerkunde in Berlin. The photograph appeared in a January 1925 edition of Der Querschnitt with the title “Borneo Beauty.” The absence of background imagery in the original Borneo image suggests that the woman was photographed in an enclosed space, possibly even an ethnographic museum or photographer’s studio, a practice common during the period.49 Because the woman was photographed in a less than natural setting, the “Borneo Beauty” appeared as more a sexual than a scientific object. Naked, she is photographed out of her geographical and social context and thus used to create an image that erased the cultural appropriateness of her (lack of) attire. She remained completely exposed—photographically and culturally—for Western sexual exploitation. In response to such overt objectification, Höch hid the real Borneo woman through photomontage overlays. By adding material on top of the Borneo woman’s body, Höch suggested that the “sadness” in the title of the photomontage refers to the isolation and the objectification of real people. Höch placed the woman and the other source materials together in an effort to call attention to the mediated nature of gender and racial objectification, as well as the way in which these forms of difference often intersected in the name of “science,” sometimes due to obvious sexual motivations. Höch used the pendulous breasts of the stool’s primary figure for the upper torso in her photomontage. Höch replaced the real breasts of the woman from Borneo, signifiers of racialized sexual availability and impropriety, with the pendulous breasts from the stool’s carved figure. Despite the addition of four arms and the sculpted breasts (which appear like strange armor), the body of the Borneo woman and her two (real) arms are still visible behind the photomontage additions. The objectification of women of color required a constant defense according to Höch, one that perhaps necessitated the photomontage figure having at least six arms to ward off any would-be aggressors. In short, Höch demonstrated sadness with anthropological science itself: it can often disguise racialized, sexualized objectification under the auspices of insightful research. She thereby also questioned those scientists who supposedly objectively demonstrated artists’ degenerate states. She indicated that little can be proven through photographic isolation, including racial inferiority or artistic sanity, except perhaps the fantasies of the scientists themselves. Höch’s “sadness” is thus a critical mourning in light

Cf. Zimmerman, Anthropology. Zimmerman discusses the numerous photographs in the Rudolf-Virchow-Nachlaß at the Berlin-Brandenburg Akademie der Wissenschaft. Zimmerman reproduces many of the portrait studies of individuals with developmental pathologies in his text.

49

174 Grotesque Visions of anthropology’s ocular-centric emphasis and her own supposedly degenerate artistic worldview. Science in general, and anthropology in particular, increasingly turned toward visual images to validate research or to serve as legitimate evidence.50 Indeed, the conflation of the work of art and the hereditary, biological condition of the producer of that work of art was identical to certain aspects of Western anthropology during the period, what Johannes Fabian has called a “double visual fixation” on the object of analysis.51 He has suggested that the dual purpose of visualism (in anthropology) required the creation of a perceptual image—an object to be viewed—and also the use of that image to illustrate a kind of knowledge about the person or persons that are being studied. In Fabian’s analysis, the anthropologist produced an image (i.e., a representation) and then proceeded to use that image in place of the actual person or people being studied (i.e., nonrepresentationally). In Prinzhorn’s and Schultze-Naumburg’s analyses, the works of modern artists or the insane—or even pictures of either—were discussed as representations, but at the same time they were also taken to be the same thing as the artist or the insane person themselves. Ironically, scientists often blamed unbelievers for failing to see the obvious truths their photographic evidence provided. Perceptual failure was indicative of a number of developmental pathologies in the early twentieth century, and not only in Germany. Julian Carter, for example, has discussed the intersection of racial evolution and sexual degeneration in scientific texts of the period. Carter has suggested that in both the psychoanalytic Oedipal narrative of sexual development and the anthropological narrative of evolutionary development disruptions supposedly result in “perceptual failures of differentiation and organization.”52 For Carter, analyzing in particular the work of

Cf. Chapter 3. Part of the research for this text involved an exploration of the archives of the Berlin Society, an important group in the history of anthropological activity in Germany. Of particular note here is the fact that the photographic collection of the Society had been (unofficially) archived since as early as 1886, although there was still serious debate internal and external to the organization as to whether or not photographic representations could serve as legitimate scientific evidence. The fact that individuals began to archive the collection as early as they did indicates, however, that anthropologists resisted but eventually submitted to the visualist orientations indicated by Fabian and critiqued, as I suggest here, by Höch. Unfortunately, no history of the photographic archives of the Society has yet been written, a historical gap I hope to correct in the near future. 51 Fabian 121. 52 Julian Carter, “Normality, Whiteness, Authorship: Evolutionary Sexology and the Primitive Pervert,” Science and Homosexualities, ed. Vernon A. Rosario (New York: Routledge, 1997): 167. 50



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sexologist Havelock Ellis, the link between evolutionary regression and Western homosexuality was, in fact, pervasive in scientific texts. Sexologists often depended upon specific rhetorical techniques to connect evolution and homosexuality and the resultant “perceptual failures”: [Sexologists equated homosexuality with] an inability to conform to conventional gender expectations, but more interestingly, they describe homosexuality as a problem of perception and interpretation of reality. Like the illiterate savages against whom Ellis defined modern sexological writers, homosexuals were too “entangled in the felted textures” of undifferentiation to recognize their own perceptual limitations. Their deviance from the master narrative of racial and sexual development, their failure to organize bodies and ideas into rationally distinct categories, disqualified them simultaneously from the status of normality and from authorship … Primitive lack of differentiation, in some sexological texts, slides into a charge of intellectual unconcern with the difference between homosexuality and heterosexuality: “the evidence shows that among lower races homosexual practices are regarded with considerable indifference … In this matter, as folklore shows in so many other matters, the uncultured man of civilization is linked to the savage.”53 The identification of a developmental analogy between homosexuality and the so-called primitive was, therefore, one of evolutionary importance. Both entities represented a “lower race” in evolutionary development. In Germany, these concerns acted to reinforce the public’s perception that the Aryan heterosexual was the ideal, the most civilized racial and sexual type. The result of these concerns with the production and reception of art, and the concomitant anxiety regarding the influence of homosexuals, primitives, and other “degenerates” on German national development, was a series of widely publicized, heavily attended exhibits in the 1930s. Already by 1933 a number of small, defamatory events had taken place, as Stephanie Barron has noted: In 1933 the earliest exhibitions of “degenerate” art were organized to show the German people the products of the “cultural collapse” that would be purged from the Third Reich. Confiscated works

Carter 165, 167.

53

176 Grotesque Visions were assembled in Schreckenskammern der Kunst (“Chambers of Art Horrors”) whose organizers decried the fact that public monies had been wasted on these modern “horrors.”54 The most famous of these events was undoubtedly the 1937 exhibit in Munich whose catalog was titled Entartete “Kunst” (“Degenerate ‘Art’”). The event attracted over three million visitors, and on August 2, 1937 alone over 36,000 people visited the event.55 Intriguingly, Höch’s photomontage critiques of anthropological science’s supposed visual objectivity preceded these gatherings, sometimes by a decade or more.

Theory and Practice Are (Not) the Same

In the preface to the catalog for her first solo exhibition in 1929 at the Kunstzaal De Bron in The Hague, Höch described her artistic mission for the public: I would like to do away with the firm boundaries we human beings so self-assuredly are inclined to erect around everything that is accessible to us … Most of all I would like to depict the world as a bee sees it, then tomorrow as the moon sees it, and then, as many other creatures may see it. I am, however, a human being, and can use my fantasy, bound as I am, as a bridge.56 Written during the early phases of her production of her photomontage series Aus einem ethnographischen Museum, Höch’s comment is provocative not because of the diversity of her list of possible subject positions—a bee, the moon, other creatures—nor the emphasis on her inevitable failure as a human being to be able to “depict the world” according to the perspective of these other positions. What is particularly interesting in the description of her artistic mission is Höch’s implicit suggestion that the “firm boundaries” between these subjects depended upon—and could be transcended by—perception (in the sense of “seeing”). Höch’s preface indicated her concern with the pervasive assumption of her Dada colleagues and German scientists during the period: to see was to know. For Höch, the ability to occupy the subject positions of a bee or the moon was impossible because people were physically “bound” by their status as human beings, thus she could never

Barron 15. Barron 9. 56 Makholm, “Chronology” 194. 54 55



Visual Objectivity Meets Impossible Object 177

“depict the world” the way a bee or the moon might see it. While she recognized the impossibility of eliminating these material limits, her call to transcend these “firm boundaries” through fantasy was, intriguingly, a desire to think epistemology within and beyond the visible. Key to her artistic mission of perceiving the world from various subject positions was Höch’s willingness to question the importance of vision as constitutive of knowledge, a resistant practice that she called using “fantasy … as a bridge.” For Höch, if the truth was reducible simply to the visible, then the “truth” or essence of an object was taken to be coterminous with a mediated optical representation. The cultural, historical, and social factors that produced the object would be elided. Rather than accept such an uncritical mode of visual reductionism, however, Höch introduced an alternative that suggested a particular, nuanced understanding of the role of visual culture during the period. Both in the Aus einem ethnographischen Museum series and in her story “Der Maler,” Höch made clear that the representations made possible through the creation of supposedly objective images were, in fact, not objective at all. Nevertheless, these constructed visible truths had very real repercussions as the conclusion to her short story demonstrated. In “Der Maler,” the painter Himmelreich determines that both the female soul and the chive are, in fact, “filled with emptiness.” His various solutions to these puzzling enigmas ultimately prove to be unsuccessful. Indeed, after two years and two days at work on his painting, the artist realizes that “theory and praxis don’t coincide”:57 Although he felt he had had no problem depicting chives, the essence of the female soul remained inexplicably elusive. As a result, Himmelreich, resigning to the impossibility of objectifying the female soul, devotes himself strictly to depicting chives.58 In spite of his realization, Himmelreich’s painting nevertheless earns accolades from friends as well as the Republic’s president. Ingeniously, Höch introduces various literary techniques to disrupt the idea that these accolades were either truthful or sincere. One of the artist’s male friends, for example, is corrected after the narrator apparently inadvertently reveals what can only be assumed to be the friend’s real impression: the picture “had a kind of power that liberated itself in an overwhelming sense of bore … No, that’s not what he said. He said,

Höch, “Painter” 217; Höch, “Der Maler” 748. The German reads as follows: “Theorie und Praxis sind zweierlei.” 58 Höch, “Painter” 217; Höch, “Der Maler” 749. The German reads as follows: “nunmehr nur an das Schittlauch zu halten.” 57

178 Grotesque Visions liberates itself in sameness.”59 Höch’s narrator corrects the utterance, undermines the sincerity of the remark, and thereby reveals the conciliatory nature of the comment. Understood in its fraternal context, the remark thus appears through Höch’s narrative injunction to be simply a vehicle for male privilege. In contrast to that of Himmelreich’s friend’s words, the Republic’s President’s praise is made in explicit service of nationhood and male social privilege. After seeing the painting, the President declares—with the help of his adjutant—that the excessive green of the image reminds him of the (1919 democratic) revolution.60 Although the artist Himmelreich had failed to accurately and to scientifically represent the essence of woman, his work is purchased by the state at the President’s suggestion and hung in the National Gallery. As a result of his creation’s prominent display in the Gallery, Himmelreich becomes a candidate for the Nobel Prize. Ironically, however, the Gallery determines that the painting did not refer at all to chives or to the revolution. Instead, the image is exhibited under a new title: Die Seele des Weibes (“The Soul of the Woman”). If there were a moral to Höch’s story, and to her Aus einem ethnographischen Museum series, it would seem to be that as long as social privilege and epistemological signification coincide, the impossibility of representing the reality of an object could act as the scientific equivalent to the object’s very essence. Much like Himmelreich, Höch was unable to objectify the essences of the subjects in her works. Unlike Himmelreich, however, she never wanted to. The Aus einem ethnographischen Museum series suggests that Höch wanted not only to take her objects out (“aus”) of the museum but also to question the very idea of the visual objectivity of scientific representation. Her story and her series both suggest that the “impossible object” may be the only object modern empirical science was capable of producing. They also indicate, furthermore, that a focus on the objectivity of science’s visual culture requires a reconsideration of some of the standard approaches to and definitions of such artistic media as photomontage.

Höch, “Painter” 217; Höch, “Der Maler” 749. The German reads as follows: “enthalte eine Staerke, die sich in einer ueberschwenglichen Langweilig … nein, dies hat er nicht gesagt, Ebenmaessigkeit Luft mache.” 60 While Höch might have had a number of motivations for emphasizing the green of the chives, she undoubtedly was alluding, in part, to the supposedly excessive use of green by Expressionist artists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. The Berlin Dadaist felt that many of the Expressionists had sold out to the art establishment and allowed their work to be turned into commodities. 59

Seven Learning to See Grotesquely

In the 1926 photomontage Denkmal II: Eitelkeit (“Monument II: Vanity”), the artist Anne (Hannah) Therese Johannah Höch combines the allure of traditional portrait nudes and the artifacts of an apparently primitive otherness (Figure 7.1).1 Part of a series of such images titled Aus einem ethnographischen Museum (“From an Ethnographic Museum”), Höch’s concatenation of European tradition and anthropological abjection does more than display.2 Much like a Germany trying to reconcile the incommensurabilities of modernity, of political and economic fluctuations, and of scientific innovation and modernist fetishization of the “primitive other,” Höch’s photomontage seeks to reorient the spectator’s perceptual relation to the new and the old, the familiar and the unfamiliar. Such a perceptual reorientation suggests an innovative engagement: In Denkmal II: Eitelkeit, display becomes a vehicle through which to offer alternative if implicit visual interpretations of some of science’s evidentiary objects. Prior to and during the early years of the development of anthropology as a formal discipline in Germany in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, scientists grappled extensively with the implications of supposed racial, evolutionary, and biological differences among Europeans and non-Europeans. By juxtaposing signifiers of racial identity (i.e., the white female body) with those of anthropological otherness (i.e., non-European sculpture), Höch does more than continue a fascination with the primitive, popular within German art circles at the time. David Pan suggests that primitivism might be thought of, in part, as a critique of science that “emphasizes that technological progress does not change the existential situation of the modern compared to the primitive.”3 Kristin Makholm extends this

Peter Boswell and Maria Makela, eds., The Photomontages of Hannah Höch (Minneapolis: Walker Art Center, 1996): 102. 2 Kristin Jean Makholm, “Film, Portraiture, and Primitivism in the Photomontages of Hannah Höch,” 1999, University of Minnesota, PhD dissertation 198–9. 3 David Pan, Primitive Renaissance: Rethinking German Expressionism. Modern German Culture and Literature Series (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2001): 6. 1

180 Grotesque Visions

Figure 7.1  Hannah Höch, Denkmal II: Eitelkeit (“Monument II: Vanity”). © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.



