Journeys Into Madness: Mapping Mental Illness in the Austro-Hungarian Empire 9780857454591

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JOURNEYS INTO MADNESS

AUSTRIAN AND HABSBURG STUDIES General Editor: Gary B. Cohen, Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota

Volume 1 Austrian Women in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives Edited by David F. Good, Margarete Grandner, and Mary Jo Maynes Volume 2 From World War to Waldheim: Culture and Politics in Austria and the United States Edited by David F. Good and Ruth Wodak

Volume 8 Crime, Jews and News: Vienna 1890–1914 Edited by Daniel Mark Vyletta Volume 9 The Limits of Loyalty: Imperial Symbolism, Popular Allegiances, and State Patriotism in the Late Habsburg Monarchy Edited by Laurence Cole and Daniel L. Unowsky

Volume 3 Rethinking Vienna 1900 Edited by Steven Beller

Volume 10 Embodiments of Power: Building Baroque Cities in Europe Edited by Gary B. Cohen and Franz A.J. Szabo

Volume 4 The Great Tradition and Its Legacy: The Evolution of Dramatic and Musical Theater in Austria and Central Europe Edited by Michael Cherlin, Halina Filipowicz, and Richard L. Rudolph

Volume 11 Diversity and Dissent: Negotiating Religious Difference in Central Europe, 1500–1800 Edited by Howard Louthan, Gary B. Cohen, and Franz A. J. Szabo

Volume 5 Creating the Other: Ethnic Conflict and Nationalism in Habsburg Central Europe Edited by Nancy M. Wingfield

Volume 12 “Vienna Is Different”: Jewish Writers in Austria from the Fin de Siècle to the Present Hillary Hope Herzog

Volume 6 Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe Edited by Pieter M. Judson and Marsha L. Rozenblit

Volume 13 Sexual Knowledge: Feeling, Fact and Social Reform in Vienna, 1900–1934 Hillary Hope Herzog

Volume 7 The Environment and Sustainable Development in the New Central Europe Edited by Zbigniew Bochniarz and Gary B. Cohen

Volume 14 Journeys into Madness: Mapping Mental Illness in the Austro-Hungarian Empire Edited by Gemma Blackshaw and Sabine Wieber

JOURNEYS INTO MADNESS Mapping Mental Illness in the Austro-Hungarian Empire

d Edited by

Gemma Blackshaw and

Sabine Wieber

Berghahn Books NEW YORK • OXFORD

First edition published in 2012 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2012 Gemma Blackshaw and Sabine Wieber

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Printed in the United States on acid-free paper ISBN 978-0-85745-458-4 (hardback) ISBN 978-0-85745-459-1 (ebook)

CONTENTS

d List of Figures Introduction Gemma Blackshaw and Sabine Wieber 1. The Mad Objects of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Journeys, Contexts and Dislocations in the Exhibition ‘Madness and Modernity’ Leslie Topp

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2. Solving Riddles: Freud, Vienna and the Historiography of Madness Steven Beller

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3. Symphonies and Psychosis in Mahler’s Vienna Gavin Plumley

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4. Creating an Appropriate Social Milieu: Journeys to Health at a Sanatorium for Nervous Disorders Nicola Imrie

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5. Travel to the Spas: The Growth of Health Tourism in Central Europe, 1850–1914 Jill Steward

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6. Vienna’s Most Fashionable Neurasthenic: Empress Sisi and the Cult of Size Zero Sabine Wieber

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7. Peter Altenberg: Authoring Madness in Vienna circa 1900 Gemma Blackshaw

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8. ‘Hell Is Not Interesting, It Is Terrifying’: A Reading of the Madhouse Chapter in Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities Geoffrey C. Howes 9. Reason Dazzled: Klimt, Krakauer and the Eyes of the Medusa Luke Heighton

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10. Mapping the Sanatorium: Heinrich Obersteiner and the Art of Psychiatric Patients in Oberdöbling around 1900 Anna Lehninger

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11. The Württemberg Asylum of Schussenried: A Psychiatric Space and Its Encounter with Literature and Culture from the ‘Outside’ Thomas Müller and Frank Kuhn

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Select Bibliography

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Notes on Contributors

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FIGURES

d Figure 0.1. Oskar Kokoschka, Portrait of Ludwig Ritter von Janikowski, 1909, oil on canvas, 60.2 x 55.2 cm. Private Collection, Courtesy Neue Galerie, New York.

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Figure 1.1. ‘Madness and Modernity’, Wellcome Collection. Installation View of Section 1: The Tower of Fools. Wellcome Library, London.

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Figure 1.2. ‘Madness and Modernity’, Wellcome Collection. Installation View of Section 2: The Modernist Mental Hospital. Wellcome Library, London.

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Figure 1.3. ‘Madness and Modernity’, Wellcome Collection. Installation View of Section 4: The Therapeutic Spectrum, and Section 5: The Pathological Artist. Wellcome Library, London.

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Figure 1.4. ‘Madness and Modernity’, Wellcome Collection. Installation View of Section 5: The Pathological Artist and Section 6: The Patient Artist. Wellcome Library, London.

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Figure 4.1. Sanatorium Dr Schalk, 2005 (known as Villa Ambasador). Photographed by the author, June 2005.

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Figure 5.1. Fr Kneipp advocates life reform at Bad Worishofen (1904). Postcard. Collection of author.

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Figure 5.2. Levico: Grand Hotel des Bains (c.1906). Postcard. Collection of author.

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Figure 5.3. Weisser Hirsch, Dresden: Men’s Air Bath (1909) Postcard. Collection of author.

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Figure 6.1. Franz Xaver Winterhalter, Empress Elisabeth, 1865, oil on canvas, Hofburg, Vienna.

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Figure 6.2. Ludwig Angerer, Portrait of Empress Elisabeth, 1864 Bildarchiv der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek Wien.

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Figure 6.3. Anonymous, Elisabeth and Baronin Rothschild in Geneva, 1898 Bildarchiv der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek Wien.

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Figure 7.1. Gustav Jagerspacher, caricature of Peter Altenberg (Midnight: The Midday Meal). Published in Der liebe Augustin, no. 13 (1904), 190.

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Figure 7.2. Gustav Jagerspacher, caricature of Peter Altenberg (6 : The Attack of Madness). Published in Der liebe Augustin, no. 13 (1904), 191.

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Figure 7.3. Interior of Peter Altenberg’s room in Hotel Graben, 1914. Wien Museum.

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Figure 9.1. L. Krakauer, ‘Ex libris Dr Wilhelm Stekel’, c. 1912. Sammlung Prinzhorn der Psychiatrischen Universitätsklinik Heidelberg.

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Figure 9.2. Gustav Klimt, Nuda Veritas, reproduced in Ver Sacrum, 1898.

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Figure 9.3. L. Krakauer, ‘Ex libris Dr Wilhelm Stekel’, c. 1912. Sammlung Prinzhorn der Psychiatrischen Universitätsklinik Heidelberg.

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Figure 10.1. Die Privatheilanstalt zu Oberdöbling, View of the Main Building, around 1890, Leipzig-Vienna, 1891).

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Figure 10.2. Map of the Privatheilanstalt zu Oberdöbling, around 1890, Leipzig-Vienna, 1891).

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Figure 10.3. Mrs A. (Case Nr. 284), Untitled (View of the Main Building), undated, pencil and coating paint on paper, 18.4 x 27.5 cm, Inv. Nr. 3391, Sammlung Prinzhorn der Psychiatrischen Universitätsklinik Heidelberg.

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Figure 10.4. Count Carl Széchényi (Mr Sz., Case Nr. 290), Sie gehören zum Profeßor Obersteiner nach Oberdöbling, undated, pencil and ink on paper, 21 x 34 cm, Inv. Nr. 3404 fol. 2r, Sammlung Prinzhorn der Psychiatrischen Universitätsklinik Heidelberg.

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Figure 11.1. Albert Krezdorn (left) and Albert Uhl (right), c. 1910. All rights with the authors.

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Figure 11.2. The asylum’s newspaper and magazine, the ‘Schallwellen’, 1890s to 1930s.

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INTRODUCTION

d Gemma Blackshaw and Sabine Wieber

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n 14 October 1909, the artist Oskar Kokoschka travelled in a southeasterly direction from Vienna to what is now the city’s fourteenth district of Penzing, a densely wooded area that climbs up towards the eastern reaches of the Austrian Alps. On the request of his patron, the architect Adolf Loos, Kokoschka was to undertake a portrait commission at Vienna’s newly opened psychiatric asylum, the Lower Austrian Provincial Institution for the Care and Cure of the Mentally Ill and for Nervous Disorders ‘am Steinhof ’, which opened in 1907 (Figure 0.1). The circumstances of this journey were interesting enough for Kokoschka to record the date and location of the portrait-sitting on the back of the canvas. The subject of the portrait was Ludwig Ritter von Janikowski, a Vienna-based doctor of law and an inspector for the Imperial and Royal Ministry of Railways. Janikowski was connected through shared literary interests to the satirist Karl Kraus’s circle (which included Loos and Kokoschka), and although his patient records no longer exist, Kokoschka relayed in his autobiography that he was institutionalised at Steinhof for the advanced stages of syphilis. The sitting was memorable for Janikowski insisting that he teach Kokoschka how to smoke using his own, chewed pipe: ‘Now, I did not want to learn in the first place, and to take his pipe in my mouth took a major effort of will. But he insisted, and in the end, out of the kindness of my heart, I gave in; he never noticed how much it revolted me’.1 Letters from Janikowski to Kraus indicate that he was first admitted to the statefinanced asylum area of Steinhof in February 1909, some eight months before his visit from Kokoschka.2 One year later, in February 1910, Janikowski was writing to Kraus from the privately-funded sanatorium area of Steinhof, although the exact date of his move from one part of the hospital to the other and the reason for this transfer is not known.3 The increasing severity of his syphilitic symptoms,

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Figure 0.1 Oskar Kokoschka, Portrait of Ludwig Ritter von Janikowski, 1909, oil on canvas, 60.2 x 55.2 cm. Private Collection, Courtesy Neue Galerie, New York.

perhaps combined with a desire to return to Poland, his country of birth, could explain a further relocation to another sanatorium near Warsaw, where he died in July 1911.4 As Kraus concluded in his obituary published in Die Fackel: ‘that great soul of his has returned home’.5 The journeys undertaken by Janikowski and Kokoschka to asylums and sanatoriums in the former Austro-Hungarian Empire, and in particular the crisscrossing of their paths both inside and outside such institutions, are material examples of the theme of this anthology – the mapping of mental illness – but they also operate metaphorically. The anxiety-inducing lesson in pipe-smoking offers us a rare glimpse into the interaction of a patient with a visitor who – in the

Introduction

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process of conversation, saliva-mixing and portrait-painting – journey into each other’s state of being, thus momentarily dissolving the boundary that separates sanity from insanity. As George Revill and Richard Wrigley argued in the introduction of their anthology Pathologies of Travel: The material and metaphorical practices of travel negotiate the boundaries between culture and nature, individual and society, wilderness and civilization, deviancy and conformity, health and sickness, producing moral geographies simultaneously in the mind, of the body and on the ground.6

The essays in this anthology are all concerned with the permeability of these boundaries between such territories as sanity and insanity, neurosis and psychosis, as they were traversed – often time and time again – by modern subjects; a permeability that Janikowski, for example, even insisted upon, briefly empowered in his role as portrait sitter (as opposed to psychiatric patient) to demand that Kokoschka smoke his pipe. Janikowski’s portrait continues to undertake comparable material and metaphorical journeys of its own. From its first unveiling at the Galerie Paul Cassirer in Berlin in 1910 to its subsequent display in Hagen (1910), Karlsbad and Vienna (1911), Zürich (1913) and New York and San Francisco (1915), the portrait had an early history of travelling across Europe and the Atlantic. From the 1920s onwards it has moved from one private collection to another, by way of commercial galleries and auction houses in Vienna and New York (its current location), and has been displayed fairly regularly in temporary exhibitions in both Europe and the United States.7 Throughout this time, art historians, curators and critics have used it to exemplify the psychological fragility and creative brilliance of Vienna’s modernists (two qualities that are considered inextricably linked) and to bolster myths of Kokoschka as an artist-genius, able to both divine and pictorially represent subjects’ troubled states of mind. Early in this reception history, the art historian Hans Tietze signalled Janikowski’s illness and internment in Steinhof in his review of its first public display in Vienna at the Hagenbund in 1911.8 However, from this moment on – and in keeping with the persistent dominance of modernist approaches to fine art practice in Vienna circa 1900, described by Leo Lensing as ‘connoisseurship over context’ – Janikowski’s own, lived experience of mental illness and the highly particular circumstances of this portrait commission at Steinhof are rarely engaged with.9 It wasn’t until the opening of the exhibition Madness and Modernity: Kunst und Wahn in Wien um 1900 at the Wien Museum (Vienna, 2010), that the portrait journeyed back to Steinhof in the context of a room display that included film footage of the psychiatric institution as it stands today, a model of the complex and a series of watercolour drawings illustrating sanatorium interiors produced around 1907, and Janikowski’s letters written during his time as a patient there. The diplomatic negotiations necessary to secure the loan of the portrait

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for this display (which the private owner would not permit to be shown at the exhibition’s first venue, the Wellcome Collection, London, 2009), along with the considerable cost of travel and insurance, point to other journeys into the fraught political and economic territories of Viennese modern art collecting and display; journeys that neither Janikowski nor Kokoschka could have anticipated as they shared that bitten pipe. Leslie Topp reflects on these issues and the experience of curating the Madness and Modernity exhibition in her essay ‘The Mad Objects of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Journeys, Contexts and Dislocations’. Focusing on ‘the disorienting history of mobility of the objects themselves’ – a history that we have only touched upon in this abridged provenance of Janikowski’s portrait – Topp explores the difficulties in seeking to reunite objects of differing value that were once located in asylums, sanatoriums, apartments and galleries; objects displaced time and time again, momentarily ‘returned’ to an ‘original’ context that, ultimately, can only ever be evoked artificially and imperfectly. Topp’s essay opens this anthology that rediscovers the lost context of works such as the portrait of Janikowski; a context specific to Austria-Hungary when radical and crucially related changes occurred in the fields of psychiatry, the visual arts and culture more broadly. A conference organised by the editors of this anthology entitled Journeys into Madness: Representing Mental Illness in the Arts and Sciences, 1850–1930 (Wellcome Trust, 2007) attempted to reach scholars outside Austro-Hungarian studies. The papers confirmed that though certain figures in other European countries were involved in rethinking madness as a collective, cultural construct and mental illness as an individual, medical condition (sometimes simultaneously, such as in the work of Jean-Martin Charcot at La Salpêtrière, Paris), this was not done with the same single-minded intensity that characterised those working within Austria-Hungary and across a variety of disciplines. In attempting to stretch beyond the boundaries of the empire, the conference paradoxically highlighted how utterly central madness and mental illness was to the articulation of Austro-Hungarian identity, touching the lives of so many. Moreover, in keeping with the mobile, migrant, multi-cultural diversity of the empire itself, the relationships of subjects to madness and mental illness were illuminatingly multifarious. From the embrace of a modernist hospital such as Otto Wagner’s Steinhof as a utopian world in architecture, to the protests of patients writing letters whilst confined behind its walls, subjects encountered madness and mental illness concurrently and in diametrically opposed ways. Our differentiation of the terms ‘madness’ and ‘mental illness’ imposes an artificial order that is maintained in this introductory essay only. In keeping with the diverse ways in which subjects produced madness and experienced mental illness, the essays of this anthology do not adhere to a single notion of either, and in the case of some – such as Gemma Blackshaw’s essay on the writer/patient Peter Altenberg – deliberately blur the two, using them interchangeably to show how slippery such distinctions could be. As editors we have attempted to strike a

Introduction

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balance between essays that deal with madness as a collective, culturally situated phenomenon and others that consider mental illness as an individual, embodied experience. Accordingly, some of the essays are concerned with how madness was discursively produced in the literature, portraiture, health tourism and psychoanalysis of the period, with authors drawing on fictional narratives, newspaper articles, musical scores, photographs and caricatures, architectural statements and medical treatises. Others attend to the details of the lives of subjects suffering from the wide range of conditions included within the category of mental illness at this time, from anorexia and alcoholism to syphilis and psychosis, drawing on diaries, memoirs and correspondence; patient case-history notes; patient artwork and annual reports on asylums and sanatoriums, which enable us to reconstruct the lived experience of architecture, therapy and patient society. Further essays, particularly those concerned with high-profile subjects such as Blackshaw on Altenberg, Jill Steward on Alma Mahler, and Sabine Wieber on the Austrian empress Elisabeth, knowingly oscillate between the cultural/collective and the medical/individual. Wieber, for example, considers the ways in which the diet and exercise obsessions of a celebrity figure like ‘Sisi’ could simultaneously impose and be subject to a disturbingly neurasthenic and utterly fashionable femininity. This brief overview of the kaleidoscope of sources consulted in the essays indicates the anthology’s attempt to stretch beyond literature and fine art (the two fields that first attracted the attention of scholars interested in madness in Vienna circa 1900), to reach scholars from other fields, such as medical and architectural history, musicology and sociology. In doing so, the anthology is deeply indebted to Carl Schorske’s pioneering interdisciplinary study of Viennese modernism, which first opened up the field to the array of archives and interpretive frameworks embraced by the authors of this anthology.10 While acknowledging the importance of Schorske’s methodology, the essays in this anthology distance themselves from his central thesis of Austria’s failed liberalism engendering a withdrawal of Vienna’s artists and intellectuals from public life into the private sphere. In this way, the anthology participates in the larger re-articulation of the ‘Schorskean paradigm’,11 first proposed by Steven Beller’s important 2001 collection Rethinking Vienna 1900. More specifically, however, Journeys into Madness asks us to rethink how Schorske, and even more so, scholars embracing Schorske’s idea, tends to reduce the complex and contested territory of psychiatry in Austria-Hungary to Vienna, to Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis and in particular to his notion of an Oedipal revolt of the sons against their liberal fathers. As borne out by this collection, Freud’s investigation of the mind through his treatment of predominantly female and middle-class patients suffering from various neuroses was one particular journey into madness, but it was certainly not the only one. The anthology takes the decisive step to embed Freud’s explorations within a broad spectrum of responses – from the medical to the juridical, and

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the architectural to the intellectual – to the perceived epidemic of nervous and mental illness in the empire at this time. Beller’s contribution to the anthology thus puts into relief the furrowed theoretical and methodological terrain that must be traversed in any sustained engagement with this Vienna-centric historiography. Hinging his discussion on the evocative idea that Freud’s endeavours were driven by his attempt to solve two riddles – that of ‘Man’ and that of ‘the Man Moses’ – Beller convincingly argues that ‘it is only in the context, the domain if you will, in which Freud lived and worked, that we will find the clues to why and how Freud sought the answers to these riddles’. Beller takes the welcome step of moving away from the famous case-studies and paradigms to consider the importance of the Jewish social experience of Vienna circa 1900, and specifically the Jewish exegetical tradition of interpretation, on the development of psychoanalysis – a tradition that was alive and well in the intellectual and overwhelmingly Jewish circles of the Austrian capital at this time. Beller provocatively argues that ‘psychoanalysis was … seen by contemporaries and by Freud himself, as a liberation, an emancipation, from the very Austrian, Catholic, conservative – in a word Viennese – context in which they found themselves’. Freud’s specter may hover over the collection, yet – significantly – Gavin Plumley is the only other author in the anthology to directly engage with him in an essay on Gustav Mahler’s ‘symphonies and psychosis’, discussing the enigmatic meeting between Freud and Mahler in 1910 as a point of entry into ‘the dialogue between the ideas of an auditory space and the “unconscious” of Berggasse-born psychoanalysis’. Since the collection’s theme is one of journeys, all contributions evoke the notion of travel – in its material and metaphorical instantiations. However, a number of essays deal more directly with concrete aspects of travel, health and mental illness. Steward’s essay, for example, shows how Austrian health tourism embodied upper-middle-class travel to fashionable health resorts and spas made by Central Europe’s expanding railway system. In search of respite from the stresses of modern urban life, Steward proposes that ‘newly prosperous individuals’ travelled across the empire to stay at ‘different kinds of health resorts and institutions that catered for the needs of health and leisure seekers c. 1900 in an increasingly competitive marketplace’. Nicola Imrie’s essay invites us to take a close look at these new destinations of health tourism by exploring parallels in architectural and cultural contexts of sanatoriums for nervous disorders and grand hotels. Through a series of fascinating case studies, Imrie unveils how owners of private sanatoria for nervous disorders wishing to court the business of affluent patients took advantage of the spatial layout of grand hotels not only to foster a sense of exclusivity based on social class and the tradition among the wealthy to seek healthcare at spa resorts but also to underline the – illusion of – the exclusion of patients suffering from dreaded psychiatric conditions.

Introduction

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Blackshaw also considers the tensions and ambiguities of rest and recuperation packages and sanatorium/asylum hybrids for the middle classes through tracing Altenberg’s movements from hotels to sanatoriums of increasing levels of strictness; movements perceived by his contemporaries as a crossing of the terrain of mental illness itself, from the territory of neurosis to psychosis. Resisting the urge to retroactively diagnose a figure who strategically constructed an identity for himself as the mad writer, Blackshaw instead focuses on the ‘revealingly complex perspective Altenberg gives us on madness in Vienna circa 1900 as a lived reality and an authorial persona, a debilitating personal illness and a regenerative creative resource, a place of exile and a means of cultural belonging, an ‘authentic’ experience and an ‘inauthentic’ representation, and a condition to be remedied and a commodity to be protected’. Portrait-caricature played an important role in the production and dissemination of Altenberg’s identity, and this emphasis on the individual’s sophisticated use of visual culture relates directly to Wieber’s re-examination of the Empress Elisabeth’s cult of beauty. Through an engagement with Elisabeth’s obsessive preoccupation with self-presentation and selfrepresentation, Wieber unveils the complicated and fraught constructions of late nineteenth-century femininity ‘that pushed Elisabeth to the brink of mental and physical disintegration’. By tracing the Empress’ journey from celebrated beauty to haunted eccentric, Wieber explores Elisabeth’s shifting activation of her body in negotiating a relationship between the self and the body social. Altenberg’s identity as – to quote his Vienna-based doctor, Arthur Schnitzler, ‘a professional neurotic’,12 calls up the arbitrary yet crucial demarcations of borderlines between sane and insane, insider and outsider, that patrolled much of the engagement with madness and mental illness in Austria-Hungary and that continues to shape our present conceptualisations of Viennese modernity circa 1900. As Geoff Howes notes in his re-reading of the madhouse chapter in Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities, the material and metaphorical journey in and out of sanatoriums ‘is not just madhouse tourism; it is a journey to the bizarre limits of what is commonly regarded as normal’. Concepts of diversity, displacement and permeability are central to his appreciation of Musil who places ‘a multiplicity of perspectives – including those of the mad – in relation to each other, without a definitive arrangement, and without one perspective – whether psychiatric, anti-psychiatric, or otherwise – dominating the others’. This anthology meets Musil’s concern to show multiplicity over singularity and with this in mind, it takes the important step of re-integrating discussions of modern art practice in Vienna with what has been termed ‘Outsider Art’ practice. Luke Heighton explores the common ground shared by ‘insider’ Gustav Klimt and ‘outsider’ L. Krakauer, plotting their shared ‘cultural, epistemological and formal similarities’, and the use of madness in Klimt’s work to evoke ‘states of hyper reflexivity and ontological indeterminacy, inter-subjectivity and plurality’.

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Anna Lehninger considers works by the enigmatically named Frau A. and Herr Sz. (who she has identified as the Hungarian count Carl Philipp Maria Széchényi): patients at the Obersteiner clinic in Oberdöbling, that were sent to Hans Prinzhorn for his collection of the ‘artistry of the mentally ill’. By re-activating a dialogue between the art works and the patient files held in the Obersteiner archive, Lehninger takes the reader on a ‘virtual journey’ through the clinic along the two different yet continually overlapping paths of patient and doctor. In their essay on the Württemberg Asylum of Schussenried in southern Germany, just across the Austrian border, Thomas Müller and Frank Kuhn consider the enterprising and surprising endeavour to engage patients in the production of a journal to educate audiences outside the mental hospital on matters related to art and culture. Their step outside the borders of Austria-Hungary to reflect upon the situation inside the Empire is historically driven. As Howes notes, Musil’s madhouse chapter has become synonymous with Steinhof and the complexities of Austrian identity construction, yet the chapter was based upon Musil’s visit to the manicomio S. Maria della Pietá in Rome. We know that the production of patient journals distributed beyond the walls of the mental hospital happened in Austria-Hungary, although research is yet to be done in this field; we hope this anthology will foster new archival work to bring these practices into meaning in the specifically Austrian context. The notion of a journey into uncharted territory defines each of the essays in this collection. While the subjects of these different journeys vary, from patients to doctors, psychoanalysts to criminologists, artists to writers, architects to composers, royalty to tourists, they share a fascinating and revealingly diverse engagement with the material and metaphorical aspects of both madness and mental illness in Austria-Hungary. It is precisely this diversity of voices, experiences and representations that continues to appeal to us today. Almost thirty years after the publication of Schorske’s first inroad into interdisciplinary scholarship, this collection of essays offers new insights into this time and place by re-introducing the importance of madness in the production, dissemination and consumption of culture. Essentially, this collection shows that Austria-Hungary’s engagement with mental illness and psychiatry was much more dynamic and contested than a more traditional scholarly focus on Sigmund Freud allows us to see. But Journeys into Madness also brings to light a hitherto underestimated interaction between psychiatry and culture. By bringing a distinctly interdisciplinary approach to concepts of health, illness and disease, this anthology thus makes an exciting contribution to the field of medical humanities. But it also asks us to rethink the medical humanities as a way of enriching medical culture through perspectives from the arts and humanities, because each essay in this collection demonstrates that carefully historicised medical knowledge opens up equally exciting vistas in the humanities.

Introduction

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Notes The editors gratefully acknowledge the support of the British Academy, the University of Plymouth and the Wellcome Trust towards the organisation of the Journeys into Madness conference (Wellcome Collection Conference Centre, 2007). For their responses and helpful suggestions, the editors would also like to thank Dr Edward J. Neather, Professor Leo Lensing, and the two anonymous readers of the anthology manuscript. 1. O. Kokoschka, My Life, trans. D. Britt (New York, 1974), 42. 2. Letter dated 19 February 1909. Wien Bibliothek im Rathaus, Handschriftensammlung, I.N. 169.152. Information on Janikowski’s period in Steinhof is thin on the ground, and what does exist is contradictory. According to a communication from Steinhof dated 29 August 1909, Janikowski voluntarily had himself committed to the sanatorium on 28 August 1909. A second entry says he was in Steinhof from 21 December 1909 to 10 October 1910 (it is unclear whether this was the sanatorium or the asylum), and then registered in Rekawinkel in Lower Austria. A third entry says he was registered as living at Reissnerstrasse in Vienna’s second district from 20 November 1908 until 8 May 1910, when he moved to Steinhof. This information was provided by the Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv; the documents themselves are the Meldeunterlagen (historical residents’ registration records). 3. Wien Bibliothek im Rathaus, Handschriftensammlung, I.N. 169.152; 169.159; 174.641. 4. Janikowski was born in Kraków, Poland, on 24 July 1868; Die Fackel, Heft 331–332 (30 September 1911): 64. 5. Ibid. 6. G. Revill and R. Wrigley, eds., Pathologies of Travel (Amsterdam, 2000), 3. 7. For provenance and exhibition history see J. Winkler and K. Erling, eds., Oskar Kokoschka: Die Gemälde 1906–29 (Salzburg, 1995), 14–15. 8. H. Tietze, ‘Ausstellung Jungwiener Künstler im Hagenbund’, Fremdenblatt (10 February 1911), 21–22. 9. L. Lensing, ‘A Portrait Gallery of Ghosts: The “Bad Likenesses” and Tortured Self-Portraits of Oskar Kokoschka’ (review of exhibition catalogue: T. Natter, ed., Oskar Kokoschka: Early Portraits from Vienna and Berlin 1909–1914, New Haven and London, 2002), Times Literary Supplement, 17 May 2002, 18. 10. C. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1980). 11. S. Beller, ‘Introduction’, in Rethinking Vienna 1900, ed. S. Beller (New York, 2001), 11. 12. A. Schnitzler, My Youth in Vienna (London, 1971), 178.

Chapter 1

THE MAD OBJECTS OF FIN-DE-SIÈCLE VIENNA Journeys, Contexts and Dislocations in the Exhibition ‘Madness and Modernity’

d Leslie Topp

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etween 2004 and 2008, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) of Great Britain funded a collaborative research project on the links between mental illness, psychiatry and the visual arts in Vienna and the Habsburg Empire between 1890 and 1914, one of the results of which was the 2009–10 exhibition ‘Madness and Modernity’. There is an impulse towards completeness in sustained collaborative interdisciplinary research such as that undertaken for the AHRC project. By devoting the close, ongoing attention of several dedicated individuals to a particular topic (madness as a cultural artefact) in a defined location and time period (Vienna circa 1900), and by breaking down disciplinary barriers in order to shed light on that topic from as many angles as possible, we seek to fill in blanks, to overcome the fragmentation and losses caused by the operations of disciplinary specialisation and grand art historical narratives. A large-scale loan exhibition can be a way of pushing this research forward by focusing attention on the material objects that constitute the concrete basis of such a project. It can also be a dramatic way of confronting viewers with the physical results of such an interdisciplinary approach through surprising juxtapositions, especially between art and non-art in the context of a format (the loan exhibition) that is still associated with ‘high art’.

Mad Objects of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: The Exhibition ‘Madness and Modernity’

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Such an exhibition, when seen as a finished product, and accompanied by a scholarly publication, involves the very public claiming and definition of a field of knowledge and interpretation. But at the same time, and possibly more than any other form of scholarly ‘output’, it is a construct beholden to and formed by numerous unpredictable contingencies. The journey towards the exhibition opening involves many dead ends and detours and requires the curators to grapple with the histories and discourses of institutions in and outside of the art world, of exhibition design, of media reception and more. My focus here, using ‘Madness and Modernity’ as a case study, is on how the act at the heart of the curating process, the assembling of objects into what Francis Haskell called an ‘ephemeral museum’, confronts us with the disorienting history of mobility of the objects themselves.1 We started out seeking to re-establish the forgotten links between art, madness and psychiatry in Vienna circa 1900, to stage a kind of homecoming in the evoked and imagined spaces of asylums, sanatoria and Viennese galleries. The exhibition did embody that ambition, but at the same time it bore multiple traces of the dislocations, changes of status and disappearances of objects and groups of objects (not all of them actually in the exhibition) in the intervening hundred years. It also drew attention to a kind of original displacement that characterised many of the ‘mad’ objects of fin-de-siècle Vienna.

Reconnecting The exhibition, the first version of which was curated by Gemma Blackshaw and myself, was called ‘Madness and Modernity: Mental Illness and the Visual Arts in Vienna 1900’. It took place at the Wellcome Collection in London from 1 April to 28 June 2009. From 20 January to 2 May 2010, a slightly altered version of the exhibition, curated by Blackshaw along with Sabine Wieber, was mounted at Vienna’s Wien Museum.2 The premise of ‘Madness and Modernity’ was that the progressive visual arts in Vienna circa 1900 were linked in concrete ways to the practices and spaces of psychiatry and to mental illness as filtered through both psychiatry and popular culture. The range of ways in which modernists in the visual arts engaged with madness, from cure and control to celebration and imitation, was linked to Viennese society’s fascination with and deep ambivalence towards mental illness and its treatment. Our art historical point was not simply that the art objects of the period need to be reinserted in the context of their time and place. At least since Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture was published in 1980, Vienna 1900 has been seen as quintessentially interdisciplinary, a place and time whose art can only be understood in its cultural context, or, more specifically, in the context of other high-culture phenomena. The impact of Schorske’s book has also meant that the modernism of the period has been seen as a markedly inward-

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looking one – the ‘politics and culture’ of Schorske’s title are connected in his argument only insofar as the latter, culture, is shaped by its withdrawal from the former, politics. A group of four large exhibitions in Venice, Vienna, Paris and New York between 1984 and 1986 constructed an image of Vienna 1900 as a hothouse of artistic and intellectual innovation.3 The Vienna version of the exhibition, produced by the predecessor to the Wien Museum, contained both ephemeral, low-status objects such as posters and cartoons and canonical works of art, architecture and design, albeit in separate ‘history’ and ‘art’ sections.4 In the three other versions of the exhibition, the ‘historical’ material was scaled back to various degrees and the emphasis put squarely on the visual arts. ‘Madness and Modernity,’ in contrast, displayed Egon Schiele self-portraits alongside photographs from a medical journal, and Wiener Werkstätte furniture alongside therapeutic exercise equipment. These juxtapositions signalled our intention to reconnect aspects of the progressive visual arts in Vienna with aspects of a particular area of activity and experience, which is normally seen as beyond the bounds of ‘Vienna as the birthplace of modernism’ – that is, psychiatry and mental illness. Of course Sigmund Freud and his development of psychoanalysis in Vienna from the 1890s onwards has always been central to the construction of Vienna 1900, and he was featured in the Vienna exhibitions of 1984–86, though more as a cultural prophet than as a practising doctor. Our choice of a particular context within which to situate progressive visual arts – that is, psychiatry and mental illness as opposed to any other area we might have chosen to focus on – was thus in part historiographically driven. We wanted to ask people to rethink the assumption that artists’ engagement with things to do with the psyche was exclusively or even significantly an engagement with Freud’s theories and that it took place on an abstract, disembodied plane. We anticipated that visitors might expect an exhibition of acute artistic insights into the operations of disordered minds. Instead the exhibition argued that artists – and architects and designers – encountered mental illness and psychiatry as something diverse, very much embodied, and situated in specific spaces. The visitor’s pathway through the exhibition – designed by architect Calum Storrie – was marked by a series of doorways, which emphasised the importance of particular sites. Freud’s consulting room door framed the entrance to the exhibition, but was soon left behind as the visitor journeyed through portals from a variety of psychiatric and art institutions.5 In terms of exhibition genres and techniques, ‘Madness and Modernity’ was part of a trend that was established, if not mainstream, or at least not mainstream in art institutions. History museums, including medical and science history museums such as the Wellcome Collection, have presented the material and ideological complexity of past times and places through the meaningful juxtaposition of objects of varying value and permanence since the 1970s. Andrea Hauser has analysed display techniques in German history museums beginning in the 1980s,

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in which seemingly paradoxical combinations of high value and ‘banal’, everyday objects sought to arouse curiosity and undermine a ‘hierarchy of objects’ she traces to the nineteenth century.6 Ken Arnold describes how in a 1993 exhibition he departed from the previous approach to exhibitions used by the Wellcome, which had focused on ‘elaborately produced, finely finished works’, and which had ignored social and cultural contexts. For Arnold, re-establishing context meant including ‘more haphazard and ephemeral materials’.7 The motivations for contextual displays could vary widely: while in German history museums the use of surprising juxtapositions was a conscious departure from the tradition of the seamless, all-encompassing ‘context’ of the period room, in British museums of history of science, the use of a plethora of diverse objects in exhibitions was embraced as an antidote to trends towards minimalist design and aestheticisation, on the one hand, and, on the other, the removal of objects from exhibitions altogether, in favour of high-tech ‘virtual’ displays.8 Art institutions have not been immune to these developments. In 1995, Carol Duncan still saw the ‘aesthetic’ hang, isolating objects and suppressing meanings other than formal ones, as the dominant museological approach in institutions displaying Western art.9 But already from the late 1970s and early 1980s, in a series of experimental exhibitions at the Pompidou Centre, canonical works of modern art were displayed alongside documents and non-art objects.10 The first decade of the twenty-first century has seen what could be called ‘contextual’ hangs, including recognised art along with low-status ephemeral objects, used relatively frequently, in both temporary exhibitions and in the installation of permanent collections, most dramatically at London’s Tate Modern and Tate Britain. Critics of the aesthetic hang emphasise its extreme selectivity and the ways in which it naturalises unequal power relations, especially by reinforcing blind spots and the marginalisation of the non-canonical. The contingent, selective aspects of the contextual hang can be masked by this critical discourse. We speak of putting objects ‘back into context’, of ‘reinserting’ them in their original field of discourse, of ‘re-establishing context’, as if the displacement of the object into a museum context can be reversed or healed through museological means. Is it possible to curate, or reflect on curating, an exhibition that emphasises context in a way that acknowledges both the journey and the impossibility of homecoming? What follows is an attempt at such a reflection.

Multiple Displacements ‘Madness and Modernity’ was presented in six sections, each of which constructed a particular aspect of the argument about the connections between madness, psychiatry and the visual arts in Vienna. Reflecting on the processes by which each section came together, on the histories of the objects included, on the loans that

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we desired but could not secure and on the curatorial techniques employed, I explore the role of displacement and contingency in the exhibition-as-process. The first section, ‘The Tower of Fools’, showed fine art objects and psychiatric spaces from the late eighteenth century – objects and spaces that resonated with the concerns of artists and psychiatrists in the circa 1900 period (Figure 1.1). In the centre was a model of the so-called Narrenturm, the ‘Tower of Fools’, an institution for the dangerous insane built in 1784 as part of the Vienna general hospital. Four Charakterköpfe (character heads) by Viennese sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt, from the 1770s, gazed upon the model in the centre of the room from a curved pedestal occupying about a third of the circumference of the partcircular space, and beyond the model at the video and sound installation, commissioned from artist David Bickerstaff, in which films projected on two screens obliquely abutting each other showed cameras moving from outside the Narrenturm building, through its courtyards and along its circular corridors. This combination of objects and installations was indicative of a pattern throughout the exhibition: the drifting, uprooted character and uncertain, in some cases obscure trajectories both of the objects themselves and of the individuals and intentions of which they were traces. The Messerschmidt heads were included because of the way in which they were received – at the time of their creation by the artist, in exile from the Viennese art world, and then again when a group of them was rediscovered and exhibited in a contemporary exhibition in

Figure 1.1 ‘Madness and Modernity’, Wellcome Collection. Installation View of Section 1: The Tower of Fools. Wellcome Library, London.

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1907 – as the bizarre and authentic products of a mad artist with mysterious intentions.11 During the psychiatric building boom of the early twentieth century, the Narrenturm stood as a kind of originary monument of the concerted and ordered (if not humane, or entirely rational) confinement of those whose raving mania had uprooted them and made them a threat to public order. But the building itself had, by the end of the nineteenth century, been decommissioned, cut adrift from its original use and crumbling. The model, probably created for (or at least included in) a public education display in 1898 on the care of the insane, ‘past and present’, used precise detail and a cut-away section showing the interiors of twelve cells, to achieve historical and architectural clarity, but explanations for the basic features of the unique building, such as its circular form, remained absent.12 The moving cameras of the video installation showed crumbling plaster on the facades, and provided glimpses of skeletons in glass cases in the corridors of the building – traces of the function of the building since 1971 as a museum for pathological anatomy, underfunded by the Austrian state (and, more allusively, ghosts of the ‘dangerous insane’ who lived and died in the Narrenturm in its eighty-two-year history as a madhouse). The next section, ‘The Modernist Mental Hospital’, announced the ambition of the exhibition to situate the visual arts’ engagement with psychiatry and mental illness in fin-de-siècle Vienna not on the level of theory, but in specific spatial contexts (Figure 1.2). The section focused on a single – though immense and

Figure 1.2. ‘Madness and Modernity’, Wellcome Collection. Installation View of Section 2: The Modernist Mental Hospital. Wellcome Library, London.