Learning to See Grotesquely 181

line of thought in examining Carl Einstein, a key proponent of primitivism, and his concerns with museums that separated their Schausammlungen (“display collections”) from their Forschungsinstituten (“research institutes”), indicating that scientists and museum directors simply had exoticized anthropological others rather than understood primitivism as, in part, a criticism of European epistemology.4 By focusing on the use of display, artists such as Höch provide a way for us to rethink scientific developments—and specifically the increasing deference to an empirical approach in biology, medicine, and anthropology—and the impact that these developments had on German modernisms. Furthermore, and in comparison to the issues associated with Peter Bürger’s “historical avant-garde,” the critical energies of artists like Höch might be viewed as directed at modern science’s optical certitude rather than at the separation of art from the quotidian. The development of applied research techniques under the auspices of “empirical science” impacted a broad array of fields, including those disciplines with some relation to biology. Scholars such as Timothy Lenoir and Lynn K. Nyhart locate the emergence of modern biology in the early nineteenth century to these ends, and detail its unique conceptual, institutional, and disciplinary development in Germany. Scholarship in the history of anthropology by figures such as Benoit Massin, H. Glenn Penny, Robert Proctor, and Andrew Zimmerman shows the extensive relationship between biology and Anthropologie (“anthropology,” but often used as synonymous with “physical anthropology”). Taking these various research developments and disciplinary concerns into account, the goal of Grotesque Visions is to examine the way in which certain artists affiliated with Dada in Berlin—Hannah Höch, Salomo Friedländer, and Til Brugman, most directly—were aware of the increasing influence of the empirical method in various scientific disciplines and the impact of these developments on public perception. These artists turned to the tradition of the “grotesque” to challenge science’s supposed visual objectivity.

The Problem of Perception

In his highly influential Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the 19th Century, Jonathan Crary examines “a new valuation of visual experience” that has its origins in the early nineteenth century, describing vision as embodied neither in the human subject nor in particular styles of artistic representation. Rather, he suggests that visual truth was—and, to a great extent continues to be—based on “an unprecedented mobility and exchangeability, abstracted from any



4

Kristin Makholm 242 fn. 529.

182 Grotesque Visions founding site or referent.”5 The origins of this visual abstraction are found, according to Crary, in the increasing interest in retinal processes in the nineteenth century, an interest associated with the field of physiological optics. Education reformers and popular scientific venues in the nineteenth century sought to employ increasingly visual devices such as the Straight-Rest and the “spectatorium” to standardize the experience of supposed optical truths, such as the correct posture to prevent degeneration of the eyes or the implications of electricity on the organs of humans and animals. Aware of these cultural changes, promoters of the observational and experimental approach in the sciences were confronted with the fact that an a priori knowledge no longer guaranteed the universality of visible facts. The realization not only meant the need to standardize observational and experimental methods to account for the new insights about retinal processes but also led to the disconcerting discovery that vision itself might be susceptible to degenerations caused by incorrect instructional methods or improper displays. The increasing credibility of the methods associated with instruction through visual aids, or Anschauungsunterricht, as well as the explosive growth in the number of German museums in the late nineteenth century suggest that those interested in popularizing and promoting new approaches and methods in science were nevertheless able to devise foundations for establishing the supposed truth of the corresponding visual information. Along with the mechanical and technical means by which the insights of physiological optics were disseminated, popularizers and promoters often utilized semi-familiar concepts in their attempts to establish new normative criteria of visual truth. In Germany, one such concept was that of an unmittelbare Anschauung—of an “immediate visual perception.”6 Individuals in a number of scientific disciplines used the concept



5 6

Crary 14. Although the term unmittelbare Anschauung has a complex history and a number of possible English equivalents, the idea of an “immediate visual perception” is closest to the purposes and ideas of figures like Virchow, figures who had an extensive knowledge of developments in physiological optics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and sought to incorporate these developments into scientific practice itself, in both its professional and public manifestations. I thus use the phrase unmittelbare Anschauung to refer to the supposed visual obviousness of science’s evidence, an obviousness that is paradoxical: an “immediate visual perception” was possible only if the evidence were displayed in the right way, using the most appropriate physical and spatial arrangements, and if the viewer, public or professional as he or she may be, was trained as to how to view the evidence correctly. Indeed, given this lengthy clarification, the idea that this “perception” was by any means “immediate” seems suspect. This is, however, precisely the point.



Learning to See Grotesquely 183

in their attempts to popularize scientific knowledge and to incorporate the insights of physiological optics as to how the eye actually processes information. The idea was incorporated into a number of museological initiatives in Germany in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries.7 The concept of unmittelbare Anschauung referred to the ideal—and what many scientists believed were the only correct—conditions for optical assessment. For scientists such as Rudolf Virchow, “immediate visual perception” meant that optical information left impressions on the retina, impressions that were communicated directly to the brain. The eye, and not the brain, served as the initial site for the processing of optical information, an insight that Virchow felt demanded “a new starting-point of analysis for the understanding of our relations to the external world, and for discriminating more precisely the merely mental [geistigen] part of vision from the part of it which is purely physical [körperlichen]” (Freedom 11–12). Virchow and others became convinced that the best way to ensure correct mental comprehension of a visual representation was to create conditions that allowed the eye to “measure” the object accurately rather than to depend upon a priori cognitive abilities. Virchow’s scientific work transcended a number of fields, from physical anthropology to cellular pathology. His emphasis on “immediate visual perception,” fostered by his relationship to his adviser Johannes Müller and his affiliations with colleagues Herman von Helmholtz and Emil Du Bois-Reymond, influenced the display strategies of his protégés greatly, including the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld and the U.S. immigrant Franz Boas. Whereas Müller’s ideas about specific nerve energies and the relationship of these energies to sense perception were key for Virchow’s early work, especially his dissertation, the further research of Du Bois-Reymond and von Helmholtz into the empirical conditions of perception—that is, the “world out there” and not simply the sensations internal to the human body—became an increasing concern for Virchow. His attempt to emphasize the empirical conditions of perception in his public and professional scientific practice—most notably in his Institute of Pathology—influenced later display techniques, including those of Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexology and of Boas and his contextual displays of anthropological artifacts. That someone like Virchow was a strong and vocal proponent of an “immediate visual perception” in public venues as well as in professional scientific practice was no minor endorsement. While Virchow



7

For a discussion of some of these museological initiatives, see Joachimides; Köstering; Penny; and Zimmerman, Anthropology.

184 Grotesque Visions was a respected scientist and researcher, he was also an extremely wellknown politician and public figure. He wrote a number of works that located the root of medical problems in public policy, beginning with a text in 1844 titled “Zur Geschichte des Carthauses in Schivelbein” (“On the History of the Carthauses in Schivelbein”). As a result of this early essay, he was appointed in 1848 to investigate an outbreak of typhus fever in Upper Silesia. His report criticized primarily the government and its misdirected approaches toward treating the effects and not the sources of typhus—that is, the disease and not its origins in improper sewage and waste removal. Such an approach to medical issues, what some undoubtedly labeled proto-socialist, was radical for the period. It was only upon his return to Berlin in 1856, however, that Virchow became involved actively with a number of explicitly political affairs. Importantly, he sought increasingly to combine his public and political concerns with his scientific research and activities. He was elected to the Berlin City Council in 1859, to the Prussian Diet in 1861, to the German Reichstag from 1880 to 1893, and founded the Fortschrittspartei (“Progressive Party”). Virchow held his post on the City Council for over forty years, until his death on September 2, 1902. The results of this combination of public and professional activities included his various attempts to change the way in which people engaged science. Indeed, his insights into optical processes had direct implications not only for his research practices but also for the public display of his evidentiary objects, issues that were key in the construction of his Institute of Pathology. In 1896 Virchow announced to an assembled crowd of dignitaries and invited guests at the Charité Hospital’s Institute of Pathology in Berlin the construction of what he believed to be an important facility for training the lay public in the most appropriate techniques of optical assessment. The facility, the Museum of Pathology of the Royal Friedrich Wilhelm University, would house an unusual collection taken from over 23,600 cellular and anatomical-pathological specimens that Virchow and his colleagues had amassed for much of the nineteenth century. Virchow’s hope was that the new Museum of Pathology would demonstrate to the public the most appropriate optical assessment of the specimens on display through an emphasis on “immediate visual perception.” The facility’s importance and influence is demonstrated by, among other things, the fact that it continues to operate in the twenty-first century as well, albeit under the name Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum der Charité. On June 27, 1899, Virchow gave the keynote address that opened the Museum of Pathology, the first of three buildings to comprise the new home of the Institute of Pathology. In the opening address, Virchow spoke of the potential significance of the museum with respect to



Learning to See Grotesquely 185

the public reception of scientific research and in contrast to the type of engagement enabled by the popular press.8 Explicitly contrasting the potential of the new facility with the public understanding of and interest in the sciences as evidenced in the popular press, Virchow indicated that the Museum of Pathology would provide a physical venue for him and his colleagues to showcase the advancements in their research. For many, the initial trepidation about the public’s ability to understand complex scientific problems had transformed by the end of the nineteenth century through an emphasis on the new means for the display of scientific knowledge. Constantin Goschler notes that Virchow juxtaposed the concept of schauen (“to look”) with sehen (“to see”) and valorized the latter term as a trained ability to view scientific evidence correctly, to learn the culture of correct optical assessment.9 Virchow felt that the distinction between schauen and sehen could also be taught to the lay public. He emphasized his and others’ belief in “immediate visual perception” as a necessary precondition in the public presentations of scientific knowledge about the body. Similar to other scientific venues and displays popular at the time, Virchow’s museum sought to make the empirical approach in science understandable for and acceptable to the lay public via visual display. In an exhibit titled Volkskrankheiten und ihre Bekämpfung (“The Fight against Public Diseases”) that appeared in Dresden, Munich, Kiel, and Frankfurt am Main in the early twentieth century, the exhibit organizer, Karl August Lingner, sought to introduce the public to the complex scientific ideas of Robert Koch in a way that was visually accessible: “[Lingner] inscribed himself into the tradition of eighteenth-century Enlightenment to propagate the idea that ‘visual instruction’ was the most appropriate form of ‘mass instruction’ for transmitting established knowledge in a way intelligible to all.”10 Much like in Virchow’s displays, in the exhibition Volkskrankheiten und ihre Bekämpfung the “connections between the dissemination of diseases and the strategies to combat them were to be visible at first glance.”11 Whereas the curator Lingner was concerned in the Volkskrankheiten exhibit with ways in which diseases were spread and could be prevented, Virchow was focused in his museum primarily on pathological developments and their impact on the human form. Both Lingner and Virchow, however,

Virchow qtd. in Krietsch and Dietel 2–3. Translation by the author. For further context around Virchow’s opening address, see Chapter 3, “The Architectonics of Public Science.”  9 Goschler 206. 10 Brecht and Nikolow 517. 11 Brecht and Nikolow 522.  8

186 Grotesque Visions sought to present this specialized scientific information in a way as easily—and as visually—accessible to the lay public as possible. Virchow’s emphasis on display and his desire to educate the public as to scientific developments perhaps provide unique German perspectives on the issue of pathology, although Virchow’s work undoubtedly had a significant effect on scientific research beyond national borders. The French medical historian Georges Canguilhem describes Virchow’s concept of pathology as “physiology with obstacles,” suggesting that for Virchow pathology was a deviation from supposed normal physiological processes and biological developments, and that for some reason—environmental, cellular, anatomical, or otherwise—these processes and developments had deviated from what was understood to be their most common paths.12 Thus, for Virchow, pathology was not an abnormality, in the pejorative sense, but rather simply a physiological and developmental phenomenon that was not as common as a supposed normal phenomenon. The body that exhibited pathological development, in other words, was by no means “unnatural.” It was in the display objects in his Museum of Pathology that Virchow sought to demonstrate the insightfulness of his approach and to standardize the optical dimensions of his science through an emphasis on “immediate visual perception.” Displays of unusual developmental and anatomical bodies included fetuses exhibiting holoprosencephaly, a condition resulting from the failure of the anterior portion of the embryonic brain to undergo proper segmentation, as well as examples of cranial malformations, such as hydrocephaly and m ­ icrocephaly. While such displays had existed in mostly private collections for centuries, Virchow had been able to secure state support for the public display of such objects, in effect generating further official, political support for his public and professional scientific ideas. One of the most popular groups of specimens included the so-called “Janus Head,” a condition resulting when a fertilized egg does not completely split in half. In comparison to such venues as Castan’s Panopticum, in which microcephalic specimens—including live human subjects—had become commonplace, Virchow sought in his museum to explain the biological and developmental conditions that led to such conditions. While ­anatomical-pathological specimens had been—and continued to be—displayed in special theaters and in local venues, the opening of Virchow’s Museum of Pathology marks an increasing belief that lay persons could be trained to assess objects scientifically if given the correct conditions for an “immediate visual perception.”

Georges Canguilhem 207.

12



Learning to See Grotesquely 187

Mediated Visions

One of the fields in which Virchow’s emphasis on unmittelbare Anschauung had immediate and lasting implications was anthropology. His emphasis on physical anthropological measurements in contrast to speculative approaches to evolution is well known and emphasized the detailed testing of scientific hypotheses before such hypotheses were endorsed in public forums.13 The Museum of Pathology allowed him to connect further a number of pathological and anthropological issues. In contrast to the emphasis on “immediate visual perception” that would inform Virchow’s and his colleague’s displays of scientific evidence, artists such as Hannah Höch would suggest a more critical approach. Her work neither accepted Virchow’s emphasis on “immediate visual perception” nor the ideas of his protégé, such as Franz Boas, who emphasized holistic or contextual displays of artifacts rather than the display of individual specimens.14 Höch’s photomontage series Aus einem ethnographischen Museum suggests the limitations of strictly “physicalist” (i.e., “physical anthropology”) as well as “cosmological” (i.e., Boas’s more explicitly “contextual”) approaches to anthropology. Through their incorporation of anthropological objects as well as signifiers of everyday European life, Höch’s photomontages show that both physicalists and cosmologists depended upon a biased “immediate visual perception” to underpin their knowledge claims. Unlike Boas and his emphasis on context in his anthropological displays, Höch’s use of photomontage demonstrates a concern that the culture not only of “exotic others” but also of indigenous Germans should be subject to critical examination. Höch was an avid reader of scientific periodicals and a collector of illustrated and photographic images; she also frequented many of Berlin’s institutes and museums. She utilized a number of images of objects and artifacts that Boas had collected and were on display in Berlin, especially objects and artifacts from what he described as the Kwakiutl Indians of the North American Northwestern coastal region.15 Höch suggests through her juxtaposition of supposedly primitive others and modern subjects in her photomontages that no amount of context can reveal that the anthropologist’s own culture is subject to change, that “immediate visual perception” does not mean

See Chapter 3 titled “The Architectonics of Public Science” for a more detailed discussion of the Virchow–Haeckel exchange. 14 Berman 215–16. 15 Judith Berman has pointed out the different affiliations among the Kwakiutl, affiliations that Boas ignored—or was ignorant of—in his work. While Höch probably was not aware of these intra-tribal distinctions either, her photomontages nevertheless suggest a concern with the homogenizing tendencies of visual strategies and research practices that would erase such distinctions. 13

188 Grotesque Visions eternal knowledge. Thus, while projecting ideas of “vanishing peoples” onto anthropological others was a strategy through which Europeans could ease their own sense of instability associated with the massive social, political, economic, and cultural changes of the period, Höch refused to provide a visual archive of “vanishing peoples” in her creations, thereby suggesting a need to confront the problems of modernity as European ones—not as projections of loss and primitiveness alleviated through elimination or fetishization of the “anthropological other.” Rather than situate Höch’s photomontages in this complex anthropological and visual tradition, scholars have often dismissed her photomontages as simply disturbing private fantasies or as irrelevant. As a result, she often is not included among the radical and innovative avantgarde artists of the day. However, her work demonstrates an important example of the untenable assumptions of avant-garde inclusion and radicalism during the 1920s. Art historians such as Peter Boswell and Maria Makela have, for example, charted the way in which Höch was excluded from Berlin Dada events because she was perceived to be too concerned with formal artistic standards and hence not radical enough to be an avant-garde artist.16 A reassessment of her work is particularly relevant given Peter Bürger’s description of Dada as “the most radical movement of the European avant-garde,” a qualifier bestowed because, rather than simply altering styles and representations of previous art movements, Dada attacked art as a social institution.17 Such a description of Dada does not apply to Höch easily. She was actively involved in the activities of the Berlin Dada group because of her interest in art as a means to achieve social change. Her work, however, consisted primarily—but not exclusively—of paintings and photomontages, not the political protests or public spectacles so often associated with Dada. Yet undoubtedly Höch’s work was innovative epistemologically. That is, her use of photomontage, an art form associated with the word “montieren” (“to assemble or mount”), refers to what Boswell and Makela describe as the “piecing together of photographic and typographic sources, usually cut from the printed mass media.”18 Often, other Dadaists depended upon the new unity produced by rephotographing their photomontages to create a smooth and seamless surface representation. Höch never rephotographed her work or manipulated negatives in the darkroom. She refused to assume that visual representations conveyed truths. Refusing to engage in such “photographic artifice,” she preferred instead “to accept the evidence of hand

Boswell and Makela 2. Peter Bürger 28–9. 18 Boswell and Makela 2. 16 17



Learning to See Grotesquely 189

cutting over the creation of a seamless image or the mass-production of images.”19 In leaving these evidentiary traces, Höch reminded the viewer that her images had been manipulated and, implicitly, of the material limitations of the medium of photography. Höch made explicit photomontage’s incorporation of different source materials into an arbitrarily constructed new unity. Consciously defying photographic convention, she refused to simply try and represent objects and sought rather to invoke an optical strategy made possible by the photomontage technique that criticized the reductive nature of visual representation itself. In Die Süße (“The Sweet One”), a photomontage from 1926, Höch combined a mask from the former French Congo and the body of an idol figure from the Bushongo tribe with an eye, lips, and the legs of a distinctly modern European woman.20 The obvious incommensurability of the figure’s right eye with its mask-face indicates a critical strategy of optical disruption: the image literally looks back at the viewer with two different eyes. The singular and standardized view of the object, a view many scientists sought to secure through an “immediate visual perception” in museum displays, was a significant focus of early German anthropology. Höch’s incorporation of eyes asymmetrical and physically incommensurable with the body in her photomontage challenges the viewer to deduce through his or her own gaze, through his or her perception, competing visual claims about the figure on display. In other words, the photomontage challenges what Lorraine Daston describes as the supposed aperspectival objectivity of scientific evidence.21 The figure with its strange eyes demands that the viewer see the evidence of human manipulation of the representation. The viewer cannot conclude through vision alone the truth that the photomontage figure is supposed to represent. Rather, the photomontage calls attention to the failure of all representations to reproduce the complexity and richness of human lives. Examining Höch’s photomontage series in light of the issue of scientific display reveals a new and important dimension for art-historical consideration. Maud Lavin suggests that, despite Höch’s incorporation of ethnographic objects, the artist was not especially critical of anthropological attitudes during the period, although there is an implicit criticism of racist and colonialist ideas to be found in Höch’s work.22 To that end, Lavin makes an important clarification:

21 22 19 20

Boswell and Makela 2. Boswell and Makela 104. Daston, “Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective” 111. Maud Lavin 160.

190 Grotesque Visions The series’ primary referent is not race, however, but the way race is socially encoded in the ethnographic museum. What concerned Höch in these works is the display of culture marked as different— for the Other as well as the self in Höch’s photomontages is the modern European woman.23 Indeed, although many of the images in the series focus on representations of women, not all of them do. Rather, it is the focus on display in the series that connects the otherwise disparate objects. In works such as Die Süße, Höch implicitly questions museological and anthropological politics, as well as the means of display and visual isolation. In other words, the confusion of anthropological artifacts and signifiers of gender in Die Süße indicate an awareness of the construction of visual knowledge, of supposedly scientific evidence. Höch’s education at the Kunstgewerbeschule (“Fine Arts School”) in Berlin, her engagement with anthropological topics as indicated by her extensive collection of photographs and illustrated magazines, and her visits to science centers and museums in Berlin suggest that Denkmal II: Eitelkeit, Die Süße, and the rest of the Aus einem ethnographischen Museum series can be read as an attempt to appropriate the visual practices of scientific display. Despite the popularity of photomontage among the Berlin Dadaists, Höch’s use therefore indicates an important, alternative understanding of the medium’s critical artistic potential: an attempt to challenge “immediate visual perception” advocated by Virchow and his protégés in service of a rethinking of the exclusions and constructions that informed such optical immediacy. Thus, in Höch’s series, photomontage takes the visual evidence “out of a museum” to reveal the illusory nature of a scientific tradition that depended upon an “immediate visual perception” to try and eliminate any epistemological uncertainty.

Serious, Silly Science

Some members of the Berlin Dada group took science very seriously— but to what ends, proves the key qualifier. Take, for example, two figures closely connected—indeed, one of them intimately connected—to Hannah Höch. Raoul Hausmann, Höch’s one-time partner, has received a great deal of critical attention for his artistic activities. Relatively little attention has been given to his scientific engagements. He is not a focus of Grotesque Visions, because his science was more serious than silly. But it is important to note both his connection to Höch and to the other

Lavin 182.

23



Learning to See Grotesquely 191

artists discussed. Indeed, Hausmann developed his own, extensively researched, if rather convoluted, theories of scientific perception. He patented, or tried to patent, a number of his related scientific inventions. These efforts began in the 1920s and 1930s, when Hausmann began a wide-ranging scientific program to challenge the physicist Albert Einstein’s supposedly reductive approach to the visible, material world. Hausmann proposed his own “Optophonetics,” based on ideas outlined to a great extent in conversation with Friedländer. Optophonetics, according to Hausmann, explained the ways in which an invisible ether connected all visible phenomena.24 For reasons of space, and because of the “serious” nature of Hausmann’s projects, his efforts are not discussed in detail in this study. However, the fairly recently published archival collection of his scientific and mathematical texts, as well as Arndt Niebisch’s critical engagement with these and other materials by Hausmann, make worthwhile reading as companions to Grotesque Visions. Like Hausmann, Salomo Friedländer was a key figure for Höch specifically, and was perhaps “the” key figure in developing a unique concept of satirical engagement with science—a humorous, biting, critical “grotesque vision.” As such, Friedländer, who also went by the pseudonym Mynona (i.e., the inversion of the German work for anonymous, Anonym), is discussed in detail in the pages that follow. He was interested—in both his incarnations—in the ways in which literary as well as visual forms of “grotesque” subterfuge might bring to light, as it were, the problems with what he so eloquently described as modern science’s “speculative empiricism.” While the connections among certain avant-garde artists and modern science’s speculative empiricism will become clearer in the various chapters and case studies that follow, the connections between Höch and Friedländer with respect to Berlin Dada’s “grotesque visions” deserve further attention before those “other” connections are explored further. Höch’s exceptionally close, platonic relationship with Friedländer is demonstrated by the dozens of adoring postcards and letters in the artist’s archives. But for those without the means to visit the exceptional Berlinische Galerie and read the epistolary exchange in person, two of

Raoul Hausmann, Dada-Wissenschaft: Wissenschaftliche und technische Schriften, trans. Arndt Niebisch (Hamburg: Philo Fine Arts; Berlinische Galerie— Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur, 2013); Arndt Niebisch, “Ether Machines: Raoul Hausmann’s Optophonetic Media,” Vibratory Modernisms, eds. Anthony Enns and Shelley Trower (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2013) 162–76.

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192 Grotesque Visions Höch’s photomontages may have to suffice to demonstrate the influence of Mynona’s thinking on the idea of a “grotesque visions”—perhaps by way of admittedly spurious evidence rather than arrogantly speculative empiricism. Friedländer is the focus of two of Höch’s photomontages made decades apart. The first, Da Dandy (“There [is the] Dandy”) (1919) (Figure 7.2), features a silhouette portrait of Friedländer.

Figure 7.2  Hannah Höch, Da Dandy (“There [is the] Dandy”) (1919). © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.



Learning to See Grotesquely 193

But the image is not really a “silhouette portrait.” Common during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, silhouette portraits typically were made by tracing the outline of an individual’s profile onto black paper, then cutting along the outline to reveal a solid black profile image of the sitter. Höch’s Da Dandy, in contrast, fills Friedländer’s profile with images of modern, white, German women—many of whom stare at the viewer with their incommensurate eyes. The convention of using two different eyes for her figures is typical of Höch’s photomontages, especially during the Weimar Era. Höch exploits this convention—or, better phrased, this strategy—to great effect in her work, especially her Aus einem ethnographischen Museum series, discussed in detail in the following study. But of note here, as scholars such as Maria Makela and others  have pointed out, Höch’s silhouette references the nineteenth-century practice of craniology, now considered a pseudoscience, in which measurements and dimensions of the head were equated with intellectual worth and evolutionary development. Höch has filled her “silhouette portrait” with modern, German women looking at the viewer playfully, if not also inquisitively. The title of the photomontage, Da Dandy, pays homage to the idea of a Friedländer as flaneur, as a modern explorer unconcerned with habituated expectations and curious with the perils and problems of modern existence. In other words, Höch’s Da Dandy celebrates Friedländer’s flamboyant personality and embraces his already-developing beliefs that supposedly objective scientific practices—like craniology—can be engaged critically through wit, humor, and bombast; that is, through all those characteristics of the “grotesque.” Da Dandy compares to another photomontage Höch made, approximately forty years later, that references Friedländer only indirectly— and, more specifically, his concerns with modern science’s “speculative empiricism.” This other, later photomontage bears a title that is both monument and memorial: Grotesk (“Grotesque”) (1963) (Figure 7.3). Grotesk is a monument to the critical if unacknowledged efforts of certain Berlin Dadaists to challenge modern science’s reductive visual conventions. But Grotesk is also a memorial to the fact that this critical intervention did not always produce the hoped-for reflection and revision needed. Key to understanding the duality of Grotesk in this way is a recognition of one of the figures referenced in this otherwise strange, funny work of art. While it is neither clearly nor definitively obvious from the photomontage, the source image for the photograph of the figure on the left in this later photomontage almost certainly is the famous physicist Albert Einstein. Einstein was a frequent target of Berlin Dadaist parodies and satires. Friedländer targeted Einstein specifically in the former’s many published and unpublished writings concerning the

194 Grotesque Visions

Figure 7.3  Hannah Höch, Grotesk (“Grotesque”) (1963). © 2020 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn.



Learning to See Grotesquely 195

“speculative empiricism” of modern science. Further evidence suggests that the image in Höch’s creation is Einstein. She had used in some of her earlier photomontages a reproduction of a photograph widely circulated in the mass media at the time. The original photograph of Einstein, taken in 1910, appeared almost a decade later, in 1919, on the cover of issue number 50 issue of the Berlin Illustrierte Zeitung (“Berlin Illustrated Newspaper”).25 Höch used this particular image of Einstein in her Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser Dada durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands (“Cut with the Kitchen Knife Dada through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch of Germany”) the same year it appeared on the magazine’s cover—that is, 1919. With this history in mind, it would not be a surprise to find that the source image for the apparently male head used for the figure on the left side of Grotesk is probably a photograph of a much older Einstein. While it is impossible to know for certain if this image of Einstein is the source material for her male figure in Grotesk, there are a number of reasons to suggest it—not least of which is the ways in which the Berlin Dadaists had aligned their critical engagements of Einstein with the subversive strategies of the grotesque. The fact that Höch would again reference both Einstein and the “grotesque” decades after the hopeful headiness of Weimar Germany’s avant-garde era suggests that many of the same issues—reductivitist scientific thinking, equating visible difference with differences in humanity, the critical role art and the aesthetic experience can play in influencing public opinion—were still very much issues that continued throughout the twentieth century, and perhaps beyond it as well.

A high-resolution version of this widely-circulated BIZ cover is available online from Getty Images at https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/ physicist-albert-einstein-on-the-cover-of-berliner-news-photo/537147689.

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Coda Toward a Critique of the Dogma of Visuality

In a 1981 essay titled “Zur Geschichtlichkeit von Anschauung / Anschaulichkeit als ästhetischer Kategorie” (“On the historicity of perception / visuality as aesthetic categories”), Peter Bürger examines the problematic conflation of the visuality of phenomenal objects and the subject’s ability to comprehend these objects through her or his vision.1 He claims that a distinction between the subject’s ability to relate to particular works of art through her or his Anschauung (“perception”) and the artwork’s ability to be perceived, its Anschaulichkeit (“visuality”), is necessary in order to explain how subjects translate their individual experiences of particular objects into universally understood and communicable information about these objects.2 Bürger’s work continues to be highly influential in explaining the emergence of the “historical avant-garde” in early twentieth-century



1

2



Peter Bürger, “Zur Geschichtlichkeit von Anschauung / Anschaulichkeit als ästhetische typo? Kategorie,” Aesthetische Erfahrung. Kolloquium Kunst und Philosophie, ed. W. Oelmüller (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1981). Unless otherwise noted, translations from this essay are by the author. Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, Theory and History of Literature Ser. 8 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997) 95. Although Hullot-Kentor translates these terms from Adorno’s text as “intuition” (Anschauung) and “intuitability” (Anschaulichkeit), the terms “perception” and “visuality” will be used respectively to emphasize the physiological and predominantly visual nature of sensory engagement at issue in the present text. Where there is a need to refer to the strict Kantian usage, however, the term “intuition” is employed and its English or German variants. For example, the phrase “empirische Anschauung” (“empirical perception”) is used in discussing the particular, subjective perception of objects to mark the explicit and specific way this act of perception is used in Kant’s aesthetics.