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spectacular – Viennese institution. The Lower Austrian Provincial Institution for the Mental and Nervous Disorders ‘am Steinhof ’ was opened in 1907 as Vienna’s main psychiatric hospital and the largest asylum at the time in Europe. The architecture of the institution, designed in part by Otto Wagner, represents an uneasy marriage between modernist utopianism on the one hand, and, on the other, an effort among psychiatrists and politicians to reform the asylum and present it as a rational, transparent and benign instrument of social control.13 The Steinhof church has been featured in several Vienna-centred exhibitions, including the 1985 ‘Traum und Wirklichkeit Wien’ exhibition in Vienna, where Wagner’s graphically striking presentation drawings were displayed alongside a model of the church purpose-built for the exhibition.14 The wish list of loans for ‘Madness and Modernity’ included the Wagner drawings, which we secured, and the 1985 model, owned by the Wien Museum, which was not available. In its place we requested and were granted the loan of an equally large-scale and detailed, but somewhat less crisp and pristine model, owned by the hospital itself, with an evocative but uncertain history that itself became part of the multi-layered, associative quality of the exhibition. The story handed down by the hospital’s employees is that the model was one of several built wholly or in part by patients as part of an occupational therapy workshop in the 1920s or 1930s. When we went to see the model we were taken through a series of rooms in a half-empty pavilion in the institution containing aging models of the asylum theatre and patient pavilions, as well as of Viennese landmarks such as the giant Ferris wheel in the Prater. In 1997, the church model underwent a restoration (including enhancements) by the clients of an occupational therapy clinic for alcoholics in the hospital.15 In ‘Madness and Modernity,’ the church model, presented with a brief commentary on its origins, but very much in a ‘clean’ museological mode, dominated one end of an axially arranged space, and was surrounded by Wagner’s presentation drawings. It bore the traces of its own origins within the institution, but also filled in for and gestured towards the 1985 model, a product of the way the church shed its psychiatric roots to become an icon of modern architecture. A model from 1908, constructed by the model maker Erwin Pendl and showing the entire institution, is, by contrast, unconnected with the context of art exhibitions. It was probably made as part of an elaborate publicity campaign around the opening of Steinhof. It was acquired from Steinhof by the Technical Museum in 1915 to form part of an installation on the development of hospital architecture and was later loaned back to the hospital for display in the foyer of the administrative building before returning to the Technical Museum’s store.16 By bringing it into contact with the church model and Wagner drawings, we confronted the art historical image of the church with its mirror image in history of medicine, while also reminding viewers of the church’s original context. A second video installation by David Bickerstaff, this one taking the viewer on a journey

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through the entrance gates of the institution (which is still entirely intact), into patient pavilions, winding through the complex and eventually into the restored church (ending up on the platform around the dome’s lantern, from which we see a panoramic view of the institution), shows that the church has never physically been separated from its context, even if, in art historical terms, it very much has. The spectacular marriage of modern architecture and reformed psychiatry offered by the models, drawings and video installation was then questioned and complicated by objects arranged around the periphery of the space. A piece of the physical fabric of the institution – an accidental addition to the loan list, encountered on the visit to see the church model – reminded viewers that, despite the overpowering contrast between the Steinhof ’s open vistas and the claustrophobic interiors of the Narrenturm, confinement was still an undeniable reality in the ‘modernist mental hospital’. This was a door to one of the isolation cells in a pavilion for disturbed or semi-quiet patients, its function indicated by its thickness, single integrated hinge and peephole. It had presumably been removed as physical isolation was abandoned as part of the treatment and management of patients, and for some reason preserved. The yellowed paint mottled with patches of bare wood conveyed the status of the door as psychiatric jetsam. The section also displayed two pairs of objects representing the heads of human beings – psychiatric patients. One was a pair of images in pencil and watercolour, rediscovered in the course of our exhibition research, by Erwin Dom Osen, an artist now forgotten and almost never exhibited but at the time closely associated with Egon Schiele personally and in terms of style. Each drawing depicts a patient whose name and number is given on the bottom corner of the work – according to a letter, the drawings were done in 1913 to illustrate a lecture on pathological expressions in portraiture.17 Their journey after this point is obscure. All we know is that until they were – temporarily – brought to London and Vienna for ‘Madness and Modernity’, they were languishing in a bank vault in a small town in the Austrian Alps, having been claimed, along with other work by Osen, as collateral when a dealer went bankrupt after staging a small exhibition of works by the artist in an effort to revive his reputation. Opposite them were two three-dimensional heads in wax, models made by Karl Henning, a Viennese maker of medical models in wax, showing two men with the condition microcephaly. Research on these heads, spurred by the exhibition, indicates that there are layers of displacement at work here.18 The men seem to have been brothers, born in the 1850s and both patients at another Lower Austrian asylum outside of Vienna, at Gugging. Heinrich Schlöss, who was a senior psychiatrist there, made a study of the two men and had them transferred to the Vienna asylum (the predecessor to Steinhof ) in 1898 so that Henning could sculpt their heads in wax, creating models that Schlöss then presumably used as teaching aids. The brothers then were separated when one grew ill and died in Vienna while the other returned to Gugging; the models ended up in

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Steinhof, where they presumably went with Schlöss when he became director of the new hospital. In 1984 they were given by the hospital to the State Museum of Pathological Anatomy, and are stored on top of a cupboard in its premises in the Narrenturm, the third and oldest asylum building the models have occupied.19 Objects with differing histories and from a range of disciplinary categories were brought together in the ‘Modernist Mental Hospital’ section in order to enhance their mutual meaningfulness. The ‘lower-status’ objects (photographs, medical models, cell door, poster) were not provided as background, or context, for the higher status works by known ‘masters’ of Viennese modernism. Instead, each object served to problematise the others around it. In presenting this institution and its patients, or rather in displaying a range of representations of institution and patients, the aim was not to re-contextualise in the sense of putting displaced things neatly back in their proper places. Instead we wanted to try to recapture the original messiness of this particular field of experience and representation. At the same time, we aimed to convey the imperfect processes by which we strive to reconnect with some kind of original way things were, in view of the physical and discursive scattering of the constituent objects since then. Visitors moved from the ‘Modernist Mental Hospital’, with its architecture and individuals, to the ‘Therapeutic Spectrum’, where furniture and fittings alluded to bodies and minds undergoing transformative treatment in starkly contrasting interior spaces (Figure 1.3). This section juxtaposed the two main compet-

Figure 1.3. ‘Madness and Modernity’, Wellcome Collection. Installation View of Section 4: The Therapeutic Spectrum, and Section 5: The Pathological Artist. Wellcome Library, London.

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ing therapeutic approaches to nervous ailments in Vienna circa 1900 through a presentation of the contrasting approaches to the visual articulation of the interior spaces within which such therapy took place. The Purkersdorf Sanatorium, a private residential clinic for nervous ailments, offered therapies based on a somatic aetiology for nervous ailments. In 1904, Josef Hoffmann and the Wiener Werkstätte designed a new therapeutic building for the sanatorium complex, creating a total work of art that became an icon of modern simplicity and technological progressiveness in histories of both architecture and design. It was received at the time as a therapeutic environment, in which modern design was harnessed as a tool in the treatment of a modern disorder. The building and its interiors shed their medical context in the course of their canonisation. Freud, by contrast, saw the source of neuroses not in the body but in the psyche, and in particular in individual childhood histories and layers of personal emotional experience. Freud’s talking cure, in which the patient’s voice was allowed free rein and particular importance was given to fragments of memory, dreams and layers of experience, took place either in the patient’s own home, or in Freud’s consulting room in his flat in Vienna, and it is the latter (in its circa 1900 state) we invoke in this section, juxtaposing it with the Purkersdorf Sanatorium. It was a place intensely personal to Freud and replete with references to the past, furnished over the years with items each of which had their own associations, and containing Freud’s eclectic collection of prints and antiquities. The section consisted of a long, narrow ‘spectrum’ of objects from the Purkersdorf and Freud interiors, a combination of furniture, fittings, ornaments and medical equipment. We played with the idea of using original objects and mockups to re-create particular rooms from each setting – we were tempted by the idea of being able to inspire appropriate psychological states in the exhibition visitor. In the end we settled on a display mode that evoked the two environments and approaches to therapy in a demonstratively artificial, museological manner. The spectrum of objects was arranged on a podium and ‘read’ from one end to the other, beginning with Wiener Werkstätte light fixtures, chairs and an ashtray from Purkersdorf, continuing with two large pieces of mechanotherapy and electrotherapy equipment of the kind we know were used there and in similar sanatoria, and concluding with a group of antique figures, a pair of prints and an evocation of Freud’s couch, with the original Persian rug and cushions – all objects known to have been in Freud’s possession before 1914. The museological model here comes from design history exhibitions, in which a series of comparable objects, for example chairs, are raised on a podium and aligned in a row to demonstrate evolution or to compel comparisons. It also refers to the convention of the timeline, moving forward through time from one end to the other. What these exhibition conventions allowed us to do was to make an argument and to demonstrate that that was what we were doing. Where re-creations of interiors imply a kind of time travel, the complete and

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authentic reconstitution of a lost context for displaced objects, the spectrum display highlights the artificiality inherent in any exhibition. By displaying objects from Purkersdorf alongside objects from Freud’s consulting rooms, we proposed to the viewer that aspects of the two interiors and the objects we use to evoke them can be better understood in relation to each other than they can as separate entities. Concerted artificiality in the display also seemed more appropriate than a pseudo-return to original context in view of the displacement histories of many these objects. Freud’s study is preserved intact, not in Vienna, but in London, where Freud went into exile after the Anschluss in 1938, bringing what he could with him to his new house in Hampstead. Though Hoffmann’s building still stands in Purkersdorf, its contents, displaced after the forced sale of the sanatorium by its Jewish owners in 1938 and later during a long period of decline, are scattered among museum collections and private collectors.20 The section is also haunted by two enormous absent objects: a pair of two-meter-high ceramic figures of naked, gaunt, writhing women that were made by the Secessionist sculptor Richard Luksch for the Purkersdorf façade, for unknown reasons never installed there, and which we traced to the Museum of Applied Arts in Hamburg.21 To have included them would have opened up a whole other aspect of Purkersdorf for viewers, concerning gender and sexuality, as well as the role of large-scale figurative sculpture in a modernist architectural environment; the visual and spatial configuration of the section would also have been significantly changed. But they were too fragile to travel, and appeared only in the book accompanying the exhibition.

Exhibition Histories In the same physical space as the ‘Therapeutic Spectrum’, on a wall opposite the podium with its line of objects, we included a section introducing part of the fine art dimension of our theme (Figure 1.4, and see Figure 1.3). Egon Schiele’s series of self-portraits from 1910–12 was juxtaposed with photographs of asylum patients with physical deformities taken from the French medical journal Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpêtrière. The visual parallels between the self-portraits and the patient photographs are striking: twisted, gaunt bodies, contorted faces and clenched or splayed hands are displayed against neutral backgrounds; the edges of the frame crowd the human figure and in some cases parts of the body are cropped out of the image. The section proposed that Schiele was looking at these images from the 1890s and early 1900s as he developed – self-consciously and strategically – a vocabulary of the artist-outsider in his self-portraits.22 This argument was a direct challenge to the traditional scholarship on Schiele, which saw him as innovating in isolation, driven by deep-seated alienation – this scholarship takes at face value

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Figure 1.4. ‘Madness and Modernity’, Wellcome Collection. Installation View of Section 5: The Pathological Artist and Section 6: The Patient Artist. Wellcome Library, London.

Schiele’s own self-fashioning as a genius-outsider, and gives the self-portraits central importance. Layers of context are suggested in the ‘Pathological Artist’ for these same self-portraits – first the medical images as a source, undermining the notion of Schiele as a pure high-art original; and indirectly the hard, straight-backed chairs and therapeutic machinery displayed opposite. In a cultural landscape preoccupied with the bodily manifestations of mental disorder, some sought to control the nervous body while others exploited it for its expressive potential. Schiele’s oeuvre had in the past been displayed in a self-referential isolation, with the self-portraits as a key highlight, or, in the Vienna 1900 shows of the mid-1980s, the self-portraits were displayed alongside other high-status works by fellow modernists, above all by Kokoschka. By juxtaposing them with disturbingly clinical images of disempowered individuals from a medical journal and equipment for the control of nervous bodies, this section emphasised the performative and strategic dimensions of Schiele’s use of the bodily language of nervous disorder. The provocative nature of this argument had a direct impact on our ability as curators temporarily to displace objects into the new context represented by the exhibition. One major Viennese art institution, which owns what we saw as the most representative examples of Schiele’s self-portrait project of 1910, rejected our loan request on ideological grounds: the director disagreed strongly with any

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association between Schiele’s work and images of mental and physical disorder. The history of the reception of Schiele’s work, and the history of the works as material objects, also left traces on the exhibition. The current historical position of the 1910–12 self-portraits (mostly gouache and watercolour on paper) as fragile material objects of extremely high market and exhibition value meant that they were difficult to secure as loans, even for the Vienna version of the exhibition. A small torso study and a lithograph self-portrait from private collections in London and New York were therefore supplemented by five photographic reproductions of the most visually striking (and well-known) works on paper from Vienna’s Graphische Sammlung Albertina. Printed in such a way that the images were positioned off-centre against a white background, and marked off spatially and by a contrasting colour of supporting wall from the two works mentioned above, the reproductions were clearly just that (this was made clear in the object labels as well).23 Their originals hovered, out of reach, to the annoyance of some visitors. When the exhibition travelled to Vienna, another dimension of the works’ history – this time their past as exhibited objects during the Nazi period – came into play, placing limitations on how they could be displayed and specifically on what they could be juxtaposed with. Curators at the Wien Museum felt that placing the Schiele self-portraits next to medical images of physical deformity and mental disorder would evoke too strongly for visitors the way that expressionist art was mistreated in the ‘Degenerate Art’ exhibition staged by the Nazi regime, which toured Germany and Austria between 1937 and 1941.24 Both the medical images and the original works and reproductions by Schiele were displayed, but with a six-metre cordon sanitaire separating them. The name of the section was changed from ‘The Pathological Artist’ to ‘Kunst und Wahn am Beispiel Egon Schieles/Egon Schiele: The Artist and Pathology’. ‘The Pathological Artist’, rather than being offered as a diagnosis, or even slur, had always been intended as a description of Schiele’s self-fashioning as ‘diseased’. But for Viennese curators, the continuing repercussions of the trauma of ‘Entartete Kunst’ put strict limits on the meanings of such a phrase in an exhibition context. The penultimate section of ‘Madness and Modernity’, displayed this time in a separately delineated space, was called, in the same spirit, ‘Pathological Patrons’ (in Vienna, ‘Moderne Porträts – Abbilder des Wahnsinns?/Modern Portraits: Imaging Madness?’). It showed portraits of a small circle of Austrian and German writers, artists and intellectuals by the artists Kokoschka, Schiele and their lesserknown contemporary Max Oppenheimer, as well as depictions of Peter Altenberg by the caricaturist Gustav Jagerspacher. The paintings (or, in the case of Schiele, reproductions of watercolours), when grouped together, demonstrated a repeated language of facial distortion and bodily wasting, conveyed through line, colour and handling of materials. The texts drew visitors’ attention to the language with which early twentieth-century critics tried to make sense of the works, a language

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replete with references to madness, nerves and physical decay, all of which were seen as interconnected. The section thus explored a seeming paradox: portraits that might seem (and that have been interpreted by art historians as) expressive of acute psychological individuality display repeated motifs of a kind of generic mental and physical degeneration. We interpreted this as a group identity, a way of signalling the sitters’ shared oppositional stance. Here the argument about the importance of psychiatric discourse for these artworks was not made by juxtaposing them with images from medical journals, therapeutic machinery or any other kind of psychiatric artefacts; this was a room full of art. But the visitor’s journey through the preceding sections was meant to create an interpretive lens through which the works were viewed, and through which the critical texts excerpted in the panels were read. In addition, with a room full of art we were alluding to the particular spatial and critical circumstances in which a critical language of mental illness had been developed a century before in Vienna. These may have been intimate portraits, but they were, from their inception, very public intimate portraits. Gemma Blackshaw’s work has shown how they circulated as gifts, were published and publicly exhibited.25 Certainly the key moment in Kokoschka’s development of the image of the nervous, degenerate intellectual was a public one – the exhibition of twenty-three of his portraits at the Hagenbund in Vienna in 1911. In this section of ‘Madness and Modernity’, the 1911 Hagenbund exhibition, the contents of which are now scattered among private and public collections in Europe and the United States, was not re-created but was present in shifting fragments, each of which evoked an aspect of the critical discourse of disease. In London, Kokoschka’s Portrait of Lotte Franzos (1909), loaned by the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, dominated one wall. For the Vienna version of the exhibition, Lotte Franzos returned to Washington, and Kokoschka’s Portrait of Ludwig Ritter von Janikowski (1909) was loaned by a private collector in New York. The presence of this work in this penultimate section of the exhibition provided a material connection to spaces evoked at the beginning. Not only was Janikowski – a poet and friend of Karl Kraus who developed mental illness – confined in Steinhof; Kokoschka’s inscription on the back of the canvas shows that the picture was painted there, two years after the new institution opened.26 The last section, “The Patient Artist,” included some of the relatively few remaining works by psychiatric patients from Vienna in the period around 1900 (see Figure 1.4). They were displayed with minimal commentary. They were there, as far as we as curators were concerned, to represent the voices of psychiatric patients themselves, and to give the people who were imaged, contained, celebrated or confined in the five previous sections, the last word. ‘The Patient Artist’ was also a room full of art, except that when the works in it were made, between 1890 and 1914, they were seen – other than, perhaps, by their makers – as ephemera, and their current status as ‘art’ is a product of developments in reception and

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markets since the interwar period. A large collage made around 1890 by an artist known only by the pseudonym ‘Frau St.’ survived in a private psychiatric clinic in Vienna, where its creator was a patient. Around 1920 it and a small group of other works were sent by the clinic director Heinrich Obersteiner to the art historian and psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn in Heidelberg in response to his request for works by patients, and it forms part of the Prinzhorn Collection, a seminal institution in the revalorisation of the art of psychiatric patients.27 In addition, the room contained twenty watercolours by Josef Karl Rädler – produced while a patient in the state psychiatric hospital first in Vienna and then at Mauer-Öhling, in the Lower Austrian countryside. The life histories of these works is obscure. Some of the images in the watercolours, which are for the most part portraits of fellow patients, heavily inscribed with text, show piles of other works by Rädler, and he himself may have been responsible for saving and storing the works until his death in the asylum in 1917. After that, the first mention of the existence of the works is by employees of the asylum who apparently saved them from a rubbish pile during renovations in the mid-1960s.28 A group of them were given by the wife of one of these employees in 1972 to Leo Navratil, the psychiatrist who famously spearheaded the patient art centre at the Lower Austrian asylum at Gugging, who in turn donated them to the Lower Austrian Provincial Museum, where an exhibition was mounted in 1994.29 Another group was managed by the Christian Nebehay art firm in Vienna on behalf of an anonymous owner, and it was from the 290 works here that we made our selection. ‘Madness and Modernity’ had a direct impact on the trajectories of these works. Immediately after and as a result of their inclusion in the London version of the exhibition, all 290 works were purchased by a private collector, who then loaned a slightly different selection to the Wien Museum for their version of the exhibition. The histories of the objects displayed in this final section – their transformation from products of individuals with a range of motives, to ephemera or curiosities (or indeed disposable rubbish) to art and the way this transformation can be mapped onto the objects’ physical journeys from place to place – recall the trajectories of Messerschmidt’s heads, displayed in the first section. That is, they are created in a situation of instability, or exile (in Messerschmidt’s case, in his home in the provinces after being excluded from the Vienna art world; in the case of the artists in this section, in asylums where they are confined); for a considerable time after their creation they have a precarious existence (and are sometimes exhibited) in locations outside the world of established art institutions and markets; and it is only in entering established art collections and institutions that they are granted not only the value that being called ‘art’ brings but also stability as material objects, protection from being damaged or destroyed altogether. The discourse about art institutions as collections of fragments, removed from their original contexts, implies that at some point those original contexts (churches, temples, domestic environments) had a natural status as stable, integrated sites, and that the removal of objects from them into art institutions involves a disman-

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tling and even violation of a previously intact whole. But when instability and dislocation characterises the original context itself, the trajectory of objects can be quite different, even reversed. Like other exhibitions that seek to re-create lost contexts through the juxtaposition of objects, ‘Madness and Modernity’ was a particular kind of construct involving the further displacement of already displaced objects in the name of reconnecting them with their ‘original’ contextual homes. The journey towards determining and re-establishing an original context, or the provision of a kind of homecoming for the objects, highlighted a kind of original homelessness for many of the objects, artists and represented individuals that went right back into the time examined by the exhibition. The process by which the objects were assembled, first in an ideal loan list and later in the two versions of the exhibition in London and Vienna, began with an impulse towards comprehensiveness, became ever more necessarily and consciously selective and was marked in the end in important ways by contingency, accident and incompleteness. The mad objects of fin-de-siècle Vienna could not be made new and whole again. Their curious, unpredictable and in some cases traumatic life histories made their own demands.

Notes 1. F. Haskell, The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition (New Haven, 2000). 2. The exhibition at the Wellcome Collection was accompanied by a book: G. Blackshaw and L. Topp, eds., Madness and Modernity: Mental Illness and the Visual Arts in Vienna 1900 (London, 2009). See 158–62 for an object checklist. For the exhibition at the Wien Museum, a slightly revised version of the book was translated into German: G. Blackshaw and L. Topp, eds., Madness and Modernity: Kunst und Wahn in Wien um 1900 (Vienna, 2009). See 154–57 for an object checklist. 3. Le Arti a Vienna: dalla Secessione alla caduta dell’impero Asburgico (Venice, 1984); Traum und Wirklichkeit Wien, 1870–1930, 2nd ed., (Vienna, 1985); K. Varnedoe, Vienna 1900: Art, Architecture and Design (New York, 1986); J. Clair, ed., Vienne, 1880–1938: L’apocalypse joyeuse (Paris, 1986). 4. Traum und Wirklichkeit Wien, 796–98. 5. Calum Storrie’s drawings for the doorways are reproduced in Madness & Modernity: Kunst und Wahn, 154–57. 6. A. Hauser, ‘Staunen – Lernen – Erleben. Bedeutungsebenen gesammelter Objekte und ihrer musealen Präsentation im Wandel’, in Sammeln, Ausstellen, Wegwerfen, eds. G. Ecker, M. Stange, and U. Vedder (Königstein, 2001), 43. 7. K. Arnold, ‘Birth and Breeding: Politics on Display at the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine’, in The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture, ed. S. Macdonald, (London, 1998), 184. 8. J. Bennett, ‘Can Science Museums Take History Seriously?’ in Politics of Display, 174. 9. C. Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (New York and London, 1995), 17. 10. J. Poinsot, ‘Large Exhibitions: A Sketch of a Typology’, in Thinking About Exhibitions, ed. R. Greenberg, B. W. Ferguson and S. Nairne (London, 1996), p. 44.

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11. L. Hevesi, ‘Hagenbund’, Kunst und Kunsthandwerk 10 (1907): 175–77; M. Krapf, ‘Die Musealisierung der “Charakterköpfe”: Messerschmidt-Rezeption im 19. Jahrhundert’, in Franz Xaver Messerschmidt 1736–1783, ed. M. Krapf (Vienna, 2002), 114. 12. For a description of the 1898 display, in which a model of the Narrenturm is mentioned, see ‘Anhang II: Die Betheiligung des Landesausschussreferates für Gesundheitswesen und Wohltätigkeitsanstalten an der Jubiläumsausstellung Wien 1898’, Bericht des nieder-österreichisches Landesausschusses über seine Amtwirksamkeit 1897–1898 4 (1898): 416. For an attempt to decode the architecture of the Narrenturm, see A. Stohl, Der Narrenturm oder die dunkle Seite der Wissenschaft (Vienna, 2000). 13. L. Topp, ‘Otto Wagner and the Steinhof Psychiatric Hospital: Architecture as Misunderstanding’, Art Bulletin 87, no. 1 (2005): 130–56. 14. Traum und Wirklichkeit Wien, 106–12. 15. The restoration was part of the Project Museum initiative at the Otto-Wagner-Spital, under the guidance of social worker Robert Hutfless. 16. L. Topp, ‘Erwin Pendl (Studio), Model of Lower Austrian Provincial Institution for the Care and Cure of the Mentally and Nervously Ill ‘Am Steinhof ’, c. 1907’, in Madness and Modernity (London), 100–109. 17. G. Blackshaw, ‘The Pathological Body: Modernist Strategising in Egon Schiele’s SelfPortraiture’, Oxford Art Journal 30 (2007): 393. 18. N. Imrie, ‘Karl Henning, Wax Models of Two Male Heads, 1897–98, Federal PathologicalAnatomical Museum, Vienna’, in Madness and Modernity (London), 38–45. 19. See the accession records for the two heads (inventory numbers 22.001 and 22.002) in the Federal Pathological-Anatomical Museum, Vienna. 20. Irene Etzersdorfer has detailed the ‘Aryanization’ (Ariesierung) of the Sanatorium Purkersdorf, which was owned by members of the prominent Zuckerkandl family. See I. Etzersdorfer, Arisiert. Eine Spurensuche im gesellschaftlichen Untergrund der Republik (Vienna, 1995), 99–121. 21. S. Wieber, ‘Richard Luksch, Two Faience Figures for the Purkersdorf Sanatorium, 1905’, in Madness and Modernity (London), 136–43. S. Wieber, ‘Sculpting the Sanatorium: Nervous Bodies and Femmes Fragiles in Vienna 1900’, Women in German Yearbook 27 (2011): 58–86. 22. G. Blackshaw and L. Topp, ‘Scrutinised Bodies and Lunatic Utopias: Mental Illness, Psychiatry and the Visual Arts in Vienna, 1898–1914’, in Madness and Modernity (London), p. 29, and Blackshaw, ‘The Pathological Body’, 377–401. 23. The graphic design for the exhibition was executed by Lucienne Roberts, who devised the off-centre printing of the Schiele reproductions. 24. S. Barron, et al., “Degenerate Art”: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (New York and Los Angeles, 1991). 25. G. Blackshaw, ‘“Mad” Modernists: Imaging Mental Illness in Viennese Portraits’, in Madness and Modernity (London), 46–65; Blackshaw, ‘The Pathological Body’, pp. 397–98. 26. T. G. Natter, ed., Oskar Kokoschka: Early Portraits from Vienna and Berlin 1909–1914 (New York, New Haven, 2002), 112. 27. G. Steinlechner, ‘Gesaltungen eines Möglichkeitssinns. Die Collage-Arbeiten der Frau St.’, in Irre ist Weiblich. Künstlerische Interventionen von Frauen in der Psychiatrie um 1900, eds. B. Brand-Claussen and V. Michely (Heidelberg, 2004), 66. See also L. Heighton, ‘Exhibiting Madness, Art and the Asylum: The Creation and Exhibition of Images by Psychiatric Hospital Patients in Vienna 1890–1914’ (PhD diss., University of London, 2008). 28. L. Navratil, Josef Karl Rädler (1844–1917) (Vienna, 1994), 7. See also Heighton, ‘Exhibiting Madness’ and L. Heighton, ‘Josef Karl Rädler, Untitled (Self-Portrait), 1913’, in Madness and Modernity (London), 110–17. 29. See P. Zawrel, ‘Nachwort des Herausgebers’, in Navratil, Josef Karl Rädler, 101.

Chapter 2

SOLVING RIDDLES Freud, Vienna and the Historiography of Madness

d Steven Beller

S

igmund Freud tried to solve two riddles. At the beginning of the long journey of exploration in the realm of mental illness that was his psychoanalytic career, Freud tried to answer the riddle of Man, the riddle that Oedipus answered to overcome the Sphinx. At the end of that distinguished but always controversial journey, Freud tried to answer another, pressing riddle, of the Man Moses: why had the Jewish people survived all these centuries, and why (from Moses to Freud) were they so hated? Freud’s answer to the first riddle, the Oedipus complex, has been hugely influential in our modern culture – his answer to the second riddle less so. It is more significant in what it reveals about him than in shedding light on Jews or Jewish history. Nevertheless, his answers to both riddles, and how he approached them, raise many questions. Why did Freud think that the riddle of Man could be answered from journeys in the realm of mental illness, and, moreover, by means of a complex whose outlines derived from classical Greek myth? Freud spent his life following the trails to what he thought of as the wellsprings of human motivation in general. Why, then, did he spend so much effort in his last years searching in the realm of ancient Egypt and the Bible’s Sinaitic wilderness for the reasons for the fate of a specific ethno-religious group, the Jews, to answer the riddle of anti-Semitism? It is only in the context, the domain if you will, in which Freud lived and worked that we will find the clues to why and how Freud sought the answers to these

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riddles. It is from the results of our discoveries in that domain – the context both of Vienna 1900 and of Jewish Vienna – that Freud’s explorations can begin to be properly understood and evaluated. They will eventually help us answer another question about psychoanalysis: at a time when psychoanalysis is increasingly beleaguered as being either unscientific or no longer of therapeutic worth, how valid does it remain? What intellectual and cultural value does it yet retain?

Some Preparatory Remarks on ‘Madness’ and ‘the Irrational’ An important starting point in exploring this context is to remember how much of a challenge to much conventional thought Freudian psychoanalysis was. Freud derived a theory about the human psyche in general largely from his experience in treating mentally ill patients. His seminal work, The Interpretation of Dreams, relies on evidence that Freud had garnered from all sorts of sources including, famously, or notoriously, his own dreams, yet much of the key evidence comes from his patients, and the overall theory he elaborates in this book was based on the case studies of those patients. It is a striking aspect of psychoanalysis, and one that is the source of much of the controversy about it, that it made no hard and fast distinction between a ‘healthy’ mind and a ‘mad’ mind. Its claim that ‘madness’ was not confined to those with physical diseases of the brain but could have psychological causes as well was one that many at the time rejected, precisely because it blurred distinctions and made ‘madness’ a possibility – and threat – for all. Freud’s very answer to the riddle of Man was an immense challenge to those who believed either that man was primarily a rational being whose pursuit of happiness was relatively uncomplicated or was a spiritual being guided to the good by divine, or at least ethical, inspiration. In contrast, Freud’s answer – which Oedipus embodied, as it were – was a profound attack on human vanity, the most radical after Copernicus and Darwin. Freud thought his identification of the Oedipus complex a huge advance in the struggle for human freedom. At the end of a successful session, Freud would, according to Fritz Wittels, show his patient an image of Oedipus – not of the tragic Oedipus Rex, but rather an engraving of Ingres’ Oedipus and the Sphinx, where Oedipus is answering (and hence destroying) the female-animal sphinx that has up until then devoured those who do not know the answer to her riddle is ‘Man’.1 Oedipus is thus here an embodiment of the liberating aspect of psychoanalysis, freeing human beings from the bonds of their suppressed and hence unmanageable, unconscious animal drives. Yet the answer that Freudian psychoanalysis gave in order to achieve this liberation was that the constellation of human desires that had led to the tragedy of King Oedipus – the son’s sexual love of the mother and the wish to kill the rivalfather – was one shared by all men. The normal state of the human psyche, in

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Freudian theory, is thus based on urges that conventional thought regarded as not only immoral but also insane. Freud saw morality and rational civilisation as based on the repression of such urges, and accepted this repression as necessary. Yet he, and even more so some of his disciples, always retained a certain ambivalence about the merit of such repression of human desires that appear to contradict what is moral or rational. Another major challenge of psychoanalysis to contemporaries around 1900, especially to those who saw Man as primarily a rational actor, was its distinguishing between what was ‘irrational’ and what was ‘mad’. We are all irrational in some sense—when it comes to emotions, to such feelings as desire and love. Some emotions, such as hatred or despair, can lead to real madness, but others, such as love, tend not to (even if someone can be ‘madly’ in love). Psychoanalysis’s greatest insight, one could argue, was that the irrational, the world of the urges and desire, is not in itself mad, and indeed that the repression of the irrational is just as likely to lead to madness as the reverse. The relationship between rationality, irrationality and madness is, indeed, far from as clear cut as we would like to think. Not only is the irrational not always mad, but what at least appears as rational choice or policy can itself lead to madness. This can occur if, as mentioned, we attempt to repress, or just ignore, the irrational in favour of the rational. If rationality is only partially applied to a situation, this can also lead to irrational or absurd (mad) results. Much economic policy is open to such an accusation because, no matter how rational the economic model used, it is based on large assumptions about human motivation and also excludes many factors that cannot be quantified, what are euphemistically called ‘externalities’, that can nevertheless be a vital factor to making a sane decision. If, for instance, the unique beauty of a landscape is regarded as unquantifiable, then it would be excluded from the cost-benefit analysis of whether to build a motorway there (as opposed to the number of houses knocked down and so forth). Whether this explains some of the decisions made in urban and rural development or not (and I suspect strongly that it does), the principle is I hope clear. Also, if rationality is applied without regard to other vital aspects of human existence, such as ethics, or if rationality is applied inappropriately, ‘mad’ consequences can ensue. One case in point would be if it is applied in an exclusory, either/or manner to areas such as the psyche and questions of human identity and self-understanding, where ambivalence, and not certainty and decisiveness, is the usual, ‘healthy’ condition. Rationalism’s ‘delusion’ of certainty is also, admittedly, a characteristic that the more dogmatic practitioners of psychoanalysis have often shared. Freud himself, with his banishment of those whom he regarded as betraying him and denying the ‘truth’ of his cause, is a notorious case in point. Yet psychoanalysis at its core is not a dogmatic theory; as we shall see, it is indeed in its structures and its principles the opposite and the very remedy to the delusion of certainty that rational-

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ism, in its drive to clarity but also decisiveness, so often falls for. Psychoanalysis has often been criticised for its method never coming to a definitive conclusion; its therapy is attacked for being unending, that is to say, open ended. Yet that is in many ways its greatest value, for it avoids the closure that comes with there being only one explanation, one policy available, only one true way, only one ‘final solution’. Freud’s last major work, Moses and Monotheism, was an attempt to understand one such closed system: anti-Semitism. We shall see that, as an analysis of the essence of Jewish tradition, the book is a fascinating insight into Freud’s own Jewish self-understanding; as an explanation for anti-Semitism, it is unconvincing. Yet Freud’s choice of anti-Semitism as his final target was very appropriate, for few subjects are as diametrically opposed to the structure and spirit of psychoanalysis. Moreover, anti-Semitism exemplifies in so many ways the psychoanalytic insight that notions of rationality and irrationality, normality and abnormality, sanity and madness are not as distinct as we care to think. Anti-Semitism’s greatest exponent, National Socialism, was in many respects all too rational, even rationalist, in many of its policies. There was, as recent research such as that of Götz Aly has shown, a large degree of instrumental rationality about it.2 But it was morally insane. It is in the light of this conundrum of the ambivalent relationship between the rational, the irrational and madness, however defined, that the arc of Freud’s intellectual journey, from Oedipus to Moses, becomes significant. Putting Freud in his proper context will help us to understand that journey.

Freud and Vienna 1900 A common view of Freud’s relationship to Vienna 1900, fostered by a superficial reading of such works as Carl E. Schorske’s Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, is that Freud invented the concept of the unconscious as a means of retreating inward to the realm of the psyche in reaction to the defeat of liberalism in Vienna in the later 1890s. In what has come to be known as the ‘Schorskean paradigm’ to explain fin-de-siècle Vienna, the sons and daughters of Vienna’s bourgeoisie, Freud among them, became alienated from the real world of political power by the defeat of liberalism, first on an Austrian level in 1879, but then more devastatingly, psychologically, on the local, municipal level by the victory of Karl Lueger’s Christian Socials in Vienna itself in a series of elections from 1895 onward. This crisis in the liberal mindset led to the epochal change from the model of a rational, activist Homo oeconomicus to that of an irrational, inward-looking Homo psychologicus that marked cultural modernism.3 The main exemplar of ‘psychological man’ was, needless to say, the psychoanalytic model of Freud, and Freud is indeed given his own chapter in Schorske’s seminal book, where The Interpretation of Dreams is interpreted as a vehicle by which Freud himself can retreat away

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from real events into the realm of the psyche.4 Another related view to explain the emphasis on the psychological in Austrian turn-of-the-century art and literature is that everyone in the world of Viennese modern culture then followed along in Freud’s wake. Once the ‘royal road to the unconscious’ was discovered, as it were, a host of others rushed in to stake their claims. Neither of these views, convincing though they may at first appear, bears closer scrutiny. The Schorskean paradigm that underlies the idea of Freudian psychoanalysis being a product of political alienation has come in for substantial academic criticism from various perspectives. To be fair to Schorske himself, much of his original work was far more nuanced and qualified than the paradigm became, but this does not detract from the problems with the paradigm itself. Almost all aspects of it have been called into question.5 Political liberalism did not fail in the way Schorske assumed; most of the bourgeoisie in Vienna was not alienated from power, whereas Vienna’s Jews, whose role Schorske downplayed, were indeed existentially threatened by the success of political anti-Semitism that the Christian Social victory represented. Moreover the so-called retreat into the temple of art and the psyche was not as aestheticist or as resigned as the Schorskean paradigm suggested, certainly not in Freud’s case and not in those of many of the other major figures in Viennese modern culture. Even the shift from the ‘economic’ to the ‘psychological’ model is highly dubious, and more a result of retrospective concentration on certain parts of Viennese modern culture rather than the broader expanse. Apart from these problems with the Schorskean paradigm, there is the further consideration that neither the Schorskean paradigm nor indeed the related idea of a ‘Freudian Vienna’ is borne out by the chronological sequence of events in and around Vienna in the late nineteenth century.6 Freud’s interest in psychotherapy and the cathartic method date to 1889. His and Josef Breuer’s Studies in Hysteria were compiled before the victory of the antiliberal forces in Vienna’s municipal elections in the spring of 1895, the point at which the political alienation of the younger generation of the liberal bourgeoisie and their turn to the refuge of art and the psyche is supposed to have occurred. Moreover, as Michael Worbs has pointed out, writers in Vienna – especially those in the group around Arthur Schnitzler, Hermann Bahr and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Young Vienna –, were already trying to ‘overcome naturalism’ in 1891, long before the publication of the supposedly epoch-making Studies in Hysteria.7 They were responding to developments in literature in France, Germany, Norway (Ibsen) and even England, and were attempting to apply naturalism’s ‘natural scientific’ approach where naturalism had not (yet) dared to venture, in the realm of the soul. Hofmannsthal expressed in a letter to Bahr in July 1891 the wish to found a ‘bacteriology of the soul’, echoing Nietzsche’s attempt at a scientific analysis of the psyche in his Chemistry of Concepts and Sensations. Felix Dörmann, another member of Young Vienna, published a collection of poems dealing with various forms of neurosis and enervation, entitled Neurotica, in the

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same year.8 Dörmann’s poetry was neither of a high standard nor insightful into psychiatric conditions; nor did Hofmannsthal pursue his proposal. Nevertheless, it was clear that interest in neurosis and the pathologies of the psyche was a major theme in Viennese literature in the early 1890s, as it was in European literature more generally. It is almost as though literature anticipated Freud’s scientific discovery of the tenets of psychoanalysis. Freud himself acknowledged that artists could reach psychological insights by non-scientific ways, and he saw Schnitzler as his own, rather uncanny, Doppelgänger. But there is no real mystery in this parallelism. Schnitzler was also a medical doctor and also treated mental illness, including that of his fellow writer, Leopold von Andrian. From 1887 to 1894 Schnitzler was the editor of the medical journal founded by his father, Johann, the Internationale Klinische Rundschau. As a reviewer and reporter for this journal, Schnitzler was also very much up on contemporary psychiatric theory. He even used his position at the journal to, indirectly, lend Freud his support in the controversy in 1886–87 surrounding Freud’s lecture on Charcot’s theories about hysteria, especially Charcot’s sensational (for the time) claim for the existence of male hysteria.9 Then there was always the fact that Schnitzler shared with Freud a Jewishness with which, despite their lack of belief in the Jewish religion, they retained a defiant identification. Freud and Schnitzler also had a large number of mutual acquaintances; indeed they were part of the same generation (almost all students at Vienna University) that also produced such stellar figures as Victor Adler, Gustav Mahler, Hermann Bahr and Theodor Herzl.10 The members of this interconnected group began as German nationalists and fervent supporters of the rebellious counterculture associated with Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche. They then went their various ways, some as politicians, others as artists, writers and psychoanalysts, but they retained the ‘irrationalist’ culture of their youth, in varying extents and in varying ways. Freud claimed not to have read anything by the notorious German philosopher before the latter’s death in 1900 (after the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams) and downplayed any direct influence on him of Nietzsche’s thought to the point of denial. Yet a close friend of Freud’s was Josef Paneth, who was a great admirer of Nietzsche, so much so that Paneth went to visit Nietzsche in the Engadine. Freud, moreover, did acknowledge an admiration in his youth for Nietzsche’s ‘nobility’ and admitted that Paneth wrote to him a great deal about the philosopher. And the thought of the early Nietzsche, as in The Birth of Tragedy and ‘Schopenhauer as Educator’, was more or less ambient among his generation of students. Freud thus appears to have been much more heavily influenced by Nietzschean ideas than he was prepared to admit, even if this influence proceeded only by a process of mediated, intellectual osmosis.11 Yet it is not as though Freud took over Nietzsche’s ideas uncritically, without bringing his own perspectives and his own goals to this rich vein of thought. As

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Alfred Pfabigan has astutely delineated, what Freud did – which was brilliant – was to ‘tame Nietzsche’ by applying his Bildung (classical education) and his scientific training (in the Medical Faculty) to the much more intuitive ideas of the philosopher. Freud took Nietzsche’s insights into the superficiality of human civilisation and of ‘good and evil’ and Nietzsche’s emphasis on the power of the unconscious drives and desires (itself a perspective derived from Arthur Schopenhauer) and created a coherent, new language to navigate this new territory, based on patient, empirical work, sitting listening to his ‘mad’ patients.12 In this way, Freud rationalised the irrational. Once psychoanalysis was given its own language – as provided by Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams – many writers and artists did then ‘receive’ Freud’s new theory, although in many idiosyncratic ways. Worbs puts forward Hofmannsthal’s plays, Elektra and Oedipus and the Sphinx as examples of Viennese writers taking Freudian concepts and using them to psychologise Greek myth. This created some ironies. When Freud saw the performance of Max Reinhardt’s production of Oedipus Rex (in Berlin in 1911) – without apparently knowing it was following the new translation by Hofmannsthal – he responded very enthusiastically because he thought he now recognised his theories confirmed in the text of the play. For the first time, Freud remarked to Hanns Sachs, he had seen fully how Sophocles’ Oedipus realises that he unconsciously wishes for his (step-) father’s death. In actuality, however, according to Worbs, this new insight was due to the fact that Hofmannsthal had artfully changed the meaning of a key passage of the play, by reinterpreting the Greek genitive case from an objective to a subjective form, from ‘desire for me’ to ‘my desire’. Hence Hofmannsthal’s Oedipus is explicitly portrayed as having an individual wish, as in the Freudian theory, to kill the father, rather than having this action wished upon him (by the gods). Freud’s identification of a Freudian insight in Sophocles is in fact a perception of a Freudian interpretation of the text by the translator, Hofmannsthal.13 Worbs views the reception of Freud by modern Viennese writers as quite broad and significant. According to him, Schnitzler, despite Schnitzler’s pointing to the French symbolist Edouard Dujardin as his precursor, actually got the idea – and more importantly the method – of the ‘interior monologue’ from the free association he encountered in Freud’s case studies in The Interpretation of Dreams.14 Artists and writers did not become Freudians overnight. They retained an independence in their psychological approach to their literary themes, adopting Freudian ideas as they saw fit, rather than becoming fully paid-up members of the psychoanalytic movement. Schnitzler, for instance, while he appreciated much of Freud’s work, thought his emphasis on the unconscious off target; instead Schnitzler thought the area of what he called ‘middle consciousness’ (Mittelbewusstsein), equivalent to Freud’s preconsciousness, as the field most interesting for understanding the human mind, at least for a writer such as himself.15 Nevertheless, especially after the appearance of The Interpretation of Dreams, artists and writ-

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ers did look to psychoanalysis for support and inspiration. Marie Pappenheim’s libretto for Arnold Schoenberg’s Erwartung is a good case in point. Even Karl Kraus, who later was to become one of psychoanalysis’s main critics and enemies within the intellectual and literary circles of Vienna, at first admired Freud’s honesty about the centrality of sexuality in human experience and regarded him as a kind of ally in his battle against the sexual hypocrisy of Viennese society and the mass media.16 Robert Musil and later Hermann Broch – whose The Death of Virgil is one of the finest uses of the technique of the interior monologue in modern literature – both took much from Freud’s work, even if they had reservations about the theory as a whole. Freud himself ultimately preferred the world and culture of classical Bildung to modernist literature, and modernist writers and artists disagreed fundamentally with Freud’s analysis of the creative spirit. Kraus, for instance, disparaged psychoanalysis’s tendency to see all art as the product of pathology, and had little time for the sort of analysis of genius that Freud’s followers, and even the master himself in his – factually inaccurate and methodologically compromising – account of Leonardo da Vinci, indulged in.17 Freud and the cultural leaders of Vienna 1900 were not one team. Even Schnitzler, who in so many ways was, as we have seen, Freud’s Doppelgänger, developed his own psychology, based on his own training and experience, and was not all that directly influenced by Freud’s theory. Even if he greatly appreciated Freud’s work, he came to see the psychoanalytic method as driven partly by ‘monomania’.18 Despite such reservations, Freud’s invention of the language of psychoanalysis and the stress on sexuality were seen by his contemporary writers and artists as liberating and emancipatory. One could say that Freud was seen by others, and saw himself, as providing a key to the map of the unconscious, which then gave others the confidence to explore that realm themselves, to liberate their own thoughts and imagination, to explore the role of sexuality and the unconscious not as something pathological, but rather as something normal, an approach that was to have revolutionary cultural and social consequences in the modern world. The revolutionary, liberating intent in Freud’s approach is often seen as expressed in the epigram from Virgil’s Aeneid that he chose for The Interpretation of Dreams: ‘Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo’ (If I cannot bend the powers above, I shall stir up the underworld). As revealing, if not more so, is another epigram that he had thought to use prior to opting for Virgil: ‘Flavit et dissipati sunt’ (He blew and they were dispersed). The significance of this quote is partly contained in the word that is absent from it. The phrase was obviously relevant to the ‘talking cure’, but it had deeper meanings for Freud. It originally came from a coin struck in Holland to celebrate the victory of Protestant England over the Catholic (and Habsburg) Spanish Armada. The phrase referred to the gale force winds that scattered the Spanish ships and prevented them from

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landing in England, which were seen at the time as divine intervention. Hence the subject of the sentence was God, blowing the Spanish away. Yet this was not only, or even, the Protestant God – on the face of the coin is God’s name, but in Hebrew letters.19 This epigram manqué was thus a clear, perhaps too clear, indication of where Freud saw himself and his new invention of psychoanalysis within the historical-political and ethico-religious landscape of his Vienna. He and psychoanalysis were on the side of the English Protestants in their struggle for freedom, backed by the God of the Jews, against the oppression of CounterReformation Catholicism and the Spanish Empire. That empire, of course, was ruled by none other than Philip II, a Habsburg – and so the enemy against which Freud was battling was, by extension, not only Catholic repression, but also Habsburg imperialism, hence Austria and even Vienna itself.

Psychoanalysis as a ‘Jewish Science’ Psychoanalysis was thus seen by contemporaries and by Freud himself as a liberation, an emancipation, from the very Austrian, Catholic, conservative – in a word, Viennese – context in which they found themselves. Moreover, there was an interesting wrinkle to all of this, which hearkens back to that passing over in silence the Jewish name of God in the epigram that was not chosen by Freud, but was mentioned by him in a note in The Interpretation of Dreams.20 To add to the intrigue, this note itself is an attempt by Freud to justify his omission of this Hebrew name of God in his original mention of the ‘Flavit’ sentence in a letter to Fliess in 1897. This appears to have been, ironically enough, a form of repression by Freud, and is an attempt, half-hearted admittedly, to obscure the fact that there was indeed, as Freud half feared and half took pride in, something ‘Jewish’ about his whole psychoanalytic enterprise. Freud later in life was much more open about his sense that there was something Jewish in his approach. In December 1930, in the preface to the Hebrew translation of Totem and Taboo, Freud wrote (speaking of himself in the third person): If the question were put to him: ‘Since you have abandoned all of these common characteristics of your countrymen, what is there left to you that is Jewish?’ he would reply: ‘A very great deal, and probably its very essence’. He could not now express that essence clearly in words; but some day, no doubt, it will become accessible to the scholarly mind.21

The question of what Freud meant by this has intrigued many scholars of psychoanalysis ever since. Freud himself was, as we shall see, to give his own indirect answer in Moses and Monotheism, but a recent interpretation of Freud’s life and work attributes to Freud’s Jewishness, defined not in essential but rather in

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cultural-intellectual terms, a central and indispensable role in the discovery of psychoanalysis. Establishing the theory and method of psychoanalysis required more than simply ‘taming Nietzsche’ through empirical research and the ‘systematisation’ of the results. It needed the use of a particular, exegetical method to arrive at a systematic, ‘logical’ theory. This was, after all, a method that depended on interpretation of psychological data, whether in dreams or later other forms, such as verbal (Freudian) slips, and rested on the ‘discovery’ that the unconscious mind made associations that were, on the face of it, illogical but could be uncovered by informed exegesis. Where, however, did Freud get this exegetical method? Jill Salberg has claimed, building on the work of many others, that Freud obtained it from the Jewish tradition of Talmudic textual interpretation. Salberg’s thesis is wrapped up in a complex psychoanalytic interpretation of Freud and his relationship to his parents, which seems to me overly speculative. The claim that Freud’s hermeneutics are ‘both Jewish and Greek, exegetical and rationally scientific’ and as such have a strongly Jewish aspect to them, albeit in tension with the ‘Greek’ logos that Freud aspired to, also can only be an interpretation – but I do find this claim much more convincing.22 For one thing, Freud was far closer to the Talmudic tradition than he let on. He presented himself as a German-speaking Jew from Moravia, but this was a little deceptive. It is true that Freud was born in Freiberg, Moravia, and grew up as a German speaker, indeed becoming one of the most admired writers of German of his time. Yet both of his parents came from an East European, Galician background, and his mother, Amalia, who was a central, indomitable figure in ‘golden Sigi’s’ childhood and even later life, spoke primarily Yiddish. According to Salberg, Amalia barely learned German, and it is probable that Freud would have spoken to her on his frequent visits mainly in some form of Yiddish, or a combination of German and Yiddish.23 Michael Armstrong has written of the ways in which Freud’s relationship to his cherished classical Bildung, from which he borrowed so much of the symbolism of his psychoanalytic theory, starting with Oedipus, was itself not ethnically neutral. As Armstrong has evocatively put it, Freud’s use of this foundation of classical education was one of the ‘Jewish trajectories’ that he and his contemporaries charted to navigate the complex cultural, social and political world of late nineteenth-century Vienna. Freud employed his mastership of the classical texts to create a ‘landscape of mischief ’ affording him critical distance not only from his own Jewish past but also from Vienna’s mainstream Catholic culture.24 Assimilation, or even ‘acculturation’ was not a simple one-way street, particularly not in Freud’s case, where his classical education and his Jewish background combined in complex and very fruitful ways. Following Salberg, another part of Freud’s ‘Jewish trajectory’ was to embed ‘Jewish exegesis’ within what on the

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surface looks like the ‘Greek’ logic of psychoanalytic theory. It is as though Freud has the unconscious mind – with its associative connections – operate according to the Talmudic exegetical procedures of his (partially repressed) Jewish heritage, so that it can only be explored and understood by a similar such interpretative methodology, that also goes ‘from sense to sense’ like Rabbinic interpretation, namely, psychoanalysis. In Salberg’s words: Ultimately, Freud creates a new field, psychoanalysis, which embraces science (logos) only to subvert it. He undermines his Greek rational logic with Jewish interpretative sensibility. The very process of interpretative examination both reveals and suggests the inability to ever fully know one’s mind, to ever be only the object or subject of investigation.

As Edgar Levenson (quoted by Salberg) has put it, ‘Freud, one might say, wrote Greek, and thought Jewish’.25 This implicitly Jewish aspect of Freudian theory, in Salberg’s evocative phrase ‘hidden in plain sight’, is perhaps even more substantial in the practice of psychoanalysis. The whole value of an analysis lies in the ability of the psychoanalyst to interpret text within very broad parameters that theory can only partially control, and indeed in his (or her) ability not to come to obvious, narrow-minded conclusions, but rather to build complex webs of association that provide layers of meaning, just as the Talmudic tradition does. This might explain why so many of the early followers of Freud also came from Jewish backgrounds: they ‘got it’ in a way that individuals who were not on one of Armstrong’s ‘Jewish trajectories’ did not. In that sense, psychoanalysis really was a form of ‘Jewish science’, because the particular Jewish background did afford an insight into what Freud was doing and the theory and methodology that he had developed, in ways that were not so easily afforded without that background. Does this mean, however, that, because psychoanalysis was created by a Jew, attracted largely Jewish followers in its early years and was even based largely on case studies of Jewish (female) patients, it was only a Jewish science, applicable only to Jews (as Nazi psychologists were to claim), invalidating psychoanalysis’s universal validity in understanding the human psyche? The short answer is ‘No’. Just because something was created in the context of one culture does not mean that it is not appropriate in another. Democracy, as the name suggests, was primarily an ‘invention’ of Ancient Greece, but that does not invalidate its applicability in contemporary Britain and America, or anywhere else for that matter. Similarly, even if it was certain aspects of his Jewish background that enabled Freud to make his methodological and theoretical breakthroughs in the study of the human psyche, this nevertheless helped him to a general insight in how the mind works, or at least a huge advance in understanding the mental processes that make us think and do the things that we do.

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Freud and the Twentieth Century Another question about psychoanalysis’s validity today is harder to answer. Psychoanalysis might have been an advance on psychological and psychiatric theory and therapy in its day, but a century later has it not been overtaken by other theories and therapies? Is it not passé? Is analysis not, for instance, too time consuming a procedure and hence fated for economic obsolescence in an era when time ever increasingly means money? If it is now passé as many have argued and no longer a viable therapy, was it not, all along, a mistake, the wrong path? The starting point for an answer to this claim is that psychoanalysis’s current travails cannot take away from its immensely positive role in liberating minds and deconstructing former, repressive social and cultural ‘verities’. (And sometimes one forgets just how repressive those verities were.) Psychoanalysis was part of a whole set of ‘critical modernist’ ways of thinking that marked the best of Vienna 1900. There was Kraus with his biting critique of social hypocrisy, Schnitzler’s uncovering of the realities behind the sexual façade of Viennese society, Musil’s unblinking analysis of the irrational bases of authority, Austro-Marxism’s politicoeconomic critique of, among other things, nationalism, the Vienna Circle of Logical Positivism and its critique of the foundations of language and thought. Then there was Ludwig Wittgenstein, who provided not one but two radical approaches to philosophy, and Arnold Schoenberg, whose Moses and Aaron is perhaps the archetypical expression of Viennese ‘critical modernism’s’ setting out of the limits on certainty in human experience. Just as much part of this world, however dialectically connected, was Otto Neurath, a leading member of the Vienna Circle. Neurath went beyond the ‘tragic’ aspect of the recognition of the lack of knowing absolute truth inherent in Schoenberg’s opera against opera by pointing out that human beings are in fact capable of communication, if only for practical purposes, and that the lack of absolute truth, of objective values, was not something to bewail but can and should be replaced by a model of human co-operation that emphasises persuasion and compromise as the main factors in reaching agreement and hence a sense of inter-subjectively valid values.26 Psychoanalysis was thus one of a number of open systems of thought. Despite some elements of dogmatism (and the infamous banishings into exile of various heretics by Freud), psychoanalysis was inherently an open system, for there was never any end of interpretation (one of the problems with its cost effectiveness), and tendentially anti-authoritarian – precisely in its undermining of the certainty of consciousness. Freud, it is true, could act like an authoritarian at times, in defence of his theory and his movement, but, as Mark Edmundson pointed out recently, his whole theory was one that contradicted the idea that there was any absolute authority, – even, ultimately, his own. He was, in other words, an authoritarian anti-authoritarian and always guarded against the closure of thought.27

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He was well advised to do so, because, against these open systems, the mass madness of the twentieth century was produced by closed thinking. Hannah Arendt’s concept of totalitarianism is, in this sense, not to be scoffed at, because it does get at a central truth of the experience of (twentieth century) modernity: that too many of its leading ideas were ones that sought totality and hence certainty within the theory or idea, regardless of the realities outside the theory’s borders. Within the realm of the theory, what we now view as madness could transpire as the rational working out of the theory’s own logic, combined with the ‘rational’ willingness to break inconvenient and hence ‘irrational’ taboos, such as, in the case of both Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Third Reich, the taboo on mass murder. Freud tried to understand the anti-Semitism of National Socialism in his final work, Moses and Monotheism. He came to the conclusion that the hatred of Jews was an irrational result of unconscious thought processes, the unconscious reaction, indeed, against Jewish intellectuality, Geistigkeit. This intellectuality was based on the Mosaic idea of the invisible God, which itself was based on the Egyptian cult of Akhnaten, and the sensory renunciation that followed. In Freud’s psychoanalytic schema, this ‘renunciation of instinct’ was then enforced by guilt, which resulted from repression of the memory of the original Moses’s murder by the Jews. This murder had been a response to the father-figure, Moses, imposing this strictly ethical, anti-sensual regime, God’s law, on them. Judaism, therefore, was sustained by the guilt from having, in effect, murdered God. The hatred of the Jews by the other ancient peoples was due, according to Freud, to the Jews’ pride at their ethical (and intellectual) superiority, brought on by this renunciation of instinct, and the explicit threat that the Jewish religion presented to the sensualist cults of those other peoples;28 the hatred of the Jews by modern Christians was due to this but in addition to the Christian belief that the Jews had ‘murdered God’. In Freud’s interpretation, there was some truth to this. The ancient Jews had ‘murdered God’ when they killed the original Moses, but they would not admit it. Freud phrases the real reproach underlying the Christian accusation against Jews of deicide as follows: ‘They will not accept it as true that they murdered God, whereas we admit it and have been cleansed of that guilt’.29 Anti-Semitism, therefore, is the result of the return of the repressed, all going back to what happened in ancient Egypt and the desert of Sinai. This is very unconvincing as a comprehensive explanation of anti-Semitism. Hatred of Jews has many sources, some of which are linked to the character of the Jewish religion that Freud touched on, but many that are not and that have little if anything to do with the return of the repressed. As mentioned before, some aspects of National Socialism’s genocidal policies towards Jews had all too ‘rational’ motives, at least in terms of the instrumental rationality of self-interest. I think we need to accept Alexander Herzen’s idea of ‘rational evil’ to understand the success of anti-Semitism in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Cen-

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tral Europe.30 Freud’s attempt to explain anti-Semitism shows more the limits of psychoanalysis’s explanatory competence than its extent. What remains interesting about Freud’s approach in Moses and Monotheism is his attempt to place himself and psychoanalysis, by heavy implication, in the tradition of intellectuality that he sees as stemming from the Jewish idea of the invisible God and that was for him the Jews’ primary contribution to the history of mankind.31 In the idea of Moses (and the Jews) as champions of abstract thought and ethics against hedonism, by the way, Freud was far from being alone. It is surely no coincidence that one of the other great works of critical modernism associated with Vienna, Arnold Schoenberg’s Moses and Aaron, had a very similar image of Moses, battling to defend the ethical truth of God’s word (the Law) against the hedonist nationalism of his brother, Aaron.32 Schoenberg is here identifying his own struggles to bring truth of expression to music with the traditions of the Jewish faith (that he had only recently rejoined). Freud too, between the lines, comes to identify his own intellectual project with that of Judaism, but he goes one step further. That is to say, Freud’s logic in Moses and Monotheism points to psychoanalysis, as the purest form of intellectuality, being Judaism without God and religion. Towards the end of Moses and Monotheism, Freud comes extremely close to making this claim explicitly. After likening Christianity to an acceptance of the fact that the Jews had murdered the father (God/Moses), he then states that while those Jews who became Christians accepted this ‘truth’, those Jews who refused and their descendants (modern Jewry) ‘have in that way taken a tragic load of guilt on themselves; they have been made to pay heavy penance for it’.33 The answer to this tragic situation appears not to be, as one might think, to convert to Christianity, for in Freud’s view that leads to further complications. Instead Jews should simply admit that they had murdered the father. By doing so Jews would accept Freud’s psychoanalytic explanation of their Jewish faith, thus accepting psychoanalytic theory and, in a sense, psychoanalysis as their new, ‘rational’ worldview (faith). For Freud, it appears, psychoanalysis really was the answer to the problems faced by Jews, and a continuation of that ultimate ‘Jewish trajectory’ of intellectuality. What of Freud’s legacy and psychoanalysis today, and in the future? Psychoanalysis’s therapeutic and theoretical validity is already contested, or more than contested, today, but what of psychoanalysis another century hence? Much of the theory will have been adjusted, or simply disappeared, I suspect, but the exegetic approach and the appeal to reason and above all to intellectuality will, I very much hope, remain. It could well be that what Freud implied as the fate he wished for Judaism, to one day make way for the purer form of intellectuality embodied in psychoanalysis, will one day happen to psychoanalysis itself. What will remain as psychoanalysis’s legacy will be, as in the case of Judaism, as a contribution to intellectuality – open-ended intellectuality. That would be a fitting

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legacy for an intellectual project that set out to recognise, understand and tame the unconscious, only to have to act as the vanguard against the modern madness of closed systems of purported rationality that led to genocide and mass murder, and disgraced humanity – where supposedly rational ‘final solutions’ were in actuality driven by and resulted in ‘rational evil’. To that extent, psychoanalysis’s tradition and legacy, with its emphasis on giving the irrational in the human mind its due, whatever the current validity of the theory, is still on the positive, inclusive, open side of history. Having been a pathbreaker in the exploration of the realm of mental illness in Vienna 1900 and opened up to others the ‘royal road to the unconscious’ or at least shown one way to navigate it, it would be a great pity if psychoanalysis were now left by the wayside. It has given us too many insights, mapped too much of the terrain of our unconscious life, whether sane or mad, to deserve this fate, and it has also provided too much of the topography of our conscious life, in its immense impact on our modern culture, to suffer it. The riddles that he tried to answer, most notably the two discussed here, might not have received the complete answers that Freud at moments thought he had given them. Those answers may not even be all that close to being correct answers, if there are such, but that does not detract from his intellectual achievement and that of his many followers. The trajectory that led him as an explorer into the ‘undiscovered country’ of mental illness enabled him to help transform the terrain of human experience. His experience along that journey also made him aware of the perils that awaited those who chose to neglect the reality of the landscape of the human soul in pursuit of an ideal, or an ideology. Freud’s example, his ‘critical modernist’ rejection of absolute, dogmatic system, his support of critical intellectuality over the urge to unreasoning certainty, suggests that psychoanalysis can still play a role in making sure that the journey into madness is not on a one-way street.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

F. Wittels, Sigmund Freud (London, 1924), 114. Cf. G. Aly, Hitler’s Beneficiaries (London, 2007). Cf. C. E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (London, 1980), esp. 3–10. Ibid., 181–207. For a summary of the main arguments against the Schorskean paradigm, see S. Beller, ed., Rethinking Vienna 1900 (Oxford, 2001). For this and what follows, see M. Worbs, Nervenkunst: Literatur und Psychoanalyse im Wien der Jahrhundertwende (Frankfurt, 1983), here esp. 17–44. Ibid., 47–78. Ibid., 53, 60. Ibid., 179–258, esp. 196, 205–206. See W. J. McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria (New Haven, CT, 1974); also McGrath, Freud’s Discovery of Psychoanalysis: The Politics of Hysteria (Ithaca, NY, 1986).

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11. McGrath, Freud’s Discovery, 138–39; A. Pfabigan, ‘Freud’s “Vienna Middle”’, in Rethinking Vienna 1900, ed. S. Beller (Oxford, 2001), 163–65. 12. Pfabigan, ‘Freud’s “Vienna Middle”’, 166–68. 13. Worbs, Nervenkunst, 259–64. 14. Ibid., 237–42. 15. Ibid., 254–56. 16. E. Timms, Karl Kraus, Apocalyptic Satirist: Culture and Catastrophe in Habsburg Vienna (New Haven, CT, 1986), 94–114. 17. Worbs, Nervenkunst, 158–77; Timms, Karl Kraus, 104–12. 18. Worbs, Nervenkunst, 218. 19. McGrath, Freud’s Discovery, 172–73. 20. The story about the coin is in S. Freud, Die Traumdeutung (Frankfurt, 1980), 183; in English, Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (London, 1955), vol. 4 of Standard Edition, 214. 21. S. Freud, Totem and Taboo, in Freud, The Origins of Religion, vol. 13, Pelican Freud Library (Harmondsworth, 1985), 51. 22. J. Salberg, ‘Hidden in Plain Sight: Freud’s Jewish Identity Revisited’, in The Jewish World of Sigmund Freud: Essays on Cultural Roots and the Problem of Religious Identity, ed. A. D. Richards (Jefferson, NC, 2010), 6 and 17–19. 23. Ibid., 13. Also, M. Krüll, Freud and His Father (London, 1986), 88–101. 24. M. Armstrong, ‘Being Mr. Somebody: Freud and Classical Education’, in Richards, Jewish World of Sigmund Freud, 40–41. 25. Salberg, ‘Hidden in Plain Sight’, 18. 26. On critical modernism, see A. Janik, ‘Vienna 1900 Revisited: Paradigms and Problems’, in Beller, Rethinking Vienna, 27–56; on Neurath, see N. Cartwright et al., Otto Neurath: Philosophy between Science and Politics (Cambridge, 1996). 27. M. Edmundson, ‘Who’s Your Daddy?’ New York Times, op-ed page, 23 September 2007. 28. S. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, in Freud, The Origins of Religion, vol. 13, Pelican Freud Library (Harmondsworth, 1985), 352–53. 29. Ibid., 386. 30. The phrase ‘rational evil’ comes from A. Herzen, Ends and Beginnings (Oxford, 1985), 254. 31. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 358–63. 32. A. Schoenberg, Moses und Aron (Mainz, 1957). 33. Freud, Moses and Monotheism, 386.

Chapter 3

SYMPHONIES AND PSYCHOSIS IN MAHLER’S VIENNA

d Gavin Plumley

It is done. An old man, bent, almost broken by the horrors of the time in which he wrote and by those that are the subject of what he has written, gazes with wavering satisfaction at the large pile of enlivened paper that is the work of his diligence, the product of years thronged with both memories and current events. – Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann1

T

homas Mann, whose work has become inextricably linked with that of Gustav Mahler, suggests a deeply historicist conclusion to his 1947 novel Doctor Faustus.2 Culture reflects time, and the resulting ‘enlivened paper’ has ‘broken’ the ‘old man’. An exchange of energies has occurred, for the betterment of culture, but to the detriment of the narrator’s well-being. Published after the Nazi era, Mann’s text is a virtuosic distillation of the neurotic era that produced both Mahler and Sigmund Freud, this essay’s protagonists. Although criticised by Arnold Schoenberg for replicating and falsifying his life in fiction, Adrian Leverkühn, Mann’s Faustian composer, is a suitable mirror for this essay and raises significant questions of the balance of emotion and creativity.3 The exchange in Mahler’s life between inspiration and welfare was one of the key topics of conversation during a meeting between Mahler and Freud on 26 August 1910. Having discovered that his wife was having an affair with a glamorous young architect, Mahler was encouraged to seek the psychoanalyst’s counsel. Freud and Mahler’s first and only acquaintance is the most direct link between psychoanaly-

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sis and music. It is the narrative backbone to Stuart Feder’s Gustav Mahler: A Life in Crisis, where these events are described as ‘crucial in Mahler’s life’.4 For our discussion, their brief contact and the texts that have attempted to interpret it open another stratum in the already rich interdisciplinary seam of madness and artistic modernity in Vienna at the turn of the last century. By 1910 and Mahler and Freud’s meeting, psychological disturbances and dream narratives were established topoi in the musical works of contemporary Vienna. These impulses found their most persuasive voice in the ‘break down’ of traditional tonality.5 Mahler’s own gargantuan symphonies and songs are replete with fractured harmonies, ironic cackles, deathly undercurrents, half-heard waltzes and stymied longing. Moreover, Mahler frequently highlighted these musical interruptions with the addition of extensive performance directions and contextual quotes, scrawled above the stave as he composed. By doing so, Mahler the artist framed Mahler the man within his work, a persistent subjectivity that is impossible to ignore in any analysis of his music. Given this persistence, it remains strange that Mahler avoided the ultimately subjective genre of opera, though his contemporaries working in music drama brought to their work similarly neurotic features. The illusory facets of Arnold Schoenberg’s expressionist monodrama Erwartung (written in 1909; premiered in 1924), Franz Schreker’s Der ferne Klang (1912) and Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Die tote Stadt (1920) reflect the wider cultural impact of Freud’s theories and the publication of Die Traumdeutung. I initially read these works within a Freudian context, though this interpretation reveals a sense of pat resolution. Without specific synopses, a similar construal of Mahler’s largely abstract works is difficult to maintain. Such reticence to accept is paralleled in Mahler’s ultimate evasion of Freud’s curing grasp. Evidence posits that Freud’s hope to alleviate Mahler (and other Viennese bourgeois neurotics) of underlying anxieties was in direct opposition to the philosophies that dominated contemporary creative thinking, in particular the Apollonian-Dionysian dichotomy of Nietzschean thought in the composer’s music (and Mann’s Faustian novel). Perceiving the productive rather than the destructive nature of these anxieties furthermore raises fundamental questions over the influential depiction of ‘Vienna 1900’ as a ‘laboratory for self-destruction’.6 I will conceive, with particular reference to Mahler’s reliance on pessimistic philosophy in his symphonies, that the so-called decadence and intellectual nihilism of contemporary philosophy were, conversely, a reformed optimism for the new century. It is therefore through a philosophical reading, such as one later suggested by Mann or by Theodor Adorno, rather than one predicated on psychoanalysis, that the true spirit of Mahler’s creativity comes to light.7 Before investigating the dialogue between music and psychoanalysis and the meeting of Mahler and Freud in 1910, we must look at the milieu that formed this outbreak of creativity. Although Vienna is the prism through which we view their careers, so many of the primary creators of ‘Vienna 1900’, including this

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essay’s two protagonists, were from outside the Austrian capital. Freud was born in the Moravian town of Freiburg (now Příbor), while Mahler was born in the Bohemian village of Kalischt (now Kaliště in the Czech Republic). Following musical studies in Vienna, Mahler became a conductor, first at Bad Hall in 1880, then in Ljubljana (1881), Olomouc (1883 – with a brief hiatus in Vienna as chorus master of the Carltheater), Kassel (1883), Prague (1885), Leipzig (1886), Budapest (1888) and Hamburg (1891). In these posts, Mahler became synonymous with an uncompromising attention to detail, high standards and a nightyrannical approach, aimed at stamping out Schlamperei (slovenliness) wherever he went.8 Yet this dogged determination took its toll. Each summer, Mahler left behind the pressure of the opera house and escaped into the Austrian countryside, re-focussing his efforts on composition, the endeavour that was dearest to him. He established this yearly composing sabbatical as of summer 1893. This need to divorce himself both physically and mentally from the city was particularly prevalent among Mahler’s contemporaries, where ‘a lively psychiatric discourse identified modern urban life as the main enemy of the nerves, with the educated middle and upper classes being particularly vulnerable’.9 These breaks away to the light, air and space of the Attersee, and later to the Wörthersee and Toblach (now in Italy), became sacrosanct though not, as we shall see, without its disturbances. For Mahler the flight away from the ‘madness’ of Vienna essentially became a journey into his own neuroses. In 1897 Mahler was appointed as the music director of the Hofoper (now the Staatsoper), the jewel in the Austro-Hungarian operatic crown, following a hasty conversion to Roman Catholicism on 23 February 1897 (thereby avoiding the impossibility of a Jew at the helm of a leading Viennese institution). Five months later he was promoted to director. Mahler’s arrival coincided with a time in which many of the key ingredients of ‘Vienna 1900’ were formed. The advent of Mahler and the death of Johannes Brahms saw the birth of modernism occurring simultaneously with the demise of old-school romanticism. Electric trams, the conveyance of the modern age, first sounded their eternal ‘bim’ in the city, while the artistic dictum of the new metropolis became petrified in the foundation of the Vereiningung Bildender Künstler Österreichs – the Secession. Having moved into his home in 19 Berggasse the previous year, Freud was hard at work on his polemic of the unconscious, Die Traumdeutung, which appeared in print in 1899 (though dated 1900). As these cultural endeavours occurred, Mahler assumed his position at the Hofoper, which dominated the Ringstrasse and Viennese culture alike. Among the regular repertoire of Mozart and Gluck, the cult of Richard Wagner’s music dramas was at large. Although the critics derided his every cut, reinstitution of a cut, casting, staging or tempi (largely through an anti-Semitic prism), Mahler was regarded as a supreme Wagnerian. Indeed, Stephen McClatchie posits that, with specific reference to Mahler the Wagnerian, ‘scholars have focussed on the creative Mahler at the expenses of the re-creative

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one: Mahler the composer instead of Mahler the conductor and dramaturge’.10 As well as conducting with an understanding of the symphonic nature of the works, he changed perceived opinions on how these works should be performed. Looking at one of the seminal works in Wagner’s oeuvre (and in Mahler’s conducting career), the impact that Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde (1865) had on modern music cannot be underestimated. This score, moving away from traditional harmony towards a freer idea of tonality, was groundbreaking. Heralding a free dream-style narrative – not least in the Liebesnacht of the second act – its repercussions can be heard in scores by composers as diverse as Debussy, Messiaen and Szymanowski. The tonal and harmonic freedom of Wagner’s idiom consciously destabilises its audience, robbing the music of a ‘home key’ (the tonic) and thereby creating a vast irrational psychodrama. In the final moments of the work, Isolde appositely asks, ‘Do I alone hear this melody?’ Paralleled with the appearance of Freud’s own investigation into the unconscious, Mahler’s performances of Tristan created significant interdisciplinary echoes in Vienna. One witness to a performance conducted by Mahler on 8 May 1906 wrote that ‘powerful waves of tone flood the room, and the murmur of the wind gives way to a terrible roaring frenzy of sound’. The nigh-penniless dauber who heard that ‘terrible roaring frenzy’ was Adolf Hitler. Such uncanny coincidence, prevalent throughout Viennese history, gives uncomfortable resonance to Gurnemanz’s words to the eponymous Parsifal in Wagner’s 1882 Bühnenweihfestspiel, ‘Du siehst, mein Sohn, zum Raum wird hier die Zeit’ (You see, my son, that here time becomes space). Issues of space, time and ‘powerful waves of tone’ were central to Franz Schreker’s 1912 post-Wagnerian opera Der ferne Klang (composed between 1903 and 1910). Although highly successful as both a conductor and chorus master (presiding over the 1913 premiere of Schoenberg’s similarly Wagnerian Gurrelieder), it wasn’t until the premiere of this, his second opera, that Schreker became established as a composer and librettist – Schreker, like Wagner, wrote both text and music. The opera is concerned with Fritz’s quest to find the ‘distant sound’ that haunts his thoughts; the hunt leads him to rediscover his lost love Grete, working as a prostitute in Venice, only to reject her. Five years later, Grete hears that Fritz has been lampooned for his latest play and goes to console him. Her compassion makes him realise that the ‘distant sound’ was love itself. Through this mélange of low-class eroticism and the otherness of the central ‘distant’ concept, Schreker struck contemporary gold. Audiences sympathised with the artist who seeks truth in an otherwise dystopian world. One particular episode in the drama chimed with popular cultural interest in the Freudian notion of the unconscious. The Nachtstück – an opulent interlude linking two scenes in the third act – is a telling distillation of the composer’s modus operandi. Richard Specht wrote of the movement in its 1909 premiere in Vienna (three years before the entire opera was first performed in Frankfurt) that ‘there are combinations of sounds in this work the likes of which have never been heard before: hallucinatory, mysteri-

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ous, mystical sounds of haunting fascination, confused whisperings, beseeching voices, whose glimmering murmurs ultimately dissolve into resplendent, transfigured rapture’.11 In this seven-minute interlude Schreker reveals Fritz’s (and the opera’s) psychosexual heart – it is by means of this dream exploration that Fritz comes to the realisation that Grete’s love prompts the ferne Klang. As Freud claims, ‘If we are not able to explain how dream-images originate, we will also labour in vain to understand and possibly treat the phobias, obsessions and delusions’.12 Through hearing these sounds (even if unconsciously), Fritz is able to uncover the route of his ‘obsessions and delusions’. Of Schreker’s equally mysterious opera Der Schatzgräber (1920), the critic Paul Bekker wrote, ‘Out of music a fairy-tale dream emerges and loses itself again in music. That is really all; the rest is scenic parable that lures the imagination away from [the] sensually representable, conceptually graspable and towards the distant regions of dream-life’.13 Wagner’s aims lived on in Schreker’s Freudian musico-dramatic world. In Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s equally vivid Die tote Stadt (1921), Paul’s dead wife Marie comes back to life in the form of the sassy Marietta. At the end of the dream sequence that forms the larger part of the opera, Paul strangles Marietta, thus ending his ‘memory of [a] psychical trauma’.14 The fantastical images and characters that accompany Paul’s dream are directly akin to what Freud and Joseph Breuer refer to as the ‘private theatre’ or double consciousness of the Anna O. case study in Studies in Hysteria. But while Freud and Breuer cite Anna’s behaviour within this secondary state as problematic (‘laying the foundations for the dissociation of her mental personality’), that world is, in the context of our discussion of neurosis and creativity, a more imaginative one.15 For Korngold and Schreker, Freudian analysis and cure ultimately become tied to the long-established happy-ending scenario—the ensuing nightmare giving Paul the strength to abandon his ‘private theatre’ and leave die Stadt des Todes. Nevertheless it broaches the idea in an operatic context that psychological exposure (and, by implication, analysis) could be key to curing anxiety. Only in the ferne Klang interlude does Schreker come closest to the ‘unconscious’ that, for Freud, could unlock the original impulses that provoke neurotic symptoms. While Bekker and Adorno hexed the wordless passages in Schreker’s operas as ‘essentially sensuous’, such criticism misses strong analogies with the neuroses and cures of the time.16 These thoughts find yet more severe articulation in Arnold Schoenberg’s 1924 Monodrama Erwartung (written in 1909). Taking Wagner’s lead, Schoenberg distances the piece’s sound world yet further. The (nameless) woman in Erwartung, as she claws her way through a dark forest, sings of ‘this endless deathly pallor,’ while jolts of expressionistic noise, calling on a vast orchestra, depict her phobic condition. Schoenberg felt that ‘the whole drama can be understood as a nightmare of anxiety’.17 That anxiety finds its voice through Schoenberg’s atonality. Like Wagner’s Tristan, these Viennese composers pitched their tents at the

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extremity of musical language, thereby finding the requisite idiom for what they perceived to be an irrational world. Mahler’s position within the new repertoire remained ambivalent. Due to the relative conservatism of the Viennese, many contemporary operas never reached the Hofoper stage during Mahler’s tenure. Yet, despite this imbedded traditionalism, between 1897 and 1907 Mahler guided the Hofoper through one of its greatest periods, in which he revolutionised the core elements of its repertoire.18 It is here that Mahler the re-creative artist (with reference to McClatchie’s position above) links with the cultural advances (including the ‘new music’) of his time. Working with the Secessionist artist Alfred Roller, who created profoundly symbolic and dimly lit sets (in a new role, devised by Mahler, overseeing many facets of production), more radical readings were sought in works such as Tristan und Isolde (1903), Don Giovanni (1905), Die Walküre (1907) and Iphigénie en Aulide (1907). Mahler’s direct involvement with these productions, collaborating with a major Secession artist such as Roller, wedded to contemporary psychological discourse, created strong in-roads to the ‘distant regions of dream-life’ of Schreker, Korngold and Schoenberg’s stage works. One person who bridged the gap between the world of the opera house and that of the culture of ‘Jung Wien’ was Alma Schindler, whom Mahler met in November 1901. Her marriage to Mahler in 1902 was one entry in a litany of celebrity obsessions. She had relationships with Gustav Klimt, Max Burckhard, Alexander Zemlinsky, Walther Gropius (married 1915), Oskar Kokoschka and Franz Werfel (married 1929). Alma was the daughter of the landscape painter Emil Schindler; following his death in 1892 her mother had married his student Carl Moll, one of the founding members of the Vienna Secession. Alma had access to the golden circle of the Viennese avant garde. Undertaking the task of editing Alma’s diaries, musicologist Antony Beaumont found the breadth of her social and intellectual milieu dizzying: ‘Even before her years with Mahler, Alma’s world was immense, and to annotate it exhaustively would have amounted to writing a new cultural and social history of fin-de-siècle Vienna’.19 Alma was herself a composer of note, having studied with Josef Labor (Schoenberg’s teacher) and her inamorato Zemlinsky. Her union with Mahler, however, was based on a fundamental compromise; Mahler insisted that she give up composing. Alma thereby became entirely subservient to Mahler and his work, and that denial of Alma’s creative outlet was to unbalance their marriage significantly. Already by the summer of 1902, compelled to be the handmaid to Mahler’s vocation, Alma was complaining, ‘I’ve sunk to the level of a housekeeper!’20 Repairing to the various spas and institutions offering cure throughout the empire became a deliberate split from the turbulence of her domestic situation, thereby paralleling Mahler’s own escape from Vienna. Despite her private consternation, Alma continued the role of dutiful wife. Their first daughter Maria, nicknamed ‘Putzi’, was born in November 1902, and

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the birth of Anna followed in June 1904. During this time Mahler kept to his previous regimen of retiring to the countryside for months of recuperation and composition after the opera season. Bruised and beaten by the continuing critical onslaught in Vienna, the time spent in his Komponierhäuschen proved to be a haven.21 The Fifth and Sixth symphonies and the Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children) written immediately after Anna’s birth, were all on Mahler’s desk during this time. Collectively their torrid language forms a contradictory response to the joy of new marriage, childbirth and stable family life; yet this music uncovered some of the fundamental tensions and neuroses of Mahler’s existence, not least the weight of artistic responsibility. Mahler took on the Beethovenian model of the symphony (the zenith of German abstract music) and the Wagnerian (and later Secessionist) idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk (the total work of art).22 Such paradoxical voices were to be expected of a man burdened with the load of Viennese musical inheritance; they are the product of that anxiety. The shadow of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony loomed large when Mahler began his own. In mockery of the Germanic worship of Beethoven’s masterwork, E. M. Forster describes the piece as ‘the most sublime noise that has ever penetrated into the ear of man’.23 That symphony charts a journey from an impassioned and embittered first movement in C minor – characterised by three short notes, falling to a longer note a major third below – to a thrilling apotheosis in C major. Forster, himself no stranger to contemporary bourgeois neurosis (prevalent in his 1910 novel Howards End, and framed therein as a specifically Germanic trait), describes the journey in yet more florid language: ‘He brought back the gusts of splendour, the heroism, the youth, the magnificence of life and of death, and, amid vast roarings of superhuman joy, he led his Fifth Symphony to its conclusion’.24 For Mahler, who began his First Symphony in D major, the key in which Beethoven finished his last symphony, the schemes of Beethoven’s work were important models. The arch heroism Forster describes echoes the Übermensch figure of Nietzschean philosophy. This heady mixture of the complete work of art, the Beethovenian paradigm and philosophical import becomes increasingly complex and takes its toll. Echoing Beethoven’s characteristic four-note motif, Mahler starts his own Fifth Symphony with the same, not falling a major third, but with a rising minor third. Keen to pay homage, but not to repeat, Mahler sets his work in C sharp minor, a semitone above Beethoven’s tonality. And while Mahler’s work shows a surface similarity to the fearlessness of his model, the musical argument becomes decidedly equivocal. There are parallels to be made with the neuroses of Adrian Leverkühn in Mann’s Doctor Faustus, whose work Lamentation of Dr. Faustus is written ‘with an eye to Beethoven’s Ninth, as its counterpart in the most melancholy sense of the word … It performs a formal negation of the Ninth’.25 In his Fifth Symphony, Mahler too repudiates the audacity of Beethoven’s framework. Most surprising, given the outward heroism of the work, is the romantic paean that forms the penultimate movement. Written