198 Grotesque Visions Western art and the movement’s continued relevance.3 Yet here he fails to illuminate fully the critical potential of art from the perspective of subjective aesthetic experience for reasons that will become clear in the following pages.4 What does a confusion of subjective perception and the phenomenology of the art object tell us about aesthetics? Disentangling this confusion explains to a significant extent the critical potential of subjective aesthetic experience. For Bürger, the distinction between such experience and the actual art object is necessary for the correct, historical analysis of art movements. He quotes from Theodor W. Adorno to demonstrate the conflation of the phenomenal existence of the work of art and the individual subject’s perception of that artwork. Citing Adorno’s Ästhetische Theorie printed in 1970, however, Bürger employs the term Anschauung (i.e., subjective perception) where he should use Anschaulichkeit (i.e., an object’s visuality):5 Die Norm der Anschaulichkeit, die das implizit Kategoriale der Gebilde verleugnet, verdinglicht Anschauung selbst zu einem Opaken, Undurchlässigen, macht sie der reinen Form nach zum



3



4



5

The concern here is not with reception studies, but rather with the attempts to locate resistance within the parameters of subjectivity itself. Shierry Weber Nicholsen describes this approach in her discussion of Adorno as one in which “genuine subjective experience is the correlate of the primacy of the object and the condition for nondiscursive knowledge of the object.” Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Exact Imagination, Late Work on Adorno’s Aesthetics (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1999) 4. On the notion of authenticity with relation to “genuine subjective experience,” see Nicholsen 229 fn. 8. For a discussion of authenticity as part of Adorno’s critical engagement with subjectivity and experience see Keya Ganguly, “Adorno, Authenticity, Critique,” Marxism, Modernity, and Postcolonial Studies, eds. Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 240–56. The critical studies that invoke Bürger’s framework are too extensive to list here. However, Richard Murphy provides an insightful overview of some of this literature and a provocative recasting of Bürger’s concept of the “historical avant-garde.” See Richard Murphy, Theorising the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and the Problem of Postmodernity (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Frederic J. Schwartz has outlined similar concerns with Bürger’s text, suggesting that the “question here is whether the historical trajectory that Bürger sketches and the critical distinctions he draws are firm enough ground from which to criticize Adorno’s position” (259 fn. 87). I have identified this error based on a comparison with a German version of Adorno’s study printed three years later, in 1973, and some ten years before Bürger’s essay.



Coda: Toward a Critique of the Dogma of Visuality 199 Abbild der verhärteten Welt, auf dem qui vive vor allem, wodurch das Werk die von ihm vorgespiegelte Harmonie stören könnte.6

The German version of Adorno’s Ästhetische Theorie published in 1973 provides a different version of the text: Die Norm der Anschaulichkeit, die das implizit Kategoriale der Gebilde verleugnet, verdinglicht Anschaulichkeit selbst zu einem Opaken, Undurchlässigen, macht sie der reinen Form nach zum Abbild der verhärteten Welt, auf dem qui vive vor allem, wodurch das Werk die von ihm vorgespiegelte Harmonie stören könnte.7 Despite the fact that Adorno’s Ästhetische Theorie was published posthumously, several English translations of the passage would seem to confirm the error in Bürger’s text.8 These translations make clear one of the key concerns of Adorno’s text: Standardized visual norms remain invisible, opaque, blind to the lens of critical examination. The English translations as well as the 1973 German version of Adorno’s Ästhetische Theorie suggest that, if Bürger did not make a transcription error, he did make a misstep in logic with significant implications. While the focus of Adorno’s criticism is scientific positivism, Bürger’s focus is a history of aesthetic theory. In short, Bürger’s challenge misrepresents Adorno’s position. It is Bürger’s mistake, exemplified in the above quote and apparent in his examination of the “historical



6



7



8

Bürger 45. To compare, here is an English translation of the quote with the incorrect phrasing, including the word “Anschauung” (“perception”), emphasized: “By denying the implicitly conceptual nature of art, the norm of visuality reifies [subjective] perception into an opaque, impenetrable quality—a replica of the petrified world outside, wary of everything that might interfere with the pretense of the harmony the work puts forth.” Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1973) 146. To compare, here is an English translation of the quote with the correct phrasing, including the word “Anschauulickkeit” (“visuality”), emphasized: “By denying the implicitly conceptual nature of art, the norm of visuality reifies visuality [itself] into an opaque, impenetrable quality—a replica of the petrified world outside, wary of everything that might interfere with the pretense of the harmony the work puts forth.” Cf. Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1998) 11 fn. 11. Crary quotes the following Adorno translation: Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. C. Lenhardt (London: RKP, 1984) 139–40. See also Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Hullot-Kentor 95. Hullot-­ Kentor has used the 1970 German version cited by Bürger as the basis for this translation.

200 Grotesque Visions avant-garde,” that reveals a common and fundamental problem in discussions of the foci of certain manifestations of critical, modern art. Grotesque Visions: The Science of Berlin Dada argues that a changed understanding of sense physiology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries led to a scientific emphasis on learned strategies of empirical visual assessment, to a demand that subjects sehen lernen (“learn to see”). An analysis of the “norm of visuality,” criteria developed and employed by advocates of empirical science and examined in detail in Chapters 3 and 4, shows the implicit assumption that there exists a general and standardized optical acuity for all perceiving subjects. As a target of critical concern in aesthetic theory, this visual standardization has been neglected in favor of a focus on the changed social, political, and existential conditions of the period. Such aesthetic-theoretical accounts produce linear historical narratives that connect the activities of and objects produced by artists with the perceptual abilities of the observers of these phenomena. In short, the “visuality” or “intuitability” of the art object often is conflated with the “perception” or the “intuition” of the observing subject. Perception is taken to be ahistorical, even when art objects and movements are aggressively historicized. Such a conflation leads to the deployment of a concept of the avant-garde that paradoxically renders invisible the artistic engagements with changing scientific standards of optical acuity itself. The parallels between Adorno’s work and the theory of the grotesque advocated by Salomo Friedländer to this end, especially with respect to the way these thinkers sought aesthetic-theoretical modes for engaging the relationship between (scientific) optics and the (subjective) imagination, are discussed at great length earlier in this study.9 The present text examines how the influence of empirical sense physiology has—or, more appropriately, has not—been incorporated into aesthetic theories. This chapter seeks to resolve a synchronic aporia in approaches to aesthetic theory by explaining the importance of a diachronic awareness of the material conditions of visual perception.



9

Cf. Nicholsen 299 fn. 9. The imagination, Einbildungskraft, has a very specific function in Kant’s theory of subjective aesthetic experience. Adorno uses the term Phantasie, as does Friedländer occasionally, to refer to something similar, what Nicholsen refers to as an “aconceptual rationality” (4). Although the terms Einbildungskraft and Phantasie are used interchangeably in the text, the former term’s affiliation with Kantian thought needs to be understood as historically jeopardized due to the developments in physiological optics in the nineteenth century. That is one reason why Adorno and Friedländer revert to the term Phantasie as a means to emphasize the nonconceptual, non-commodified aspects of subjective experience so important to them, albeit for different reasons, in their aesthetic theories developed in the twentieth century.



Coda: Toward a Critique of the Dogma of Visuality 201

Taken together with the case studies that focus on anthropology and pathological anatomy earlier in Grotesque Visions, this chapter demonstrates the far-reaching impact of the professional development and public dissemination of the emphasis on learned, empirically based forms of visual assessment. In other words, the changing expectations for and standards of perception are central to an understanding of aesthetic experience and the avant-garde in the early twentieth century.

Anschauung, Anschaulichkeit, and Aesthetics

The terms Anschauung and Anschaulichkeit have several possible equivalents in English, none of which express fully the complex nature of the terms’ philosophical import in aesthetic theory and theories of sense perception since the Enlightenment. The various possible translations of Anschauung are due, in part, to the term’s etymological relationship to four Latin words: visio, intuitio, evidentia, and contemplatio.10 While Anschauung is thus not reducible to the visual, the term nevertheless often carries an association with both the visual and the knowable. Its contemporary usage is often synonymous with “view” or “perspective” (i.e., Ansicht) in the sense of seeing (i.e., an Ansichstkarte is a “picture postcard”), but also in the sense of an opinion or perspective from a particular vantage point (i.e., an Ansicht von oben is a “view from above”).11 To retain the combination of the sensorial and the epistemological, Werner S. Pluhar translates the term Anschauung as “intuition” and the adjective anschauend as “intuitive” in his English version of

Waltraud Naumann-Beyer, “Anschauung,” Ästhetische Grundbegriffe: historisches Wörterbuch in sieben Bänden, ed. Karlheinz Barck (Stuttgart; Weimar: Metzler, 2000) 212. 11 Friedrich Kluge, “anschaulich,” Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1975) 24. Although he does not provide separate definitions for the terms Anschauung or Anschaulichkeit, Kluge does give the following definition of anschaulich: “anschaulich Adj. ist ein Wort der spätmittelalter. Mystik, von Tauler und seinen Zeitgenossen vom Anschauen der Gottheit gebraucht. Im älteren Nhd. [Neuhochdeutsch] bedeutet es ’ansehnlich’ angesehen,’ Lessing verwendet es im Sinne unsere augenscheinlich. Weiter tritt anschaulich an Stelle des Part. Anschauend, das (wie: eine wohlschlafende Nacht, die vorhabende Reise, essende Speise) pass. verwendet wurde: etwas anschauend zu machen wissen. Neuere philos. Sprache verwendet das Adj. Als ’der Anschauung dienend,’ ebenso seit Basedow die Pädagogik, in der ’etwas anschaulich zu machen wissen’ und ’anschaulicher Unterricht’ zu wichtigen Schlagwörtern aufgestiegen sind.—Auch anschouwunge geht von den Mystikern aus und wird weiterhin mit Anblick gleichbedeutend. In philos. Fachsprache bezeichnet Anschauung die ’unmittelbar auf den Gegenstand als einzelnen sich beziehende Erkenntnis’ (Kant). Umgangssprachlich steht es für Ansicht.— Anschaulichkeit nicht vor Herder.” 10

202 Grotesque Visions Immanuel Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft (“Critique of Judgment”). Pluhar also quotes M. Inwood’s A Hegel Dictionary to justify a definition that helps explain the distinction between the Anschauung of a perceiving subject and the Anschaulichkeit of an object in relation to the perceiving subject.12 Robert Hullot-Kentor employs the term “intuitability” for Anschaulichkeit in his translation of Adorno’s Ästhetische Theorie to emphasize the phenomenological existence of the object of perception as juxtaposed to the sensorial processes of an observing subject. These various explanations and translations suggest the terms’ semantic pregnancy as well as the danger of their philosophical misapplication. Although Kant’s critiques—of reason, pure reason, and judgment— together form the corpus of his philosophical system, it was in the third critique, the Kritik der Urteilskraft, that he explicated fully the role of Anschauung in the context of an aesthetic theory of judgment. In that text, Kant clarifies that a judgment of taste differs from the individual aesthetic experience insofar as a universal judgment of taste “lays claim to autonomy.”13 All judgments of taste are singular judgments about the presented objects and, unlike reason or pure reason, are not explicable themselves via the laws of logic as a priori universals (i.e., reason and pure reason were explicable according to the laws of logic as Kant had outlined in the earlier two critiques). Rather, aesthetic judgments must account for the individual subject’s own unique experience and simultaneously employ the subject’s imagination (Einbildungskraft) to communicate these experiences to the understanding (Verstand) for coordination with the universal laws of reason (Vernunft). The initial experience of the aesthetic object can cause feelings of pleasure or displeasure, but there is no ground, no “empirical basis of proof,” to compel anyone to agree with the subjective feelings of another. It is the impulse to make subjective feelings of pleasure or

Inwood qtd. in Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1987) 371 fn. 15: “‘Anschaulichkeit,’ the character of an object such that it is possible or necessary to enter into immediate, nonconceptual contact with it. Eymologically [sic] this immediacy of relationship is modeled [sic] on vision.” There has been extensive work done on the issue of immediacy in Kant’s work. For the current purposes, however, the key issues are (1.) the emphasis on immediate visual perception that develops as a result of nineteenth-century physiology and (2.) is taken up by empirical scientists in the latter part of that century, a series of developments that (3.) discouraged, whether intended or not, critical reflection on the act of perception itself. Immediacy thus becomes an equivalent to optical efficiency, rather than one stage in the processes of cognition, understood in the Kantian sense. 13 Kant 145. A German translation of the English reads as follows: “erhebt Anspruch auf Autonomie.” 12



Coda: Toward a Critique of the Dogma of Visuality 203

displeasure about the aesthetic object binding for others, however, to “extend a merely subjective validity as a claim to all subjects” that is the motivation for Kant to outline a critique of judgment.14 The pleasure or displeasure in the experience of an object is felt directly. To this end, Kant will speak of “feeling as an interior sense” that does not have a corresponding organ such as sight does with the eye or hearing with the ear.15 He will suggest, however, “this kind of pleasure, since it enters the mind through sense, so that we are passive, may be called the pleasure of enjoyment.”16 Enjoyment is construed as passive for Kant because it is the result of a sense perception the cause(s) of which are not consciously apparent. Kant claims that sense perceptions, including feeling as an inner sense, are fundamentally incommunicable data: The only way for it to be conceivable that what is specific in the quality of such a sensation (Sinnesempfindung) should be universally communicable in a uniform way is on the assumption that everyone’s sense is like our own. This, however, we simply cannot presuppose about such a sensation. Thus to a person who lacks the sense of smell we cannot communicate this kind of sensation; and even if he does not lack the sense, we still cannot be certain whether he is getting the very same sensation from a flower that we are getting.17 Importantly, Kant connects the feeling of pleasure or displeasure with perceptions of the external world (i.e., sensations proper, or Sinnesempfindung). As Pluhar notes, Kant considers feeling a form of “receptivity”—an Emfänglichkeit—as a passive but necessary aspect of every aesthetic experience.18 The difficulty, then, is how the

Kant 148. A German translation of the English reads as follows: “eine lediglich subjektive Gültigkeit als Anspruch auf alle Subjekte ausdehnen.” 15 Kant 157. A German translation of the English reads as follows: “das Gefühl as innerem Sinn.” 16 Kant 158. A German translation of the English reads as follows: “Diese Art von Vergnügen kann, da es durch den Sinn in den Geist gelangt, so dass wir passiv sind, als Vergnügen des Genusses bezeichnet werden.” 17 Kant 157–8. A German translation of the English reads as follows: “Der einzige denkbare Weg, dass das, was für die Qualität einer solchen Sinnesempfindung spezifisch ist, auf einheitliche Weise universell kommunizierbar sein sollte, ist die Annahme, dass jeder Sinn wie unser eigener ist. Dies können wir jedoch von einer solchen Empfindung einfach nicht voraussetzen. Daher können wir einer Person, der der Geruchssinn fehlt, diese Art von Empfindung nicht mitteilen; und selbst wenn ihm der Sinn nicht fehlt, können wir immer noch nicht sicher sein, ob er von einer Blume das gleiche Gefühl bekommt, das wir bekommen.” 18 Kant 157 fn. 19. 14

204 Grotesque Visions incommunicable data of internally felt pleasure or displeasure can be universally applicable. In the process of relating new, empirical experiences to the existing understanding, the imagination (Einbildungskraft) plays a key role. The imagination functions to allow for the “matching” of a concept in the understanding with empirical Anschauung. The imagination seeks to locate the particular features of any empirical Anschauung in accordance with an existing concept. In other words, the imagination apprehends or takes up what is given in empirical Anschauung and puts together or relates the particulars in a way to, as closely as possible, match an existing concept. Thus, the limits of the imagination to perform this function of matching empirical encounters with cognitive mechanisms also mark the end of the subject’s ability to match her or his perception, her or his empirical Anschauung, with her or his existing knowledge. Kant elaborates on the relation of Anschauung to understanding in a lengthy introduction to Kritik der Urteilskraft published for the first time in 1914 (and after key figures such as Johannes Müller and Hermann von Helmholtz had developed their theories of empirical sense physiology in the nineteenth century).19 It is in the introduction that Kant refers to judgments of tastes as “aesthetic reflective judgments.”20 He makes clear that judgment, which employs the imagination to mediate between perception and the understanding, is “a very special cognitive power,” merely “an ability to subsume under concepts given from elsewhere.” Thus, the concept that emerges from the power of judgment is not a property of judgment itself but rather “a concept of things of nature insofar as nature conforms to our power of judgment.”21 The purposiveness of nature, nature’s existence as it relates to subjective understanding, is a prerequisite of the ability to comprehend natural phenomena. To explain the way in which an experience can be subjective yet also has the potential to be universal, Kant outlines two types of judgment in his critique. A judgment can be either teleological or aesthetic. Unlike teleological judgments, which depend upon an explicit purposiveness, aesthetic judgments are reflective for Kant because they are not identifiable through recourse to a discernible purpose. Here within lies the “purpose without a purpose” of aesthetic judgment as well as

Werner S. Pluhar, “Translator’s Introduction,” in Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1987) xxix. 20 Kant 428. A German translation of the English reads as follows: “ästhetische reflektierende Urteile.” 21 Kant 392. Emphases in original. A German translation of the English reads as follows: “ein Konzept von Dingen der Natur, sofern die Natur unserer Urteilskraft entsprich.” 19



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the universal applicability of this form of judgment: the assumed lawfulness of nature lends itself to aesthetic judgment through a harmony between perception and understanding made possible by the imagination. The result of aesthetic judgment is not, therefore, a concept (in the Kantian sense) but a feeling of pleasure or displeasure, a “nonconceptual awareness … of the form’s purposiveness for our cognitive power as such, i.e., purposiveness for the harmony of imagination as such with understanding as such.”22

Bürger, Adorno, Aesthetic Experience

The relationship between the understanding and the empirical Anschauung as outlined in Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft appears in a slightly different form in Bürger’s essay “Zur Geschichtlichkeit von Anschauung / Anschaulichkeit als ästhetischer Kategorie.” Bürger’s essay is, on one level, an attempt to explain Adorno’s critique of the positivistic standardization of sense perception, of the “Dogma der Anschaulichkeit” (“dogma of visuality”).23 On another level, Bürger’s text is an effort to challenge Adorno’s postulation of art “as the reconciliation, as the promise of human existence.”24 Bürger suggests that Adorno’s solution is based upon a conflation of the artwork’s phenomenal existence and the uniqueness of the artwork: “Adorno obviously combines together here a duality: the recovery of the particular through the artwork and the artworks itself as particular.”25 Adorno attempts to use the artwork in two incompatible ways, according to Bürger, as a symbolic entity as well as a phenomenal object. Bürger’s concern is rendered problematic, however, because of his inaccurate transcription of Adorno’s critique as directed at the subject’s perception (Anschauung) instead of at the norm of Anschaulichkeit, at the modern “dogma of visuality” (“Dogma der Anschaulichkeit”).26 While Bürger correctly challenges the conflation of Anschauung and Anschaulichkeit, he misrepresents Adorno’s critical target in the supposed conflation of the artwork as particular and the particular in the artwork. The problem, according to Bürger’s criticism, is that Adorno privileges the uniqueness of the aesthetic experience (i.e., artwork as enabling a unique experience), a privileging that acts as a restriction on discussing the uniqueness of the work of art (i.e., the artwork’s

24 25

Pluhar lviii. Bürger 49. Bürger 45. Bürger 48. The German reads as follows: “Adorno verknüpft hier offenbar zweierlei miteinander: die Rettung des Besonderen durch das Kunstwerk und das Kunstwerk als ein Besonderes.” 26 Bürger 49. 22 23

206 Grotesque Visions content). Bürger suggests that Adorno tries to accomplish inadequately two tasks at once: the rescue of the particular (das Besondere) through the work of art and, simultaneously, of the individual artwork as itself unique.27 Using the example of the character of Gretchen from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, Bürger claims that the particular in a work of art is to be found in the collision of traditional and modern ideas, a collision that must be articulated in language.28 A discussion of this collision requires not only the identification of the uniqueness of the work of art as a work of art. It requires an identification of what is unique within the work of art itself, its unique content. Uniqueness is thus self-evident with respect to form (i.e., something is a work of art), but not with respect to content: The meaning of the figure [Gretchen from Goethe’s Faust] exists precisely in the fact that it is here that suffering that comes from the collision of traditional and modern behavior is able to be articulated.—Thought to its logical conclusions, Adorno’s definition of art as the recovery of the particular leads to a ban on speaking about the artwork; the translation into rational terminology would destroy each particularity that it situates among concepts.29 Goethe’s Faust for Bürger represents the perfect example of a unique form (i.e., a work of literature) whose content (i.e., the narrative and its characters) remains inaccessible to an analysis of aesthetic experience according to Adorno’s theory. The content of the work of art must be translated “into rational terminology” in order to communicate its uniqueness.30 Adorno assumes, according to Bürger, that reason destroys the uniqueness of the aesthetic experience. The content of the work of art cannot be discussed, however, without employing a rational (Kantian) conceptual schema or a rational system of language to do so. As a result, while Adorno’s theory is accurate insofar as it establishes

Bürger 48. Bürger uses the phrase “das Leid zur Sprache kommt,” the “suffering that becomes communicable in language,” to explain this phenomenon. 29 Bürger 48–9. The original German reads as follows: “Das Bedeutende an der Gestalt [Gretchen von Goethes Faust] besteht doch gerade darin, daß hier das Leid zur Sprache kommt, das aus dem Zusammenstoß von traditionellem und modernem Verhalten sich ergibt.—Konsequent zu Ende gedacht, führte Adornos Bestimmung der Kunst als Rettung des Besonderen zum Redeverbot über Kunstwerk; denn die Übersetzung in rationale Termini würde dann eben jenes Besondere zerstören, indem sie es unter Begriffe zwingt.” 30 Bürger 49. 27 28



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the uniqueness of aesthetic experience as embodied in the work of art as a work of art (i.e., its form), the theory is incorrect in that it cannot establish the uniqueness of the individual artwork without permitting a rational discussion of its content. Bürger’s incorrect transcription of the passage from Adorno’s text makes apparent a problem in his own aesthetic theory and approach to modern art. Adorno’s concern, according to Bürger’s transcription error, is that “the norm of visuality, which denies what is implicitly categorical in artworks, reifies perception itself as opaque and impenetrable.” Read as transcribed, the quote suggests that perception itself is static and unchanging. Bürger suggests that Adorno cannot do away with the concept of Anschauung: “In spite of his critique of visuality, Adorno’s aesthetic thinking belongs to the tradition identified with the concept of perception.”31 The implication of Bürger’s assessment is that Adorno does not critique the modern standards of perception but rather a static form of subjective perception. As a result, Bürger misses the fundamental critique of Adorno’s passage to make his own error: Bürger confuses the individual subject’s perception (i.e., empirical Anschauung) with the perceptive powers of all human subjects (i.e., Anschauung). Indeed, it is the latter that Bürger implicitly claims is the “dogma of visuality” that is the target of Adorno’s passage. The unique empirical Anschauung that might be in tension with the “dogma of visuality” is subsumed to an “opaque and impenetrable,” a quasi-universal Anschauung. For Bürger, it is thus not the “norm of visuality” but perception that is static and historically unchanging. As such, he does not need to historicize individual perception in relation to the changing norms of visuality. Adorno retains an important distinction in Ästhetische Theorie by emphasizing that the “norm of visuality” renders impossible a critique of “visuality,” whereas Bürger posits the “norm of visuality” against a static concept of the subject’s perception. That is, Bürger claims that Adorno’s aesthetic-philosophical critique of perceptual norms depends upon an ahistorical idea of perception, thus making his own account of historical artistic transformations seem more radical, more historically relevant. The conflation obscures the distinction between the individual subject and the social function of works of art, however. The criticism found in Adorno’s passage implies that the individual subject’s empirical Anschauung can produce at the level of the quotidian, with its accompanying “dogma of visuality,” an incommensurability between individual aesthetic experience and universal reason that remains infinitely beyond any appropriative tendencies.

Bürger 46.

31

208 Grotesque Visions The problematic conflation of observing subject and standards of perception occurs in Bürger’s other treatments of aesthetic phenomena as well. Bürger claims in Theorie der Avantgarde (“Theory of the AvantGarde”) that the goal of the “historical avant-garde” is to make art function again in bourgeois society, to reintegrate art into the (social) praxis of life. He attempts to account for elimination of the institution of art by the avant-garde—a critique of art within art—but must privilege the changing historical conditions of the production of art rather than the changing standards of perception to do so.32 In order to delineate his concept of the “historical avant-garde,” Bürger must conflate the social standards of visuality and the individual subject’s perception. Bürger explains the concept of the historical avant-garde in a footnote: The concept of the historical avant-garde movements used here applies primarily to Dadaism and early Surrealism but also and equally to the Russian avant-garde after the October revolution. Partly significant differences between them notwithstanding, a common feature of all these movements is that they do not reject individual artistic techniques and procedures of earlier art but reject that art in its entirety, thus bringing about a radical break with tradition.33 Bürger’s conflation of the various movements he catalogs under the rubric of the historical avant-garde is highly questionable. The introduction of photography into German artistic circles and its use by László Maholy-Nagy, as one example, and Hannah Höch’s photomontage series Aus einem ethnographischen Museum (“From an Ethnographic Museum”), as another, provide concrete and specific examples of Expressionist- or Dadaist-inspired artistic engagements that incorporate

Cf. Peter Bürger, Vermittlung - Rezeption - Funktion: Aesthetische Theorie und Methodologie der Literaturwissenschaft (1979): 9–17, 147–59. The original version of Theorie der Avantgarde was published in 1974. The English translation, which appeared in 1984, was based on a second edition of the German text published in 1980, an edition that contained two additional chapters that originally appeared in Vermittlung - Rezeption - Funktion as “Einleitung: Theorie der Avant-Garde and Theorie der Literatur” and “Hermeneutik – Ideologiekritik – Funktionsanalyse.” These chapters appear in the English translation as “Introduction: Theory of the Avant-Garde and Theory of Literature” and “One. Preliminary Reflections on a Critical Literary Science.” Cf. Bürger, Theory xlix–lv; 3–34. It is necessary to clarify the above developments in order to understand that the English translation of Bürger’s text already contains a response to several of Bürger’s (German) critics (i.e., the two additional chapters). 33 Bürger, Theory 109 fn. 4. 32



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existing formal standards developed originally for painting (i.e., Höch and photomontage) or simply developed new formal standards for new media (i.e., Maholy-Nagy and photography).34 These artists and their work can hardly be considered as having rejected earlier art in its entirety. For Bürger, however, the “historical avant-garde” can only be understood as opposed to Aestheticism, as a specific attempt to alter the institutionalized commerce with art—as the self-criticism of art as an institution.35 The misunderstanding of Adorno’s criticism explains why, according to Bürger, the “historical avant-garde” fails. The movement fails in Bürger’s study in its goal of reintegrating art into the praxis of life because of a problematic elision. That is, Bürger simply displaces Karl Marx’s concept of labor with his own concept of the avant-garde. He claims the connection between the insight into the general validity of a category and the actual historical development of the field to which this category pertains and which Marx demonstrated through the example of the category of labor also applies to objectification in the arts.36 Bürger simply substitutes the concept “avant-garde” for Marx’s concept of “labor” under the auspices of a materialist art history. Not only is it a dubious claim to suggest that labor can be said to be simply an “example” in Marx’s analysis rather than fundamental to it, the elision also aligns the “historical avant-garde” with resistance toward capitalism. Thus, the “historical avant-garde” fails because capitalism succeeds. This is not the only way to understand the critical potential of aesthetic experience, however. Key to Bürger’s thesis is that in the art movements leading up to the emergence of the “historical avant-garde,” the contents of the works of art become paramount: art simply wants to be art. As a result, the contents of works of art by the end of the nineteenth century lost their political character. Bürger’s periodization of the avant-garde thus reinforces Renato Poggioli’s. Both agree that by the end of the nineteenth century

Cf. Christopher Phillips, “Resurrecting Vision: The New Photography in Europe between the Wars,” The New Vision: Photography between the World Wars (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art; H. N. Abrams, 1989) 81. 35 Bürger’s text contains a lengthy footnote on the concept of Aestheticism, an artistic orientation that he criticizes as strictly concerned with the formal properties and not with the content of art. Bürger, Theory 111 fn. 16. 36 Bürger, Theory 17. 34

210 Grotesque Visions (for Poggioli, the 1880s) an artistic avant-garde is possible. For Bürger, the separation of the artistic from the political avant-garde is simply the beginning of the separation of art from political concerns, a separation that will later foster the development of the “historical avant-garde,” which actively critiques that very separation.37 The historical separation of the content of works of art from political concerns thus engenders a critical response according to Bürger: As institution and content coincide, social ineffectuality stands revealed as the essence of art in bourgeois society, and thus provokes the self-criticism of art. It is to the credit of the historical avant-garde movements that they supplied this self-criticism.38 Bürger effectively separates the “historical avant-garde” not only from the rest of society but also implicitly from those artists who do something other than critique the institution of art. Bürger’s concept of the “institution of art” refers to the status of art in society. As an institution, art has become separate from the praxis of life. The “historical avantgarde” attempts to reintegrate art into the praxis of life by destroying, among other things, the notion of the artist as creator.39 However, accounting for the social transformations at the quotidian would require Bürger to forefront the incommensurabilities of the observers of artworks (i.e., the aesthetic experience) and the dogma of visuality during the period rather than to privilege the dynamism of avant-garde artistic innovations. Bürger’s invocation of an ahistorical idea of perception, rather than identifying, as does Adorno, the critical potential of subjective aesthetic experience in the face of a “norm of visuality,” thus fails to provide a critical theory of aesthetics that can identify continued moments of experientially critical potential.