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in response to his engagement to Alma, this ‘Adagietto’ has come to symbolise a melancholic and feminised Mahler, an introspection on which Luchino Visconti preyed when he (over-) used it as the soundtrack to his 1971 film Death in Venice (at which point the figure of Mann eerily enters our sphere once more).26 Yet that plurality of voice, interpreted as love song or homoerotic contemplation, shows how Mahler had fundamentally undermined his heroic message, as Adorno later commented: Mahler was a poor yea-sayer. His voice cracks, like Nietzsche’s, when he proclaims values, speaks from mere conviction, when he himself puts into practice the abhorrent notion of overcoming on which the thematic analyses capitalise, and makes music as if joy were already in the world. His vainly jubilant movements unmask jubilation; his subjective incapacity for the happy end denounces itself.27

Undermined and exposed, this equivocation displays the essential nervousness of Vienna at that time. Beethoven’s oeuvre blossomed in a Europe of Napoleonic expansion, echoed in its bold idealism. Mahler, on the other hand, became the ‘poor yea-sayer’ in a time dominated by the pessimism of Nietzsche, the dichotomy of Apollonian versus Dionysian impulses, or reason versus madness, if you will. In order to generate the happy end, Mahler, like Mann’s Adrian Leverkühn, enters a malevolent pact with negativity (seen through a constantly subjective prism). These strains pervade the daring of the fifth and at last derail its sincerity and Mann’s post-Nietzschean reading of culture, as suggested by the opening quotation in this essay, suggests a way forward in interpreting Mahler’s work. If the Fifth Symphony had been ‘vainly jubilant’, the ensuing Sixth was incontrovertibly bleak. Where in the Fifth Mahler had formulated ‘vast roarings of superhuman joy’ (echoing Hitler’s review of Mahler’s performance of Tristan), the Sixth was the exclusion of that ambivalent happiness. Couched in a stark A minor, with the marking wie gepeitscht (as if whipped), the symphony states unambiguous tragedy. Yet even the tragedy has a plurality; within a quiet interlude in the first movement and the Andante, Mahler displays contrary warmth. Accompanied by the clatter of cowbells, these havens of calm echo the peace at his and Alma’s summer home at Maiernigg, set on the shore of the Wörthersee, and contrast with the whirlwind of aggression elsewhere in the work, indicative of a relentless, mechanised world, filled with chatter and criticism, such as Mahler experienced in Vienna. Just as Otto Wagner’s church at ‘Am Steinhof ’ had privileged an open worship space with light flooding the room – reflecting the vast grounds in which the hospital was set – Mahler’s sought his own ‘asylum’ in the immense light spaces mountains of his adopted Austria and portrayed them in musical discourse.28 Yet the creation of these symphonies, which were the result of his escape from Vienna’s modernity and madness, was itself a refuge, hiding in the staves, themes and orchestration that are its vocabulary.29 However, the sanctuary itself becomes plural. Performance markings, such as Stürmisch bewegt,

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mit grosser Vehemenz (violently agitated, with great vehemence) in the Fifth Symphony (also used in the First Symphony), indicate an untameable cynicism. As in Schreker, Korngold and Schoenberg’s stage works, these tensions readily portray themselves in form and harmony. In the fourth movement of the Sixth Symphony, converse thoughts of ‘asylum’ and automated horror are summed up in an immense orgy of noise. Moving away from the ease of diatonic music and the rigorous structure of earlier movements, Mahler’s music strides toward the brink with apparent formlessness and the ‘breakdown’ of tonality. Thematic material disintegrates and, with a terrifying assault, Mahler unleashes a nihilistic coda. Worse was yet to come. Alma commented later (with the aid of hindsight) that the Sixth Symphony was a premonition of the sadness that would plague Mahler’s final years.30 In 1907 the Mahlers’ first daughter Maria died of scarlet fever at home in Maiernigg; the ‘haven’ from urban purgatory had been tainted. When a doctor came to check on the family (Anna, the younger daughter had also been ill, but recovered), Mahler was diagnosed with a serious heart condition. The same year, after a decade of relentless critical attack, Mahler left the Hofoper. Fleeing upsetting memories and the insatiable aggression of the Viennese press, the Mahlers left for New York where Mahler was to conduct at the Metropolitan Opera. On his departure, Klimt, marking the end of a significant era in Viennese modernism, was heard to sigh, ‘Es ist vorbei’ (It is over).31 Despite the great distance, Mahler preserved his pattern of working throughout the opera and concert season, and then repairing to the Austrian countryside. Although well paid in New York, Mahler suffered the same critical onslaught he had experienced in Vienna, and he increasingly craved his countryside refuge. Maria’s death had made a return to Maiernigg impossible, so they found a new home in Toblach (now Dobbiaco, Italy). Yet catastrophe was ready to meet Mahler in the summer of 1910, when he discovered that Alma had been having an affair. The haven had been disturbed once again (and perhaps irrevocably). Mahler’s summer was dominated by his Tenth Symphony and the intricate preparations for the world premiere of his Eighth in Munich that autumn. For Alma, however, the summer looked decidedly bleak. Predicated on a refusal of Alma’s creative talent and beleaguered by a failing attraction to a husband twenty years her senior, Alma found such a subservient existence increasingly difficult. She suffered from depression and frequently took to spa cures. As Stuart Feder has surmised, ‘Neither she nor Mahler was in a position to understand her depression. Mahler’s efforts were tinged with denial as he could only intellectualise and thus spare himself any true empathy’. Feder continues: ‘Bewildered by Alma’s moods, Mahler veered between declarations and demonstrations of heartfelt love and the abstract philosophising of which Alma complained’.32 These are the impulses we hear in the dichotomous language of the Fifth and Sixth symphonies. For Alma, however, there was no output for these frustrations. Doubtless influenced by the popular press’s oversexualisation of the increasingly popular

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art-cum-science of psychoanalysis, Alma wrote in her diary that she was suffering from ‘severe hysteria’, a euphemism for sexual frustration. In the summer of 1910, she decided to visit Tobelbad, a fashionable spa for the treatment of nervous conditions and female disorders. While there, Alma embarked on a torrid affair with the twenty-seven-year-old architect Gropius.33 When Mahler discovered the affair, the impact on his emotional stability was marked. More intriguing for this discourse is its manifestations, as Mann writes, in the ‘product of years thronged with both memories and current events’, or, put another way, in the exchange between negative emotion and positive creativity in his music. Having completed the Ninth Symphony the previous summer, Mahler had already composed two movements of his Tenth Symphony before discovering his wife’s affair. The revelation caused Mahler to annotate the score with overt statements. ‘Tod! Verk!’ on the preliminary sketch may refer to the Todesverkündigung (Annunciation of Death) in Wagner’s Die Walküre. Similarly, it has been seen as an unlikely abbreviation of Verklärung (transfiguration). Another, ‘O Gott! O Gott! Warum has du mich verlassen’, (Oh God! Oh God! why did you leave me) replicates Jesus’ last words on the cross. ‘Dein Wille geschehe!’ (Thy will be done) was also written above the score of the drafted third movement; a painful acquiescence. But other more personal statements, such as ‘The Devil leads me in a dance. Madness seizes me, Curses! Annihilate me that I may forget, that I am! That I may cease to be’ or ‘Oh! Oh! Oh! Farewell my lyre! Farewell, Farewell, Farewell!’ display an inner sense of breakdown, accompanied by a comparable crisis of harmony and tonality in the work.34 The nonmusical superscriptions lend us a clear programme (though the work was never finished) and confirm Mahler’s role as the pathological subjective, placing himself and his emotions at the centre of his work. While semiotic analysis is incisive, the composer himself posits such an emotional view of his work in the manuscripts’ superscriptions that context becomes essential. As such two Mahlers arise; the Mahler of the everyday, the man we read through biography, and the Mahler of perception, the ‘big Other’ that Lawrence Kramer, by way of Hegel and Slavoj Žižek, suggests we ‘re-enact as [our] own’ when we hear and interpret the music.35 For Alma, the precarious balance of these two Mahlers had been problematic from the start, and her personal creative urge was a direct challenge to both. She was patently aware of the upset she had caused during the summer of 1910, and simultaneously Mahler, perhaps realising the underlying problem in their marriage, suggested that Alma should now have her compositions published; work and life are dangerously intertwined. During the immediate aftermath of these events, the idea of Mahler consulting Freud, now the most public figure for psychoanalysis in Vienna, was raised. Rather than rejecting Alma’s idea (though he cancelled the appointment twice), Mahler went to meet Freud in Holland, where the analyst was holidaying with his family.

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What occurred on 26 August 1910 was never fully recorded. As such, the event has been prey to imagination, not least in Felix and Percy Adlon’s otherwise perspicacious 2010 film Mahler auf der Couch.36 Freud left no details about what he and Mahler discussed on their four-hour walk around Leiden.37 However, Freud later talked about the encounter with his trusted disciple Marie Bonaparte, who subsequently recorded it in her diary: Then [Mahler] arrived in Leiden, and asked me to meet him in the hotel. I went there, and we walked around the whole town for four hours. He told me his whole life history. It became late. I said: ‘I must catch the last tram, otherwise I can’t get home … and you, what will you do?’ I asked Mahler. ‘I’, he answered, ‘I am returning straight away to the Tyrol’. Mahler gave me the curious impression that he was both a genius and an ape. He has been dead a long time, so I can speak freely to you. He came to me because of his marriage. He had married a woman who was younger than he was; and at that time they were not getting on very well with each other. He was a normal, rigorous man, who loved his wife. He had only superficial affairs apart from her. He was faithful to her. But she didn’t arouse him. He spoke to me about all sorts of things. But after this short analysis it became a happy marriage … I said to him, ‘Your mother was called Marie of course?’— ‘How do you know that?’ he exclaimed. I had deduced it from what he had told me. He had an enormous mother-fixation.38

The elision of Alma and mother figure, hence Mahler’s depression at the prospect of losing her, is open to the customary acceptance or rejection of all Freudian readings – both Feder and de la Grange are convinced by this reading. Taking into account that this is a third-hand report of a conversation, written in a diary, however, there are many missing elements. For Freud it appears the nub of this four-hour conversation was about the relationship that had caused the breakdown. What is intriguing is that Freud decided to focus on a recent neurosis (i.e. caused by the Gropius affair – though that relationship was never directly noted or mentioned), citing it as Mahler’s failure to be attracted to his wife rather than the deep-seated tensions that are, as we have seen, manifest throughout the composer’s work. On that subject Freud remains silent. That silence betrays much. Only when later writing to another follower, Theodor Reik, does Freud admit his defeat at dealing with Mahler: ‘No shaft of light was thrown at the time on the symptomatic façade of his compulsive neurosis. It was as if one was digging a single deep tunnel through a building complex’.39 Elsewhere too, Freud spoke to Bonaparte of a more fundamental issue with the analysis of creative person, saying, ‘Behind the neurosis there are always problems, conflicts enough, which analysis cannot eliminate! The big problem of human nature, of the human intellect, of the human instincts, is their relationship

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to the world’.40 Bonaparte aptly goes on to call this, à la Thomas Mann, the ‘Faust problem’. Although Feder and de la Grange expound widely on the possible analyses of Mahler’s relationships, the ensuing neuroses and the impact on his work, de la Grange admits that there is a major lacuna in the information available: without Freud recording the analysis, as he had previously with his Viennese patients and his own self-analysis, we are missing the text ne plus ultra. De la Grange posits another central problem: ‘The danger of Freud’s impromptu analysis – a danger that strikes us as self-evident nowadays – is that it may have opened Mahler’s eyes to some of the possible causes of his neurosis without giving him the necessary weapons to tackle it’.41 In his defence, Freud had rarely been required to undertake such a short analysis with a patient without recourse to further sessions. Freud had, in effect, brought the boil to a head without actually lancing it. Feder’s conclusion is more convinced by Freud’s ability to cure: the ‘precious word’ that Mahler sought and found in the journey to Leiden to see Freud was ‘life’.42 This summation is as glib as those offered by and to the neurotic characters of Schreker and Korngold’s Die Traumdeutung-infused works. After leaving Leiden, Mahler returned home and then travelled to New York to resume his conducting appointments; the Tenth Symphony was absent from Mahler’s creative thoughts. Having worked on the piece extensively during that summer, even after discovering the affair, he did not take the manuscript to New York ‘because of the anguished inscriptions he had written on the autograph sketches, but also because he did not want to be reminded of those terrible weeks during which the idea of losing Alma had driven him to despair’.43 Equally, as we have seen, Mahler focussed on being a re-creative being during the opera and music season, before returning to being the creative one in the calm of the Austrian countryside. In this respect he preserved his previous routine. In 1911, however, Mahler died before such a return could be accomplished; the Tenth Symphony therefore remained unfinished. Discussions about the ways in which the Tenth Symphony could have been completed are legion and, for the purposes of our discussion, largely irrelevant.44 The substance of the Freud-Mahler meeting is more readily concerned with what Mahler hoped to cure and whether Freud was suitably equipped to do so. The answer to the former is that Mahler sought only temporary relief from his anxieties caused by the Gropius relationship and his apparent fear of losing Alma. He was given the immediate panacea of the mother-fixation diagnosis and returned to his re-creative work. In this pursuit he was merely pandering to his wife’s wish for him to meet with Freud and therefore allay herself of some underlying guilt. The task was thus ably undertaken and diagnosed (promptly if simplistically) by Freud. But what about the creative being and the generative quality of the anxiety that fuelled him? At no point in Freud’s reports or in Mahler’s life had the question of curing the underlying Mannian ‘Faust problem’ been raised. Even if, later in life, Freud ponders the tension between human beings and their

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cultural milieu in Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (Civilisation and its Discontents), that discussion is far removed from the specifics of Mahler’s life.45 Intriguing and alluring as this meeting between two great creative minds may be—one musical, one new scientific—the conclusions remain unclear. I would argue that Freud and his disciples’ wish to rationalise neurasthenic problems through psychoanalytical language fails to grasp the irrational drive of Mahler, the intense postNietzschean Faustian. Analysis, both psychological and musical, so often fails fully to interpret the original, and Mahler, the wilful subject and ‘the big Other’, constantly reminds us of his presence within our understanding. The attempt to account for or cure these irrational impulses is symptomatic of our misguided view that the explosion of art, literature and music in ‘Vienna 1900’ was both degenerate and intrinsically linked with the disintegration of the sociopolitical makeup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Moreover, the utopianism of Freud’s hoped-for cure (belying his roots in medicine) misses an essential trigger: creativity, even when ‘violently agitated and with great vehemence’, is still creativity. To cure the Dionysian is to fell opposition to the Apollonian. Mahler’s music is not the last breath of an irrational romanticism, then, but the new voice of an equally irrational twentieth century, plural but thrilling to the last, and it is Mahler’s Janus-like quality that is its most beguiling trait. Musical commentators, particularly those able to draw on the various strands of biographical, poetic and philosophical texts available to them, are more readily able to deal with these issues. Adorno remarked that Freud ‘declined to cure [Mahler’s] person out of respect for his work’.46 We must also consider that Freud may have simply enjoyed the privilege of talking with, as he said, ‘a man like Mahler’.47 Consequently, Freud’s mother-fixation diagnosis comes nowhere near breaking the Gordian knot of Mahler’s neuroses and, considered alongside Freud’s more revelatory diagnoses (largely out of self-analysis), is markedly facile. The dilemmas, the kernel of the neuroses, propelled Mahler’s personal inventiveness, even to generate as bleak a canvas as the Sixth Symphony at a time of happiness. Adorno would come close in later years to unlocking this morass by codifying it further in his labyrinthine style. But during Mahler’s lifetime, the composer’s subjective nihilistic prophecy was too much to take, even for the self-obsessive Viennese (who often rejected his work). Schoenberg’s twelve-tone system, reasoning with the breakdown of form and tonality, did not cure those tensions; it opened up yet new avenues of invention. Contrary to the position of reactionary criticism of the time, Schoenberg’s serialism continued to toy with the Apollonian and Dionysian alike.48 That Freud’s meeting with Mahler has opened up the dialogue between the ideas of an auditory space and the ‘unconscious’ of Berggasse-born psychoanalysis is essential. It creates rich parallels between the radiant spaces of Otto Wagner and Josef Hoffman’s asylums and the fleeting luminescent landscapes of Mahler’s symphonic output, thereby finding utopian sounds in an otherwise

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dystopian world. Furthermore, we can explore these impulses in contemporary opera, though many show only a surface attraction to the Freudian ‘cure’ and fall into nostalgic models (the penniless artist, the lachrymose lover); ‘The emotional surge becomes a splurge, the representation of inarticulacy itself becomes inarticulate’.49 However fruitful these lines of investigation created by musical and interdisciplinary analyses, an analyst as great as Freud had to admit defeat in the face of a patient as complex as Mahler. Freud’s conclusions and ours are only another imagining, a further layer of text covering the neurosis itself; the abstract cannot be rationalised, and Freud’s ‘talking cure’ ultimately failed to heal the master of ambivalent musical communication.

Notes 1. T. Mann, Doctor Faustus, trans. J. E. Woods (New York, 1999), 528. 2. The link between Mahler and Mann stems from a letter Mann wrote to the painter Wolfgang Born in March 1921. In it Mann reveals that the news of Mahler’s death coincided with the creation of Death in Venice. ‘Later, these shocks fused with the impressions and ideas from which the novella sprang. So that when I conceived my hero who succumbs to lascivious dissolution, I not only gave him the great musician’s Christian name, but also in describing his appearance conferred Mahler’s mask upon him’. See The Letters of Thomas Mann 1889–1942, vol. 1, trans. R. and C. Winston (London, 1970), 110. Such coincidence provided the inspiration for Luchino Visconti’s more blatant elision of Mahler and Gustav von Aschenbach in his 1971 movie of Death in Venice. 3. L. Weschler, ‘Paradise: The Southern California Idyll of Hitler’s Cultural Exiles’, in Exiles and Emigrés: The Flight of European Artists from Hitler, ed. S. Barron and S. Eckmann (New York, 1997), 346. 4. S. Feder, Gustav Mahler: A Life in Crisis (New Haven, CT, 2004), 3. 5. R. G. Hopkins, Closure and Mahler’s Music: The Role of Secondary Parameters (Philadelphia, 1990), 1. 6. R. Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London, 1991), 3. 7. Adorno wrote widely on Mahler’s work, though of especial note is his monograph Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, trans. E. Jephcott (Chicago, 1992). 8. H. de la Grange, Gustav Mahler: Volume 3—Triumph and Disillusion (1904–1907) (Oxford, 1999), 4. 9. G. Blackshaw and L. Topp, ‘Scrutinised Bodies and Lunatic Utopias: Mental Illness, Psychiatry and the Visual Arts in Vienna, 1898–1914’, in Madness and Modernity: Mental Illness and the Visual Arts in Vienna 1900, ed. G. Blackshaw and L. Topp (Surrey, 2009), 18. 10. S. McClatchie, ‘Mahler’s Wagner’, Mahler im kulturellen Kontext/Contextualizing Mahler, ed. E. W. Partsch and M. Solvik (Vienna, 2011), 407. 11. R. Specht, Der ferne Klang (Review), Der Merker 3, no. 18 (1912). 12. S. Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. J. Crick (Oxford, 1999), 5. 13. P. Bekker, Klang und Eros (Stuttgart and Berlin, 1922), 48. 14. S. Freud and J. Breuer, Studies in Hysteria, trans. Nicola Luckhurst (London, 2004), 17. 15. Ibid., 45. 16. For a further discussion about wordless music in Schreker’s operas, see C. Morris, ‘A Torrent of Unsettling Sounds’, in Reading Opera Between the Lines: Orchestral Interludes and Cultural Meaning from Wagner to Berg (Cambridge: 2002).

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17. Quoted in D. Hamilton, ‘Schoenberg’s First Opera’, Opera Quarterly 6, no. 3 (Spring 1989): 48–58. 18. See the extensive discussions about Mahler’s performance and production practice in H. de la Grange, Gustav Mahler: Volume 2—Vienna: The Years of Challenge (1897–1904), (Oxford, 1995). 19. Alma Mahler-Werfel: Diaries 1898–1902, trans. A. Beaumont (London, 1998), xviii. 20. De la Grange, Gustav Mahler, 2:536. 21. See K. J. Clarke, Mahler’s Heavenly Retreats: My Encounters with the Masters ‘Composing Houses’ (London, 2006). 22. For an in-depth discourse on the mythologizing of Beethoven’s legacy see C. Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley, CA, 1992). 23. E. M. Forster, Howards End (London, 2000), 26. 24. Ibid., 29. 25. Mann, Doctor Faustus, 514. 26. For more on this movement’s interpretations see G. Kaplan ‘Adagietto: “From Mahler with Love”,’ in Perspectives on Mahler, ed. J. Barham (London, 2005). 27. Adorno, Mahler, 137. 28. For a discussion of Wagner’s utopian aims in the construction of the ‘Am Steinhof ’ chapel see Blackshaw and Topp, ‘Scrutinised Bodies’, 27. 29. Similar visual responses to the mania of contemporary Vienna formed the basis of the 2009 Wellcome Collection exhibition Madness and Modernity (curated by G. Blackshaw and L. Topp), which was restaged by G. Blackshaw and S. Wieber in 2010 at the Wien Museum. 30. De la Grange, Gustav Mahler, 3:813. 31. Ibid., 792. 32. Feder, Gustav Mahler, 178. 33. Ibid., 179. 34. See D. Matthews, ‘Wagner, Lipiner and the “Purgatorio”,’ in The Mahler Companion, ed. D. Mitchell and A. Nicholson (Oxford, 1999), 508–16. 35. L. Kramer, Interpreting Music (Berkeley, CA, 2011), 48. 36. F. O. Adlon and P. Adlon, Mahler auf der Couch [film] (Leipzig: Kinowelt, 2010). 37. It should be noted that leiden is the German verb to suffer; Leiden, from the present participle, means suffering. 38. H. de la Grange, Gustav Mahler: Volume 4—A New Life Cut Short (1907–1911) (Oxford, 2008), 893–84. 39. Ibid., 898. 40. Ibid., 897. 41. Ibid., 916. 42. Feder, Gustav Mahler, 238. 43. De la Grange, Gustav Mahler, 4:919. 44. The symphony has been subject to several posthumous completions. For further information see ibid., 1452–529. 45. S. Freud, Civilisation and Its Discontents, trans. J. Strachey (New York, 2005), 154. 46. Adorno, Mahler, 39. 47. Feder, Gustav Mahler, 1. 48. See Schoenberg’s Variationen für Orchester (1926–28), in which the composer develops the emotional, textural and motivic possibilities of a twelve-tone theme on a large orchestral scale. 49. Adorno ‘Schreker’, Quasi una fantasia, trans. R. Livingstone (London, 1992), 141.

Chapter 4

CREATING AN APPROPRIATE SOCIAL MILIEU Journeys to Health at a Sanatorium for Nervous Disorders

d Nicola Imrie

M

ention the word ‘sanatorium’ to anyone familiar with German literature, and chances are the response will be Der Zauberberg or Magic Mountain. Thomas Mann’s 1924 novel about Hans Castorp, his cousin and other patients at a tuberculosis sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland, is well known. In Mann’s 1903 short story ‘Tristan’, a distinctive sanatorium building is described: Here is Einfried, the sanatorium! White and rectilinear, it is situated with its main building and elongated wing amid extensive gardens with delightful grottoes, pergolas and small pavilions made from bark. Behind its slate roofs the mountains, massive, with gentle crags and blanketed with green firs, rise skyward.1

The form and colour of Sanatorium Einfried seem to strongly prefigure the much-studied early modernist Purkersdorf Sanatorium (1905) designed by Josef Hoffmann, built to treat nervous disorders at an existing hydrotherapy clinic near Vienna.2 The designers of many sanatoria for nervous disorders adopted formal qualities from tuberculosis sanatoria, as we shall see. Often early twentiethcentury sanatoria are portrayed as hygienic, white boxes, yet, many therapeutically consistent but stylistically distinct sanatoria for nervous disorders were constructed across the Austro-Hungarian Empire around 1900.3 Creating an effective therapeutic environment was clearly paramount; however, the organisa-

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tion of the functional spaces within many sanatoria and the importance placed upon the social milieu suggested the character of a grand hotel. The typical grand hotel arrangement of public and private spaces was frequently adopted and ‘given the bourgeois and even aristocratic clientele at these fee-paying, profit-making establishments, the link to hotel architecture is not surprising’.4 The exclusive reputation of grand hotels was made via luxuriously designed buildings frequently located far from guests’ homes reached by a comfortable train journey. By examining the useful case of Sanatorium Dr Schalk in Abbazia, Küstenland (today Opatija, Croatia) (1906) (Figure 4.1), which represents just one of a diverse range of architectural responses to the task of creating a sanatorium for nervous disorders, the aim here is to demonstrate how owners of private sanatoria for nervous disorders wishing to court the business of affluent patients, not only took advantage of the spatial layout of grand hotels to foster a sense of exclusivity based on social class and the tradition among the wealthy to seek healthcare at spa resorts, but also to underline the – illusion of – the exclusion of patients suffering from dreaded psychiatric conditions. The spaces to which patients travelled and the therapeutic journeys they underwent during their stay in sanatoria such as Dr Schalk’s shall be examined.

Figure 4.1. Sanatorium Dr Schalk, 2005 (known as Villa Ambasador). Photographed by the author, June 2005.

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Abbazia The history of the Adriatic coastal spa resort Abbazia is intrinsically linked to the expansion of the railways in the Austro-Hungarian Empire during the midnineteenth century. The relative comfort and simplicity of rail travel facilitated the growth of tourism to destinations increasingly distant from the tourists’ urban homes. Significantly, Abbazia had legitimate medical endorsements for the healing properties of its climate for respiratory conditions and nervous disorders from the start.5 In 1873, the Südbahn connecting Vienna with Trieste, the principal city of the imperial province Küstenland, was extended to include a branch line to Fiume (today Rijeka) in the Hungarian part of the empire.6 Located a short distance west of Fiume, back in Austrian Küstenland, with its own station, was Abbazia, a fishing village surrounding St Jacob’s Abbey. In 1882, while pursuing an abiding interest in establishing a winter resort on the Adriatic coast, the director of the Südbahngesellschaft (the southern railway operator), Friedrich Schüler, purchased undeveloped land near the abbey.7 The offices of the Abbazia spa resort committee (Kurkommission) were established in an existing private house, Villa Angiolina.8 The construction of large hotels in Abbazia, financed by the Südbahngesellschaft, began in 1883 setting in motion the transformation of fishing and religious communities into a renowned resort.9 Two years later, Abbazia gained legitimacy as a place of healing. The respected Vienna surgeon Dr Theodor Billroth10 published an article in the Wiener Medizinische Zeitschrift describing Abbazia as an important location for the treatment of nervous disorders due to the beneficial climate, particularly in winter.11 The same year, Friedrich Schüler invited Dr Julius Glax, a university professor and balneologist from Graz, to Abbazia as a medical advisor. Glax soon became the resort’s principal doctor and chairman of the spa resort committee.12 These medical endorsements attested to the resort’s growing reputation as a place to recover one’s health. The impact of Billroth, Glax and others’ convincing promotion of Abbazia drew the attention of many Viennese doctors as a place to recommend to their wealthy patients.13 The first grand hotels built by the Südbahngesellschaft in Abbazia were designed by architect Franz Wilhelm, who had been active in Vienna since the 1870s, creating impressive stations for the imperial rail companies.14 Wilhelm’s first hotels in Abbazia, built from 1883, were massively proportioned buildings with surfaces rendered in warm tones, symmetrical facades furnished with balconies or loggia, completed with elaborate neobaroque surface ornament picked out in white and busy roof-lines. These hotels would have appeared at home on Vienna’s impressive Ringstrasse. It seems likely that the architectural style and design of the grand hotels in Vienna, the values they embodied and the wealthy clientele they attracted inspired architects on the Adriatic. In Abbazia, where its

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distance from Vienna would have posed an initial financial hurdle to would-be visitors, a similarly exclusive clientele was appealed to from the resort’s inception. Almost every publication on Abbazia, in addition to the resort’s Kurlisten, is littered with the names of Austro-Hungarian and European royalty, aristocratic families, successful businessmen, artists and writers.15 At Sanatorium Dr Schalk in Abbazia the notion of attracting ‘suitable’ patients held the utmost importance; the architectural design and interior furnishings of the sanatorium were seen as crucial aspects of creating an ‘appropriate’ social milieu.16 In 1906, Dr Franz Schalk outlined the accommodation, therapeutic approach and facilities and the character of his sanatorium, including the type of patient he wished to attract: ‘It is to be stressed, that predominantly patients will be admitted who suit one another socially and that treatment extends mostly to curable functional disturbances of our organism’.17 The phrase ‘curable functional disturbances’ reveals that Dr Schalk did not wish patients with full-blown mental illness in his sanatorium but marketed his clinic to patients with somatic nervous disorders with an underlying, if unknown, physical origin. This is reinforced in the advertising literature for the sanatorium, which stated that mentally ill patients were excluded.18 According to these advertisements, psychiatric as well as tubercular and infectious patients were consistently excluded from sanatoria for nervous and physical disorders, reflecting societal fears about the hereditary degeneration of nervous disorders into mental illness if not treated promptly. However, as Edward Shorter has written, ‘It was the great but rather ill-kept secret of the private nervous clinics that many were, in reality, “hotels for psychotics”’.19 In the context of prestigious Abbazia, it seems possible that Sanatorium Dr Schalk was also party to the deception of harbouring psychotic patients. Schalk concedes the existence of the feared psychotic patient in (other) spa resorts, yet maintains the illusion that ‘those figures who make such a soul-destroying impression on the less ill, in which they suppose to see an image of the woeful future they face’ are not present in Abbazia and certainly not at Sanatorium Dr Schalk.20

Sanatorium Dr Schalk and a Model Grand Hotel The sense of exclusivity was fostered by the design of the sanatorium. Its physical appearance coupled with the expectations of affluent clientele suggest a further building type, which is useful for understanding this type of sanatorium. According to an article on the grand hotel by present-day Austrian cultural historians Herbert Lachmayer, Christian Gargerle and Géza Hajós, on arrival at a grand hotel, the visitor ‘would encounter the essential services (telegrams, doctors, etc) and standardised sophisticated comforts epitomised by the grand hotel, as well as the company of compatriots of a similar class and taste’.21 Moreover, ‘the grand hotel aspired to create an aristocratic ambience’, by connecting itself

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to the ‘characteristics of the stately home’, some of which were ‘adopted’, while others were ‘neglected or rejected’.22 At Sanatorium Dr Schalk similar services, comforts and class of fellow patient could also be expected. By exploring such similarities, Sanatorium Dr Schalk can be shown to retain characteristics of the spaces and ambience of both a grand hotel and a stately home. Lachmayer, Gargerle and Hajós reflect on the relationship between space and power within the stately home: ‘The existence of a unified household determined the organisation of the interior: everything served to express the power of the owner. The smooth running of the household depended on the observance of a hierarchy’. On entering the stately home, guests were obliged to respect that hierarchy, which also established the layout of the rooms.23 However, although the grand hotel adopted many ideas from this arrangement at the stately home, others were modified, rejected or remained unfulfilled due to the transitory nature of hotel life. The ‘unified household’ no longer existed, for there was no omnipresent patriarch; the hotel manager had essentially become the head servant while even the highest ranking guest was simply a temporary resident. Although in many ways an evocation of the stately home, the grand hotel ‘did not produce its unity of structure and function’. In contrast, interior spaces became ‘increasingly atomised’ and furnishings ‘increasingly standardised’; hotel guests, regardless of status, were accommodated in what effectively were identical rooms.24 The transformation of the notions of the ‘unified household’, the essential loss of the master of the household and internal hierarchy from the stately home to the grand hotel are crucial for understanding life in Sanatorium Dr Schalk. In this respect, the sanatorium departs from functional and spatial similarities to the grand hotel and retains aspects of the hierarchical structure of life in the stately home. At the sanatorium, where the collective goal of patients was the recovery of their health and where the facilities and the design of the building were imbued with the sense of that end, it was still the case that ‘everything served to express the power of the owner’, the doctor. As the principal doctor and owner, Dr Schalk could still be regarded as the ‘master of the household’ at the sanatorium. He would have been the ‘ever-present patriarch’, exerting his power by prescribing and supervising the treatment of his charges. The arrangement of rooms in the sanatorium too, as in a stately home, would be subject to the same hierarchy, determined by the doctor’s prescription of treatment and activities during a patient’s stay. The notion that ‘the guest in the stately home was compelled to respect the established hierarchy’ can be understood as patient submission to the sanatorium regime upon arrival. However, at Sanatorium Dr Schalk interior spaces had become increasingly atomised, furnishings increasingly standardised and patients occupied essentially identical bedrooms. Thus, they were not subject to a hierarchy among themselves.25 The sanatorium hierarchy created by the daily routine of treatment and social pursuits informed the arrangement of rooms and can be further compared to the

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stately home, in that ‘[t]he functioning of the house was governed mainly by the continuing interchange between public and private’26; a similar process occurred in the grand hotel through the movements, arrival and departure of guests. From the public arena of the street to the privacy of his or her individual room, a patient could have made a tangible journey from public to private at Sanatorium Dr Schalk. At a stately home and a grand hotel, “[t]here was usually a drive, derived from the old cour honneur leading to an imposing main façade’.27 Sanatorium Dr Schalk was accessed by a private driveway from the street.28 Next, at the stately home or grand hotel, “[a]rrival was given a sense of occasion by an opulent reception area and staircase’.29 The spacious entrance foyer at Sanatorium Dr Schalk functioned as both a gathering place for patients and as a waiting room for the baths, physical therapy and the doctor’s consulting room, which were housed in adjacent rooms.30 It was a space where everyone would be seen. Beyond a decorative archway were the stairs and elevator serving every level of the sanatorium. Rather than the series of magnificent spaces of the stately home or grand hotel serving the purpose of social interaction, at the sanatorium a ‘ceremonial route’ could be seen to have been replaced by the spaces for hydrotherapy, exercise and medical consultation, the reasons for the patients’ stay at the sanatorium; treatment rooms were located off the entrance foyer across the length of the lower ground floor, while in the stately home or grand hotel, ‘[a] sequence of grand rooms followed a ceremonial route along the axes’.31 Moreover, at Sanatorium Dr Schalk like the model grand hotel, the epicentre of activity … was concentrated in the vestibule (later in the hall) and in the dining room, for the element of ascent had disappeared – in general nothing public took place upstairs – and the staircase had become a place of descent. Guests waited in the vestibule for the evening meal which for all its ceremonial overtones (the ‘table d’hôte’) was hardly comparable to the audience.32

At the grand hotel, the ceremonial quality echoing the ‘aristocratic ambience’ of the stately home was continued in the guests’ use of the vestibule as waiting room for meals, while the foyer at the sanatorium served as a waiting room for the ‘ceremony’ of treatment as well as a patient’s ‘audience’ with the doctor, closer to the traditional organisation and hierarchy of the stately home. Furthermore, the layout of space at the sanatorium also attests to the privacy of the upper floors.33 Finally, the form of Sanatorium Dr Schalk appears to have been informed by the model grand hotel, where a long façade furnished with a great number of windows was often oriented towards a panoramic view. The sanatorium’s ‘principal façade is orientated towards the south-east (sunrise)’,34 looking out to sea, while the symmetrical elevation with a central bay and concluded with rounded tower-like constructions bears striking similarity to grand hotels found in Abbazia’s competitor resorts on the French Riviera albeit on a reduced scale.35 These

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parallels in design firmly locate Sanatorium Dr Schalk within the realm of hotels rather than that of state-run asylums. By the first decade of the twentieth century, public asylum design had turned away from large structures with long wings of wards in favour of individual pavilions set in a green landscape, where the separation of functions and patients by behaviour was understood to best suit the treatment of mental illnesses in addition to offering better ventilation, noise reduction and prevention of the spread of contagion.36 The therapeutic spaces and facilities at Sanatorium Dr Schalk also maintain distance from the world of asylums and psychiatric illness by advertising treatment for the somatic nervous disorders that only seemed to plague the affluent classes.

Therapeutic Approach and Design Sanatorium Dr Schalk is designated as treating nervous disorders first and foremost. In advertisements for Sanatorium Dr Schalk in the Offizielles Jahrbuch 1909 des Zentralverbandes der Kur- und Heilanstalts-Besitzer resp. Leiter in Österreich and the Österreichisches Bäderbuch. Offizielles Handbuch der Bäder (1914), nervous disorders are buried within lengthy lists of conditions treated including ‘convalescence, conditions of the constitution, metabolism, circulation, nervous system, respiratory system, digestive system, musculoskeletal system; kidney and bladder ailments and female disorders’.37 Yet in Abbazia. Ein Führer für Kurgäste, Dr Julius Glax underlined the significance of the resort for patients seeking treatment for disorders of primarily the cardiopulmonary system and the respiratory system but also the nervous system.38 Describing complaints treated at his sanatorium, Dr Schalk placed nervous disorders at the top of a list, followed by metabolic and cardiac conditions.39 There was, then, a discrepancy between Schalk’s and Glax’s experiences of the most frequently presented illness. A simple explanation for this might be that visitors to Abbazia suffering from nervous disorders consulted doctors in the resort besides Glax. This may be true; however, an alternative explanation can be found in Edward Shorter’s 1990 article ‘Private Clinics in Central Europe, 1850–1933’. Shorter maintains that at private clinics during his period of study, there was increasingly a drift towards ‘organicity’, meaning the assumption on the patient’s part and the clinic staff’s implicit collusion that one’s symptoms were genuinely organic. In the world of the clinic, everything smacking of ‘modern medicine’ was embraced; anything having to do with ‘mental’ was shunned.40

He argues that the spectre of mental illness, the ‘degradation and hereditary taint’ of the asylum haunted particularly the social classes who sought health care in spa resorts.41 ‘“Nervous” patients … did not want to become associated with psychiatric patients … most nervous patients feared the “odium” of the asylum’; instead

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they sought refuge at Sommerfrische and spas.42 In light of the ‘drift or flight towards organicity’, the directors or principal doctors of private clinics and sanatoria ‘would salt their lists of indications for admission with such nebulous terms as “metabolic diseases,” “people in need of restoration” (Erholungsbedürftige) and “convalescence”’.43 Shorter suggests these terms imply nervous disorders.44 He continues that the training of the principal doctor also had a fundamental effect upon how private clinics were advertised: If [the principal doctor] had psychiatric training the facility would be assigned to ‘nervous’; if he described himself as an ‘internist’ or ‘gastrointestinal specialist’ (MagenArzt), the clinic would be considered internal-medical in nature.45

As shown above, the list of advertised indications for admission to Sanatorium Dr Schalk included terms like ‘metabolic disease’ and ‘convalescence’, and references to conditions of the constitution, circulation and digestive system. Moreover, as Shorter suggests, associations with ‘modern medicine’ are also significant in this context. A brief phrase in the advertisement for Sanatorium Dr Schalk in the Offizielles Jahrbuch 1909 seems to confirm the associations with modern medicine as well as with organicity: ‘An institution equipped with state-of-the-art facilities for dietary and physical therapy’.46 Schalk also makes several references to new research and advances in medical science in his own description of the sanatorium.47 Furthermore, consistent with Shorter’s argument on the principal doctor’s training,48 Franz Schalk was described as an ‘internist’ and gynaecologist.49 In fact, he had benefited from a wide-ranging medical training, which was outlined in the local spa newspaper.50 Considering the wording of advertisements for the sanatorium and Dr Schalk’s training within the context of the prestigious resort of Abbazia and the attitudes of its clientele, a sanatorium portrayed as treating organic disorders likely treated large numbers of patients suffering from functional nervous disorders. Indeed patients presenting the somatic symptoms of a nervous disorder would have matched perfectly the organic conditions listed in the advertised indications for admission. Dr Schalk’s approach to treatment further underlines Sanatorium Dr Schalk’s designation as a sanatorium for nervous disorders. Schalk described his approach to treatment as encompassing ‘all methods of scientific naturopathy’.51 It was an holistic approach in which almost every aspect of a patient’s health was addressed by therapies practiced: air, lying and sun cures, all forms of dietetic cures, a variety of water cures, electrotherapy, manual and machine massage, remedial exercise and medico-mechanical therapy, radiotherapy, seawater-drinking cure, psychotherapy and terrain cure.52

Schalk’s philosophy on the aetiology of conditions was based very much in the circumstances of modern life. He wrote:

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In the fast-paced life of our present time, man pays too little attention to his health. The hustle and bustle of his surroundings and of his job often do not allow this and thus we frequently see illness which originates as a result of social status.53

These lines could also have been written by American neurologist George Beard, who first defined neurasthenia, or German-Austrian psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing, author of Psychopathia Sexualis and several texts on nervous disorders. Schalk clearly saw himself as part of an international network of practitioners treating nervous disorders. Like Beard and Krafft-Ebing, Schalk firmly believed in the connection of a patients’ social status to their nervous disorder. To promote recovery, he described the advantages of a stay in a (his) sanatorium: All the more warranted is their [sanatorias’] existence in spa resorts, where patients should live for their recovery and their health, where peace and respite from daily monotony and the staving-off of petty domestic worries are one factor in cure and convalescence. All of this is found only in an institution where everything has already been provided for, where treatment, climate, peace and the patients’ surroundings support one another and form the cornerstone of returning shattered health and the sick body to equilibrium.54

The advantages of the healthful surroundings and of patients’ removal from the detrimental aspects of daily professional and family life are highlighted to complement the array of treatment prescribed. He explained that the routine of sanatorium life would further facilitate recovery under the constant supervision of a doctor.55 Finally, the important role played by the physical environment in the process of recovery is outlined: Even the mere residence at a sanatorium alone offers advantages to health, because in the design of the facilities as well as the furnishings and fittings, with the doctor as owner, all hygienic considerations were able to be and had to be taken into account, which in the case of other buildings arguably is only ever taken into consideration on a secondary level.56

Approach to Therapy Expressed in Architectural Design But how did ‘the mere residence’ at Sanatorium Dr Schalk promote recovery from nervous disorders? How did the design of the sanatorium encourage the healing process? In his book Die Moderne, die aus den Sanatorien kam. Reformkultur und Reformarchitektur um 1900, historian Nils Aschenbeck argues that the architecture of tuberculosis sanatoria was developed to correspond to the rhythm of life and therapy occurring inside.57 This is also true of sanatoria for nervous disorders. The initial aspect of holistic approach to treatment at Sanatorium Dr Schalk was the provision of a setting different than and distant from patients’ usual

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domestic and professional surroundings. For patients travelling from homes in land-locked Austria, Hungary or Slovakia to Abbazia by train for their sojourn at Sanatorium Dr Schalk, the most tangible change would have been the view, the sound, the smell and taste of the sea.58 At the conclusion of their long journey southwards when the train descends through forested hillsides, the dark blue Adriatic suddenly comes into view and a new landscape begins to unfold. The importance of fresh air, sunlight and outdoor exercise to the therapeutic regime was demonstrated in elements of the surroundings and design. Dr Schalk described with pride the location of his sanatorium away from the disturbance of the main street on a promontory on Abbazia’s north shore with panoramic views of the Gulf of Fiume.59 For the purposes of sun and light therapy as well as the simple enjoyment and contemplation of the view, Schalk’s sanatorium was furnished on its three seaward sides with loggias and balconies; thus many patients benefited from a private outdoor space where they could feel the sun and warm breeze on their recuperating bodies. The most important therapy in Abbazia was sea bathing. Sanatorium Dr Schalk may have had its own facilities on the shore immediately in front of the sanatorium. However, no evidence of this seems to remain. Alternatively, patients may have been supervised by sanatorium staff at the nearby communal bathing stations, which are well documented.60 An element of Abbazia’s townscape that would have served both the resort clientele’s social curiosities as well as therapy – the Terrainkur – was the Luongomare, a twelve-kilometre coastal promenade with Abbazia at its centre. Lastly, the hotel-like arrangement of spaces within Sanatorium Dr Schalk provided a clear sense of patients’ daily routine. Public spaces for therapy and social activities were located outdoors, on the lower and upper ground floor levels, the more active therapies occurring outdoors while passive treatment was administered on the lower ground floor. The first floor and those above were given over exclusively to patients’ private rooms, while the spaces supplying the essential but dirty, noisy and smelly services were concealed underground below the driveway. The exterior of the sanatorium reflected the separation of public and private spaces: above the upper ground floor, a moulded string-course encircled the building. Below it the surface of the facade was rendered to resemble dressed stonework, above, the stucco render was completely smooth. Public spaces were represented externally by a more elaborate surface finish, the private spaces by something more simple.

Conclusions Finally then, just how appropriate was the social milieu created at Sanatorium Dr Schalk for the restorative journeys well-to-do patients underwent there? The location of the sanatorium in the prestigious resort of Abbazia with its healthful climate and elegant grand hotels provided medical legitimacy and met

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the values and expectations of the affluent and aspirational clientele. The design of Sanatorium Dr Schalk adopted elements of the luxury of grand hotels and of the spatial and hierarchical organisation reminiscent of the stately home; Dr Schalk, the master of the house, provided patients with a physical and social environment corresponding to their envisaged demands. The hotel-like arrangement of the functional spaces further facilitated the smooth running of the daily therapeutic regime at the sanatorium to assist in fostering patients’ gradual return to health. The public presentation of Sanatorium Dr Schalk was crucial in attracting the desired patients. The exterior detailing of the building allowed the sanatorium to fit discreetly into its largely neobaroque surroundings. Advertising materials declared the exclusion of psychiatric patients, a fact reinforced in Dr Schalk’s own writings. In line with apparently prevailing tendencies, the doctor’s training in a variety of medical and surgical specialties preserved the status of his sanatorium as treating organic and somatic disorders of the nerves and thus rejected any associations with dreaded psychiatric conditions. This real or perhaps illusory exclusion of mentally ill patients from Sanatorium Dr Schalk combined with its exclusive and healthful design created an ideal environment catering to wealthy, fee-paying clientele with pronounced social sensibilities. This was a milieu appropriate to preserving cherished society reputations, calmly curing nervous disorders and assuring the journey to a future of improved health. Retracing the journey from Vienna to Abbazia provided a sense of sanatorium patients’ travel experiences as well as an understanding of the sanatorium building and its resort setting. The hotel-like Sanatorium Dr Schalk represents a design counterpoint to the most modern looking and most well-known of sanatoria for nervous disorders, Purkersdorf Sanatorium. This essay – and the larger study to which it belongs – offers a new glimpse into a genre of buildings that existed in abundance across the Austro-Hungarian Empire and played a considerable role in popular culture around 1900. However, due to their apparently unremarkable designs, these buildings are often overlooked. Nevertheless, an investigation of ‘the architecture of everyday life, part of the familiar background’,61 neither avantgarde nor vernacular, can surely enrich and expand the history of architecture and so afford new significance to and understanding of ‘conventional’ architecture.62

Notes 1. T. Mann, ‘Tristan’, Sämtliche Erzählungen (Frankfurt am Main, 1963). 2. See: L. Topp, ‘An Architecture for Modern Nerves: Josef Hoffmann’s Purkersdorf Sanatorium’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 56, no. 4 (December 1997): 414–37. 3. Further sanatoria for nervous disorders are explored in my PhD thesis: N.J. Imrie, ‘The Architecture and Culture of Sanatoria for Nervous Ailments in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, 1890 – 1914’ (University of London, 2008).

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4. N. Imrie and L. Topp, ‘Modernity Follows Madness? Viennese Architecture for Mental Illness and Nervous Disorders’, in Madness and Modernity: Mental Illness and the Visual Arts in Vienna 1900, ed. G. Blackshaw and L. Topp (London, 2009), 86–87. 5. E. Denby, Grand Hotels: Reality and Illusion (London, 2002), 24. On the history and development of Abbazia as a spa resort, see D. Vasko-Juhász, Die Südbahn: Ihre Kurorte und Hotel, vol. 1 (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar, 2006), 133–40, R. Basch-Ritter, Die k.u.k. Riviera (Vienna, 2002) and A. Pozdena-Tomberger, ‘Die Kurorte und Seebäder an der österreichischen Riviera’ (Master’s thesis, University of Vienna, 1992). 6. Vasko-Juhász, Die Südbahn, 133–34. 7. Basch-Ritter, Die k.u.k. Riviera, 69. F.J. Schüler (1832–1894) was one of many Frenchmen employed by Austro-Hungarian railway companies as directors and engineers. In 1855, he took up a position in Vienna at the Staatseisenbahngesellschaft in which the French were majority shareholders. By 1861, he was a general inspector for the Südbahngesellschaft, also under French leadership. As a railway expert, Schüler was soon on the board of directors (1865) and in 1878, he became its general director. Under his leadership, resorts on the southern railway, such as Abbazia and Semmering, became increasingly reputable and popular. See Vasko-Juhász, Die Südbahn, 47–51. 8. Ibid. 9. Vasko-Juhász, Die Südbahn, 135. 10. Theodor Billroth (1829–1894) was a pioneering abdominal surgeon and teacher who became a University of Vienna professor and head of the second Viennese surgical clinic in 1867. Billroth remained in these posts until his death. In Vienna he also founded the K.k. Haus der Gesellschaft der Ärzte, developed and wrote on nurse training and improved surgeon training. He was educated and participated in surgical training in Germany and spent seven years developing his teaching and surgical skills, his own and the clinic’s reputation at the University of Zurich. Billroth’s connections to Abbazia emerged from his own ill health, in particular for the beneficial climatic treatment of pulmonary and cardiac weaknesses that ultimately proved fatal. On Billroth, see: D. Engelhardt, ed., Biographische Enzyklopädie deutschsprachiger Mediziner, vol. 1 (Munich, 2002), 76; R. Vierhaus, ed., Deutsche biographische Enzyklopädie, vol. 1 (Munich, 2005), 662–63. 11. Dr T. Billroth, “Über Abbazia’, Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift 35, no. 3 (1885): 83. 12. Basch-Ritter, Die k.u.k. Riviera, 69. Dr Julius Glax (1846–1922) practiced balneology in Rohitsch Sauerbrunn before his arrival in Abbazia and is perhaps the most significant figure, medical or otherwise, for the development of Abbazia into a world-class resort. 13. Ibid., 67. 14. Vasko-Juhász, Die Südbahn, 184; Amir Muzur Majnarić, Opatija – Abbazia. Itinerary for Researchers and the Inquisitive, trans. S. Drenovac (Rijeka–Opatija, 2001), 81. 15. Vasko-Juhász, Die Südbahn, 137; Majnarić, Opatija – Abbazia, 68f; Basch-Ritter, Die k.u.k. Riviera, 7. 16. F. Schalk, ‘Sanatorium Dr Schalk’, Festschrift zum 60. Geburtstag des Prof. J Glax, ed. J. Cohn, G. Fodor et al. (Abbazia, 1906), 180. 17. Ibid. 18. Offizielles Jahrbuch 1909 des Zentralverbandes der Kur- und Heilanstalts-Besitzer resp. Leiter in Österreich (Vienna, 1909), 9; Österreichisches Bäderbuch. Offizielles Handbuch der Bäder (Berlin, Vienna, 1914), 706. 19. E. Shorter, ‘Private Clinics in Central Europe, 1850–1933’, Social History of Medicine 3, no. 2 (1990): 185. 20. Schalk, ‘Sanatorium Dr Schalk’, 179.

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21. H. Lachmayer, C. Gargerle and G. Hajós, ‘The Grand Hotel’, AA Files, trans. P. Johnston, vol. 22, (1991), 34. 22. Ibid., 36. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., 37. 25. Ibid., 36 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 37 and 39. 28. Schalk, ‘Sanatorium Dr Schalk’, 175. 29. Lachmayer, Gargerle and Hajós, 39. 30. Schalk, ‘Sanatorium Dr Schalk’, 175–76. 31. Lachmayer, Gargerle and Hajós, 39. 32. Ibid. 33. Schalk, ‘Sanatorium Dr Schalk’, 176. 34. Ibid., 175. 35. Denby, Grand Hotels, 76. 36. Many articles on the design of pavilion-type asylums appeared in psychiatric journals around this time. See, for instance: Dr J. Starlinger, ‘Ein Beitrag zum Irrenanstaltsbau’, Psychiatrische Wochenschrift 3, no. 13 (1901/02): 131–36; Anonymous asylum doctor, ‘Zum Bau der Irrenanstalten’, Psychiatrisch-Neurologische Wochenschrift 10, no. 7 (1908): 53–55. 37. Offizielles Jahrbuch, 9. 38. Dr Julius Glax, Abbazia. Ein Führer für Kurgäste (Abbazia, 1914), 38. 39. Schalk, ‘Sanatorium Dr Schalk’, 179. 40. Shorter, ‘Private Clinics’, 190. 41. Ibid., 178. 42. Ibid., 179. 43. Ibid., 168. 44. Ibid. 45. Ibid. 46. Offizielles Jahrbuch, 9. 47. Schalk, ‘Sanatorium Dr Schalk’, 171, 178 and 179. 48. Some private clinics were owned by the principal doctor while others were owned by another, nonmedical person. Sanatorium Dr Schalk was owned by Alexander Schalk, the doctor’s brother, a businessman, hotel owner and former employee of the Austro-Hungarian Imperial Ministry of Finance in Vienna. Anonymous, ‘Abbazia 1910’, Kur- und BadeZeitung der österreichsichen Riviera 5, no. 36 (3 September 1910): 1–2. 49. Ibid., 1. 50. Schalk trained at university ophthalmology and medical clinics in Graz, where he was introduced to modern bacteriology and climatic treatment of gastrointestinal conditions. Next, he was head of gynaecological and surgical outpatient clinics in Graz. During five years at the surgical outpatient department, Schalk participated in study tours to German clinics and sanatoria, where, presumably, he encountered nervous disorders and approaches to their treatment. Schalk practiced as a balneologist in Abbazia for two years prior to the opening of the sanatorium in 1906. Anonymous, ‘Dr Franz Schalk’, Kur- und Bade-Zeitung der österreichsichen Riviera 2, no. 38 (17 September 1910): 4. 51. Schalk, ‘Sanatorium Dr Schalk’, 178. 52. Ibid. 53. Ibid., 172–73. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., 174.

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56. Ibid. 57. Imrie, ‘The Architecture and Culture of Sanatoria’, 36; N. Aschenbeck, Die Moderne die aus den Sanatorien kam: Reformarchitektur und Reformkultur um 1900 (Delmenhorst, 1998), 26–32. 58. When the Kur- und Bade-Zeitung der österreichsichen Riviera was first published in 1906, the Abbazia Kurlisten were published weekly during the off-season (winter) and twice weekly during the high season. They showed guests’ names, occupations (or often alternatively privat for female visitors), home town and at which hotel, sanatorium or pension they stayed. These lists of arrivals reflect the popularity of the Austrian Riviera both within the empire and internationally. 59. Schalk, ‘Sanatorium Dr Schalk’, 175. 60. See, for example: Basch-Ritter, Die k.u.k. Riviera; Majnarić, Opatija – Abbazia and VaskoJuhász, Die Südbahn. 61. D.E.B. Weiner, Architecture and Social Reform in Late Victorian London (Manchester, 1994), 1. 62. A.A. Van Slyck, Free to All: Carnegie Libraries and American Culture, 1890–1920 (Chicago, 1995), xx.

Chapter 5

TRAVEL TO THE SPAS The Growth of Health Tourism in Central Europe, 1850–1914

d Jill Steward

I

n the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the lives of extraordinary numbers of individuals in Central Europe were touched by the new culture of movement, which made their immediate worlds appear smaller and extended their mental horizons. Many saw this as one of the more positive features of modernity, but others regarded the frenetic atmosphere of Hetzen und Jagen (hurry and haste) created by the speeding up of travel and communications as a cause for concern.1 These fears were supported by the sensational publicity accorded to railway accidents and the traumatic effects of ‘railway spine’, and it was certainly not a coincidence that the opening scene of Robert Musil’s Der Mann Ohne Eigenschaften (Man without Qualities) (1930–32) set in 1900 featured a traffic accident in a Viennese street.2 Contemporaries frequently commented on the ‘nervousness of the age’,3 a condition often attributed to the effects of sensory overload and the stresses and strains of daily life on vulnerable minds and bodies. These were particularly acute in the Großstädte (big cities), where social and economic changes brought with them industrial growth, thousands of new immigrants, housing shortages, problems of sanitation and disease and a steady increase in the intensity with which the nerves and senses of the inhabitants were assaulted by noise, pollution and traffic. The appearance of ‘pathological’ conditions, such as the ‘fashionable agoraphobia’ (or Platzfurcht/Platzscheu [street fright]), first diagnosed in Vienna and Berlin in the late 1860s and described

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by the Viennese planner Camille Sitte (1889) as a ‘very new and modern ailment’, seemed to confirm the disruptive and destabilising effect of environmental change on the human cognitive and perceptual system.4 Meanwhile, newly prosperous individuals who engaged with modern urban lifestyles often discovered that an over-enthusiastic or incautious enjoyment of sensory pleasures could exact a heavy physical and psychological toll on the health. In these circumstances a recuperative stay in a salubrious, rural environment or some kind of health resort offered a welcome respite for distressed and overwrought systems and frayed nerves. Not surprisingly therefore, in the second half of the century Die Sommerfrische (the summer holidays) became a middle-class institution and health travel within the region enjoyed a period of rapid growth and development, some aspects of which are examined in the first part of this essay, particularly its association with what were widely regarded as ‘problems of modern civilisation’. The second part deals briefly with the travels of four individuals influenced by these trends whose respective journeys encompassed a representative cross-section of the different kinds of health resorts and institutions that catered to the needs of health and leisure seekers c. 1900 in an increasingly competitive marketplace.

Therapeutic Tourism: Travel Practices before 1914 The association between travel and the pursuit of health was deeply entrenched in Central European culture where, in the early modern period, it was common practice among all social classes to make visits to the region’s many springs and thermal waters that were widely used for prophylactic purposes. In the nineteenth century this habit persisted, as for example, in the context of modern forms of pilgrimage travel and in the lifestyles of the aristocratic elites who continued to use spa resorts for therapeutic and pleasurable purposes.5 In the first half of the century many new customers began to visit the spas as enlightened interest in the properties of the waters, Romantic attitudes to nature, interest in Naturheilung (natural healing) and the activities of entrepreneurial spa physicians combined to make spa medicine attractive to an increasingly receptive and expanding market. Members of the bourgeoisie who formerly took their cures at neighbourhood springs, such as Heiligenstadt or Döbling in Vienna,6 now paid regular visits to more outlying resorts, such as Vöslau or Baden (now accessible by rail) and places further afield. Spa culture became increasingly medicalised as the waters were used with greater precision and improvements in the education of spa personnel and the regulation and administration of the official spas contributed to the professionalisation of spa medicine.7 In the second half of the century demand continued to grow, influenced by shifts in the medical discourses and practices concerning sickness and health and

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the general care of the body, growing prosperity and changes in middle-class lifestyles. The rapid expansion of the medical marketplace and the demand for health travel was evident in the number of new spa guides and tourist handbooks published during this period. Braumüllers Bade-Bibliotek series (first published in Vienna in 1862) covered all the official spas and health resorts in Austria and Hungary while successive editions of the Baedeker handbooks indicated the extent to which the new railway networks were gradually opening up the region and hitherto inaccessible rural areas. But – where to go? By the 1880s there was plenty of choice for potential travellers. Growing competition encouraged many of the spa companies and local authorities to invest in expensive new infrastructure, and they were eager to attract customers. Established spas upgraded, extended and redeveloped their pump rooms, baths and theatres; they updated their medical facilities and improved their recreational amenities, transforming themselves into modern leisure resorts. The Rhineland spas most affected by the enforced closure of the German casinos made special efforts to compensate for the resulting loss of revenue by making themselves more attractive in other ways and placing greater emphasis on their therapeutic function.8 As competition became more intense, greater effort went into marketing and publicity, and local and regional tourist associations were active in promoting the attractions of their areas. Health seekers, whose main requirement was rest and relaxation, tended to be attracted by the social tone of a place as well as the medical reputation of its waters, air and climate, although in the years before the Great War, particularly in the Habsburg Monarchy, other factors such as ethnic, cultural and linguistic identity also came into play.9 Middle-class Berliners favoured the Harz Mountains, Saxon Switzerland and the Spree forest as well as the Rhineland and the spa towns of southwestern Germany, the Bavarian Highlands, Switzerland, the North Sea coastal resorts and the Tirol.10 The German-speaking Viennese bourgeoisie were fond of the Salzkammergut, as was Emperor Franz Josef who spent his summer holidays in Bad Ischl. The continued popularity of this area, first made visible to potential tourists by artists and writers,11 was a demonstration of the way that people were often drawn to and developed a deep personal attachment for places, particularly if frequented by members of their own social and cultural networks,12 while the publicity attracted by a royal presence was always good for business. The Viennese also liked the area around the Wörtersee in Styria, the eastern Alps (particularly the Semmering, which was popular with artistic and intellectual circles),13 the Tirol and the Garda Riviera. The Südbahn railway offered access to the sunny Adriatic coast (including the elite resort of Abbazia), Venice and Trieste from where it was possible to visit North Africa or take a Mediterranean cruise. While doctors had plenty to say about the general effects of travel on the system, specialist pronouncements on the therapeutic properties of waters, airs and climates were taken extremely seriously, since they stressed the importance

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of matching conditions and constitutions with particular waters and environments.14 In the 1860s, claims of particularly good results for consumption and pulmonary disorders at Dr Brehmer’s clinic at Görbersdorf in Prussian Silesia (where patients lived in small wooden huts and spent time lying in hammocks in the nearby pine forest) led to greater emphasis on the role of air and altitude.15 Doctors in the Swiss Alps also reported positively on the effects of high altitude, pure air and sun, and the milk diet commonly used to treat illness in many alpine regions. The growing acceptance and spread of these ideas led to significant changes in the medical topography of Central Europe as many new Luftorte (air resorts) were founded, some of which contained clinics and sanatoria catering specifically for consumptives, who were slowly beginning to be isolated from the other patients. In the new high-altitude winter resorts invalids were exposed to cold air and warm sunshine as they reclined in special chairs on purpose-built south-facing balconies, while the more active engaged in winter sports.16 Some well-placed resorts with particularly mild climates, such as Meran in the south Tirol, became transit stations for the hivernants as they moved between their summer and winter quarters. These developments and the growing popularity of healthy open-air recreational activities extended the season of many summer resorts in the mountainous areas of Central Europe, particularly in the Eastern Alps, the Tirol, the Tátras and the Carpathians. As these trends suggest, by 1900 the market for health travel was both extensive and diverse. In the regular spas the majority of the middle-class invalids who could afford it tended to stay in one of the private clinics or sanatoria, which ranged from smart and luxurious ‘Grand Hotels’ and imposing villas, to modest Pensionen, the status of which depended on whether there was a resident physician.17 By 1900, for example, Baden-Baden contained at least six large private sanatoria and, by 1905, five more.18 Hospitals, clinics and sanatoria in and around big cities like Vienna, Berlin, Prague and Budapest attracted visitors from near and far, although it was noticeable that admissions to urban clinics peaked in the spring, as travelling became easier, and in autumn, when patients were discharged from the Bade- and Wasserheilstalten (bathing and water cure establishments) elsewhere.19 In addition there were the great mondäne Kurstädte, such as the Bohemian and Rhineland spas patronised by cosmopolitan royalties, diplomats and rich businessmen. Then there were the many officially recognised Bade- and Kurorten, which included inland spas like Bad Nauheim in Germany and Rohitsch-Sauerbrunn in Austria, the lake and seaside resorts such as Abbazia and the places around Lake Balaton and Lake Constance, and spas in more distant places like Herkulesbad in Transylvania, many of which were patronised by a wide cross-section of regional society.20 In some places the influence of the Lebensreform (life reform) and Naturheilung (natural healing) movements led to the creation of smaller, less conventional settlements in which life was governed by ideas based on holistic attitudes to the mind and body, a philosophy of ‘back

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to nature’ and programmes of health hygiene that included time in the fresh air (usually a minimum of two hours per day), exercise and sun bathing.21 At his clinic in Veldes on the Wörtersee, for example, the Swiss naturopath Arnold Rikli delivered therapy to a fashionable international clientele based on the use of water, air and light, while Father Sebastian Kneipp at Worishofen in Bavaria and Adolf Just at Jungborn in Germany implemented utopian and idealistic views on life reform and health hygiene. One reason why spa medicine continued to attract customers was the persistence and strength of ‘therapeutic scepticism’ in the medical schools where, from the point of view of the patients, doctors appeared more interested in establishing the causes of disease than alleviating the sufferings of the living for whom they could, in any case, still do relatively little.22 Consequently, help and relief had to be sought elsewhere. There was plenty of choice. The Viennese, for example, were within easy reach of four flourishing Kurorte in Lower Austria (Baden, Vöslau, Deutch-Altenberg and Pyrawath), as well as nineteen Kaltwasserheilanstalten (cold water cure institutions), seven of which were close to the city.23 Some of these establishments originated in the success of the cold water cure practised at Gräfenburg in Austrian Silesia by Vincent Priessnitz in the period from 1820s until his death in 1851. The mainstays of spa medicine – balneology, hydrotherapy and climatology – received more official support in the monarchy than in Germany, where they were caught up in the ongoing struggles between different sectors of the medical profession. Homeopathy had been legalised since 1837, and, from the 1860s, hydrotherapy received support from within the Vienna Medical School, particularly from Johann von Oppolzer, who had trained in Prague where sympathy for natural healing was greater than in Vienna. And counter to the prevailing trend in Schulmedizin, he regarded healing as the ultimate aim of all medical research. A beneficiary of this relative openness was Wilhelm Winternitz, a lecturer in the Vienna Medical School who in 1872 was involved in the setting up of the General Polyclinic and as one of Austria’s most influential hydrotherapists was awarded a chair in 1881.24 A former asylum doctor, Winternitz worked to establish a scientific basis for hydrotherapy (frequently used as a treatment for the mentally ill), but in his own private Wasserheilanstalt in Kautenleutgeben just outside Vienna (founded in 1865) he also employed a variety of other methods in regimens that were often gruelling for the patients. As a ‘model’ clinic, Kautenleutgeben attracted international attention and many professional visitors, some of whom founded similar establishments elsewhere. By 1901 it had four hundred beds, and the international clientele included Mark Twain’s ailing wife.25 Hydrotherapy using warm water (certainly more popular with the patients) became popular in the 1860s, and under the influence of Winternitz, electrotherapy, gymnastics and special diets also became standard elements of the treatments used in many sanatoria, private clinics and the official spas, indicating the grow-

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ing professionalisation of spa medicine and the adoption of a competitive and self-consciously ‘rational’ approach to the care of the body by spa doctors who wished to show that they were just as modern as their academic counterparts. These trends accelerated in the 1880s as the surge in demand led to the upgrading and adaptation of many spa villas and public buildings in order to accommodate new sanatoria, surgeries, clinics and institutes of dietetics.26

The Health Trade c. 1900 In 1900 the spas and health resorts claimed to be able to cater for almost every conceivable form of illness, but much of their core business still came from their traditional clientele, which included sufferers from arthritis, gout and rheumatism and people recovering from trauma, many of whom claimed to experience some positive relief from pain. Other ‘regulars’ included ‘wasting’ girls, women with gynaecological complaints and people with syphilis-related problems. From the 1880s, as the consumptive and lung patients moved on from the spas to the new Luftorte, their place was taken by the rapidly expanding band of sufferers from ‘modern life’, another traditional source of spa income and one on which the health trade was increasingly dependent. This important income stream consisted, firstly, of people whose health problems and dietary disorders were supposedly caused by a ‘weakness of the will’ conducive to ‘excessive gluttony and high living’ and the immoderate imbibing of ‘strong liquors’ and, secondly, of ‘nerve patients’, that is, people with ‘nervous’ symptoms the origins of which were often unclear but were hopefully assumed to have some physical origin in the harmful effects of modern civilisation on the human system. A major selling point for all spa customers was the ‘naturalness’ of their environments, which contrasted sharply with the artificial, polluted world of the city, particularly since health resorts were usually situated in scenic, rural surroundings carefully enhanced by parks, gardens and landscaped walks conducive to rest and relaxation. Dr Herman Weber, physician to the London carriage trade, defined a ‘good health resort’ as one that had verandas which can be opened or closed at pleasure, suitable walks for taking outdoor exercise provided with comfortable seats and also with seats having high backs which can be turned to shelter from the wind, resting places in both sunny and shady spots, hammocks, wheel chairs for invalids, donkeys and horses suitable for riding.27

Spa therapies were designed to ‘rebalance’ systems and to heal minds and bodies constantly assailed by noise and the nauseating smells of gas, industrial production and poverty and to calm sensitive nerves stimulated to the breaking point by chaotic lifestyles and the constant temptation to succumb to potentially dangerous sexual experiences and overindulgence in contaminated food and drink.

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The health trade therefore benefited commercially from the willingness of its customers to engage with modern lifestyles and the sensory pleasures associated with them, while simultaneously fretting about their health. For bodies suffering from consumptive excess, a spa cure represented a temporary acknowledgement of the practical and moral value of self-discipline and restraint, particularly since it was the failure to live sensibly and moderately (a traditional precept for a healthy life) that was held responsible for symptoms of ennui such as failing appetites and languid digestions, as well as obesity and its related disorders.28 Postcards from the Bohemian spas, sometimes anti-Semitic in nature ( a reference to their popularity with the Jewish community),29 frequently caricatured guests whose ample persons revealed the effects of new found prosperity, access to regular and plentiful food supplies and the enjoyment of urban lifestyles increasingly geared to gastronomic pleasure and the cultivation of sensation for its own sake. Writing of the ‘grown-ups who stood about my childhood’ in Vienna, the writer Stefan Zweig recalled being struck by ‘the fact that many of them were corpulent at an early age. My father, my uncle, my teacher, the salesmen in the shops, the members of the Philharmonic at their music stands, who were already, at forty, portly and “worthy” men’.30 Not surprisingly therefore, the practice of taking a spa cure to cleanse the system enjoyed considerable popularity among the Viennese bourgeoisie. Standard ‘reducing’ diets combined exercise with the use of purgative mineral waters.31 A character in Shlomo Aleichem’s novel Marienbad (1911) complains: The people who come here are those whom God has blessed with an abundance of money and an abundance of flesh. Perhaps it is really the very opposite – punished with an abundance of flesh. But alas … These people are the most miserable on earth. They crave food and aren’t allowed to eat. They yearn to travel and can’t. These desire nothing better than to lie down and aren’t permitted.32

Patients suffering from loss of appetite were often put on ‘fasting’ diets since their condition was usually ascribed to the effects of an over-stimulating environment and too much consumer choice, a combination that could jade the palate of even the most persistent gourmand. In Mark Twain’s short story, The Appetite Cure, the narrator describes the experience of incarceration in an ‘Austrian health establishment’ where the prescribed treatment for restoring a lost appetite was ‘covert starvation’: ‘Grape-cure, bath-cure, mud-cure-it is all the same. The grape and the bath and the mud make a show and do a trifle of the work – the real work is done by the surreptitious starvation’.33 Just as important to the health trade were the ‘nervous’, whose symptoms ranged from the near psychotic and severely dysfunctional to the mildly irritating. Middle-class patients of this kind were generally, unless their symptoms were particularly acute, treated in the private clinics, most of which were situated in or near to a spa or health resort.34 The spas, particularly Wasserheilanstalten, had

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a long tradition of treating ‘nerves’ as a form of ‘organic’ illness since this enabled middle-class families to avoid the stigma attached to the asylums and to any hint of madness or hereditary disorder.35 The establishment of ‘open’ nervous clinics that were able to take patients without certification in the 1860s meant that the more disruptive or problematic patients were less evident in the Wasserheilanstalten, although these still took in many ‘nervous’ patients, including those with symptoms of syphilis.36 In the last decades of the century there was a significant rise in the number of nerve patients and a corresponding increase in the number of institutions dealing with them. Berlin alone had over sixty private clinics for nervous diseases,37 and spas with a reputation for treating ‘nerves’, such as Wiesbaden and Baden-Baden, experienced a sharp rise in visitor numbers.38 In 1900 nerve patients usually fell under the accommodating labels of ‘hysteria’, ‘nerves’ or ‘neurasthenia’; the latter diagnosis was imported from America and neatly crystallised the ‘preoccupations and anxieties’ of the era.39 However, because of the growing reputation of the Wasserheilanstalten as ‘warehouses’ for the mentally ill, patients and their families became increasingly reluctant to use them, and in a climate of growing hostility to psychiatry, other solutions had to be found.40 The transport revolution made it more feasible for doctors like Hermann Weber to make greater use of climatic resorts and to suggest alternatives such as sea voyages for depressives or journeys to southern Italy for hysterics, or, for overworked ‘brainworkers’ suffering from ‘neurasthenia’ (a discreet way of referring to mental illness in professional men), a lengthy mountain residence in a climatic resort, possibly in the lower Alps where by 1900 there were many new establishments dealing with nerves.41 In an effort to distance themselves from their past reputation, most of the Wasserheilanstalten strategically rebranded themselves as Kurheime, Kurhotels, Kurhäuser or Kurpensionen and implied that the disorders they treated were ‘organic’ rather than psychiatric in origin – a move greatly assisted by the diagnostic suppleness of ‘neurasthenia’, a concept that conveniently blurred difficult distinctions.42 Many continued to mention ‘nerves’ in their advertisements, however, and though claiming to exclude the mentally ill still advertised the standard methods used in their treatment – warm water therapy, mud baths, electrotherapy (often used to treat ‘tired nerves’), massage and exercise as well as the rest cures involving isolation and the milk diet (Mastkur) widely associated with hysteria and neurasthenia.43 A few clinics, such as those run by Heinrich Obersteiner at Oberdöbling in Vienna and Richard Kraft-Ebbing in Graz, also included ‘suggestion’ and psychotherapy in their repertoire, while elsewhere the general atmosphere and personal contact with the authority of the clinic doctors helped to gain the co-operation of the patients.44 During the course of the century the social and spatial topography of the spa resorts and the nature of life within them was substantially changed by these developments. Until the creation of the Wasserheilanstalten invalids had mingled

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freely with pleasure seekers, and the most arresting and disruptive forms of ‘nervous’ illness were on display to all who used the public and semipublic areas of the baths, pump rooms and promenades and sat at the communal table d’hôte. In the later decades of the century not only was the intimate atmosphere characteristic of earlier days destroyed by the presence of large crowds in the most popular resorts but by 1900, partly as a consequence, most of the wealthier patients preferred to be treated within the privacy and confines of the exclusive walls and grounds of the luxurious new Grand Hotels and villas designed and built to function as private clinics and sanatoria in which they now spent most of their time. One of the selling points of the new Westend villa-cum-clinic in Karlsbad, built in 1889 for its chief physician, Dr Adolf Ritter, was the centralisation of all its functions, including the consulting and treatment rooms, within one building.45 However, since doctors sometimes encouraged patients who were well enough to enjoy the local amenities, it often became increasingly difficult to distinguish ordinary leisure tourists from those who were ill. The popularity of the spas as a refuge for the ‘nervous’ did not escape the notice of social critics like Max Nordau, editor of the Hungarian newspaper Pester Lloyd for whom the ‘highways of fashionable watering places’ were associated with the symptoms of ‘degeneration’ – namely, ‘nervous irritability’, ‘sexual psychopathy’, ‘neurasthenia’ and ‘hysteria’.46 His attitude was in tune with that of the Hungarian press, given to reporting cases of mental illness in eminent people, which it implied were symptomatic of the effects of modern civilisation across the social spectrum.47 Nordau identified the typical customer for spa medicine as a ‘German hysteric anxiously concerned about his precious health’ whose crazes hinge on the exhalations of his skin and the functions of his stomach. He becomes a fanatic for Jaeger vests, and for the groats which vegetarians grind for themselves, he gets vehemently affected over Kneipp douches and barefoot perambulations on wet grass. As a rule, all these derangements appear simultaneously.48

Such people were less likely to be found in the mondane and official spa resorts than in one of the establishments run by practitioners of alternative medicine and their followers, many of whom were influenced by the forms of cultural critique represented by the ideas of Lebensreform. This umbrella movement encompassed a wide range of different philosophies and practices, many of which mapped onto the health concerns of the period and embraced versions of natural healing, abstinence, vegetarianism, naturism, popular hygienic culture, temperance and clothing reform.49 Popular works included Sebastien Kneipp’s So sollt Ihr Leben [Thus Shalt Thou Live] (1889), which targeted the physical and moral effects of contemporary lifestyles and modes of consumption on mind and body (Fig 5.1), particularly their detrimental effects on masculinity.50 Inevitably some of these concerns were of a class-based nature and were linked to anxieties about the fitness of the race.51

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Figure 5.1. Fr Kneipp advocates life reform at Bad Worishofen (1904). Postcard. Collection of author.

Health Travellers As the above demonstrates, by 1900 the emergence of modern forms of health and leisure culture in Central Europe were associated with the identification of particular places and spaces as distinctive therapeutic environments. A brief survey of the travels of four individuals that, while not perhaps typical in themselves, taken together offer an insight into the different kinds of institutions constituting the increasingly competitive and commercialised marketplace represented by the health trade. The first and most socially distinguished is the Empress Elisabeth who, in the course of her wanderings, visited a wide range of spas and health resorts across the length and breadth of Central Europe and beyond. Like many members of the transnational aristocracy, her itinerary also included North Africa, Corfu, Biarritz and the French Riviera. Generally believed to have suffered from an eating disorder and rheumatism, the empress experimented obsessively with diet and exercise in an effort to maintain her youthful figure and always took a few hens and cows with her on her travels, even on board ship. Her hunting activities and diligent use of modern gymnastic equipment was highly unusual for women in the period (as were her marathon treks through the countryside leaving exhausted ladies-in-waiting trailing in her wake).52 Although clearly obsessive in the case of the empress, specialised diets and exercise regimes, such as Dr Zander’s Swedish gymnastics were widely used in many private clinics and

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anticipated the coming fashion for slimmer, healthier bodies in some upper-class circles influenced by the new fashionable taste for active sports (which encouraged admiration for a healthier, more slender sporting figure compatible with cycling and winter sports). This trend was supported by the new definitions of health and beauty emerging from the Lebensreform movement and possibly by the desire of some individuals to distance themselves from the overly solid middle classes.53 A less intense form of health tourism was represented by Walburga, Lady Paget, the German-born wife of the former British ambassador to Vienna who in 1912 who was so impressed by the rejuvenation of a friend that she decide to visit Dr Guggenberg’s Wasserheilanstalt in Brixen in the south Tirol to see for herself. Paget was struck by the general tranquillity of the place, which was set amid beautiful surroundings and run on strict Kneippist principles. Treatments included the usual wrappings, pine-needle baths and hardening douches of cold water applied with the iconic watering can (the ‘shrieks and wails of the weakminded and self-indulgent under the cold jet’ could be clearly heard through the wooden partitions of the bath cabins) and a plain, mainly vegetarian diet cooked so as ‘to retain all the salts and phosphates in the vegetables’. Clothing consisted of sandals and simple ‘Kneipp’ undergarments of rough, open linen (the abrasion benefited skin suffering from too many hot baths and noxious unguents) since ‘abominations of civilisation as stays, tight shoes, high heels, and still collars have to be discarded at once’ but since ‘one is … always dressing and undressing all day long’ this was not a problem, particularly if ‘taking complicated sitz and electric baths with massage’. Many patients were also ‘made to saw wood and lie for hours on deck-chairs in the sun, with the snow all around them, in a large wooden hall called a Liegehalle’. Observing her fellow guests, who included spoilt society beauties ‘there to retain their looks even more than their health’, Paget commented: ‘Many or most of the patients go to this water-cure for what they are pleased to term nerves, but which is generally only the result of their own misunderstood way of living’.54 Many of the patients were too ill to appear in company but those who did included Poles, Russians and Austrian army officers. The experiences of Alma Mahler, wife of the composer Gustav Mahler, were less pleasant. In 1909 she was advised by her doctor to take a cure at Levico in the south Tirol, a relatively new spa accessible from the alpine resort of Tolbach where Mahler was spending the summer working. Until the 1890s Levico was better known for bottled waters than for cures, at which point it was taken over by a Berlin businessman and heavily promoted as a ‘model establishment’.55 Alma stayed in the spa company’s splendid new Kurhaus equipped with lifts, central heating and bathing facilities, set in a large landscaped park linked to the station by a grand avenue (Fig 5.2). Although Mahler observed of his wife that, ‘after all, in her case her problems are mostly psychological’,56 it appears that her condition was also related to a longstanding fondness for alcohol: treatment included a restricted diet, cold baths and the wearing of a linen shift. In a letter

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Figure 5.2. Levico: Grand Hotel des Bains (c.1906). Postcard. Collection of author.

to Mahler, she describes her experience: ‘Night after night I sat on the balcony in a melancholy state. I was in tears as I observed the merry and brightly-dressed crowd, whose gaiety pained me, was filled with a mad longing for something, for love, for life, for a window away from this cold and glacial atmosphere’.57 The following year she stayed in a Kuranstalt in Tobelbad in Styria, whose waters and warm baths were advertised as beneficial for a wide range of complaints including nervous disorders and neurasthenia. The ancient spa had been redeveloped the previous year and was now a fashionable resort known for its mildly radioactive waters and pleasant climate, and included the emperor among its visitors.58 Individual visitors were housed, colony-style, in rustic villas with flower gardens dotted around the spa park. The director had previously worked at Dr Hermann Lahmann’s influential sanatorium at Weisser Hirsch near Dresden, and the food was prepared according to his theories of nutrition. Despite the company of her child and its nurse, Alma’s memoirs complain that she was ‘so solitary and so melancholy that the head of the sanatorium was worried and introduced young people to me as company on my walks. There was a young architect (X), whom I found particularly sympathetic, and I soon had little doubt that he was in love with me and hoping that I might return his love’.59 The subsequent English version was more explicit. ‘In the sanatorium I lived completely withdrawn, as always when I was alone somewhere. Barefoot, clothed in a horrible nightgown, I meekly took the outdoor exercise in rain and wind that was the hallmark of the therapeutic faith adhered to by this institution. I lived on a lettuce-and-buttermilk diet which made my little girl sick to her stomach. I bathed conscientiously

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in the hot springs although the first time I fainted and had to be carried back to bed’.60 She was also more forthcoming about the consequences of the doctor’s attempt to relieve her boredom and depression by suggesting that she go dancing, as a result of which she met the young German architect, Walter Gropius, with whom she embarked on a passionate affair. Finally, one of the most famous participants in the new health culture was Franz Kafka, whose troubled relationship with his body was expressive of many of the cultural preoccupations of the period and which, in the course of his short life, led him to visit a number of different kinds of spas and health establishments. In his early travels Kafka’s ‘nervousness’ and anxiety about his body, and his interest in natural healing and physical culture (for example, the Müller exercise system), took him to a number of places influenced by Lebensreform ideas about health and hygiene.61 As a student in 1902 he took at two-week nature cure at Weisser Hirsch. Under its owner and director Dr Lahmann, this former Wasserheilanstalt had become a large and fashionable private sanatorium.62 Lahmann was an entrepreneurial naturopath and vegetarian who believed that unnatural lifestyles lived in sunless, ill-ventilated rooms, with too much sedentary work and too little exercise, unsuitable clothing, poor diet and self-indulgence, were all bad for the human system. The remedy was ‘correct’ hygiene involving water, light, fresh air, massage combined with controlled exercise, dietetics, electrotherapy and, in certain cases, ‘mental suggestion’ but no drugs (Fig. 5.3).63 He also wanted to free the body from the effects of sweating and breathing by reforming underwear and was in dispute with Gustav Jaeger as to whether cotton or wool

Figure 5.3. Weisser Hirsch, Dresden: Men’s Air Bath (1909) Postcard. Collection of author.