Renato Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1868) 11–12. 38 Bürger, Theory 27. 39 Bürger, Theory, 109 fn. 4. Duchamp’s 1917 Fountain by R. Mutt is the paradigmatic example of an artistic provocation that “radically questions the very principle of art in bourgeois society according to which the individual is considered the creator of the work of art.” Bürger explicitly chooses to isolate a select group of individuals—those artists affiliated with Dada, Surrealism, and Russian Constructivism, in particular—who supposedly are capable of transcending the observational strictures of their day to, figuratively and literally, “see” differently. He is able to ignore the epistemological paradox because he reduces the praxis of life itself to an ahistorical phenomenon and, hence, to a conceptual abstraction embodied in the creations of particular artists. Bürger also discusses the neo-avant-garde in his text to this end. 37



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Aesthetic Theory as the History of Science

If the contemporary turn toward the history of scientific thought in an effort to explain art history can be understood as a response to a tradition of charting art-historical movements as disembodied phenomena, some of the key advocates of this history of science approach toward the sensing body have surprisingly little corporeality in their theories of aesthetic experience.40 Jonathan Crary is a key example, in both respects. In his Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Crary attempts to refute what he deems “the myth of modernist rupture” evident in texts like Bürger’s.41 Crary suggests that the supposed nineteenth-century separation of Renaissance (what he also labels “classical”) and modern models of vision is tenuous, at best. Not simply a problem of aesthetic consideration, however, the historiographical function of the “modernist rupture” has been equally detrimental to accounts of Modernism and modernity insofar as these accounts “depend on a more or less similar evaluation of the origins of modernist visual art and culture in the 1870s and 1880s.”42 The accounts ignore the fact that “the separation between art and science in the nineteenth century” did not exist, that artistic and scientific discourses “were both part of a single interlocking field of knowledge and practice.”43 Crary provides a point of departure for understanding both the limits of dominant theoretical models of aesthetic modernity and the problematic historiographical separation of artistic and scientific phenomena. He proposes a model that explicitly connects vision as a form of sensate knowledge, a knowledge that is immanent to or within the body, with a theory of aesthetic modernity that acknowledges the impact of scientific discourses.44 According to Crary, Goethe’s Farbenlehre (“Theory of Colors”) is exemplary of “a key delineation of subjective vision, a post-Kantian notion that is both a product and constituent of modernity.”45 For Crary, subjective vision is synonymous with

Cf. Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1999). Crary has a significant list of primarily scientific sources in the bibliography in the volume, especially the list of items published before 1910. Crary, Suspensions 371–9. 41 Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, MA, and London: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1998) 4. 42 Crary, Techniques 3. 43 Crary, Techniques 9. 44 See, in particular, Crary’s chapter in Techniques titled “Subjective Vision and the Separation of the Senses” (67–96). 45 Crary, Techniques 69. 40

212 Grotesque Visions a physiological observer who will be described in increasing detail by the empirical sciences in the nineteenth century, and an observer posited by various “romanticisms” and early modernisms as the active, autonomous producer of his or her own visual experience.46 Crary’s etymological motivation in employing the term “observer”47 has its origin in both his concern with “the exclusive preoccupation with problems of visual representation”48 and the fact that the related term “spectator” has in its Latin root the meaning “to look at.”49 While Crary’s concept of the observer goes a long way to make explicit the relation between scientific and artistic modes of vision, several scholars have indicated that Crary’s observer suffers from a recurrent tendency toward abstraction, a tendency due in part to his use of (Foucaultian) genealogy.50 While problematic, Crary’s insights nevertheless illuminate the limitations of Bürger’s approach and provide a partial corrective to Bürger’s error. To fully understand the motivations for Crary’s observer, as well as account for the aporias of his own approach, it is necessary to clarify the intellectual and national context of a number of Crary’s historical examples as well as to examine the methodology he employs to posit his modern observer. Indeed, Crary’s criticisms of aesthetic theories that posit a “small number of advanced artists who generated a radically new kind of seeing and signification” find a Doppelgänger

Crary, Techniques 69. Emphasis in original. Cf. Crary, Techniques 5–6. The Latin observare means “to conform one’s action, to comply with.” 48 Crary, Techniques 3. 49 Crary, Techniques 5. 50 See, for example, Vanessa R. Schwartz, “Cinematic Spectatorship before the Apparatus: The Public Taste for Reality in Fin-de-Siècle Paris,” Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994) 87–113. In her discussion of the quotidian phenomena of visual modernity associated with such public spectacles as the Musee Grevin (an early wax museum) and the Paris Morgue, Schwartz alludes to the fact that spectatorship is often cast “as an idealized vision produced through discourses about perception and embodied in technological innovation” (87). Her response is to posit spectatorship (in implicit contrast to Crary’s “observer”) as “a practice … [which] can be understood by examining both the relation between the content and form of technologies that produce possibilities for observation and the discourse produced by the experiences of those technologies in a specific context” (88). Schwartz’s corrective helps situate Crary’s text in the context of specific sites and locations in which the “dogma of visuality” might be identified and challenged. 46 47



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in his own disembodied, universal observing subject.51 To help correct this surprisingly disembodied aesthetic theory is to examine one of the most glaring problems of Crary’s approach: his overemphasis on subjective perceptual experience to the disadvantage of what Adorno calls the “Vorrang des Objekts,” the “primacy of the object.”52 It is in this latter category that Crary’s affiliation with Foucault reveals most readily the limits of his observer. Crary’s methodology, as discussed earlier in Grotesque Visions, is indebted to the work of his predecessors, not only Michel Foucault’s The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception but also Foucault’s adviser and mentor, Georges Canguilhem. Key here is the fact that Canguilhem references Rudolf Virchow only once in 1966’s Le Normal et la pathologique, published in English in 1978 as The Normal and the Pathological.53 This, despite the fact that Canguilhem cites the work of the German pathological anatomist and anthropologist in his doctoral dissertation, written in 1943 and reissued in 1950. Likewise, in Foucault’s text, published in 1963 as Naissance de la Clinique and in English in 1973 as The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, Virchow’s name is absent completely. Foucault’s failure to mention one of the most prolific and influential German scientist-politicians of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is no minor oversight. Virchow’s work on standardizing medical and anthropological observational practices, and his efforts to bring these standards to the public, might be seen as exemplary of a “norm of visuality” in the Germany of the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Foucault’s focus on primarily French-language source materials, however, renders the application of his methodology and his discussion of the historical transformation of the clinical method and the anatomico-clinical glance highly suspect if applied uncritically to non-French contexts. Both Canguilhem and Foucault appear to have suffered a case of seemingly willful historical blindness—an historical blindness from which Crary, too, would seem to suffer. Some scholars have seen this aporia in Foucault’s (and Canguilhem’s) thinking as irrelevant. Authors such as Lisa Cartwright have sought to explain the move as part of Foucault’s focus on “clinical, and not

Crary, Techniques 4. Cf. Nicholsen 3–4. 53 George Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, trans. of Le Normal et le pathologique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1966), introd. Michel Foucault (New York: Zone Books, 1998) 25. The book includes an essay published for the first time (“Section Two. New Reflections on the Normal and the Pathological”) together with Canguilhem’s dissertation (“Section One. Essay on Some Problems concerning the Normal and the Pathological”). 51 52

214 Grotesque Visions laboratory, medicine.”54 In the Germany of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, the distinction between clinical and laboratory medicine was not so readily apparent. Other scholars, such as Gilles Deleuze, have provided generous readings of “the visual” in Foucault’s work.55 Deleuze attempts to make dialectical Foucault’s concept of spatialization in The Birth of the Clinic.56 Foucault’s more explicit examination of the visible (notably Discipline and Punish) is, according to Deleuze, a correction of the earlier simplification of vision, a simplification that results in a tension between the “historical irreducibility of the visible” and the “primacy of statements.”57 That is, Foucault’s early work presumes a norm of visuality that he could not and does not theorize, even as he examines the construction of truth in language. Neither Cartwright’s aside nor Deleuze’s more nuanced assessment can account fully for Foucault’s lack of analysis of vision as integral to certain forms of knowledge production, an error that Crary’s work goes to great lengths to correct.

Conclusion

The possibility of a critical, subjective aesthetic experience is encapsulated in Adorno’s concern with the “dogma of visuality.” Far from embodying a “rationalized snobbery on the Left” or being the “dour opponent of all [Walter] Benjamin’s optimism over the technology of mass art,” Adorno’s approach to aesthetics actually testifies to the critical capacity on the part of the individual aesthetic experience.58 Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995) 11. 55 Deleuze 47–69. 56 Deleuze 49. The full subtitle of the book is “The Archaeology of the Medical Gaze,” but the “Medical” is often omitted in references to the work. 57 Deleuze 49. 58 Cf. Thomas Crow, Painters and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Paris (London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985) 261–2 fn. 45. Adorno often overtly appears to denounce tout court all forms of popular culture. Jazz is, of course, the paradigmatic example, and a form that Adorno dismisses in apparent racist and academic-elitist fashion. Crow notes, however, that Susan Buck-Morss has demonstrated that the “notorious vehemence” of Adorno’s criticisms was “directed less against the music itself than against the way it was being heard.” Not only do the supposed improvised flourishes in jazz depend upon a “romantic perception of an upwelling of underclass spontaneity,” but jazz’s progressive appearance is illusory insofar as the music necessarily and continually returns to standardized conventions to orient itself and its audience. Crow describes the latter issue as part of the collective experience of mass culture, which “represents a return to the archaic ritual life in the midst of a disenchanted secular modernity. Like the festive rites in preliterate societies, the apparent release of the individual from normal constraints is automatic and unreflective; in truth it effects a renewed sacrifice of individual life to the overwhelming demands 54



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He clarifies the issue in terms that are quite relevant to the present discussion: Works of art which by their existence take the side of the victims of a rationality that subjugates nature are even in their protest constitutively implicated in the process of rationalization itself. Were they to try to disown it, they would become both esthetically and socially powerless: merely clay. The organizing, unifying principle of each and every work of art is borrowed from that very rationality whose claim to totality it seeks to defy.59 Adorno’s refusal to consider the possibility of an “outside” to existing forms of rational social organization does not mean a complete pessimism about the possibility for the realization of the Kantian aspiration of a subject that avoids self-incurred tutelage. Rather, only by theoretically accounting for co-optation is it possible to develop an understanding of aesthetics that locates in “the mass-cultural form a static configuration of the social antinomy” that is (momentarily) compressed in the process of commodification.60 Enlightenment reason can be invoked as a possible moment of revelation or redemption in the form of sensate knowledge, a knowledge that can discern the potential for the realization of authentic experience as a latent and individual subjective response.

of the collective.” Key is the fact that Crow points out that Adorno emphasizes commodified reception more so than simply dismissing jazz or popular culture. Indeed, Crow points out that Adorno’s critical treatment of jazz—and appreciation of it as an object worthy of critical analysis—is significant. Adorno’s project is geared toward the development of critical individual-receptive practices as opposed to the strictures of (programmed) mass-cultural expectation, a development that cannot occur en masse due to capitalism’s tendency toward co-optation of mass phenomena for profit. 59 Adorno qtd. in Crow 263 fn. 45. Cf. Theodor W. Adorno, “Commitment,” Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ernst Block (London: New Left Books, 1977) 177–95. The quote is from the Crow essay rather than from the English translation of Adorno’s essay. The translation in Aesthetics and Politics obscures the relationship between the process of (socioeconomic) rationalization and the impossibility (as a “victim of rationality”) of claiming a position “outside” of that process, although it does emphasize the standardization of the perception of empirical “reality” that is a key target of Adorno’s criticism: “Works of art that react against empirical reality obey the forces of that reality, which reject intellectual creations and throw them back on themselves. There is no material content, no formal category of artistic creation, however mysteriously transmitted and itself unaware of the process, which did not originate in the empirical reality from which it breaks free” (Adorno, “Commitment” 190. Emphasis added). 60 Adorno qtd. in Crow 263 fn. 45.

216 Grotesque Visions Unlike Bürger, Crary acknowledges the dimension of Adorno’s thought that seeks to develop an individual-critical response to aesthetic phenomena with a particular emphasis on the norm of visuality. Crary, however, invokes Adorno to chart a history of observational techniques and technologies.61 Adorno suggests, in contrast, that “[a]esthetic theory, wary of a priori construction and cautious of an increasing abstractness, has as its arena the experience of the aesthetic object.”62 Thus, the concept of experience for Adorno speaks directly against Crary’s postulate of the observer as one who “conforms one’s actions” in order “to comply with”:63 Preartistic experience requires projection yet aesthetic experience— precisely by virtue of the a priori primacy of subjectivity in it—is a countermovement to the subject. It demands something on the order of the self-denial of the observer, his capacity to address or recognize what aesthetic objects themselves enunciate and what they conceal. Aesthetic experience first of all places the observer at a distance from the object.64 The self-denial of the observer is more than an attempt at a convenient word play. Rather, I want to point out that the type of subjective experience that Adorno here refers to is not “ominous lived experience [Erlebnis] that is supposed to deliver up all secrets,” but rather a second order of reflection enabled by sensate knowledge, an understanding that “has as its idea that one become conscious of the artwork’s content by way of the full experience [Erfahrung] of it.”65 Aesthetic theory, as a philosophy of art, becomes the means through which to isolate the second-order consciousness to which Adorno alludes:

Crary footnotes a passage from Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory to that end: “By denying the implicitly conceptual nature of art, the norm of visuality reifies visuality into an opaque, impenetrable quality—a replica of the petrified world outside, wary of everything that might interfere with the pretense of the harmony the work puts forth” (Adorno qtd. in Crary, Techniques 11). The concern here is, perhaps obviously, that in his effort to historicize visuality, Crary has historicized a concept rather than a quotidian phenomenon. In other words, he quotes the very same passage on Anschaulichkeit that Bürger mistranscribes when he quotes the original German. 62 Adorno, Aesthetic 345. Emphasis added. A German translation of the English reads as follows: “ästhetische Theorie, vorsichtig gegenüber einer a priori Konstruktion und vorsichtig gegenüber einer zunehmenden Abstraktheit, hat die Erfahrung des ästhetischen Objekts zum Ziel.” 63 Crary, Techniques 6. 64 Adorno, Aesthetic 346. A German translation of the English reads as follows: “ominöse gelebte Erfahrung, die alle Geheimnisse preisgeben soll.” 65 Adorno, Aesthetic 346. Emphases in original. A German translation of the English reads as follows: “hat die Idee, dass man sich des Inhalts des Kunstwerks durch die volle Erfahrung bewusst wird.” 61



Coda: Toward a Critique of the Dogma of Visuality 217 Each work, if it is to be experienced, requires thought, however rudimentary it may be, and because this thought does not permit itself to be checked, each work ultimately requires philosophy as the thinking comportment that does not stop short in obedience to the prescriptions stipulated by the division of labor … Inherent to the idea of aesthetics is the intention of freeing art, through theory, from its induration, which it suffers as a result of the inescapable division of labor.66

In other words, because subjective experience, Erfahrung, is mediated by thought, a mediation reinforced in an administered society, experience can disentangle the potential for its appropriation by acknowledging that mediation. Thus, the subject’s capitulation to “a dominating, systemizing rationality that is the counterpart of an administered world” is a—if not the—key concern of Adorno’s aesthetic theory.67 To understand subjective aesthetic experience is to dislodge it from mediation by thought. In the artwork Adorno finds the possible critical potential of subjective experience as a form of intervention into the “norm of visuality.” That is, art enacts the power of subjective reflection, the power to recognize the mediation of thought, by fulfilling the logical dictates of a critical aesthetics and, at the same time, transcending the distinct sphere of art. Jürgen Habermas, whose take on aesthetic experience is radically different from Adorno’s, nevertheless describes the process in similar language: aesthetic experience then not only renews the interpretation of our needs in whose light we perceive the world. It permeates as well our cognitive significations and our normative expectations and changes the manner in which all these moments refer to one another.68

Adorno, Aesthetic 350. A German translation of the English reads as follows: “Jedes Werk erfordert, wenn es erlebt werden soll, Gedanken, wie rudimentär sie auch sein mögen, und da sich dieser Gedanke nicht überprüfen lässt, erfordert jedes Werk letztendlich Philosophie als Denkverhalten, das nicht im Gehorsam gegenüber den Vorschriften aufhört durch die Arbeitsteilung festgelegt. … Der Idee der Ästhetik liegt die Absicht bei, die Kunst durch die Theorie von ihrer Verhärtung zu befreien, die sie durch die unausweichliche Arbeitsteilung erleidet.” 67 Nicholsen 3. 68 Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity—An Incomplete Project,” trans. Seyla Ben-Habib, The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press) 13. The German is as follows: “Die ästhetische Erfahrung erneuert dann nicht nur die Interpretation unserer Bedürfnisse, in deren Licht wir die Welt wahrnehmen. Es durchdringt auch unsere kognitiven Bedeutungen und unsere normativen Erwartungen und verändert die Art und Weise, in der sich all diese Momente aufeinander beziehen.” 66

218 Grotesque Visions While an effort to situate theories of aesthetic experience thus requires an acknowledgment of the problems of teleological or nonsynchronous explanations of Modernism and the avant-garde, it is only when the individual subject’s perception is rendered problematic—when the “norm of visuality” is examined in particular historical contexts—that a theory of aesthetic experience becomes not only a theory of art objects but also a way to explain critical subjective experiences. Adorno’s emphasis on an exakte Phantasie, an “exact imagination,” provides a stark contrast to Bürger’s diagnosis of the avant-garde as “historical,” a movement whose early twentieth-century promise of aesthetic redemption can only be deemed a failure in his framework. If Adorno’s analysis points to failures, these are not categorical but rather, as Shierry Weber Nicholsen reminds us, perhaps fruitfully belated: “Late work” names the dilemma of subjectivity and subjective experience as Adorno experienced and formulated it, a dilemma that is still more advanced in our own time. If “exact imagination” names the ideal of a genuine subjective experience that can lay claim to nondominating knowledge, then “late work” signals how very problematic the capacity for exact imagination must be today. And if the conjunction of exact imagination and late work is surprising, that is a measure of the degree to which we have barely begun to explore the significance of the aesthetic dimension of Adorno’s work.69 An examination of Adorno’s “aesthetic dimension” provides insight into the forms that a critical, subjective experience might take. The “lateness” of his own aesthetic theory bespeaks not only its delayed reception among English-speaking scholars but also Adorno’s insight that, as art appears to become increasingly less timely, it reveals the historical situatedness of aesthetics, a gap between subject and object that potentially frustrates subjective experience to critically productive ends. Adorno’s emphasis on the “exact imagination” and its relationship to “the role of the subject and subjective experience” finds startling parallels in the work of Friedländer.70 In order to explain these thinkers’ engagements with the possible forms critical aesthetic experience might take, Grotesque Visions set its sights on the empirical scientific

Nicholsen 8. Nicholsen 4.