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should be worn next to the skin. Members of the literary and artistic community interested in Lebensreform attracted to Weisser Hirsch included Rilke and Jeanna Bauck, a teacher at the Berlin art school attended by Paula Modersohn-Becker. The latter was greatly impressed by Bauck’s youthful appearance and recalled that ‘she once told the class that Dr Lahmann had told her to paint without any clothes on so that her skin could breathe. And that she much regretted being unable to ask her class to do likewise’.64 Typically, Lahmann supported and promoted his enterprise and ideas through his writings, cookbooks and the sale of health food products through the health food shops that were springing up in large cities like Vienna, Berlin and Paris. In July 1905 Kafka took another cure for his nerves at the Zuckmantel Sanatorium and Wasserheilanstalt in Austrian-Silesia run by a Winternitz disciple, returning the following year.65 In 1909 he spent a week’s leave (for nervousness and fatigue) in a filthy pension in the climatic resort of Riva on Lake Garda. Other Naturheilanstalten he visited included the Ernlenbach sanatorium in Switzerland and one in Warnsdorf; in 1912 he spent three weeks’ leave (including a week’s extension for a ‘pathological nervous condition manifesting itself in nearly continuous digestive disturbances and sleep problems’ at the Kuranstalt Jungborn (Fountain of Youth) sanatorium at Eckertal in the Harz Mountains run by the naturopath Adolf Just. In a rural, Christian environment where life was focused on spiritual renewal through physical culture, the guests slept in open air huts or in the grass.66 Just’s Kehrt zur Natur Zurück! (Back to Nature) (1896) utopian and idealistic treatise argued for the usual natural healing methods using sun, air, light and mud with cold rub-downs. Nudism was generally practiced, although not by Kafka, who described a typical day: ‘This morning: washing, setting-up exercises, group gymnastics (I am called the man in the swimming trunks), some hymn singing, ball playing in big circle … Pitched hay in the afternoon’.67 Other places Kafka visited were Zimmermann’s Naturheilanstalt at Chemnitz, Gossman’s clinic in Kassel-Wilhelmshöhe, and the Bilz- Sanatorium Schloß in Dresden in Radebeul.68 In 1913 he returned to Riva for three weeks to a sanatorium owned by a Dr Hartingen (who also owned a winter establishment in Brixen), and in 1915 he spent a weekend in Karlsbad with Felice Bauer. Rejected by the army, he then spent ten days in the Frankenstein sanatorium in Rumburk, writing in his diary: For weeks on end I dread being alone in my rooms. For weeks on end fever is the only sleep I know, I go to a sanatorium, convinced ahead of time that to do so is crazy. What can I expect to find there? A chance to escape the night? On the contrary, things are worse there: the days too are like nights.69

In 1916, the year tuberculosis struck, he stayed in Marienbad with Felice; he then returned again to Karlsbad for a weekend, but this time with Milena.70 In Austria the question of whether tuberculosis should be a notifiable disease had been debated since the 1890s, and the legislation passed in 1905–10 was not

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yet effective. By 1920 his lungs were deteriorating, and unable to get a visa for Bavaria, he took an expensive rest and sun cure in Meran.71 December found him in a sanatorium in the Slovakian resort of Matliáry in the High Tátras, a form of boarding house where many of the patients from the ex-monarchy were funded by an international charitable organisation.72 Here, before moving on to the mountain resort of Spindlermühl, he rested, drank milk and cream, was weighed daily by the resident doctor and had his temperature taken constantly. Four years later and desperately ill, he made his final journey, first to the Wiener Wald sanatorium, then to the Vienna University clinic and finally, to the Kierling sanatorium where he died on 3 June 1924.

Conclusion As these brief case studies suggest, the travels of the wealthier members of Central European society circa 1900 concerned about their health were influenced not only by material factors but also by cultural ones, particularly shifts in medical and cultural theories and discourses relating to health and sickness and the care of the body. The identification of the relative salubriousness of particular localities and the attribution of therapeutic properties to their airs, waters and climatic environments encouraged the development and expansion of many established spas and the creation of many new health resorts and settlements. The rhetorical appeal of the health trade for many of its customers was based on the disjunction between their desire to engage with modern urban lifestyles and consumption practices, on the one hand, and, on the other, their anxiety about its effects on their systems. To ‘victims of modern civilisation’ therefore, a therapeutic sojourn in a spa, a health resort, or a holiday in the country ostensibly seemed to offer those who could afford it a form of mediation between an idealised world of healthy minds and bodies and an actual world in which they felt themselves continually subjected to mental and physical distress. The moral and physical discipline of a cure was presented as a temporary solution to this particular dilemma of modern life, while at the same time it created new opportunities for representatives of the health trade who were willing and able to respond.

Notes 1. J. Radkau, ‘The Neurasthenic Experience in Imperial Germany’, in Pathologies of Travel, ed. G. Revill and R. Wrigley (Amsterdam, 2000), 205. 2. On railway accidents see W. Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1986), chaps 8 and 9; A. Killen, Berlin Electropolis: Shock, Nerves, and German Modernity (Berkeley, 2006), 85–114, 164–67. 3. See W. Erb, ‘Über die wachsende Nervosität unserer Zeit’ [1893], cited in Killen, Berlin

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4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

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Electropolis, 79; also A. Steiner, ‘Das nervöse Zeitalter’, Der Begriff der Nervosität bei Laien und Ärtzen in Deutchland und Österreich um 1900, Zürcher medingeschichtliche Abhandlungen, Neue Reihe 21 (Zurich, 1964); J. Radkau, ‘Die wilhelmische Ära als nervöses Zeitalter: oder Die Nerven als Netz zwischen Tempos und Körpergeschichte’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 20 (1994): 211–41. Cited in A. Vidler, ‘Agoraphobia: Psychopathologies of Urban Space’, in Warped Space: Art, Architecture and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge MA, 2000), 25–50, 28; see also Killen, Berlin Electropolis, 55–56, 70. See W. Kos, ‘Zwischen Amusement und Therapie: Der Kurort als sociales Ensemble’, in Das Bad, eine Geschichte der Badekultur im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. H. Lachmeyer, S. MattlWorm and C. Gargerle (Salzburg, 1991), 220–50. J. Steward, ‘The Culture of the Water Cure in Nineteenth-Century Austria 1800–1914’, in Water, Leisure and Culture: European Historian Perspectives, ed. S.C. Anderson and B.H. Tabb (Oxford/New York, 2003), 24–25. A. Frank, ‘The Pleasurable and the Useful: Pilgrimage and Tourism in Habsburg Mariazell’, Austrian History Yearbook 40 (April 2009): 157–82. A. Auer, Kurstadt Wien (Vienna, 1978), 36; A. Erlich, Ärtze, Bader, Scharlatane: die Geschichte der Heilkunst in Österreich (Vienna, 2007), 212. For the German trade see K. Wood, ‘Spa Culture and the Social History of Medicine in Germany’ (PhD diss, University of Chicago, 2004). Also J. Steward, ‘The Spa Towns of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Growth of Tourist Culture 1800–1914’, in New Directions in Urban History: Aspects of European Art, Health, Tourism and Leisure since the Enlightenment, ed. P. Borsay, G. Hirschfelder and R. E. Mohrmann (Munich, 2000), 117–20, and for statistics see, A. Leonardi, ‘L’Importanza economica dei ‘Kurorte’ nello sviluppo del turismo austriaco’, in Il luogo di cura nel tramonto della monarchia d’Asburgo, ed. P. Prodi and A. Wandruszaka (Bologna, 1995), 173–218. See E.J. Carter, ‘Breaking the Bank: Gambling Casinos, Finance Capitalism and German Unification’, Central European History 39 (2006): 185–213, and Wood, ‘Spa Culture’, 148– 60. Casinos were not allowed in Austrian spas. Steward, ‘Spa Towns’, 117–20. G. Dawson, German Life in Town and Country (London, 1901), 197. See W. Kos and E. Krasny, eds, Schreibtisch mit Aussicht: österreichische Schriftsteller auf Sommerfrische (Vienna 1995). See, for example, D.R. Coen, ‘Liberal Reason and the Culture of the Sommerfrische’, Austrian History Yearbook 38 (2007): 146–49. See W. Kos, ed., Die Eroberung der Landschaft: Semmering, Rax, Schneeberg, Niederösterreichische Landesaustellung (Schloss Gloggnitz/Wien, 1992), 304–33. For example, H. Weber and F. Parkes Weber, Climatotherapy and Balneology; The Climates and Mineral Water Health Resorts (Spas) of Europe and North Africa (London, 1907), 617. H. Weber, ‘Treatment of Disease by Climate’, Von Ziemssens Handbook of General Therapeutics, trans. J. Macpherson (London, 1885), 182. On tuberculosis, see E. Dietrich-Dann, Die “Wiener Krankheit”. Eine Sozialegeschichte der Tuberkulose in Österreich (Vienna, 2007); S. Barton, Healthy Living in the Alps: The Origins of Winter Tourism in Switzerland, 1860–1914 (Manchester, 2008), 212. E. Shorter, ‘Private Clinics in Central Europe, 1850–1933’, Social History of Medicine 3, no 2 (1990): 163. Wood, ‘Spa Culture’, 178. Shorter, ‘Private Clinics’, 171. Steward, ‘Spa Towns’, 97–99. See K. Buchholz, R. Latocha, H. Peckmann, K. Wolbert, eds, Die Lebensreform: Entwürfe zur Neugestaltung von Leben und Kunst um 1900, 2 vols (Darmstadt, 2001).

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22. E. Lesky, The Vienna Medical School of the Nineteenth Century, trans. L. Williams and I.S. Levi (London, 1976), 33; E. Lafferton, ‘From Private Asylum to University Clinic: Hungarian Psychiatry, 1850–1908’, in Framing and Imagining Disease in Cultural History, ed. G. S. Rousseau, with M. Gill, D. Haycock and M. Herwig (London, 2003), 206. 23. Erlich, Ärtzte, Bader, Scharlatan, 212, 234–35, 243–45. 24. Lesky, Vienna Medical School, 31–32, 33, 124–26, 300–302; Wood, ‘Spa Culture’, chaps. 4. and 5. He also notes the lack of professorial chairs in Germany. 25. C. Dolmetsch, ‘Our Famous Guest’, Mark Twain in Vienna (Athens and London, 1992), 221–22. 26. L. Zeman, Karlovarský Westend: Vilová architektura v Karlvých Varechi (Karlovy Vary, 1998), 120. 27. Weber, ‘Treatment of Disease’, 218. 28. J. Steward, ‘The Social Pathology of Tourism: Food, Diet and Therapy in Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Spa Culture (1800–1914)’, Sanitas per Aquas. Spas, Lifestyles and Foodways, ed. P. Lysaght (Innsbruck, 2008), 103–18. A version of this section first appeared here. 29. R. Dipper, ‘“Einmal muss der Mensch ins Bad!” Grusse aus Karlsbad und Marienbad’, Abgestempelt: judenfeindliche Postakarten, ed. H. Gold and G.C. Heuberger (Frankfurt am Main, 1999), 194–204; some hotels banned Jews altogether, see F. Bajohr, ‘Unser Hotel ist Judenfrei’, Bader- antisemitismus im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt, 2003). 30. S. Zweig, World of Yesterday, trans. C. and E. Paul (London, 1987), 30. 31. S. Merta, ‘Karlsbad and Marienbad: The Spas and Their Cures in Nineteenth-Century Europe’, in Diffusion of Food Culture in Europe from the Late Eighteenth Century to the Present Day, ed. D.J. Oddy and J.L. Petranovà (Prague, 2005), 152–62. 32. S. Avinieri, Marienbad: A Novel, trans. A. Shevrin (London, 1911), 49–50. 33. M. Twain, ‘At the Appetite Cure’, Cosmopolitan (1898). http://www.twainquotes.com/ Bradley/appetitecure.html. 34. E. Shorter, ‘Private Clinics’, 194. 35. E. Shorter, History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (London, 1997), 116. 36. Ibid., 126–27. 37. Killen, Berlin Electropolis, 63. 38. Shorter, History of Psychiatry, 126; see also, Wood, ‘Spa Culture’, 171. 39. Killen, Berlin Electropolis, 57; Shorter, ‘Private Clinics’, 170; Radkau, ‘The Neurasthenic Experience’, 205; A. Rabinbach, ‘Neurasthenia and Modernity’, Incorporations: Zone 6, ed. J. Cary and S. Kwinter (New York, 1992), 178–89; M. Gijswijt-Hofstra and R. Porter, eds., Cultures of Neurasthenia, Wellcome Series in the History of Medicine, Clio Medica 63 (Amsterdam, 2001). 40. See E. Engstrom, Clinical Psychiatry in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, NY, 2003), 177–88. On psychiatric reform in the south Tirol, see E. Dietrich-Daum and R. Tafiani, Psychiatrielandschaft/Oltre il manicomio (Geschichte und Region / Storie e regione 17, no. 2), (Innsbruck, 2008); also L. Topp, ‘The Modern Mental Hospital in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany and Austria: Psychiatric Space and Images of Freedom and Control’, in Madness, Architecture and the Built Environment, Architecture, ed. L. Topp, J.E. Moran and J. Andrews (New York 2007), 242. 41. Weber and Parkes-Weber, Climatotherapy, 726–28; Weber, ‘Treatment of Disease’, 229– 30; P.A. Rinck, Kleine Geschichte der klimatischen oberitalienishen Seengebiet (Norderstedt, 2007). 42. Shorter, ‘Private Clinics’, 129–30; 164; Killen, Berlin Electropolis, 50–51, 57. 43. R. Mosse, Bäder-Almanach; Mittheilungen der Bäder, Luftorte und Heilanstalten in Deutsch-

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44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49.

50. 51. 52.

53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

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land, Österreich, der Schweiz und den angrensenden Gebeiten für Ärzte und Heilbedürftige, 8th edn. Berlin, 1901, contains a comprehensive list of such places and their details. Shorter, History of Psychiatry, 139–40; Killen, Berlin Electropolis, 73–80. Zeman, Karlovarský Westend, 117. M. Nordau, Degeneration (London, 1895), 7. Lafferton, ‘From Private Asylum’, 206–8. Nordau in Lafferton, 209. See, for example E. Barlösius, Naturgemäße Lebensführung. Zur Geschichte der Lebensreform um die Jahrhundertwende (Frankfurt and New York, 1997), 2000; R. Jütte, ‘Naturheilkunde’, Die Lebensreform 1: 237–390; R. Ulmer, ‘Ernährungsreform und Vegetarismus’, Die Lebensreform 2: 529–38; E. Meyer-Renschhausen and A. Wirz, ‘Dietics, Health Reform and Social Order’, Medical History 43 (1999): 324–25. Steward, ‘Culture of the Water Cure’, 32–33. On racial aesthetics, see M. Hau, The Cult of Health and Beauty in Germany: A Social History, 1890–1930 (Chicago, 2003), 82–100. For a detailed list of the places she visited see B. Hamann and E. Hassmann eds., Elisabeth: Stationen ihres Lebens (Vienna, 1998), 36–37; see also G. Praschl-Bischler, Kaiserin Elisabeths Fitness und Diät- programm (Vienna, 2002). M. Hau, ‘Gender and Aesthetic Norms in Popular Hygienic Culture in Germany from 1900–1914’, Social History of Medicine 12, no. 2 (1999), 271–92; for change in attitudes see C. Leuchtner, ‘“Rekord kostet Anmut, meine Damen!” Zur Körper-Kultur des Frau im Bürgertum Wiens (1880–1930)’, Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für deutsche Geschichte 21 (1992): 127–51. W. Paget, ‘Brixen and Health’, in W. Paget, Scenes and Memories (London, 1912), 238–51, 241–241. Steward, ‘Spa Towns’, 103. H.-L. De La Grange, Gustav Mahler: A New Life Cut Short (1907–1911) (Oxford, 2008), 457–58. Ibid., 462–63, 838. O. Hafner, ‘Zur Kulturgeschichte Tobelbads in den Jahren 1862 und 1910’, Blätter für Heimatkunde Austria 53, no. 1 (1979): 17–22. A. Mahler, Erinnerungen, cited in La Grange, Gustav Mahler, 836. A. Mahler, And the Bridge Is Love (New York, 1958), 50ff. M. Anderson, Kafka’s Clothes. Ornamentalism and Aestheticism in the Habsburg Fin-de-Siècle (Oxford, 1994), 77, 79–82, ft 8. Mosse, Bäder-Almanach, 537. F.R. Walters, Sanatoria for Consumptives in Various Parts of the World (London, 1905), 165. P. Mödersohn-Becker, The Letter and Journals of Paula Mödersohn-Becker, trans. and ed. J. D. Radyecki (New Jersey, London, 1980), 39. E. Pawel, The Nightmare of Reason: A Life of Franz Kakfa (London, 1988), 122. Anderson, Kafka’s Clothes, 84–85, n.17; Pawel, Nightmare of Reason, 260. See also Jütte, ‘Naturheilkunde’, 389. F. Kafka, The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1914–1923, trans. M. Greenberg with H. Arendt, vol. 2 (London, 1948–49), 303. On Bilz see Diethart Kerbs, ‘Die Welt im Jahre 2000: Der Prophet von Oberlößnitz und die Gesellschafts-Utopien der Lebensreform’, Die Lebensreforme I: 61–66. Cited in Pawel, Nightmare of Reason, 341. Ibid., 338, 340. S. Gilman, Franz Kafka: The Jewish Patient (New York, 1985). Pawel, Nightmare of Reason, 413.

Chapter 6

VIENNA’S MOST FASHIONABLE NEURASTHENIC Empress Sisi and the Cult of Size Zero

d Sabine Wieber

Wandern, wandern, wandern. An den Gestaden südlicher Meere, durch kleine Städte Italiens. Unerkannt, unscheinbar in ihren Trauerkleidern, versteckt und den Zudrang der Menschen meidend. Jahre.1 – Felix Salten (1910)

I

n the above-quoted essay, Felix Salten – probably best known as the author of Bambi (1923) – commemorated the Austrian empress Elisabeth (1837–1898) as an isolated individual who spent the final decades of her life restlessly travelling through the Mediterranean. Salten used this text to project Elisabeth as an ethereal, misunderstood and ultimately tragic figure: ‘The Empress … has long escaped our grasp, she was the embodiment of someone who carried her way and well above the existence of others’.2 Salten’s rhetoric formed part of a wider posthumous idealisation of the Empress first set into motion by her assassination in 1898 but continuing well into the present day. Films such as Ernst Marischka’s iconic Sissi trilogy or Xaver Schwarzenberger’s 2009 costume drama produced for Austrian, German and Italian television audiences have kept Elisabeth alive throughout the twentieth century.3 But these films form only a small part of Elisabeth’s twentieth-century popularisation, and indeed commercialisation, as a beautiful and carefree young Bavarian princess who married the dashing Austrian

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emperor Franz Joseph for love in 1854 but whose spirits were soon stifled by the strict etiquette of the Habsburg court. Indeed, it is virtually impossible to visit Vienna and not encounter Sisi – be that in the form of her portrait on chocolate boxes, her full-length silhouette beckoning us to visit the Sisi Museum in the Hofburg or tourist guides inviting us to follow Sisi’s footsteps. This posthumous re-articulation of Sisi’s life differs greatly from the much more ambivalent and problematic engagement with the Austrian empress during her lifetime. Whilst garnering unprecedented attention as one of Europe’s most beautiful royals, many of Elisabeth’s contemporaries were indeed quite troubled by the enigmatic empress and her increasingly bizarre behaviour. She was often viewed as a rather difficult personality, exceedingly beautiful but inaccessible and self-centred. Despite the empire’s strict censorship laws, the initial enthusiasm over Franz Joseph’s marriage soon died down and rumours of Elisabeth’s alleged unconventionality, even irrationality, began to circulate in Vienna – no doubt fuelled by the court’s notorious gossip mill. Elisabeth’s perceived failings as a mother to her children and to her subjects (Landesmutter) became a particular issue of discontent in relation to her frequent physical absences from the Viennese court. As Salten alluded to in the above quote, contemporary observers were particularly troubled by Elisabeth’s seemingly endless travels across Europe during the 1880s and 1890s, which were conceived as acts of selfish abandonments of her husband, children and subjects. It was only through her death by assassination in 1898 that Elisabeth’s image shifted from a narcissistic to an ultimately tragic figure. This shift lay the groundwork for Elisabeth’s subsequent mythologisation and eventual commercialisation in print and media. In keeping with this anthology’s theme, the notion of journeys – material journeys taken by the ailing empress to warmer climates, to famous European spas, to her country estate in Gödöllo and her villa on Corfu as well as more challenging metaphorical journeys into mental instability and physical deterioration – provides a productive point of entry into a historicisation of the ‘Mythos Sisi’, with the goal of re-evaluating nineteenth-century constructions of beauty, femininity and mental health. The aim here is not to prove or disprove the ‘truth’ behind this myth, but to examine how Elisabeth tried to negotiate her often conflicting identities as an empress, a wife, an avid sportswoman and a mother (not necessarily in this order) through her body and her carefully controlled image as one of Europe’s greatest beauties of her time. Her wasp-waist (measuring an unbelievable 51 centimetres), her cascading profusion of brown hair and her considerable height were rendered immortal by contemporary visual culture and turned her into a worldwide celebrity figure. Today, we are so conditioned by the kinds of visual materials emerging from current invasive paparazzi practices that it is difficult to imagine how contemporaries contented themselves with the kinds of carefully staged paintings and photographs of female royals released by palace officials. During her first decades as an

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empress, Elisabeth actively participated in the articulation of royal authority, tradition and idealised femininity by deploying official court portraiture (paintings and photographs) to satisfy her subjects’ seemingly insatiable hunger for pictures of ‘their’ gorgeous empress. Willingly participating in this cult of her personality, Elisabeth commissioned the internationally renowned society painter Franz Xaver Winterhalter (1805–1873) to complete a series of state portraits and more intimate private portraits of Franz Joseph and herself. At the time, Winterhalter was celebrated for the skilful capture of his elegant sitters’ external beauty and internal emotions. Indeed, it could be argued that Winterhalter’s remarkable ability to immortalise Elisabeth’s delicate youth on his canvases made him one of the best portrait painters of the day. Not surprisingly, his portraits of Elisabeth garnered instant fame and were reproduced in print across Europe.4 Winterhalter’s 1865 portrait Elisabeth with Diamond Star Ornaments in Her Hair counts among his most iconic representations (Figure 6.1). This painting shows Elisabeth in an exquisite ball gown, exposing her shoulders and coyly turning towards the viewer. Her skin is the colour of porcelain, and her flawless face is slightly flushed to emphasise its high cheekbones and dark brown eyes. Her hair is clearly one of the portrait’s most striking features, and she wears it in a highly fashionable, loosely braided up-do. Twenty seven diamond stars adorn her coiffure – a present from Franz Joseph who had commissioned Vienna’s famous imperial court jewellers Rozet and Fischmeister to make them for his new wife. Winterhalter’s portrait clearly projects a highly idealised image of the young empress that colluded in the construction and perpetuation of a Cinderella-like fairy tale (from innocent, albeit privileged, country girl to glamorous empress beloved by her Franz Joseph). The ideal femininity represented in this painting is one of exceptional beauty, grace, innocence and compliance with court etiquette and ceremony. Yet, while seeking to anchor Elisabeth in her new role as Austrian empress, this portrait also gives her room to perform a certain level of individuality signalled by her almost flirtatious engagement with the viewer, her seemingly natural beauty and her location in a more intimate setting. In many ways, this portrait functioned as a means through which Elisabeth actively deployed herself as Austria’s new empress. Having recently made the transition from Bavarian princess to Habsburg empress, Elisabeth used painting and photography to perform her, at this point in time still quite indeterminate, femininity. This contrived and indeed highly unstable performance of Elisabeth’s imperial identity was necessary because, as Judith Butler articulated, ‘there is neither an “essence” that gender expresses or externalises nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires because gender is not a fact, the various acts of gender create the idea of gender, and without those acts, there would be no gender at all’.5 Butler’s idea of ‘acts of gender creating the idea of gender’ opens up a space to think about the ways in which representation was deeply implicated in Elisabeth’s construction of not only a public image, but equally a sense of self. In

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Figure 6.1. Franz Xaver Winterhalter, Empress Elisabeth, 1865, oil on canvas, Hofburg, Vienna.

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this context, it could be argued that it was precisely through the act of picturing herself (abbilden) that Elisabeth experienced her own subjectivity. Jacques Lacan’s controversial utterance ‘la femme n’existe pas’6 alludes to the complicated construction of female identity through acts of mirroring, presenting and picturing that one’s confrontation with an often idealised image of femininity entails. Viewed from this perspective, female subjectivity should be understood as being constantly challenged by culturally conditioned images of ideal femininity after which women of all generations and historical time moments model themselves. In the case of Elisabeth, this process was further complicated by the fact that she was a model of ideal late nineteenth-century femininity, which put her into the virtually impossible position of having to uphold this idealised image at all times. Historical evidence suggests that she was temporarily able to balance this deeply fraught ‘performance’, but that ultimately her carefully crafted image as one of the greatest beauties of her day was eventually disrupted by rumours of mental instability, narcissistic self-absorption and anxious predisposition. This indicates a troubling disjuncture between Elisabeth’s participation in late nineteenth-century constructions of ideal femininity and the physical and mental realities engendered by this idealised body. As Elisabeth grew older and as the physical and mental demands of her self-imposed beauty ideal began to take their toll, Elisabeth’s interactions with the world changed. From the 1880s onwards, she largely withdrew from public life and refused to participate in the previously highly effective machinations of visual culture. Henceforth, Elisabeth no longer communicated her subjectivity through beautiful photographs and paintings (her last official photograph was taken in 1868/69 when Elisabeth was only thirty-one) but began to use her increasingly frail body as a conduit through which to forge a troubled relationship with the external world. In the end, this deeply flawed strategy was not successful, and it is argued here that the complex negotiations between the self, her body and the body social ultimately pushed Elisabeth into a sad state of mental disintegration. Rather than to retroactively diagnose Austria’s most famous royal with a mental illness, this contribution to Journeys into Madness traces Elisabeth’s passage from great beauty to haunted eccentric in order to historicise the fraught nature of late nineteenth-century ‘body politics’.

The Young Empress Born in 1837, Elisabeth grew up between her family’s country estate in the idyllic Upper Bavarian village of Possenhofen on Lake Starnberg and their Munich residence. Despite her familial connections to the Wittelsbachs and the Habsburgs, protocol played only a small part in Elisabeth’s upbringing. It is a well-docu-

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mented fact that the adolescent duchess much preferred outdoor activities over ‘proper’ female pursuits in the domestic sphere. Although athletic and slender in build and blessed with long, thick blond hair, Elisabeth was not considered the great beauty of her family. This role fell to her older sister Helene, who was originally destined to marry the dashing Austrian emperor. But after Elisabeth and Franz Joseph’s fateful meeting during their Sommerfrische in Bad Ischl in 1853, their mothers had to change their respective marriage plans and allow Franz Joseph to marry Helene’s younger sister. By 1854, Elisabeth had moved to the Viennese court and become empress of Austria by marriage to Franz Joseph.7 Much has been written about Elisabeth’s difficult adjustment to Vienna’s strict court etiquette and her strained relationship with her mother-in-law, the archduchess Sophie.8 But during her first decade in Vienna, Elisabeth dutifully bore three children in quick succession (two girls and the much-anticipated crown prince, followed by another daughter born over a decade later)9 and participated in state visits and other official engagements. Yet, Elisabeth’s recovery from each birth proved increasingly difficult, and she soon showed signs of postnatal depression and nervous exhaustion. In 1859, for example, the imperial physician Dr. Seeburger complained that the empress ‘did not meet her obligations either as an empress or as a woman; though she was essentially idle, her contacts with the children were casual, and though she sorrows and weeps for the absent noble Emperor, she rides horseback for hours, to the detriment of her health’.10 But despite her precarious health during these early years as empress, Elisabeth actively participated in the production and dissemination of her image as one of Europe’s most enviable beauties of her day. Some of Elisabeth’s most iconic oil portraits and photographs stem from this time period, such as the aforementioned Winterhalter portrait. Indeed, it became a favourite pastime of foreign delegates and envoys to the Habsburg court to see if the empress was indeed as beautiful in person as her reputation suggested.11 Although famously impatient with the lengthy procedure entailed by official court portraiture, Elisabeth regularly sat for Winterhalter. As a woman of her time, however, Elisabeth was much more inclined to have her photograph taken, and a large photographic archive of images of Elisabeth survives from the 1860s and 1870s. In developing a representational language in print, Elisabeth worked closely with the k.k. Hof-Photograph Ludwig Angerer who developed an iconography associated with the empress to this day (Figure 6.2).12 Not unlike Winterhalter’s 1864 portrait Elisabeth with Diamond Star Ornaments in her Hair, this photograph also shows Elisabeth in a side view, but she is no longer engaging with the viewer in the same direct manner. Contrary to Winterhalter’s more formal portrait, Elisabeth is wearing everyday attire. At her feet, one of Elisabeth’s loyal wolfhound dogs, Shadow, rests as though waiting to be taken for a walk at a moment’s notice. The setting of this photograph is typical of late nineteenth-century studio photography, complete

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Figure 6.2. Ludwig Angerer, Portrait of Empress Elisabeth, 1864 Bildarchiv der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek Wien.

with the heavy curtain to the left of the empress indicating a formal staging of this representation. And, as in the more formal oil portraits Elisabeth is captured as slender bodied, sumptuously attired and gracefully posed. In the context of these photographs, it is interesting to note that – with the exception of an early photograph taken by Angerer in 1859 – virtually no photograph exists of the empress in the physical context of her family.13

The Cult of Beauty Two key aspects of the visual iconography articulated in these representations of Elisabeth at the height of her beauty in the mid-1860s were her hair and her wasp-waist. As Angerer’s photograph shows, Elisabeth had thick and healthy hair that reached almost to her calves when not braided and/or pinned up. Indeed, contemporary observers regularly remarked upon Elisabeth’s amazing hair, and her hairdresser Fanny Feifalik reportedly spent three hours every day combing and coiffing it.14 Every two to three weeks, Elisabeth’s hair was washed with a variety of special tinctures (a mixture of cognac and egg-yolk amongst them), which could take up the entire day, and in later life, she probably dyed her hair with indigo and an extract made from walnut shells.15 To make use of the time dedi-

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cated to these beauty regimes, Elisabeth often conversed with her reader Constantin Christomanos, whose diaries offer crucial insights into some of the more private aspects of Elisabeth’s life. Describing one of these hair-dressing sessions, Christomanos wrote that ‘the Empress sat at a table, which had been moved to the centre of the room and covered with a white cloth, wearing a white gown embellished with lace, with her loose hair reaching all the way to the floor and literally enveloping her being’.16 Twentieth-century biographers often comment on Elisabeth’s preoccupation with her hair as an ‘obsession’,17 but her struggle with weight should be viewed as a much more troubling fixation. At a height of 172 centimetres (5’8”), Elisabeth maintained an average weight of 47 kilograms (103 lbs) throughout her adult life. More astonishingly, her waist measured a mere 51 centimetres (20 in) despite having borne four children. Admittedly, women of Elisabeth’s generation were heavily corseted from a young age onwards, and her body would have physically changed into an ‘hourglass’ shape. And yet, Elisabeth’s extremely slender physique during the 1860s, combined with her frail constitution and pallor, conjures up recent debates in the fashion industry about the literally shrinking size of models – viewed from this distinctly twenty-first-century perspective, Elisabeth would have been considered a ‘size zero’ (derived from US catalogue sizing: 30–22–32 in).18 In order to maintain her remarkably slender physique, Elisabeth followed an extremely disciplined exercise regime that included fencing, gymnastics, horseback riding and very brisk foot marches. While Elisabeth’s contemporaries celebrated her physical attributes and tried to sneak a glance at her wherever Elisabeth went, they were much less forgiving of the physical regime required to achieve (and maintain) this beauty ideal. Elisabeth’s exercise room at her apartments in Vienna’s Hofburg aroused attention among contemporary observers. Das Fremdenblatt, for example, reported in 1864 that ‘it should be of great interest to report that the great hall of the Imperial Castle has been converted into a gymnastics room. There one finds all kinds of equipment: rings, horizontal bars, parallel bars, monkey bars etc’.19 In fact, when embarking on a tour of Elisabeth’s and Franz Joseph’s reconstituted private quarters in the Hofburg, one finds the empress’s exercise equipment placed among plush red carpets, brocade wall-coverings, gilded frames and historicist furniture, which makes for a rather strange interior decorating scheme. Christomanos described a funny episode in Elisabeth’s daily gymnastics regime that allegedly took place on New Years Day 1892, when Elisabeth was already fiftyfour years old. Upon entering her salon, he discovered the empress lifted off the ground and working her hand-rings, but wearing a silk dress with an ornately embroidered train: I had never before seen her this imposing! Hanging on the ropes, she made a fantastic impression, like a creature somewhere between snake and bird. To let herself back

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down, she had to jump over a rope stretched above the ground. ‘This rope’ she said ‘is there to make sure that I don’t forget how to leap. My father was a mighty hunter before the Lord, and he wanted us to learn to leap like the mountain goats.’ She then begged me to continue my reading of the Odyssey and explained that she was so formally dressed because she was about to receive some archduchesses.20

As entertaining as this incident appears, it also points to the compulsive and time-consuming nature of Elisabeth’s daily physical regime. A typical day would see her rise early, have a bath and a massage, do her gymnastic exercises, have a meagre breakfast, undergo her hair and beauty routine, get dressed for more exercise (fencing or riding), return for a brief lunch, go on one of her power marches, return to get dressed and spend some time with her youngest daughter Marie Valerie, and then have dinner with the royal family (which was usually cut short as both Franz Joseph and Elisabeth considered these meals a waste of their time – Franz Joseph because he wanted to get back to his desk and Elisabeth because she was usually dieting).21 During her lifetime, Elisabeth was notorious for her radical diet regimes, which at times eliminated most solid foods and included drastic fasts. She reportedly checked and recorded her weight every day and never allowed it to exceed fifty kilograms.22 Not surprisingly, her complete refusal to eat often coincided with particularly stressful periods in her life such as the anxious times as a new mother, or following the hosting of a state function involving one of Vienna’s famously elaborate banquets (some of the menus for these functions are today displayed in the Sisi Museum in the Hofburg). Further triggers for these periods of starvation was a recurring sense of insecurity in her marriage (Elisabeth suspected her husband of multiple affairs), the departure of a family member from the Viennese court or Elisabeth’s return to Vienna after extended periods away. In 1860, for example, Foreign Minister Count Louis Rechberg reported that ‘since her return [from a restive cure in Madeira], the Empress has the deepest aversion to any kind of nourishment. She no longer eats anything at all, and her energies are exhausted all the more as … severe pain robs her of the sleep that might still be able to keep up her energies’.23 Much has been made of Elisabeth’s strange diet regimes and some of her more exotic eating habits, such as the persistent rumour that she drank raw blood of veal.24 These have clearly been exaggerated, but Elisabeth frequently fasted and often consumed only oranges or milk (for this reason, she often took goats on her frequent ship journeys to secure a constant supply of fresh milk). These periods of starvation or severely restricted food intake alternated with periods of more regular eating habits, as evidenced by bills from various Viennese pastry shops attesting to the empress’s love of cakes and ice cream.25 This brief exploration of Elisabeth’s beauty-, diet- and exercise regimes is intended to show that she worked very hard to create and, even more so, maintain

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her reputation. Over time, though, it became increasingly difficult to navigate the delicate balance between her idealised self and her corporeal self, resulting in the gradual unravelling of her progressively fragile state of mind. The more Elisabeth tried to control and discipline her body, the more it seemed to slip from her grip. As Elisabeth’s life story continues to inspire generations of ‘Sisi’ devotees across the world, it is important to keep in mind that a deeply troubled individual lurked beneath the projected façade of beauty and glamour. While Elisabeth’s rigorous self-discipline won her elaborate praise for her beauty, her hourglass figure and her fashionability, this cultivation of an ideal femininity by means of self-denial demanded a high price, and before long, Elisabeth was reproached by members of the court and occasionally the popular press for her failing abilities as a mother, her narcissistic self-absorption and her restlessness. For Elisabeth, the nineteenth-century equivalent of a cult of ‘size zero’ thus proved an elusive ideal because once attained, it spiralled her into a vicious circle of physical and mental disintegration.26 How much of Elisabeth’s sense of self was tied into her physical appearance is evidenced by her niece Marie Freiin von Wallersee’s observation: She [Elisabeth] worshipped her beauty like a heathen his idols and was on her knees to it. The sight of the perfection of her body gave her aesthetic pleasure; everything that marred this beauty was displeasing and repulsive to her … She saw it as her life’s work to remain young, and all her thoughts turned on the best method for preserving her beauty.27

The Price of Beauty What von Wallersee calls the ‘best methods for preserving her beauty’ were actually quite detrimental to Elisabeth’s physical health. Throughout her life, Elisabeth suffered from a range of serious ailments directly resulting from her excessive exercise and erratic eating regimes. This is not the place to enter into a detailed discussion of her many conditions and their nineteenth-century diagnoses, but it should be pointed out that Elisabeth suffered, for example, from hunger edema, or dropsy to use the nineteenth-century term, throughout her adult life. Induced by periods of prolonged starvation, Elisabeth’s body began to retain fluid induced by a lack of protein in her blood and malfunctioning kidneys. At times, Elisabeth’s feet and legs were so swollen that she was not able to walk. In addition, she experienced extreme fatigue, shortness of breath, fainting spells and ‘greensickness’ or anaemia generated by her tight corset and her starvation diets. These physical symptoms were accompanied by anxiety attacks, crying fits and depression. During the early years of her marriage, Elisabeth also suffered from seemingly inexplicable coughing fits, which instigated her first restive cure in Ma-