69 70



Coda: Toward a Critique of the Dogma of Visuality 219

“dogma of visuality” as this norm became increasingly dominant in early twentieth-century Germany. Throughout Grotesque Visions, the intellectual and optical foci become clearer: imagination as an aspect of critical aesthetic experience must itself be historicized, understood as situated and deeply affected by its own particular perceptual contexts.

Acknowledgments

My interest in the German language and culture began when I was a teenager, about fifteen years old. With the wary and trepid encouragement of my parents, Travis and Lila, and a little bit of pocket money, I left the small, southern Minnesota town of Lyle. I boarded a plane by myself, not exactly sure what to expect. I flew across the Atlantic for what would be the start of a lifelong journey. Germany welcomed me with open arms, thanks to my Uncle and Aunt, Eugene and Hiede Haakenson, who lived for a few, too brief years, in Rhineland-Palatinate. My Uncle and Aunt’s intellectual support and encouragement—prior to, during, and after that trip—have been wonderful blessings. I am so thankful to them for encouraging a small-town boy to jump on a plane and to fly some 4,375 miles alone. I am still not sure what my parents were thinking, or why they let me go exactly. But I am thankful they did. Grotesque Visions: The Science of Berlin Dada began, about a decade later, as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Minnesota. A number of individuals have helped me greatly in supervising the dissertation research and writing process. My adviser Keya Ganguly played a profound role throughout my academic career as a mentor, intellectual guidepost, and friend. My preliminary examination committee, comprised of incredible scholars—Leslie Morris, Liz Kotz, and Jennifer Alexander—encouraged me as I formulated my topic and transitioned from graduate student to doctoral candidate. The members of my dissertation committee—Arlene Teraoka, Timothy Brennan, Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, and Patrizia McBride—provided invaluable insight and advice, and have been scholarly role models beyond compare. Certain other academic colleagues and friends have proven incredibly generous and supportive throughout the research, writing, and revising of early versions of this book. Adi King, Jürgen Laun, Monika Moyrer, and Brechtje Beukert all provided translation assistance and emotional support. Alison Guenther-Pal and Mirko Hall provided critical insight, each in unique forms and often in multiple formats. The



Acknowledgments 221

writing group of which I was a part in Berlin during the early years of my academic career provided an interdisciplinary context for working, writing, and thinking. Its various members, to whom I owe much thanks, include Jennifer Creech, Jason Peck, Marynel Ryan, and several others whose names I forget but whose influence I do not. During and after my years of graduate study, I was very fortunate to befriend two “Berliners” who changed my life a great deal. Klaus Milich, visiting faculty at the University of Minnesota from the Humboldt Universität, offered support and friendship in the early phases of my graduate career and into my dissertation research. He graciously sublet me his Berlin apartment for a time, and I repaid him by burning down his toilet—something he claims to have forgotten, but which I never will (i.e., Kevin Amidon and Necia Chronister know the story!). I developed an immediate bond with Anne Mihan, a graduate student from the Humboldt Universität as well, during her brief year in Minnesota from 1998 to 1999. Kindred spirits. Our relationship took on a delightfully more personal turn. She invited me as her friend to become part of her life in Germany. She and her partner Ulrike—“Mama” and “Mamu,” respectively—have since those long-ago days built a beautiful, wonderful life together in the capital city. They invited me along. So I am blessed to be “Papa Tom” to Carlo and Ella—making our group a very modern Dada family. In many ways, other professional contacts and friends in Berlin have made Grotesque Visions possible. Lorraine “Raine” Daston and colleagues at the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte— not exclusively but especially Anke te Heesen and Charlotte Klonk, both now at the Humboldt Universität—were and continue to be challenging, inspiring, supportive, enlightening, and generous beyond belief. Karin Goihl of the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies at the Freie Universität was a remarkable anchor early in my academic career, helping me navigate a significant period of research and growth during my time as a fellow and as part of this amazing program. Karin has become an invaluable Berlin constant and friend ever since, an incredible supporter and frequent collaborator. Likewise, Ralf Burmeister at the Berlinische Galerie has been exceptional in his ­enouragement of my interest in Dada. Our professional and personal relationship has spanned—incredible to me—more than twenty years. Among my dear friends in Germany that I would be remiss for not mentioning, Barbara Wolbert stands out: she has been a joy to know, and a source of much sunshine too. If I could only bottle her energy! On the U.S. side of the Atlantic, and more recently, René Urbina has provided love, companionship, and intellectual sparring after some very difficult personal years for me. I owe him a great deal of thanks for

222 Acknowledgments making life possible and more interesting, for good cooking and great adventures. No other person has been so near and dear to my work and my heart throughout the research and writing of Grotesque Visions, however, as has Maria Makela: art historian and curator extraordinaire, incredible human, socialite and supporter, sweet and kind friend. Maria has seen me through the best and worst of times. And she never stops caring and encouraging and loving. To her, and to all of the above colleagues and family and friends, I owe a great deal of thanks. No list of acknowledgments would be complete, of course, without a nod to the many sources that provided financial support for my thinking, researching, writing, and revising: the U.S Fulbright Commission, the Social Science Research Council, the Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, the German Historical Institute, the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies, the German Studies Association, the Studienstiftung des Abgeordnetenhauses von Berlin, the Goethe-Institut Inter Nationes, the Foreign Language Area Studies Fellowship, and the Frank Hirschbach Research Abroad Travel Grant. There are too many archives, institutes, and libraries to mention in this brief space, yet I owe the individuals who make these spaces open for intellectual exploration a heartfelt thanks as well. Versions or portions of some of the text in Grotesque Visions: The Science of Berlin Dada have been published in other venues. “The Architectonics of Public Science: ‘Learning to See’ in Rudolf Virchow’s Museum of Pathology” appeared in altered form in a volume I coedited with Deborah Ascher Barnstone, Representations of German Identity, in the series German Visual Culture. A special thanks goes to Laurel Plapp for her tremendous work on that series and for allowing me to reproduce a version of my essay in this book. Significantly changed portions of “Sexuality ad oculos: Sigmund Freud and Magnus Hirschfeld Meet Til Brugman’s ‘Celluloid Children’” are slated to appear as part of an essay in a volume edited by Barnstone and Makela with the working title New Challenges to Conventions: Innovative Visual Work in the Weimar Republic. A revised version of “Visual Objectivity Meets Impossible Object: Hannah Höch ‘From an Ethnographic Museum’ Photomontages” appeared in Rutgers Art Review. Finally, “The Science of Berlin Dada: Salomo Friedländer, Walter Benjamin, and the Grotesque” appeared as “‘The Merely Illusory Paradise of Habits’: Walter Benjamin, Salomo Friedländer, and the Grotesque” in New German Critique. This book did not get published on its own—and I mean that in a very material sense. To these ends, I owe an immense amount of gratitude to Imke Meyer for her generous intellect and incredible thoughtfulness, and for including me in her extraordinary series New Direction in German Studies. Special thanks go as well to colleagues at Bloomsbury, notably Haaris Naqvi for his good guidance, to Rachel Moore



Acknowledgments 223

for her encouraging eye, Sarah McNamee and the copyeditor for their amazing patience, and to the many others at this wonderful publishing house who were involved in helping me realize Grotesque Visions: The Science of Berlin Dada, but whose names I do not know. And, finally, this book would not be possible with the brave and creative artists whose vision and criticality make Grotesque Visions: The Science of Berlin Dada the unique intersection of art and science. Hannah Höch, Salomo Friedländer, Til Brugman, and the other artists discussed in these pages had a vision for a better world—more humane, more humorous, more colorful, more exciting. And that is a vision worth ­realizing.

Bibliography

Archival Works

Materials by Salomo Friedländer / Mynona at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach, Germany (DLM). The abbreviation DLM is followed by the file / cataloging number used at the archive, if available. Friedländer, Salomo (a.k.a., Mynona). “Anti-Einstein.” DLM 61.616. Friedländer, Salomo (a.k.a., Mynona). “Der Humor als Weltanschauung.” DLM 61.93. Friedländer, Salomo (a.k.a., Mynona). “Der Mensch als subjective kopernikanische Sonne.” DLM 60.868. Friedländer, Salomo (a.k.a., Mynona). “Ernst Marcus als Kritiker Kant’s.” DLM 61.618. Friedländer, Salomo (a.k.a., Mynona). “Gut und Böse. Fragelehrbuch zum Unterricht in den Elementen des Vernunftsglaubens nach Kant.” DLM. Friedländer, Salomo (a.k.a., Mynona). “Immanuel Kant als Magier.” DLM 61.616. Friedländer, Salomo (a.k.a., Mynona). “KANT—Allgemeine THEORIE, Exzerpt.” DLM 61.616. Friedländer, Salomo (a.k.a., Mynona). “Kant als Magier.” DLM 61.616. Friedländer, Salomo (a.k.a., Mynona). “Kant für Künstler.” DLM 61.612. Friedländer, Salomo (a.k.a., Mynona). “Kant / Marx. Imaginärer Dialog zwischen Kurt Hiller und Mynona.” DLM 61.617. Friedländer, Salomo (a.k.a., Mynona). “Kant und die sieben Narren.” DLM 60.867, DLM 61.614. Friedländer, Salomo (a.k.a., Mynona). “Kantholizismus.” DLM 61.616. Friedländer, Salomo (a.k.a., Mynona). “Kant und die Sieben Narren.” DLM 69.867. Friedländer, Salomo (a.k.a., Mynona). “Moderner Sieg der Goethischen Farbenlehre.” DLM 60.870. Friedländer, Salomo (a.k.a., Mynona). “Nochmal der Fall Humanismus.” Unpublished manuscript. DLM 61.617. Friedländer, Salomo (a.k.a., Mynona). “Philosophisches Fragenlehrbuch nach Kants kleinen Schriften.” DLM. Friedländer, Salomo (a.k.a., Mynona). “Polaristischer Kommentar zu Kants Kritik d[er] r[einen] [Vernunft].” DLM 61.617, DLM 61.6156. Friedländer, Salomo (a.k.a., Mynona). “Über Ästhetik.” DLM Z 6298. Friedländer, Salomo (a.k.a., Mynona). “Vom Weltäther: Nach Immanuel Kant und Ernst Marcus.” DLM 60.883.

Published and Unpublished Sources

Ackerknecht, Erwin H. Rudolf Virchow: Doctor, Statesman, Anthropologist. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1953.



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Index

ad oculos 89, 92, 101, 103, 222 Adorno, Theodor W. 6, 8 fn.12, 8–9, 15 fn.38, 20, 50, 197 fn.2, 197–200, 198 fn.3, 198 fn.4, 198 fn.5, 199 fn.7, 199 fn.8, 200 fn.9, 202, 205 fn.25, 205–7, 206 fn.29, 209–10, 213–18, 214–15 fn.58, 215 fn.59, 216 fn.61, 216 fn.62, 216 fn.64, 216 fn.65, 217 fn.66, 218 Africa 129 fn.25, 161, 164–5 Alexander Ufer 76, 76 fn.43, 78 anatomical pathology 19, 28, 63 fn.10, 73 Anschauung 33, 51, 65 fn.17, 66, 66 fn.18, 131 fn.31, 132, 182, 182 fn. 6, 183, 187, 197–8, 197 fn. 2, 198 fn. 6, 201–2, 201 fn. 11, 204–5, 207 Anschaulichkeit 20, 39, 197–9, 197 fn.2, 201–2, 201 fn.11, 202 fn.12, 205, 216 fn.61 Anschauungsmaterial 66 fn.18, 104, 147 fn.1 Anschauungsunterricht 182 Anthropologisch-Ethnologisches Album in Photographien (see also Dammann, Carl W.) 118, 128–30, 129 fn.24, 129 fn.27, 130 fn.29, 133 Aoaquis 165

Arab 129 fn.25 Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung 155 Ärztliche Gesellschaft für Sexualwissenschaft und Eugenik (see also Medical Society for Sexual Science and Eugenic) 111 Ästhetische Theorie 198–9, 199 fn.7, 202, 207 Aus einem ethnographischen Museum (see also From an Ethnographic Museum) 20, 150, 150 fn.8, 153, 157, 161–2, 172, 176–8, 179, 187, 190, 193, 208 avant-garde 3, 12 fn.24, 19–20, 44, 169, 171, 181, 188, 191, 195, 197, 198 fn.4, 200–1, 208–10, 210 fn.39, 218 Ayumara 165 Bakhtin, Mikhail 9–10, 10 fn. 17, 10 fn. 19, 17 Balfour, Henry 132 Bartels, Max 90, 90 fn.3, 98, 135–7, 135 fn.35, 135 fn.36 Bastian, Adolf Philipp Wilhelm 17–18, 121 fn. 13, 132 Bauhaus 170 Benjamin, Walter 6, 9, 14–17, 14 fn.30, 24, 44–52, 44 fn.55, 45 fn. 57, 46 fn. 58, 48 fn. 64,

256 Index 51 fn. 71, 51 fn. 72, 55, 91, 97, 112–13, 149 fn.7, 214, 222 Bergius, Hanne 3–4 Bergson, Henri 6, 25 Berlin Illustrirte Zeitung (BIZ) 164, 195 fn.25 Berliner Gesellschaft für Ethnologie, Anthropologie, und Urgeschichte (see also Berlin Society; Berlin Society for Ethnology, Anthropology and Prehistory) 20, 68 fn.23, 90 fn.3, 98, 101, 118, 118 fn.7, 120 fn. 11, 122, 124–5, 129–30, 129 fn.25, 135–40, 135 fn.35, 136 fn.38, 143, 174 fn.50 Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum (see also Berlin Medical Historical Museum; Museum of Pathology) 57, 66 fn.18, 82, 184 Berlinische Galerie 191, 221 Bildnerei der Geisteskranken 169, 170 fn.46 Bildung 62, 84–5, 85 fn.66, 148 fn.5 Black 125, 164–5, 167 Boas, Franz Uri 18, 145–6, 155, 157, 183, 187, 187 fn.15 Borneo 172–3 Boswell, Peter 152, 188 Brazil 165 Brugman, Til (see also Maria Petronella Mathilda Brugman) 18, 20, 55 fn.79, 89, 91–2, 91 fn.4, 94, 105–9, 106 fn.29, 112–14, 158 fn.25, 162, 181, 222–3 Bürger, Peter 181, 188, 197–9, 198 fn.4, 198 fn.5, 199 fn.6, 199 fn.8, 205–12, 206 fn.28, 208 fn.32, 209 fn.35, 210 fn.39, 216, 216 fn.61, 218

Canguilhem, Georges 63 fn.10, 83–4, 83 fn.60, 186, 213, 213 fn.53 celluloid 108–9, 112–13 cellular pathology 61 fn.5, 63, 63 fn.10, 68, 80–1, 183 Chaplin, Charlie 8–9, 14–17, 44, 46–7, 50–1, 55 Charité Hospital 58 fig.3.1, 60 fig. 3.2, 61, 61 fn.5, 63, 64 fn.13, 76 fig. 3.5, 76 fn.44, 78, 82, 184 Clifford, James 58, 118–20, 145–6 Code of the German Empire 72 Cohn, Hermann 115–16, 115 fn.1, 118–19, 122–5, 122 fn.14, 123 fn.17, 128, 128 fn.23 Congress of German Naturalists and Physicians 70 Crary, Jonathan 26 fn.7, 36 fn.34, 39 fn. 43, 40, 59 fn.4, 63, 84–6, 125–8, 128 fn.22, 181–2, 199 fn.8, 211–14, 211 fn.40, 212 fn.50, 216, 216 fn.61 creative indifference 38, 43, 151 Critique of Judgment (see also Kritik der Urteilskraft) 4, 5 fn.10, 30, 30 fn.16, 32, 35 fn. 30, 36 fn.32, 202, 202 fn.12, 204–5 Dammann, Carl W. 118, 128–33, 129 fig. 5.4, 129 fn.25 Darwin, Charles 68–9, 69 fn.28, 72 fn.35 Das ABCs des Bauens 170 Daston, Lorraine 85 fn.66, 142 fn.50, 189, 221 degenerate art (see also Entartete Kunst; Entartete “Kunst”) 1–2, 2 fn.3, 2 fn.4, 171, 174–6 Deleuze, Gilles 11, 11 fn.21, 214, 214 fn. 56 Der Querschnitt 4 fn.9, 44 fn.53, 52, 155, 164, 173

Der Eigene 52 Der Sturm 41 Dionysus 7 Disney 47–8 Dogma der Anschaulichkeit (see also dogma of visuality) 20, 197, 205, 207, 210, 212 fn.50, 214, 219 Dresden 104, 185 Du Bois-Reymond, Emil Heinrich 122, 183 Ebert, Friedrich (President) 167–8 Einbildungskraft 21, 29, 51, 200 fn.9, 202, 204 Einstein, Albert 18, 18 fn.43, 191, 193, 195 Einstein, Carl 25–6, 181 Ellis, Havlock 175 England 43, 120 Erste International Dada-Messe (see also First International Dada Fair) 151 eugenics 90, 117, 145, 168 expert (see also expertise; nonexpert) 14, 16–17, 53, 59, 63 fn.9, 68, 82–3, 85 fn. 66, 86 101, 121, 136, 143–4 Expressionism (see also Expressionist) 12 fn.24, 178 fn.60, 208 Fabian, Johannes 112, 174, 174 fn.50 Faust 72 fn.35, 206 fetishism (see also fetish) 90–1, 100, 102, 105, 107–14, 109 fn. 34, 111 fn.38, 159, 161, 179, 188 Foucault, Michel 11, 11 fn.21, 63, 65 fn.15, 77, 83–5, 144 fn.54, 212–14 Fortschrittspartei 68 fn.22, 184 Fragelehrbücher 24, 53

Index 257 Frankfurt (see also Frankfurt am Main) 1–2, 185 Fratzen (see also grimace) 35, 35 fn.30 Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 54 Freud, Sigismund Schlomo (see Freud, Sigmund) 20, 48, 109–10, 109 fn.34, 112 Friedländer, Salomo (see also Mynona) xii, 4, 6–9, 14, 17–20, 23–45, 23 fn.1, 27 fn.10, 29 fn.13, 32 fn.24, 35 fn.30, 51–5, 54 fn.78, 91, 151, 181, 191–3, 200, 200 fn.9, 218, 222–3 Fritsch, Gustav 95, 118, 120, 130–3, 131 fig.5.5, 131 fn.31, 131 fig.5.6, 134 fig.5.7 G: Zeitschriften für Elementare Gestaltung 169 Gabon 162 Ganguly, Keya 14, 48 fn.64, 198 fn.4, 220 Geschlechtskunde 91, 94, 100–1, 103, 111 fn.38 Geschlechtsübergänge 94–5, 95 fn.11, 96 fig.4.1, 98, 100–1, 103 Gestaltungskraft 170 Giese, Karl 90 fn.2, 102, 104 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 2, 7, 24, 36–43, 36 fn.34, 39 fn.43, 126, 206, 211, 222 Gropius, Walter 171 Grosz, George 150 Groteskfilme (see also slapstick comedies) 8–9, 16, 44, 46–51 Grotesk!: 130 Jahre Kunst der Frechheit (see also Grotesk!; Grotesque!: 130 years of the Art of Insolence) 1–4 Habermas, Jürgen 217 Haeckel, Ernst 69–71, 70 fn. 31, 101–3, 104 fn.25

258 Index Haus der Kunst 1 Hausmann, Raoul 151, 190 Heartfield, John 150, 154–5, 156 fig.6.2 Heidegger, Martin 6 Helmholtz, Hermann von 40, 85, 122, 125–6, 128 fn.23, 183, 204 Hirschfeld, Magnus 18–20, 89–106, 89 fn.1, 90 fn.2, 93 fn.7, 96 fig.4.1, 103 fn.21, 104 fn.25, 108–12, 109 fn.34, 183, 222 Hitler, Adolf 158, 168 fn.43 Höch, Anne Therese Johanna (see also Höch, Hannah) 18, 20–1, 55 fn.79, 147–69, 149 fn.7, 150 fn.8, 154 fig.6.1, 158 fn.25, 160 fig.6.3, 162 fig. 6.2, 163 fig. 6.5, 166 fig.6.6, 167 fig.6.7, 172–3, 172 fig.6.8, 174 fn.50, 178–81, 178 fn.60, 180 fig.7.1, 187–95, 187 fn.15, 192 fig.7.2, 194 fig.7.3, 208–9, 222–3 Holmgren, Alarik Frithiof 118, 122–3, 128 Horkheimer, Max 8 fn.12, 15, 44 fn.55 Hullot-Kentor, Robert 197 fn.2, 199 fn.8, 202 Husserl, Edmund 6 Huxley, T. H. 120 Institut für Pathologie (see also Institute for Pathology) 20, 61 fn.5, 62 fn.8, 63–64, 64 fn.14, 66 fn.18, 66 fn.19, 72, 76 fig.3.5, 78 fn.48, 89, 183–4 Institut für Sexualwissenschaft (see also Institute of Sexology; Institute of Sexual Science) 18, 89, 89 fn.1, 100–1, 108 intuitability 197 fn.2, 200, 202 intuition 197 fn.2, 200–1

Jew (see also Jewish) 6, 20, 23 Kant, Immanuel (see also Kantian) 4–9, 21, 23–5, 23 fn.1, 27, 29–37, 30 fn.16, 32 fn.24, 35 fn.30, 36 fn.32, 41, 44, 51, 53–5, 54 fn.78, 115 fn.1, 148 fn.5, 197 fn.2, 200 fn.9, 202–6, 202 fn.12, 211, 215 Kayser, Wolfgang 9–12, 11 fn.23, 12 fn. 24, 12 fn.25, 12 fn.26, 17 Kiel 185 Koch, Robert 77, 137, 137 fn.40, 185 Körperwelt 31 Kracauer, Siegfried 6, 9, 14–15, 54, 91, 97 Kraus, Paul 82 Kriegsbeschädigten und Kriegshinterbliebenen Komitee (see also German War Damages and Bereavement Committee) 82 Kulturträger 63 fn.9, 85 fn.66 Kunst und Rasse 171 Kunstgewerbeschule (see also Kunstgewerbe Schule; Fine Arts School) 190 Kwakiutl Indians 155, 155 fn.2, 157, 187, 187 fn.15 Lamprey, John 120, 120 fn.11 Las Meninas 11, 11 fn.20 Leslie, Esther 17, 44, 44 fn.55, 46 fn.58, 50, 91 Levy-Lenz, Ludwig 105–6 Lingner, Karl August 185 Lombroso, Cesare 68, 69 fn.25, 103 fn.21 Lubarsch, Otto 82 Maholy-Nagy, Laszlo 208–9 Makela, Maria 150, 152, 154–5, 161 fn.32, 165 fn.37, 188, 193, 222

Marcus, Ernst 31 Marcus, George E. 117, 120 Marx, Karl (see also Marxism; Marxist) 14, 44 fn.55, 48 fn.64, 209 Mattern, Eric 82 Müller, Hermann 72, 72 fn.35 Müller, Johannes 40, 66 fn.19, 71 fn.33, 85, 126, 183, 204 Müller-Lippstadt Affair 72 Munich 1, 70, 176, 185 Museum für Völkerkunde 155, 173 Museum of Pathology 57, 58 fig.3.1, 61–3, 61 fn.6, 63 fn.10, 72–3, 73 fig.3.3, 76 fig.3.5, 81–4, 184–7 Nägeli, Karl Wilhelm von 71 National Socialism (see also National Socialist; Nazi) 1–3, 2 fn.3, 104, 107, 117, 145, 158, 164, 168–9 Naturvölker (see also primitive peoples) 98, 123, 138, 161 Neuhauss, Richard 135 fn.35, 135 fn.36, 136–40, 142–3 Neumayer, Georg von 131, 134 fig.5.7 New Woman 99 fn.14, 161, 167 Newton, Isaac (Sir) (see also Newtonian) 40–3 Niebisch, Arndt 191 Nietzsche, Friedrich 6–8, 25 Nobel Prize 178 Nordau, Max 68, 69 fn.25 Nubian 123 fn.17 Odysseus 8, 8 fn.12 Oedipal 174 Optophonetics 191 Orth, Johannes 81–2 Oxford 132–3

Index 259 Panopticum 27 fn.10, 186 Paragraph 152 (of the German Penal Code; see also Article 20 of the Prussian Charter) 71–2 Paris 3, 46 fn.58, 69 fn.25, 102, 212 fn.50 Pasteur, Louis 102–3 Phantasie 21, 34, 200 fn.9, 218 Picasso, Pablo Ruiz 16, 47 Pitt Rivers Museum 132 Ploss, Herman Heinrich 90, 98 Pluhar, Werner S. 30 fn.16, 201–3 Pöch, Rudolf 139, 139 fn.43 Poggioli, Renato 209–10 Prinzhorn, Hans 169–71, 174 Pygmies 139–40 Reitzenstein, Ferdinand von 90–1, 98, 104 Rhineland 165, 220 Richter, Hans 169 Rössle, Robert 82 Rohe, Ludwig Mies van der 169 Rudolphi, Carl Asmund 80 Sander, August 97, 153 fn.19 Schaulust 81–2, 87 Schlaginhaufen, Otto 139–43, 139 fn.43 Schopenhauer, Arthur 6, 23 fn.1 Schöpferische Indifferenz (see also Creative Indifference) 38, 43, 151 Schultze-Naumburg, Paul 170–1, 174 sehen lernen (see also learning to see) 19, 20, 62, 65 fn.15, 81, 87, 90, 92, 116, 200, 222 Sekula, Allan sense physiology 24, 29, 40, 200, 204

260 Index Sexologie (see also sexology; sexual science) 19, 28–9, 89–91, 90 fn.2, 100–2, 106–7, 109–10, 112 Sinnesempfindung 203 South American 165 spectatorium 182 Spinoza, Baruch 7 Stocking, Jr., George W. 145 Sturm und Drang 12–13 sublime 35 fn.30 Sultan of Zanzibar 129 Surrealism (see also Surrealist) 12 fn.24, 13, 45, 48, 48 fn.64, 208, 210 fn.39 Talbot, Fox 152 Technik 47, 49, 52, 113 Third Reich 168 fn.43, 175 Tiergarten 18, 89 Tylor, E.B. 132 Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich 103 unmittelbare Anschauung (see also immediate visual perception) 45, 65–6, 66 fn.18, 74, 79, 80, 86, 144, 182–7, 182 fn.6, 189–90, 202 fn.12 Uraricapara River 165 Velázquez, Diego Rodríguez de Silva y 10 Veranschaulichungsmethoden (see also methods of visual illustration) 113 Verhandlungen der Berliner Gesellschaft für Anthropologies, Ethnologie und Urgeschichte 118, 124, 135 fn.35

Vernunft 35, 202 Verstand 5, 81, 202 Virchow, Rudolf 17–20, 27, 57, 57 fn.1, 59–84, 60 fig.3.2, 61 fn.5, 63 fn.9, 63 fn.10, 64 fn. 11, 64 fn.12, 64 fn.14, 65 fn.15, 66 fn.18, 66 fn.19, 68 fn.22, 69 fn.25, 69 fn.27, 70 fn.31, 71 fn.34, 75 fn.42, 76 fn.43, 76 fn.44, 78 fn.48, 79 fn.51, 86, 89–90, 92–4, 99, 101, 103 fn.21, 116 fn.3, 121 fn.13, 124–5, 130, 132, 146, 173 fn.49, 182 fn.6, 183–7, 185 fn.8, 187 fn.13, 190, 213, 222 Völkerschauen 27 fn.10, 115 Volkskrankheiten und ihre Bekämpfung 185 Weimar Academy of Fine Arts 171 Weimar School of Arts and Crafts 171 Weimar Republic 157–8, 161 fn. 34, 168, 168 fn.43 Weltanschauung 152, 170–1 Wundt, Wilhelm 6 Zeitschrift für Ethnologie 118, 165 Zelluloidkinder (see also celluloid children) 108, 112–13, 222 Zur Farbenlehre (see also Toward a Theory of Colors) 37, 40–1, 43, 211 Zurich 3 Zwischenstufe (see also Zwischenstufen; intermediary stages) 93–5, 97–9, 102, 104 Zwischenstufenwand 104