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deira suggested by the eminent lung specialist Dr Josef Skoda during the winter of 1860.28 Taking these diverse symptoms into account, a retrospective diagnosis of anorexia nervosa would be a tempting albeit highly problematic undertaking. While Elisabeth most certainly exhibited symptomatic continuities with what we now classify as anorexia nervosa, the kind of congruence implied by this linkage of modern psychiatry with historical evidence poses a challenge to the historian. And yet, Elisabeth’s periodic rejection of food raises the interesting question posed by Joan Jacobs Brumberg’s study of modern Fasting Girls: ‘Why is it that women and girls in certain cultural systems and historical epochs become susceptible to particular forms of exaggerated behaviour centering on food?’29 Brumberg’s question opens up exciting possibilities to think about Elisabeth’s refusal to eat as both a historically specific disease pattern and a socio-cultural act. While women and girls have negated food intake throughout time for diverse reasons,30 it is during the period under consideration in this essay that the diagnosis of anorexia nervosa entered medical discourse in both England and continental Europe. Historians have long seen the nineteenth century as being ‘notable for the identification, classification, and description of many diseases’,31 resulting in new nosologies and disease patterns (Krankheitsbilder) such as anorexia nervosa. The term ‘anorexia nervosa’ was properly articulated in 1873 through a paper delivered by Sir William Withey Gull (1816–1890) at the October meeting of London’s Clinical Society and published shortly after as ‘Anorexia Nervosa (Apepsia Hysterica, Anorexia Hysterica)’.32 In this lecture, Gull discussed three cases and their medical treatments: ‘Food should be administered at intervals varying inversely with the exhaustion and emaciation [of the patient]’.33 Prior to Gull, the term ‘anorexia’ had been used to describe a general absence of appetite, but functioned as more of a general symptom, than a properly defined disease.34 Virtually contemporaneous with Gull, the French neuro-psychiatrist Ernest-Charles Lasègue (1816–1883) also employed the term but in conjunction with hysteria (l’anorexie hysterique), which, with historical hindsight, implies an orientation towards a later Freudian model of the psyche (which is not to argue for a pre-Freudian articulation of the psyche). While both physicians shared a desire to inventory a range of new symptoms they had observed in primarily young women who refused to eat over prolonged periods of time, they disagreed on the disease’s pathogenesis. For Gull, the roots of the disease were located in the hypothalamus and thus represented a nervous condition of somatic origin. As a result, Gull took issue with Lasègue’s term l’anorexie hysterique because it not only implied a psychological interpretation of the patient’s physical symptoms, but also continued to locate anorexia in the uterus (hysteros-uterus) rather than the nervous system.35 While a detailed discussion of Gull and Lasègue exceeds the parameters of this essay, their rivalry clearly indicates the stakes in this debate: is the voluntary starvation observed in women (although Gull already made allowances for male

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anorexics) about the body or about the mind?36 In the context of late nineteenthcentury Vienna, Gull’s insistence on the nervous, and thus somatic, origins of anorexia worked well with Austria’s dominant psychiatric practice of the day which foregrounded the treatment of nerves, nervosity and nervous ailments. Although Vienna is the birthplace of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis (Interpretation of Dreams, 1899), late nineteenth-century asylum and university psychiatrists dominated the field and were much more interested in finding and treating the physiological origins of nervous conditions such as anorexia and neurasthenia.37 A key figure in this discourse was the Austrian psychiatrist Richard von KrafftEbing (1840–1902) whose influential 1885 publication Über gesunde und kranke Nerven greatly contributed to the popularisation of what historian Andreas Killen calls the ‘new disease construct of neurasthenia’,38 or chronic nervous exhaustion. According to Krafft-Ebing, neurasthenia resulted from the over-stimulation of an individual’s inherent nervous resources by the varied stresses of modern, urban life: ‘Such a lifestyle necessarily depletes one’s life-force and especially one’s nerveforce before their time and anticipates a premature aging accompanied by many mental and physical ailments’.39

Neurasthenia and Sanatorium Culture To the best of our knowledge, Elisabeth was never diagnosed with anorexia nervosa, but it is safe to say that her various ailments (anaemia, edema, panic attacks, etc.) resulted from her persistent refusal to eat and her excessive exercise routines. To ease her suffering, imperial physicians prescribed a range of therapeutic regimes developed at the time for treating a whole gambit of neurasthenic conditions, including anorexia nervosa. These therapies were largely administered in the private clinical setting of a sanatorium. As argued elsewhere in this collection of essays, the final decades of the nineteenth century represented one of the high points of health tourism and sanatorium culture.40 Elisabeth actively participated in this health tourism and spent extended periods of times at some of Europe’s most famous and fashionable spas such as the Hungarian Baths of Hercules (Herkulsfürdö) in the Carpathian Mountains and the German elite spa town of Bad Kissingen in Lower Franconia – both popular sites of natural hot springs frequented by members of Europe’s aristocracy in search of balneological treatment regimes for a wide spectrum of symptoms. On one level, Elisabeth’s retreat to these private clinics provided her with a means of escape from the suffocating etiquette and intrigue at the Vienna Court. The sanatorium’s resident physicians did not allow for any of her regular routines to infiltrate these ‘concentrated kernels of aestheticised life’.41 Although Elisabeth had to follow a quite regimented schedule of treatments, she was not subjected to the daily pressures of Viennese court life. She often travelled under a false name,

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and after the death of her son, the Crown Prince Rudolf, in 1889 she always dressed in inconspicuous black (usually armed with a white umbrella to further shield herself from view). Beyond providing Elisabeth with a means of escape from Vienna, these sojourns also offered much-needed relief from the increasingly crippling secondary symptoms of her nervous ailments. This forced Elisabeth to seek ever more respite in the Mediterranean and in the above-mentioned sanatoriums and spas. As previously discussed, Elisabeth undertook her first recuperative journey in 1860–61 to the warm climate of Madeira because she was suffering from a persistent cough that had plagued her for many months (an interesting condition when thinking about Sigmund Freud’s patient Anna O.). One of her most reliable biographers, Brigitte Hamann describes the lead up to Elisabeth’s stay in Madeira as follows: The form of disease was completely obscure – and remains so to this day … For years, she suffered from severe coughing attacks, which increased ominously in the winter of 1860 and probably led to the diagnosis of pulmonary disease. Her stubborn refusal to eat not only caused her to suffer from ‘greensickness’ – anaemia – but kept her physically exhausted. Her nerves could take no more. Repeatedly, she fell into crying jags that would not stop … The diagnosis of life-threatening ‘affected lungs’ was received with much scepticism. Especially the Viennese relatives and the court society were not willing to believe that the Empress was really so very ill.42

A nineteenth-century diagnosis of ‘affected lungs’ covered a wide spectrum of conditions, and it is likely that Elisabeth was already exhibiting symptoms of a form of neurasthenia rather than pulmonary disease. After spending the winter in Madeira, Elisabeth travelled onwards to Corfu, Venice and Bad Kissingen. She only returned to the Viennese court on 12 August 1862, almost two years after her initial departure. After this lengthy absence, the 1860s marked a period of relative quiet in terms of Elisabeth’s health journeys, and her time away from Vienna was restricted to the royal family’s annual Sommerfrische in Bad Ischl. When Elisabeth and the children resided at Bad Ischl, Franz Joseph joined his family whenever he could get away from the daily politics in Vienna. The 1860s were heady political times culminating in the Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 and the crowning of Elisabeth as queen of Hungary – one of the few political events Elisabeth actively supported. As mentioned, this was also the period of Elisabeth’s mindful creation of her image as one of Europe’s most beautiful women through the employ of visual culture. As pressure to fulfil her role as empress increased during the 1870s, Elisabeth began to travel to her various country estates such as Gödöllö and remained away from Vienna for extended periods of time. The 1880s and 1890s were again characterised by Elisabeth’s frequent travels throughout Europe, both in search of relief for her crippling physical ailments (by this point, she also suffered from rheumatism and heart complaints)

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and to appease her increasingly restless, even deteriorating, state of mind. By the mid-1890s, Elisabeth was absent from the Viennese court for most of the year and when in Vienna, she locked herself away in the Hermes Villa commissioned for her by Franz Joseph in 1882 and located in the former imperial game preserve in Lainz. In a letter dated from 1887, Franz Joseph alluded to the toll his wife’s constant travels were taking on their relationship (although by this point in time, the emperor had already begun a liaison with the actress Katharina Schratt)43 that would last until his death in 1916: ‘If you think that it is necessary for your health, I shall keep silent, although this year we have not spent more than a few days together since spring’.44

Flight from the Court From the late 1880s onwards, and even more so after Rudolf ’s suicide in 1889, Elisabeth spent considerable time cruising the Mediterranean on her yacht Miramar. Here, it is worth mentioning that Elisabeth preferred destinations that had yet to be developed for tourism such as Southern Italy and some of the more remote Greek Islands.45 The non-existent tourism infrastructure and seclusion of these places made it very challenging to cater to the royal households’ needs. Elisabeth’s travel patterns during the final decade of her life suggest that her journeys were not so much about arriving at a particular destination but about the process of travelling. Constantly on the move, the Empress told her loyal confidant Christomanos that ‘the destinations are only desirable because a journey lies in between. If I would arrive somewhere and did not know that I could leave again, then even a stay in paradise would turn into hell for me’.46 Although Elisabeth had access to her own very luxurious train carriage furbished with lush fabrics and divided into a sleeper and salon, she much preferred being at sea: ‘Life on board of a ship is more than mere travel. It is an improved, a true life … without requests and sense of time’.47 She even had an anchor tattooed on her shoulder in 1888. Surrounded by only her most trusted companions – Christomanos, her long-time Hofdame Countess Marie Festetics and an exclusive number of staff – Elisabeth clearly treasured this liminal state of being, always in transit, never arriving. However, her entourage witnessed her behaviour growing ever more troublesome and strange. The strict censorship laws enforced by the Viennese court and the still very restricted access to private papers left by individuals in Elisabeth’s inner circle make it difficult to trace the magnitude of Elisabeth’s journey into mental decline. However, even her devoted biographer Egon Caesar Conte Corti (1886–1953) could not help himself and made a series of telling allusions to the empress’s increasing eccentricity and egomania.48 Luckily, Countess Festetics’s diaries are available, and Hamann used them extensively in her afore-quoted biography The Reluctant Princess (1998). That it was physically

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challenging to keep abreast with the agitated empress during the final two decades of her life is unsurprising. But despite Festetics’s undisputed loyalty to the empress, her diary sheds some light onto Elisabeth’s bizarre behaviour and its toll on her companion: ‘On board, it becomes more and more unbearable each day … Her majesty occupies the entire yacht, and when it rains or in the evening one does not know where to go. Her majesty tells me the most intimate details, she is very endearing and good, but I often shudder when seeing this beautiful soul drowning in egotism and paradoxes’.49 As evidenced by this carefully worded excerpt, Elisabeth’s conduct grew virtually unbearable for her fellow travellers and could no longer be contained within the small circle of her confidants. Hamann recounts a number of incidents where Elisabeth appeared ‘uninvited and unannounced’50 (and unrecognised) at strangers’ houses, or even worse, fellow royalties’ palaces demanding to stay the night. In a letter from Corfu to Elisabeth’s Hungarian Hofdame Ida Ferenczy, Festetics describes one of these episodes, which took place in 1888: It upsets me, dear Ida, what I see and hear. Her majesty is always kind when we are together and she speaks like she used to. But she is no longer the same person – a shadow cast over her soul … Believe me, my heart cries bloody tears. She does things that make one’s heart and reason stop. Yesterday morning, the weather was bad already, and despite this, she went to sea with the sailboat. It started to pour down with rain at 9 o’clock and it lasted until 3 o’clock in the afternoon, accompanied by thunder. During this entire time, she sailed around us and sat on deck – holding her umbrella above her, but being soaked to the skin. Then she disembarked someplace, ordered her carriage and wanted to stay overnight in a complete stranger’s villa!51

‘Endstation’ On 10 September 1898, Elisabeth was assassinated in Geneva by the Italian anarchist Luigi Lucheni, who stabbed the empress in the heart as the result of a mistaken identity. The week prior, a final ‘paparazzi’ photograph had been taken of Elisabeth in the company of Baroness Rothschild (Figure 6.3). This photograph is very different from the ones sanctioned by the empress at the height of her beauty during the 1860s. Here, we see the kind of unsolicited photography that dominates our present-day press in the making: the empress is caught by the camera ‘off guard’ while walking along a parade of shops; the photograph is slightly grainy and out of focus, but Elisabeth is clearly recognisable (possibly by her unopened white umbrella, which she used to shelter her face from curious onlookers); and she is caught in the act of a private conversation with her companion. What lends this photograph even further ‘celebrity status’ and poignancy is the fact that it was the very last image capturing the empress alive. Ironically, Elisabeth was killed while boarding a steamship destined for yet another journey, this time to Montreux.

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Figure 6.3. Anonymous, Elisabeth and Baronin Rothschild in Geneva, 1898 Bildarchiv der Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek Wien.

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Lucheni’s act of violence brings Elisabeth’s physical journeying throughout Europe to an abrupt end. But her death also concludes Elisabeth’s troubled lifejourney from beautiful and admired young empress to odd recluse on the brink of mental illness. Ultimately, this essay has tried to show how Elisabeth’s strategy of using her body to forge a sense of self as one of Europe’s outstanding beauties gradually unravelled into a self-destructive struggle to attain an ever-elusive ideal. As Elisabeth used her ‘size zero’ body to articulate social relations as well as her own identity as a woman in the fraught world of late nineteenth-century etiquette and decorum, this very body began to rebel against her ever-more-drastic disciplinary interventions. As Elisabeth’s self-destructive behaviour continued, her body ceased to cope with the physical effects of her cycles of excessive exercise and starvation. From this point onwards, an interesting shift seems to occur in that Elisabeth no longer activated visual culture (the last officially sanctioned photograph was taken thirty years before her death) to negotiate her own subjectivity and her relationship with/to the world, but her nervous ailments instead. She still used her body to initiate a deeply fraught dialogue with the world around her, but her formerly ‘perfect’ body gradually metamorphosed into a diseased body and mind. Elisabeth’s body thus serves as living proof of Maud Ellmann’s powerful observation that starvation is ‘destined to undo the self in the very process of confirming identity’.52

Notes 1. ‘Roaming, roaming, roaming. On the shores of southern seas, through small Italian towns. Unrecognised, inconspicuous in her sables, hidden and avoiding contact with others. Years’. F. Salten, ‘Elisabeth’, in Die Wiener Moderne: Literatur, Kunst und Musik zwischen 1890 and 1910, ed. G. Wunberg (Stuttgart, 1981), 98. All translations in this essay are the author’s unless otherwise noted. 2. Ibid., 98. 3. Marischka’s films launched the international career of the young Romy Schneider (1938– 1982) and used Elisabeth’s pet name for their titles (although Elisabeth and her contemporaries used the spelling ‘Sisi’). E. Marischka, Sissi, 1955–58 and Xaver Schwarzenberger, Sisi, 2009 (ORF/ZDF/RAI). 4. R. Ormond and C. Blackett-Ord, Franz Xaver Winterhalter and the Courts of Europe, 1830– 70 (New York, 1992). 5. J. Butler, ‘Performative Acts and Gender Construction’, in Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory, ed. K. Conboy, N. Medina and S. Stanbury (New York, 1977), 405. 6. J. Lacan, Seminar XX (1972–73). See S. Barnard and B. Fink, Reading Seminar XX: Lacan’s Major Work on Love, Knowledge and Feminine Sexuality (New York, 2002). 7. The encounter between the young and carefree Elisabeth and one of Europe’s most eligible bachelors continues to form one of the central plots in the many romantic revisions of their lives. See for example E.C. Corti, Elisabeth: Die seltsame Frau (Salzburg, Graz, 1934) or H. Klüver, Sissi: Die rebellische Kaiserin (Hamburg, 1996).

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8. See for example B. Hamann, The Reluctant Princess (Berlin, 1998) or M. Tuveri, Tabularium. Considerazioni su Elisabetta d’Austria (Rome, 2007). 9. Arch Duchess Sophie (1855–1857), Arch Duchess Gisela 1856–1932) and Crown Prince Rudolf (1858–1889), Arch Duchess Marie-Valerie (1868–1924). 10. J.K. Mayr, Das Tagebuch des Polizeimeisters Kempen von 1848 bis 1859 (Vienna, 1931), quoted in Hamann, Reluctant Princess, 88. 11. Hamann, Reluctant Princess, 131. 12. A large archive of photographs of Elisabeth is housed at the Bildarchiv of the Austrian National Library in Vienna. 13. Ludwig Angerer took a final photograph of the then thirty-year old empress in 1868–69, and all subsequent photographs and paintings of the empress are unsanctioned retouches or conjectures. See G. Mraz and U. Fischer-Westhause, Elisabeth: Prinzessin in Bayern, Kaiserin von Österreich, Königin von Ungarn (Vienna, 2008). 14. Evincing the popular interest in the empress and her beauty regime, Faifalik’s appointment in 1863 was actually reported in the press. See Morgen-Post, 27 April 1863. 15. Hamann, 134. 16. Constantin Christomanos quoted in K. Unterreiner, Sisi: Mythos und Wahrheit, 2nd ed. (Vienna, 2006), 67. 17. See for example Hamann, Reluctant Princess, or L. Merkle, Sissi: die schöne Kaiserin (Munich, 1998). 18. Will Pavia, ‘Vogue Editor Launches New War on Size Zero Fashion’, London Times, 13 June 2009. The Vogue editor in question here is Alexandra Shulman. http://women.timesonline .co.uk/tol/life_and_style/women/fashion/article6489243.ece (accessed 15 January 2011). 19. Quoted in J. Wellmann, ‘Turnstunden im Schloss’, in Sisis Kaiserliches Schönheits- und Gesundheits-Buch (Bad Sauerbrunn, 2000), 122. 20. Christomanos quoted in Unterreiner, Sisi: Mythos und Wahrheit, 73. 21. Hamann, Reluctant Princess, 126–42. 22. G. Praschl-Bichler, Kaiserin Elisabeths Fitness- und Diät-Programm (Vienna and Munich, 2002). 23. Hamann, Reluctant Princess, 110. 24. In this instance it should be clarified that she drank the boiled juices of a veal shank, a concoction that was very much like a broth. 25. Unterreiner, Sisi: Mythos und Wahrheit, 74. 26. It is tempting, albeit problematic, to draw parallels here to the struggles of Diana, Princess of Wales (1961–1997). 27. M. Freiin von Wallersee, Meine Vergangenheit (Berlin, 1913), 27. 28. At the time, Madeira was not a renowned designation for health tourists, and it remains a mystery why Elisabeth chose this particular island. Interestingly, this trip occurred before she had her own royal yacht, and she actually travelled on Queen Victoria’s private yacht Victoria and Albert, which she boarded in Antwerp. For a more detailed discussion of the logistics of this first trip to warmer climates see Hamann, Reluctant Princess, 102. 29. J. Jacobs-Brumberg, Fasting Girls: The Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa as a Modern Disease (Cambridge, MA, 1988), 4. 30. Medieval mystics such as Catherine of Siena (d. 1380) or Catherine of Genoa (d. 1508), for example, used extreme fasting as a means of Eucharistic devotion that figured prominently in their religious practice. For an excellent discussion of the importance of food to medieval religious communities of women see C. Walker Bynum, The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women (London, 1987). 31. Jacobs-Brumberg, Fasting Girls, 100.

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32. W.W. Gull, ‘Anorexia Nervosa (Apepsia Hysterica, Anorexia Hysterica)’, Transactions of the Clinical Society of London 7 (1874): 22–28. 33. Ibid., reprinted in A Collection of the Published Writings of William Withey Gull, Physician to Guy’s Hospital (London, 1894), 310. 34. Gull is also an extremely interesting figure in that he pioneered the use of visual representation to showcase patients ‘before’ and ‘after’ their treatment. For a sustained discussion of the implications of this visual strategy see E. O’Conner, ‘Pictures of Health: Medical Photography and the Emergence of Anorexia Nervosa’, Journal of the History of Sexuality 5, no. 4 (April 1995): 535–72. 35. For a discussion of anorexia’s late-nineteenth-century etiology see for example T. Habermas, ‘The Psychiatric History of Anorexia Nervosa and Bulimia Nervosa: Weight Concerns and Bulimic Symptoms in Early Case Reports’, International Journal of Eating Disorders 8, no. 3 (1989): 259–73. On the German instantiations of the debate see W. Vandereycken and T. Habermas, ‘German Publications on Anorexia Nervosa in the Nineteenth Century’, International Journal of Eating Disorders 10, no. 4 (1991): 473–90. For a more general discussion of Gull and Lasègue, see Jacobs-Brumberg, Fasting Girls, 101–25. 36. The etiology of anorexia continues to be debated to this day, but the DSM-IV-TR (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder) favours a socio-psychological interpretation reflecting our post-Freudian position. 37. G. Blackshaw and L. Topp, eds., Madness and Modernity: Mental Illness and the Visual Arts in Vienna 1900 (London, 2009). 38. A. Killen, Berlin Electropolis: Shock, Nerves, and German Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 39. R. von Krafft-Ebing, Über gesunde und kranke Nerven (Tübingen, 1885), 11. 40. See the contributions to this anthology by N. Imrie and J. Steward. 41. J. Howard, ‘The Gifts of Good Baths, Harmonic Cosmopolises and Magic Mountains’, paper presented at Bauen für ein neues Leben – Jugendstilstädte in Europa, Bad Nauheim, 27–30 September 2006. http://www.jugendstil-bad-nauheim.de/jugendstil/content/index_ html?a=8&b=0&docID=39 (accessed 18 May 2010). 42. Hamann, Reluctant Princess, 100. 43. B. Hamann, Meine liebe, gute Freundin! Die Briefe Kaiser Franz Josephs an K. Schratt (Vienna, 1992) and G. Markus, Katharina Schratt: die zweite Frau des Kaisers (Vienna, 2004). 44. G. Nostiz-Rieneck, Briefe Kaiser Franz Joseph an Kaiserin Elisabeth, vol. 1 (Vienna, 1966), 188. 45. During her first visit to Corfu in 1861, Elisabeth fell in love with the place, and upon her return to the island in 1888, she commissioned a summer palace in Gastouri she named after her favourite Greek hero Achilles and filled with expensive works of art and antiques. As usual, Elisabeth soon lost interest in the project and tried to sell it after only a few years. The Achillion Palace was eventually sold by the empress’s estate to the German emperor Wilhelm II in 1907 and is now open to the public. 46. Christomanos quoted in E. Hassmann, Sisi auf der Spur: Kutschen, Kleider, Kultobjekte der Kaiserin Elisabeth von Österreich (Vienna, 2009), 16. 47. Ibid. 48. See footnote 7. 49. Festetics quoted in Unterreiner, Sisi: Mythos und Wahrheit, 99. 50. Hamann, 353. 51. Unterreiner, Sisi: Mythos und Wahrheit, 101. 52. M. Ellmann, The Hunger Artist (Cambridge, MA, 1993), 31.

Chapter 7

PETER ALTENBERG Authoring Madness in Vienna circa 1900

d Gemma Blackshaw

O

n 23 December 1912, the architect Adolf Loos and the English performer Bessie Bruce wrote to their good friend, Peter Altenberg, wishing him a ‘Merry Christmas’ from the Grand Hotel Couttet et du Parc in Chamonix where they were taking the Mont Blanc air for Bruce’s consumption. In a teasing close to their chatty letter, she writes: ‘What is one to do with such an old fool but just send him to Steinhof ? That’s what comes of too much Prodomos [sic] – but go!’1 Bruce exclaims that Altenberg’s fanatical devotion to those early twentiethcentury tenets of good mental health – diet, hygiene and exercise – as set out in his 1905 book Pròdroˇmoˇs, had sent him straight to Vienna’s principal psychiatric institution. Almost two weeks before the dispatch of their letter, the writer had made the journey from his room at the Hotel Panhans, Semmering, to the Villa Austria, Steinhof.2 Altenberg was to stay at the fee-paying sanatorium, attached to the vast, state-financed asylum, for nearly five months before a visit from his Vienna-based doctor and fellow writer Arthur Schnitzler and the promised guardianship of Loos facilitated his release. In a letter to Altenberg’s one-time companion, Helga Malmberg, Loos wrote that he had decided on a ‘cure by force’: ‘I had his belongings packed, paid his bill, and told the Director that I wanted to distract Peter by a journey’.3 On 2 May 1913, Loos and Bruce took him on the night train from Vienna to Trieste and from there they travelled on to Venice, for what they hoped would be a restorative summer holiday on the Lido with friends.

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This essay explores the journey of Richard Engländer, known by his pen name Peter Altenberg, in and out of Steinhof. This journey has already been retraced by Altenberg’s biographer Andrew Barker, but my essay will follow a different route, considering further archival material along the way.4 My aim is to consider the journey both materially and metaphorically; following Altenberg’s movements from one sanatorium or hotel to another, charting his changing moods in private correspondence and his varying reflections on psychiatric care and cure in both published and unpublished (during his own lifetime) writing, whilst simultaneously considering these in terms of the shifting construction of his identity as the mad writer. In keeping with Altenberg’s active participation in the distinctive Selbstdarstellung culture of Vienna circa 1900,5 this particular identity was one of many that he developed and experimented with. His religious identity as a Jewish-born man living in a profoundly anti-Semitic time and place, his sexual identity as an adult committed to the protection of children and attracted to prepubescent girls, and his Lebensreform identity as a diet and exercise fanatic who was also an alcoholic and prescription-drug addict6 are just some examples of the tensions that defined his complex negotiation of these multifarious identities in the public sphere. For the purposes of this collection, however, I will focus only on the early formation and later repositioning of his identity as the mad writer; tying this latter process firmly to Altenberg’s experience of the architectural, social and therapeutic environment of Steinhof. Caricature – one of Altenberg’s preferred modes of portraiture – played an important role in this process of identity construction. Though painted by such artists as Oskar Kokoschka and ordinarily obsessed with his own image, Altenberg was ambivalent about the production of his portrait in oil. His attitude contrasts in interesting ways with his enthusiasm for the portrait-caricature,7 and can be related – I will go on to suggest – to issues concerning the authoring of madness in the competitive cultural world of Vienna circa 1900. In considering the Baudelarian concept of caricature as a medium not just of modernity but also of madness, I will also explore how – unlike portrait-paintings – portrait-caricatures were ideally suited to the production, dissemination and consumption of Altenberg’s image as the author of madness in the city; a role he did not like to share. I will conclude by proposing that Altenberg’s control of portrait-caricatures shows not only his investment in this medium, but also his awareness of the empowering possibilities of presenting himself as ‘the old fool’ to an audience he was determined would always remain outside Steinhof.

A Day in the Life of the Mad Writer In 1883, at just twenty-three years old, Altenberg was diagnosed as neurasthenic.8 The term ‘neurasthenia’, identified by the American neurologist George Beard

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in 1869, was used to describe a state of nervous exhaustion in which individuals could no longer summon the strength to deal with the stress and speed of modern, metropolitan life. According to Beard, regarded as one of the ‘true intellectual fathers of the private nervous clinic in Europe’,9 this state led to the development of a bewildering array of complaints including anxiety, depression, indigestion, neuralgia and excessive or erratic sexual activity.10 The daily battle with practically all of these complaints was to become one of the central subjects of Altenberg’s own writing.11 Across an impressive range of periodicals and twelve single-authored books, he produced and disseminated across a wide, Germanspeaking audience a distinctive public identity for himself as a writer irresistibly drawn to the cultures and commodities of modernity that psychiatrists considered so harmful. This was reinforced in his private correspondence to friends and family, ranging from long letters on hotel stationery to single-sentence postcards, in which Altenberg’s illness obliterates almost all other topics of conversation. As far as the terrain of mental health in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was concerned, the territory occupied by the curable neurotic patient was separate from that of the incurable psychotic patient; the ‘mad’. The presence of both privately-funded sanatoriums for the nervously ill and statefinanced asylums for the mentally ill served to maintain a classed border between these two territories that was, nevertheless, traversed by subjects – materially and metaphorically – time and time again. Altenberg was no exception. Despite being diagnosed with neurasthenia, and despite not entering sanatoriums until the end of 1909 – some twenty-six years after this diagnosis, and some thirteen years into his writing career – Altenberg used his experience of nervous complaints to formulate an identity as the mad writer, metaphorically journeying from one territory to the other in both his writing and his use of caricature. In 1904 he published two sketches in Der liebe Augustin, a periodical distributed in Berlin, Leipzig and Vienna.12 The sketches were entitled ‘A Day in the Life of Peter Altenberg: some pieces of information about my life which ought not to interest many people’, and in them Altenberg described with typically minute precision the routines and rituals that structured his everyday existence. In the first, he details the spitting out of ‘totally indigestible’ bean and pea pods, the drinking of Moët et Chandon and Crémant rosé on his own or in company, the writing in bed on an ‘absorbent undersheet from Emil M. Engel’, and the swinging of wooden clubs weighing 1.5 kilos each ‘to maintain full elasticity’. In the second, he relays the benefits of Pasta Dr Suin de Boutemard for the cleaning of the teeth and Tamar Indien Grillon for the clearing of the bowel. Sleeping, he declares, is more important than eating or drinking – unless of course you have slept sufficiently, in which case eating and drinking take priority. The two sketches stage Altenberg’s lifelong, obsessive-compulsive approach to health and hygiene; an approach that, as his friend Bruce wryly pointed out, was hardly conducive to maintaining a mental equilibrium. His recommenda-

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tions in Der liebe Augustin reappeared the following year in his book Pròdroˇmoˇs, along with others such as drinking tea (‘an internal, stimulating nerve bath’13), practising callisthenics to the piano, wearing no underwear (‘prohibitor of the wonderful bond of “human skin” and “atmospheric air!”’14) and sleeping naked with the window wide open whatever the weather. The book was, as Barker has argued, quintessentially ‘Altenberg’ in that: ‘Through the title alone – Greek for forerunner, signpost or antechamber – Altenberg claims guru status, but unlike most gurus he remembers the yawning gulf between intention and realisation’.15 The idiosyncrasy of Altenberg’s rules for good mental health was central to the production and consumption of his identity as the mad writer. Texts such as these were even funny, because Altenberg’s audience knew that such a rule book was either impossible to follow or bound to be broken. The sketches in Der liebe Augustin were accompanied by two portrait-caricatures of Altenberg completed by a family friend, the Munich-based artist Gustav Jagerspacher.16 In the first (Figure 7.1), the writer sits at a table with a bottle of alcohol and a full glass in the pose of the morose drunk, head on hands and shoulders slumped in thought. The deep ‘v’ in his forehead points down towards his nose to suggest depressed self-absorption. In the second (Figure 7.2), he clutches his head in terror, eyes wide and lips parted to reveal clenched teeth. The deep ‘v’ in his forehead has reversed to point alarmingly up in fright. His pince-nez has fallen to the table top. The glass has broken at the stem. Alcohol runs into a pool. The bottle has shattered, transformed rather ominously from vessel to weapon. What has happened in the apparent time lapse between these two caricatures, printed on consecutive pages? The clue lies not in the content of the two sketches, but in the titles contained within the frame of each image – titles that Altenberg would have decided on: ‘Midnight: The Midday Meal’ and ‘6 : The Attack of Madness’. They describe the topsy-turvy nature of a day in the life of the mad writer – consuming a liquid lunch in the middle of the night, drinking through to the early hours of the morning until hunger, fatigue and alcohol bring on an attack of madness. The relationship of image to printed text on these two pages is a complex one. The caricatures do not directly relate to the content of the sketches; there is no attack of madness at a café table in Altenberg’s musings on his hatred of flower beds, wigs, manicured hands and make-up. Rather, the two sequential images of the depressed, distressed Altenberg support an interpretation of his fractured lists of do’s and don’ts, likes and dislikes as the confused outpourings of the mad writer. Altenberg switches from reflections on the planting of exotic flowers into lawns to the horror of having readable handwriting, from his desire for a room stuffed with Japanese objects to his wonder at the gift of an ‘astonishingly elastic’ bath sponge. He is aware of the fact that there is an open relationship between text and image on these two pages, a space for a reader familiar with his identity as the mad writer to insert their own interpretation of the relationship between

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Figure 7.1. Gustav Jagerspacher, caricature of Peter Altenberg (Midnight: The Midday Meal). Published in Der liebe Augustin, no. 13 (1904), 190.

visual and written content.17 He even suggests at the close of the second sketch that this interpretive space for his readers to diagnose his madness for themselves is what they really want of him: ‘These bits of information make no claim to completeness. But I also do not believe that anyone wanted that’. A further interesting feature is the inclusion of handwritten text within the image field. Altenberg wrote his name in pen in his highly distinctive hand across

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Figure 7.2. Gustav Jagerspacher, caricature of Peter Altenberg (6 : The Attack of Madness). Published in Der liebe Augustin, no. 13 (1904), 191.

the top of the first image before it went to print. Such an intervention was typical of the writer’s practice with visual material.18 Yet Altenberg did not need to use his name to identify himself to his public; by 1904, the bald head, pince-nez and walrus moustache were so recognisably ‘Altenberg’ that viewers could not have

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been in any doubt on the subject of the portrait-caricature. Rather, I would argue that the function of Altenberg’s large, sprawling signature was to enable him to claim authorship of the image (over the artist, Jagerspacher), and by extension, authorship of the madness it represented. Maintaining control of this authorship seems to have become more important as Altenberg became more unwell, embarking from late 1909 onwards on various trips in and out of sanatoriums; a period he experienced as being ‘in exile’.

‘In Exile’: Altenberg in Sanatorium Steinhof Altenberg’s early construction of his identity as the mad writer in Der liebe Augustin was reinforced in subsequent publications such as the 1911 expanded third edition of Märchen des Lebens (Fairy Tales from Life, first published in 1908). Two new cycles of sketches appeared at the end of this new edition entitled ‘Krankheit’ (Sickness) and ‘Sanatorium I’, inspired by Altenberg’s experiences from the winter of 1909 onwards as a patient in sanatoriums of increasing levels of strictness in and around Vienna: the Sulz hydrotherapy clinic near Mödling in the Wienerwald; the Fango, which offered Moorbad (mud bath) treatments; and the Inzersdorf (referred to in the title of the second cycle). As far as the Viennese press was concerned, Altenberg’s journeying from one sanatorium to the other was a traversing of the terrain of mental health itself, from neurasthenia to psychosis. Checking into the Sulz or Fango for the easing of nervous complaints was commonplace and even fashionable enough to go unnoticed in the press; patient admission was voluntary. Inzersdorf – a sanatorium that had the authority to detain its fee-paying patients whilst they underwent treatment for mental illness – was a different story. Altenberg’s committal on 10 May 1910 into this sanatorium/asylum hybrid made the daily news section of the Neues Wiener Journal as an exclusive with the headline ‘Peter Altenberg – in the asylum’. The journalist reports that though receiving treatment for an over-stretching of the nerves down to a debilitating lifestyle, Fango doctors had diagnosed Altenberg as having a more serious, incurable condition that required his immediate transfer to Inzersdorf: ‘Peter Altenberg is suffering from persecution mania. That must be the most derisive irony that unfriendly fate could invent. What was there to fear for his most classic bohemian nature?’19 Interestingly, the journalist positions Altenberg at a café table in a scene wholly reminiscent of the 1904 portrait-caricatures in Der liebe Augustin: ‘In the early hours with an absinthe in a deserted café, alone; who could know what was hiding behind the mask of apparently imperturbable insouciance, fanatical austerity and contentment?’20 The 6  ‘Attack of Madness’ depicted by Jagerspacher and signed by Altenberg had shifted from a witty and somewhat dubious authorial persona to an altogether more serious, lived experience of madness;

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how ironic, the journalist suggests, that the ‘mad’ writer had in fact been mad all along! With the exception of a break from August to December 1910, Altenberg was to stay in Inzersdorf until the late summer of 1911. Once discharged in September, he travelled to Semmering for a recuperative stay in the chic spa town made accessible to the city with the construction of the Semmering railway line in 1854. He stayed in a small, modest room of the Hotel Panhans, one of the leading hotels of the Austrian Alps,21 until his relationship with Klara Panhans, the eleven-year-old daughter of the hotel owner, ended abruptly in October 1912, triggering a period of severe mental decline. In a letter from his bedroom on Hotel Panhans stationery to his friend Lotte Franzos who had just arrived in Semmering, he wrote: ‘I am very, very ill. I am suffering more than is bearable in the long run. If it will somehow be possible for me to get up during the afternoon so that I am able to greet you, I shall do so!’22 In November 1912, still from the Hotel Panhans, he contacted his brother, Georg Engländer: ‘Day and night hellish pain, in the body and in the shattered soul, martyred to death … Every hour is a hell of eternities. I am consumed by fire!!! Too cowardly to commit suicide!!! Oh how appalling!!! Help me, the most unhappy of men! I can no longer sleep, nor stand, nor lie, nor sit!’23 Engländer’s response was to send Altenberg to Steinhof. Altenberg’s alarm at what he considered to be an over-reaction is registered in the three telegrams of protest he fired off to his brother in quick succession on 4 December.24 But by 13 December (three days after his arrival at Steinhof ), he was back at work, writing to his publisher Samuel Fischer, requesting portrait-photographs in profile to accompany what he hoped would be a new, expanded edition of his latest book Semmering 1912.25 Control of the authorship of his work and also – I would argue – his madness is central to this correspondence. He urges Fischer to send corrections ‘to me!’, reiterating his address and his desire to see the new edition ‘corrected and revised by me!’, reminding Fischer, ‘Many things about the author belong to him and his production’. He closes his letter with an attack on his brother: ‘Unfortunately I am feeling very, very poorly, an ill-considered act by my brother brought me here from my paradise “Semmering”!’26 Altenberg constructs the narrative of his journey from Semmering to Steinhof as an expulsion from a Garden of Eden, a move from a utopian to a dystopian world. Such a response reveals the tensions that existed between the public face of the sanatorium and the private experiences of those visiting or residing there. The Lower Austrian Provincial Institution for the Care and Cure of the Mentally Ill and for Nervous Disorders ‘am Steinhof ’ opened in 1907. It was the largest institution of its kind in Europe, with facilities to house five hundred staff to care for 2,500 patients with conditions ranging from nervous complaints to criminal psychosis. As Leslie Topp has explored, the complex of sixty buildings in extensive, landscaped grounds in an elevated, rural position overlooking Vienna

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was laid out by the city’s leading modern architect Otto Wagner and was associated with the very latest in utopian planning.27 Steinhof ’s approach to psychiatric care and cure, from the placing of patients in heated, ventilated, plant-filled pavilions maintained at the highest possible hygienic level, to the provision of a Kurhaus (spa) with up-to-the-minute facilities, was also marketed as stridently forward thinking. Unusually, Steinhof encompassed both an asylum and a sanatorium; a collection of ten pavilions on the west side of the complex, screened off from the asylum with a newly planted meadow. Altenberg was taken to the sanatorium and assigned as a first-class patient to the Villa Austria,28 an open pavilion on the furthest reach of the complex with uninterrupted views across the Vienna Woods, a cultivated garden that sloped down to the perimeter wall encircling the entire complex, and private apartments for patients furnished with ‘exquisite taste and considerable comfort’.29 Watercolours of the pavilion interiors produced by Erwin Pendl to advertise the sanatorium show elegant interiors with mahogany furniture, elaborate staircases, pianos, potted palm trees, writing desks and gleaming parquet floors strewn with rugs.30 Villa Austria patients had freedom of the grounds and an array of leisure and entertainment opportunities at their disposal, from dance and variety theatre performances, to an indoor swimming pool, tennis courts and, in the winter months of Altenberg’s arrival, an ice rink and toboggan run. Despite, therefore, the shared architectural language of the pavilions in both the state-financed and fee-paying areas of the complex, the public face of Sanatorium Steinhof appealed to the image of the grand hotel situated in a resort that could cater to the needs of the discerning tourist; a hotel very like the Semmering Panhans Altenberg had just left.31 Visitors and patients, however, experienced Steinhof in rather more ambivalent terms; terms that both nuance and resist the utopian tone adopted in the institution’s publicity material. In an article entitled ‘The Island of the Unfortunate’, Joseph Roth describes his visit to ‘the garden town of the crazy, refuge for those who have been wrecked by the madness of the world, home from home for fools and prophets’.32 He makes no distinction between the state-financed and fee-paying areas; some pavilions have gardens, others none, yet all buildings are identical with firmly locked doors. He describes the pristine white gravel walkways, the golden sprays of laburnum, the raining down of lark song from cloudless skies, but this utopianism is kept in check with his noting of the delusional patient struggling with a phantom pram and the ominous presence of the highsecurity pavilion for the dangerously insane. Steinhof, he considers, has both ‘a smiling countenance’, and ‘solid iron bars through which, from time to time, a twisted, grimacing human face looks out’.33 Letters from a sanatorium patient, Ludwig Ritter von Janikowski, sent to his friend and benefactor Karl Kraus throughout 1909 and 1910, two years before Altenberg’s arrival, offer further, unsettled views of Steinhof. He pleads with Kraus to persuade his guardian to have him released: ‘I am going to rack and ruin

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here … I need my freedom. I implore and beg you to help me’.34 Yet in another letter he rejoices in the views across the trees capped with snow, the polite tone of the staff, the gentle forms of treatment, and the sense of peace that has crept into his ‘wild, sick, ravaged soul’.35 He describes the facilities as rivalling those at Vienna’s leading hotels, the Sacher or the Bristol, and agonises over the women he comes across when walking through the grounds with his care assistant, whom he characterises as both a guardian angel and a prison warder: ‘The greatest beauties are among the serving girls or the working women who are not sick but have been taken into care. One is terribly aroused by such constant meetings … especially as one walks so much in the fresh air and has done absolutely nothing for nine weeks … This abstinence, this enforced chastity is my greatest torment’.36 There was a social hierarchy at Steinhof, from the first- and second-class sanatorium patients paying daily rates of 20 and 10 Kronen respectively, to those placed by the state in the care home area of the complex. This hierarchy was enforced spatially through the organisation of the sanatorium and asylum into different zones, yet Janikowski’s descriptions of the ‘constant meetings’ of patients between these zones in their daily perambulations indicate that the grounds of Steinhof were more interstitial than the institution plan suggests. This certainly chimes with Altenberg’s own experience of Steinhof. In an undated sketch entitled ‘Der Rendezvous’ (The Rendezvous), discovered by Andrew Barker, Altenberg describes both the beauty of the Steinhof grounds – the blossom, the scent of primroses, the large cool garden, the bare white legs of a child climbing a silver birch – and his feelings of imprisonment and frustrated sexual desire; feelings that nevertheless diminish as he encounters the fifteen-year-old girl he had arranged to meet the previous evening: ‘He no longer saw the long brown wall winding its way around. He believed he was on the outside, free amongst meadows, hills, woods, in a gentle, kind and peaceful world’.37 Altenberg’s sketch is characterised by a metaphorical criss-crossing of this material wall; a back and forth, to and fro movement between outside and inside, freedom and confinement, fulfilment and desire. The sophistication of the sketch lies in the tension he generates between these binary oppositions, which constantly threaten to collapse; for sexual fulfilment, rural bliss and beauty are to be found both outside and inside the sanatorium; as the young girl exclaims about their thwarted attempts to cross paths the previous evening: ‘And anyway, could it possibly have been any more beautiful?!?’38 Moments such as these articulated by Roth, Janikowski and Altenberg – whether real or imagined – offer important insights into the tensions and ambiguities of Steinhof ’s open/closed, sanatorium/asylum environment. The sanatorium promoted an image of patients as guests, of self-admission over certification, of movement over confinement, and of voluntary as opposed to forced submission to the therapeutic regime; yet the reality of patient life was somewhat different. Annual reports enable us to reconstruct the compulsory range of treatments Al-

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tenberg would have experienced including hydro-, mechano- and electro-therapies, and the hierarchical sanatorium management he would have been subject to, from the daily morning visits of the consultants preparing both oral and written patient reports for the director, to the subordinate doctors on daily hygiene inspection rounds, also responsible for the issuing of patient visiting cards and the testing of sanatorium food at each fixed meal time.39 We also know from a 1924 article in Der Tag, which seems to have been written by a Steinhof member of staff, that Altenberg was assigned his own care assistant, Josef Hennebichler, who was responsible for monitoring his every move and who knew ‘how to go much further than required by professional reserves of patience to checkmate, as was necessary, the torments and hostilities of his patient and to exert a healthy influence on him’.40 This environment, with its emphasis on the exertion of power upon the patient – an emphasis that we might productively think of in the Foucauldian sense of the patient as the object of observation and experimentation to ultimately be mastered – was highly problematic for Altenberg.41 Four months into his stay, on 3 and 4 April 1913, he inscribed two photographs of himself taken during his ‘pre-Fall’ time on the Semmering mountain with his name and the words ‘In Exile!’42 Altenberg might have grumbled to Kraus (a patron not just of Janikowski’s but also of Altenberg’s), that ‘motor cars are available and should have come [bringing him visitors] at least once a week’.43 But he was not necessarily in exile from his family and friends; his letter to Kraus was prompted by the visit the editor of Die Fackel had just paid him, and his friend Ernst von Lieben had a permanent visitor’s pass that enabled him to visit Altenberg daily between 2  and 4 .44 Moreover, correspondence such as the ‘Merry Christmas’ greetings from Loos and Bruce that opened this essay shows he was in receipt of letters from his circle. Altenberg was not in exile from his work, either. On arriving at the sanatorium he immediately embarked upon the editing of new material for Semmering 1912, and may even have produced new sketches such as ‘Der Rendezvous’.45 And he was not in exile from the company of prepubescent girls. In a later sketch written about his release from Steinhof, which seems to tip into sexual fantasy, he relays his excitement at how, on leaving, the eleven-year-old daughter of the sanatorium doctor pleaded with him to return alone and stay until – Altenberg implies – he had tired of her.46 I would argue, then, that Steinhof placed Altenberg in exile from his identity as the mad writer. This authorial persona, constructed years before this period on the foundations of rather mild nervous complaints, might have been legitimised by his stay in Steinhof, but ultimately its force and its meaning depended on his being outside the framework of the psychiatric institution. Steinhof, it seems, eclipsed Altenberg’s sense of himself as the mad writer who ultimately belonged to the world of modernity; a world he perceived as being outside the walls of the sanatorium. April visits from his doctor, Schnitzler – who had maintained a

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thirty-year distrust of the ‘absolute genuineness of PA’s madness’47 – confirmed that though relieved of the alcohol-induced insanity he’d been suffering from on arrival, this would no doubt return ‘in a week, in a month or in six months’.48 Internment, Schnitzler concluded, was pointless as the source of Altenberg’s agitation was in being confined. Altenberg’s desire was freedom to be ‘mad’; the removal of this liberty – as signalled in the submission to the Steinhof environment – was the destruction of his identity. In a letter to his brother sent just days before he was released, he wrote: ‘Every delay in giving me unconditional freedom is malicious murder. Nobody is in a position to control what I do as regards sleeping pills or any other sort of behaviour. I desire and must be totally free … You brought me to this position and you want to exploit it to destroy me utterly. I demand my immediate and total freedom from you brother-murderer’.49 Georg Engländer relented on Schnitzler’s advice, on the condition that Altenberg travel back to Semmering to stay in the resort Kurhaus rather than the Hotel Panhans.50 Altenberg journeyed instead on the Semmering railway to the Venice Lido with Loos and Bruce, to dance, swim and sunbathe the memory of Steinhof away. On 3 May 1913, en route to Venice, he sent a postcard to his brother from his suite with balcony and sea-view in the Excelsior Palace Hôtel, Trieste: ‘Health brilliant. Steamers marvellous. See everything for first time’.51

Caricature and Control / Joker takes Power52 In this same year of freedom of 1913, Altenberg returned to the two portraitcaricatures by Jagerspacher published in Der liebe Augustin in 1904. He owned the original drawings, free of the typed titles. In an interesting overlaying of a new experience on an old pair of images, he inscribed the first in French with the words ‘In despair over Esthère Vignon’ and the second in German with the words ‘A maniacal rage over Esthère Vignon, 1913’53 – Klara Panhans of the Semmering episode had been replaced by another. We could interpret Altenberg’s inscriptions as a self-defeated acknowledgment that once again a fixation with a young girl had precipitated a psychological crisis; same problem, different object. Alternatively, and I think more persuasively, we could consider his re-engagement with these early images of himself as the mad writer as a gesture of defiance, an insistence on picking up from where he’d left off before being confined, a reminder – significantly dated to the year of his release – that the only person to author his madness would be him. Interestingly, in a photograph of his rooms at the Hotel Graben – his new residence in Vienna’s First District – of 1914, the two images with these new inscriptions can be seen in frames displayed above his writing desk (Figure 7.3). Such a reactivating of the caricatures post-Steinhof shows not only Altenberg’s continuing investment in this particular mode of portraiture, but also his use of it at a critical moment in his life to regain control of the authorship of madness.

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Figure 7.3. Interior of Peter Altenberg’s room in Hotel Graben, 1914. Wien Museum.

Altenberg’s fascination with portrait-caricature is seen in the extent to which he commissioned, collected, framed and displayed such images of himself and (less frequently) his circle from his early writing days onwards. The Wien Museum acquired a significant part of this collection of portrait-caricatures, including the two images by Jagerspacher, in 1950, though it is rarely seen and is thus difficult to appreciate in terms of its size and its centrality to the construction of Altenberg’s identity. Altenberg did not produce caricatures himself, preferring to work with artists and illustrators, including the Cabaret Nachtlicht and Fledermaus performer Karl Hollitzer,54 and Bertold Löffler.55 Jagerspacher, however, was his caricaturist of choice, producing a significant number of portraits that Altenberg often inscribed with variations – sometimes in English, sometimes in German – of what was clearly a much-loved phrase: ‘Are we not all only caricatures from the truly and ideal wishes, which God and Nature made with our souls and our bodies?!?’56 Altenberg’s predilection for covering these images with such inscriptions, which were always accompanied by his name and the date, along with his careful arrangement of caricatures in changing displays on his hotel-room walls shows his insistence on both signing and curating them as his own work. Such interventions were not possible with portrait paintings, such as that commissioned of Altenberg by Loos from Kokoschka in 1909. When this work was displayed alongside twenty-two others by Kokoschka in a group exhibition at the Hagenbund in Vienna in February 1911, Altenberg was in Inzersdorf. Unable to

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visit the show himself, he could nevertheless follow its sensationalised reception in the Viennese press; according to the majority of the city’s critics, Kokoschka’s portraits signified the collective ‘madness’ of the artist and his sitters.57 This reception, coinciding with Altenberg’s confinement, was significant enough for him to publish a cryptic review of the Hagenbund show – despite not seeing it in person and some ten months after it had opened – for Simplicissimus. In his review, titled ‘Authentic’, Altenberg celebrates the creative genius of Vincent van Gogh (not Kokoschka, who is not even named) – whose madness is nothing more than a ‘chance additional extra, like a pimple or a bad cold’58 – and despairs of those who take this to mean that madmen are, by virtue of their condition, also geniuses. This mistaken association of madness with creative genius, he argues, is what Kokoschka had capitalised on, and disingenuously so, for Kokoschka’s madness, along with most of his sitters (only Janikowski and Altenberg were being treated at this time for mental illness), was not authentic. It is perhaps for this reason that Altenberg – only recently discharged from Inzersdorf – does not even mention the production or display of his own portrait in his review. Leo Lensing has explored Altenberg’s unusual silence on this matter in a fascinating essay on a previously unknown text by Kokoschka entitled ‘The Viennese and the Artist’, written in 1934, which revisits the moment of their portrait sitting in 1909. Lensing proposes that Altenberg’s suppression of the presence of his own portrait in his review of the Hagenbund show was down to Kokoschka’s intuitive representation of his deteriorating mental health; a difficult sight, considering the timing, which the writer preferred to avoid.59 It’s a powerful argument, but I would like to extend it slightly further to reflect upon what we might think of as the competitive economy of madness in Vienna circa 1900. Despite Altenberg’s celebrity status in the city (evident in the Neues Wiener Journal article on his committal to Inzersdorf ), his portrait was barely mentioned in the reviews of the exhibition; rather, the press focused on Kokoschka and his representation of the shared madness of the city’s modernist community. Altenberg’s identity as the mad writer was thus subsumed into a broader group identity, constructed and controlled by Kokoschka. Moreover, by depicting people with no histories of even mild nervous complaints as – according to the critics – mad, Kokoschka revealed the possibility of madness as representation and madness as profession. This exposure of what we might think of as Altenberg’s own practice and position was perhaps the challenging aspect of the portrait; after all, authenticity (keeping in mind the title of Altenberg’s review) was crucial for an individual whose own doctor suspected him of being ‘a professional neurotic’.60 Could we therefore interpret Altenberg’s resistance to the Hagenbund show as his uneasy recognition of Kokoschka as another ‘author’ of madness, ‘writing’ for the same audience in a comparable ‘language’? This would explain Altenberg’s significant mention of his own, similarly ‘scandalous’ first published book Wie ich es sehe (As I See It, 1896) in the review, which precedes his telling and begrudg-

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ing admission: ‘It is perhaps preferable that the “van Goghs” of each profession stick together’.61 Kokoschka’s rival status was not apparent when Altenberg first sat for his portrait in 1909, but the media spotlight on his work in February 1911 revealed a competitor. Lensing has uncovered a further piece of evidence relevant here; a manuscript located and dated as ‘Inzersdorf 1910’ by Kraus, in which Altenberg fantasises about giving two lectures for the city’s artists and writers, to be announced in a periodical edited by himself, the first of which has the title ‘On Madness and the Danger of a Clique: KK, AL, OK!’62 Altenberg, writing ‘authentically’ yet also remotely from the Inzersdorf sanatorium, clearly felt ousted from the Karl Kraus/Adolf Loos/Oskar Kokoschka circle, and – as the Hagenbund reception unfolded – perhaps even outed. Unable to manage the circulation and reception of his portrait, Altenberg could only respond by making a belated intervention, outing Kokoschka in return as the inauthentic one in his review. These manoeuvres and delays show the difficulties Altenberg faced in retaining control of the dissemination and consumption of his portrait in oil. Portrait-caricature – as we have seen with the titling, inscribing, editing, framing and curating of the Jagerspacher images – was a far easier genre with which to assert and maintain his authorial rights. Altenberg’s interest in caricature can also be explained through its association with the cultures, commodities and conditions of modernity as described and exemplified by the poète maudit Charles Baudelaire, an important writer for Altenberg. Baudelaire’s defence of what he identified as the genre of caricature has led to its reception in recent years as a medium of late nineteenth-century modernity.63 Certainly, the concept of the caricature as a speedily sketched image on a scrap of paper, produced in the midst of a dynamic environment, which is detachedly critical of its subjects and associated with such urban spaces as the café,64 chimes with Baudelaire’s famed description of modernity in his essay The Painter of Modern Life of 1863. Baudelaire introduces his ideal painter of modern life, the illustrator Constantin Guys, by way of Edgar Allan Poe’s description in his short story The Man of the Crowd of 1840 of the convalescent, absorbed in gazing at the bustling street from his table by a window in a café before hurtling headlong into it. For Baudelaire, it is the convalescent, ‘lately returned from the valley of the shadow of death’, who is able to ‘set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement, in the midst of the fugitive and infinite’.65 Guys is, for Baudelaire, the supreme example of this convalescent/ man-of-the-crowd; able to rapidly and vividly capture the multiplicity of modern life. Convalescence, caricature and the café table thus mutually reinforce each other in Baudelaire’s essay on the experience and representation of modernity, in ways which were to become defining for such later café habitués as Altenberg. A convalescent himself, located in the Innere Stadt heart of Vienna and concerned with developing an impressionistic literary form to convey the ‘fugitive’ and ‘infinite’ spaces of modernity, Altenberg could be seen as the Viennese embodiment

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of Baudelaire’s Guys. But Baudelaire is important for another reason, namely, for his discussion of how caricature could also function as the medium of madness. In an earlier essay of 1855 entitled ‘On the Essence of Laughter’, Baudelaire claims that his interest in caricature lies in its ability to represent the physical and moral ugliness of man in such a way that the viewer erupts into laughter. Such laughter is the effect of the relief the viewer feels in having their physical and moral superiority confirmed; they are not as unfortunate as the subject of the caricature. The laugh, Baudelaire writes, is a ‘nervous convulsion … prompted by the sight of someone else’s misfortune’,66 but it is also a point of departure, a passage into another state of being, for as Baudelaire argues: ‘What pride and delusion! For it is a notorious fact that all madmen in asylums have an excessively overdeveloped idea of their own superiority: I hardly know of any who suffer from the madness of humility. Note, too, that laughter is one of the most frequent and numerous expressions of madness’.67 Caricature thus takes the viewer on their own journey into madness. Considering this Baudelarian hypothesis alongside the portrait-caricatures in Der liebe Augustin; in looking at the two sequential images of the depressed, distressed Altenberg, the viewer experiences feelings of superiority and relief; they are not as mad as the mad writer; they are not heading straight to Steinhof. We might think of this process in terms of the portrait-caricature establishing a border between sanity and insanity, a border that reassures the viewer. Yet the transgressive power of the portrait-caricature that Baudelaire highlights and that – I would argue – Altenberg activates is its ability to produce in the viewer a burst of laughter that momentarily opens this border up; for the briefest of moments, for the duration of their laugh, Altenberg takes the viewer into the territory of madness. Ultimately, a process such as this is an empowering one. Altenberg knowingly presents himself as the embodiment of – to use Baudelaire’s terms – physical and moral ugliness, the object of laughter. Yet in producing this state of laughter in the viewer, Altenberg is also exerting a power of his own as the joker,68 and as the agent of madness. Crucially, and in contrast to the reception of Kokoschka’s portraits at the Hagenbund, this process is one that keeps Altenberg at its absolute centre; it is a process that he ultimately controls. Yet this power in producing – albeit temporarily – madness in the viewer, and in owning the joke throughout, could only be exercised pre-Steinhof. PostSteinhof, Altenberg’s identity as the mad writer, and agency in the production, dissemination and consumption of his portrait-caricatures, was, ironically, in jeopardy. The coinciding of his authorial persona with the diagnosis of mental illness meant the joke was no longer a laughing matter. Altenberg’s re-engagement with these portrait-caricatures in the year of his release is interesting in this critical context. Re-inscribed, framed and displayed on a wall space above his writing desk to be seen by the occasional visitor, the images are still clearly important to

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the writer, but they are no longer engaged with the wide readership of Der liebe Augustin. The joke, it seems, is no longer at work, by implication it is no longer meaningful and, as if to signal this, Altenberg displays the portrait-caricatures in reversed order (Figure 7.3).

Conclusion Altenberg was to maintain his horror at having to return to Steinhof until the very end of his life in 1919. In 1918, seven years almost to the very day that he was institutionalised, he wrote to his friend Lotte Franzos re-stating his protest against the institution: ‘A sanatorium is nothing but murder, no, it is treacherous assassination as these criminal idiots have not the faintest hint of my pathological, egocentric organism and force such a person as me into their comfortable, charmless routines’.69 Altenberg’s insistence on his right to experience his madness has led to his appreciation by Theodor Adorno as ‘an example of individualism carried to the extreme, a last hiding place where a private life could escape from the control of totalitarian authorities and allegiances, anticipating a freer conception of mankind’.70 Such an embrace of Altenberg as an early precursor of the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s, driven to a large part by the publication of Foucault’s History of Madness in 1961, is interesting, particularly as this movement was in its infancy during this time of major psychiatric reform in Austria-Hungary, and was a concern of Altenberg’s close friend, Kraus.71 It does not, however, allow for the historically specific and revealingly complex perspective Altenberg gives us on madness in Vienna circa 1900 as: a lived reality and an authorial persona; a debilitating personal illness and a regenerative creative resource; a place of exile and a means of cultural belonging; an ‘authentic’ experience and an ‘inauthentic’ representation; a condition to be remedied and a commodity to be protected; an assertion of power on the mad subject and an assertion of power by the mad subject. Altenberg’s simultaneous engagement with these diametrically opposed notions of madness shows not only the multiple positions just one subject could take up on the map of mental illness at any one time, but also the varied and contested geography of this same terrain. Portrait-caricature was an important way of navigating such ground and staking a claim to such coordinate positions, although this is not the story we usually come across in discussions and displays of the visual arts in Vienna circa 1900. Altenberg’s extensive collection of portrait-caricatures rarely comes out of the lockers of his dedicated archive in the basement of the Wien Museum. If it did, I suspect that it would challenge both the dominance of painting in the narrative of identity production, dissemination and consumption in studies on turn-of-the-century Viennese modernism, and associated assumptions about madness, authorship and agency in this time and place.

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Notes 1. Wien Bibliothek im Rathaus, Handschriftensammlung, I.N. 138857. 2. The first of three monthly bills itemising Altenberg’s stay at the Niederösterreichische Landes-Heil- und Pflegeanstalten für Geistes- und Nervenkranke ‘Am Steinhof ’ states 10 December as the date of his arrival. Wien Bibliothek im Rathaus, Teilnachlass Peter Altenberg, 7.21. 3. I have not been able to locate the original letter, reported in H. Malmberg, Widerhall des Herzens: Ein Peter Altenberg-Buch (Munich, 1961), 263. 4. A. Barker, ‘Madness and Confinement’ in Telegrams from the Soul: Peter Altenberg and the Culture of Fin-de-siècle Vienna, ed. A. Barker (Columbia, SC, 1996), 140–65. For an abridged account see Heinz Lunzer ‘Irrenanstalt Am Steinhof ’, in Peter Altenberg: Extracte des Lebens: Einem Schriftsteller auf der Spur, ed. H. Lunzer and V. Lunzer-Talos (Salzburg, Vienna, Frankfurt, 2003), 182. 5. For a further discussion of Selbstdarstellung – the theatrical parade of the ‘private’ self in public spaces – see T. Gronberg, Vienna: City of Modernity (Bern, 2007), 37–67. 6. Lebensreform translates literally as ‘life reform’. It refers to a social movement of the latenineteenth-century that advocated a back-to-nature lifestyle that included an abstention from alcohol and drugs. 7. This term is also used in E. Gombrich and E. Kris, ‘The Principles of Caricature’, British Journal of Medical Psychology 17 (1937–38): 319–42. 8. Altenberg was diagnosed by Ludwig Schlager (1828–1885), Professor of Psychiatry, ‘in charge of the department of observation of mental conditions with uncertain diagnosis’ at the General Hospital. M. Whitrow, ‘The Early History of the Vienna Psychiatric Clinic’, History of Psychiatry 1 (1990): 419. 9. E. Shorter, ‘Women and Jews in a Private Nervous Clinic in Late-Nineteenth-Century Vienna’, Medical History 33 (1989): 158. 10. G. Beard, ‘Neurasthenia, or Nervous Exhaustion’, Boston Medical and Surgical Journal (1869): 217–21. 11. Altenberg’s first published work was an article: ‘Lokale Chronik’, Liebelei: Eine Wiener Zeitschrift Jg. 1, Heft 3 (21 January 1896): 49. This was swiftly followed by the publication of his first book Wie ich es sehe (Berlin, 1896). 12. Altenberg, ‘Ein Tag aus dem Leben Peter Altenbergs’, Der liebe Augustin 1, no. 13 (1904): 190–91. 13. Altenberg, ‘I Drink Tea’, Pròdroˇmoˇs (1905), in The Vienna Coffeehouse Wits 1890–1938, trans. Harold. B. Segal (West Lafayette, IN, 1993), 155. 14. Altenberg, ‘I Drink Tea’, 154. 15. Barker, Telegrams from the Soul, 109. 16. Jagerspacher was Austrian born and was the son of the photographer Carl Jagerspacher, who had a studio in Gmunden. Carl Jagerspacher produced carte-de-visite photographs of highprofile subjects such as Princess Marie of Saxe-Altenburg, who became queen of Hanover by marriage in 1851. Carl Jagerspacher took at least one portrait-photograph of Altenberg in 1903. For more information on Gustav Jagerspacher see Thieme-Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon der Bildenden Künstler, 18 (Leipzig, 1925), 340. 17. The production of this interpretive space is characteristic of Altenberg’s creative outputs as a whole; from the unexpected veering from one subject to another in his writing to the strange juxtaposition of images in his annotated photograph albums, readers/viewers are encouraged to make their own diagnoses. 18. For a discussion of Altenberg’s collecting and inscribing of photographs see L.A. Lensing, ‘Peter Altenberg’s Fabricated Photographs: Literature and Photography in Fin-de-Siècle

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19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39.

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Vienna’, in Vienna 1900: From Altenberg to Wittgenstein, ed. E. Timms and R. Robertson (Edinburgh, 1990), 47–72. ‘Peter Altenberg – im Irrenhause’, Neues Wiener Journal, 17 May 1910. Ibid. The fashionability of the spa cure in Semmering can be seen in the opening of the Semmeringer Kurhaus in 1909, which was marketed as a high-class hotel offering both comfort and discretion. Guests at this time included Josef Kainz, Alma Mahler, Max Reinhardt, Arthur Schnitzler and Franz Werfel. For another view of Altenberg’s time in Semmering see T. Gronberg, ‘Panoramas of Desire: The Visual Poetics of Peter Altenberg’, in Gronberg, City of Modernity, 159–89. Wien Bibliothek im Rathaus, Handschriftensammlung, I.N. 115.774. Wien Bibliothek im Rathaus, Handschriftensammlung, Teilnachlass Peter Altenberg, 1.7. Wiener Stadt- und Landesbibliothek, Handschriftensammlung. P.A. Abscrift 510–12. Altenberg, Semmering 1912, 1st ed. (Berlin, 1913), 217 pp; 2nd ed. (Berlin, 1913), 248 pp. Wien Bibliothek im Rathaus, Handschriftensammlung, Teilnachlass Peter Altenberg, 1.9. L. Topp, ‘Otto Wagner’s Steinhof Psychiatric Hospital: Architecture as Misunderstanding’, Art Bulletin 87 (2005): 130–56. For a shorter account of Steinhof see Topp, ‘Erwin Pendl (studio), Model of Lower Austrian Provincial Institution for the Care and Cure of the Mentally and Nervously Ill “Am Steinhof ”, c. 1907’, in Madness and Modernity: Mental Illness and the Visual Arts in Vienna 1900, eds. G. Blackshaw and L. Topp (London, 2009), 100–109. Wien Bibliothek im Rathaus, Teilnachlass Peter Altenberg, 7.21. E. Holub, ‘Niederösterreichische Landes-Heil- und Pflegeanstalten für Geistes-und Nervenkranke “am Steinhof ” in Wien XIII’, Die Irrenpflege in Österreich in Wort und Bild, ed. H. Schlöss (Halle, 1912). The original watercolours are held in the Wien Museum. They were reproduced in a poster advertising the sanatorium of 1907. The poster is held in the Otto-Wagner Spital und Pflegezentrum, Vienna. For more information on hotel-style sanatoriums see N. Imrie, ‘The Architecture and Culture of Sanatoria for Nervous Ailments in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, 1890–1914’ (PhD thesis, University of London, Birkbeck College, 2008), 68–121. ‘Die Insel der Unseligen’, in J. Roth, Werke I: Das journalistische Werk 1915–1923 (Köln, 1989), 23–24. Ibid. Letter dated 19 February 1909. Wien Bibliothek im Rathaus, Handschriftensammlung, I.N. 169.152. Letter dated 28 March (no year given). Wien Bibliothek im Rathaus, Handschriftensammlung, I.N. 169.159 Letter dated 23 February 1910. Wien Bibliothek im Rathaus, Handschriftensammlung, I.N. 174.641. Altenberg, ‘Der Rendezvous’, in Barker, Telegrams from the Soul, 238–39. This sketch is related to an earlier, unpublished manuscript written on 15 May 1911 entitled ‘Summer Evening in May’, in which Altenberg describes the courtyard garden of Inzersdorf and the sudden, revelatory appearance of the ‘child-woman’ Liotshka, accompanying his friend Ernst von Lieben. I am very grateful to Leo Lensing for sharing this manuscript from his private collection with me. Ibid. ‘Die Niederösterreichischen Landes-Irrenanstalten: Annual Report of the Asylums of Lower Austria’, 1 July 1907–30 June 1908.

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40. Custos, ‘Aus Peter Altenbergs düsteren Tagen’, Der Tag (21 September 1924). Reproduced in H.C. Kosler, ed., Peter Altenberg: Leben und Werk in Texten und Bilden (Munich, 1981). 41. M. Foucault, History of Madness, trans. J. Murphy and J. Khalfa (London, 2006). 42. Wien Museum, I.N. 94.780. This photograph was sent as a postcard to his brother on 3 April 1913. Altenberg writes: ‘To my dear brother Georg on his 51st birthday. If only, brother, you had left me on my Semmering! Oh, my little room in the “Panhans”’. Georg Engländer added the words: ‘14 days before his release from Steinhof, 1913’. This dates Altenberg’s departure as 17 April though this date conflicts with the correspondence between Arthur Schnitzler and Hermann Bahr, which shows Altenberg was still in Steinhof on 25 April. See D. Daviau, ed., The Letters of Schnitzler to Bahr, (Chapel Hill, NC, 1978), 112. The second image is reproduced in A. Barker and L. Lensing, eds., Peter Altenberg Semmering 1912. Ein altbekanntes Buch und ein neuentdecktes Photoalbum (Vienna, 2002). 43. Letter dated 25 March 1913. Wien Bibliothek im Rathaus, Handschriftensammlung, I.N. 160.405. My brackets. 44. Jewish National Library, Archivmaterial: JNUL Briefe (Signatur Ms. Var. 304). L (Dt.), 5.123. 45. Wien Bibliothek im Rathaus, Handschriftensammlung, Teilnachlass Peter Altenberg, 1.9. Though undated, Altenberg’s letter from Steinhof to Fischer clearly precedes that written on 13 December 1912, just three days into his stay at the institution. 46. Altenberg, ‘Frühling 1915’, Nachfechsung (Berlin, 1925): 221–22. 47. Letter of 18 April 1913 to Bahr, in Daviau, Letters of Schnitzler to Bahr, 110. 48. Letter of 22 April 1913 to Bahr, in ibid., 111. 49. E. Friedell, Das Altenberg Buch (Leipzig, Vienna and Zürich, 1921). 50. Letter of 22 April 1913 from Schnitzler to Bahr, in Daviau, Letters of Schnitzler to Bahr, 111. Custos records a departure date of 28 April 1913 in Der Tag, 21 September 1924. 51. Peter Altenberg Archive, Galerie St. Etienne, New York. Loos wrote a further message to Georg Engländer on the postcard edge: ‘Peter is really enjoying himself. Loos’, which was also signed by Bessie Bruce. 52. I am indebted here to Susan Purdie’s Foucauldian investigation of comedy in S. Purdie, Comedy: The Mastery of Discourse (London, 1993). 53. Wien Museum, I. N. 94.725. I have not been able to locate further information on Esthère Vignon beyond the letter identified by Barker, which shows Altenberg perceived Loos as a rival for her attention. Wien Bibliothek im Rathaus 160.467. Barker, Telegrams from the Soul, 188. 54. For more information on Karl Hollitzer and these two cabaret venues see: M. Buhrs, B. Lesák and T. Trabitsch, eds., Fledermaus Kabarett, 1907–13 (Vienna, 2007); H. Veigl, Lachen im Keller von den Budapestern zum Wiener Werkel: Kabarett und Kleinkunst in Wien (Vienna, 1986); H. Veigl, Nachtlichter. Sezessionistisches Kabarett (Vienna, 1993). 55. For more information on Bertold Löffler see E. Patka, ed., Bertold Löffler: Vagant zwischen Secessionismus und Neobiedermeier (Vienna, 2000). 56. For example Wien Museum I.N. 94.706, I.N. 94.715, I.N. 94.736. For another version of this image by Jagerspacher, inscribed with the same phrase in English, see that held in the Neue Galerie, New York, dated 1909. For a further discussion of these images see G. Blackshaw, ‘Gustav Jagerspacher, Bildnis Peter Altenberg, 1909’, in Madness and Modernity. Kunst und Wahn in Wien um 1900, ed. G. Blackshaw and S. Wieber (Vienna), 70–77. 57. Altenberg, ‘Authentisch’, Simplicissimus 16, no. 36 (1911): 621. For a fuller discussion of this Hagenbund exhibition see G. Blackshaw, ‘“Mad” Modernists: Imaging Mental Illness in Viennese Portraits’, in Madness and Modernity: Mental Illness and the Visual Arts in Vienna 1900, ed. G. Blackshaw and L. Topp (London, 2009), 47–65. 58. Altenberg, ‘Authentisch’, 621.

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59. L.A. Lensing, ‘Scribbling Squids and the Giant Octopus: Oskar Kokoschka’s Unpublished Portrait of Peter Altenberg’, in Turn-of-the-Century Vienna and Its Legacy: Essays in Honour of Donald G. Daviau, ed. J. Berlin, J. Johns and R. Lawson (Vienna, 1993), 193–220. 60. A. Schnitzler, My Youth in Vienna (London, 1971), 178. 61. Altenberg, ‘Authentisch’, 621. 62. Wiener Stadt- und Landesbibliothek I.N. 160.488 63. C. Baudelaire, ‘On the Essence of Laughter and, In General, on the Comic in the Plastic Arts’, (1855) in The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, trans. J. Mayne (London, 1995), 147–65. For examples of the reception of caricature as a medium of modernity see M. Hannoosh, Baudelaire: From the Comic to an Art of Modernity (University Park, PA, 1992). I am very grateful to Kasia Murawska-Muthesius for sending me a copy of her paper ‘Michalik’s Café in Kraków: Café and Caricature as Media of Modernity’, presented at the conference ‘The Viennese Café as an Urban Site of Cultural Exchange’ at the Victoria and Albert Museum and Royal College of Art, 17–18 October 2008. 64. Gronberg describes caricature as ‘the visual equivalent of the witty banter popularly assumed to characterise these establishments’, in Gronberg, City of Modernity, 73. 65. Baudelaire, ‘On the Essence of Laughter’, 7. 66. Ibid., 152. 67. Ibid. 68. Purdie argues: ‘Funniness involves at once breaking rules and “marking” that break, so that correct behaviour is implicitly instated; yet in transgressing and recognising the rules, jokers take power over rather than merely submitting to them’. Mastery of Discourse, 3. 69. Letter dated 13 December 1918. Wien Bibliothek im Rathaus, Handschriftensammlung, I.N. 115.775. 70. This is what Jürgen Habermas reported was significant about Altenberg for Adorno. J. Habermas, ‘Ein philosophischer Intellektueller’, Über T.W. Adorno (Frankfurt, 1968), 35–36. 71. See for example K. Kraus, ‘Irrenhaus Österreich’, Die Fackel 6, no. 166 (6 October 1904). Anti-psychiatry discourses developed in the press during the late nineteenth century. For a further discussion of this see L. Topp, ‘The Modern Mental Hospital in Late NineteenthCentury Germany and Austria: Psychiatric Space and Images of Freedom and Control’, in Madness, Architecture and the Built Environment: Psychiatric Spaces in Historical Context, ed. L. Topp, J. Moran and J. Andrews (New York, London, 2007), 241–61.

Chapter 8

‘HELL IS NOT INTERESTING, IT IS TERRIFYING’ A Reading of the Madhouse Chapter in Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities

d Geoffrey C. Howes

I

n Book II, Chapter 33, of his magnum opus The Man without Qualities (1930– 1932), titled ‘The Lunatics Greet Clarisse’, the Austrian author Robert Musil recounts a visit to an insane asylum in Vienna by the protagonist Ulrich and several other characters.1 This essay traces the origins of this fictional account of a European mental institution before the First World War in Musil’s diaries, and then situates it within the novel’s plot and social and cultural concerns. Finally, it examines what the ‘madhouse’ chapter might tell us about the relationship between madness and modernity in Austria and Vienna around the turn of the twentieth century. The Man without Qualities undertakes to represent the Austro-Hungarian Empire as ‘a particularly clear-cut case of the modern world’ in the year 1913, on the eve of the First World War.2 Ulrich, the ‘man without qualities’ of the title, is a mathematician, a former soldier and engineer. He has developed a form of curiosity about the human condition that is at once passionately interested in what people do and why, yet at the same time informed by a perspective based on his practical and scientific training that allows him to observe human activity precisely and with disinterest. Musil equates this approach to life with the characteristics of the literary genre of the essay. An essay, says his narrator, is ‘the unique

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and unalterable form assumed by a man’s inner life in a decisive thought’ (273). This is not, however, subjectivism. ‘Terms like true and false, wise and unwise, are equally inapplicable, and yet the essay is subject to laws that are no less strict for appearing to be delicate and ineffable’ (273). This flexible precision, this strict perspectivism, has taken him to more and more abstract levels of thought and existence. He is even abstracted from himself, viewing his qualities as a collection of traits that are assembled around an empty space, a locus of possibility with no essential shape other than the one that these contingent attributes give to it.3 Just as Ulrich decides to take a ‘vacation from life’ to discover what his depersonalised personality traits are good for, his father, concerned about his thirtysomething son’s lack of achievement, uses his connections to get Ulrich a position as secretary to a great patriotic project: planning the seventieth anniversary celebration in 1918 of Emperor Franz Josef ’s coronation. The central satirical construct of the narrative, this ‘Parallel Campaign’ (Parallelaktion) will try to rival the German Empire’s plans for the thirtieth anniversary of its own kaiser’s coronation in the same year. Not the least irony here is the fact that both empires were to end in 1918. Another irony: the first order of business of the Parallelaktion is to discover an ‘Austrian idea’ that will somehow subsume the variety of nationalities, cultures, religions, languages, political parties, classes, legal systems and genders of ‘Kakania’, which is Musil’s nickname for the late Habsburg empire.4 Ulrich’s nearness to power allows Musil to survey Austrian society, from the still-dominant aristocracy, to the military, to the economically and culturally ascendant upper middle class, to the lower middle class. Besides these classes and persons that maintain a function in the often dysfunctional world of Kakania, The Man without Qualities also explores a group defined by its inability to function in society: those afflicted with mental illnesses. The mentally ill are represented by two major characters: Clarisse and Moosbrugger. Clarisse is married to Ulrich’s childhood friend, the aimless aesthete Walter. With various levels of attraction and repulsion, Ulrich observes and sometimes indulges her growing psychotic delusions. Moosbrugger is an itinerant worker who has murdered a prostitute in an episode of paranoid psychosis. For a time, his case attracts the public’s prurient and morally outraged attention, along with Ulrich’s somewhat more philosophical interest, for Moosbrugger also seems to be a ‘man without qualities’, exhibiting a collection of depersonalised traits. But unlike Ulrich he is an unwitting and unwilling participant in this role. In the course of the novel Clarisse descends further and further into schizophrenic isolation from her husband and others around her. The path of Clarisse’s madness crosses that of Moosbrugger when she develops the outrageous notion that it is Moosbrugger who embodies the Austrian idea, the unifying concept that is supposed to give focus to the Parallel Campaign.5 As mad as this idea seems, it is no more improbable than some of the proposals that are earnestly put forward, such as a ‘Year of a Global Austria’ (246) or celebrating Franz Joseph as the ‘Emperor of Peace’ (248).

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Clarisse writes Ulrich’s superior, Count Leinsdorf, to suggest that the government sponsor a ‘Nietzsche Year’ as part of the Parallel Campaign, which would somehow involve Moosbrugger, who is connected in Clarisse’s mind with Nietzsche by the fact that they both suffered from madness (244). In the second book, Clarisse reports in a confused letter to Ulrich how she and her brother Siegmund, a physician and psychoanalyst, have tried to arrange a meeting with Moosbrugger at the insane asylum where he is being held pending the appeal of his trial. Siegmund wants his sister to meet Moosbrugger, perhaps as some form of psychoanalytic cure, since she has identified the murderer as a saviour figure. After one failed attempt to get to see Moosbrugger, Clarisse, her husband Walter, Meingast (their philosopher friend) and Siegmund ask Ulrich to use his influence. Ulrich recruits his acquaintance General Stumm von Bordwehr, the war ministry’s delegate to the Parallel Campaign, to make the arrangements. In Book II, Chapter 32, Stumm and Ulrich pick up Clarisse and Siegmund, and their carriage stops in front of the asylum. Despite similarities with the Lower Austrian State Provincial Institution for the Cure and Care of the Mentally and Nervously Ill ‘am Steinhof ’, the asylum in The Man without Qualities is not named as such, and the account in the novel is not based on a visit to this main mental institution in Vienna. Most of the descriptions are taken from an entry in Musil’s diary from 1913 recounting his visit in Rome to the manicomio (insane asylum) S. Maria della Pietá, popularly known as ‘S. Onofrio’ after a nearby church. In his definitive biography of Musil, Karl Corino notes that Musil and his wife Martha had planned to spend a week in Rome, but ended up staying there for more than two months. Corino points out that the Rome that tourists seek out – St. Peter’s, the Vatican Museum, the Pantheon – does not make its way into Musil’s journals. He does, however, write about a visit with his acquaintance Quirino Sergi to the Anthropological Institute, and in the next entry he writes about a tour of the mental hospital. Musil does not look for Goethe’s classical ideas of noble simplicity and quiet greatness, Corino says, but he does seek out ‘their opposite’: paralysis, paranoia, dementia praecox and other mental disorders.6 Musil’s diary records a modern pilgrimage, a journey to sites associated with social and medical knowledge rather than culture in the traditional sense. The asylum S. Maria della Pietà dates to the year 1548. It was moved in 1725 to the Via della Lungara, near the location Musil visited, where two buildings, one for men and one for women, were built. In the wake of a series of scandals surrounding conditions at the hospital, a new facility was built in 1856 on the Gianicolo hill. This institution was designed by Francesco Azzuri according to the villa system that would mark Steinhof, which opened over fifty years later, in 1907. At the time Musil visited the manicomio, a new, single hospital building had been put up, into which patients were moved between 1913 and 1924. This hospital was closed in 1978, when Italy was deinstitutionalising all mental pa-

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tients. It now houses an interactive museum of psychiatry, Il Museo Laboratorio delle Mente.7 Steinhof opened, as noted, in 1907, and anyone reading the novel unaware of the source might assume that Steinhof is being depicted.8 Like Steinhof, the asylum in the novel is easily reached by carriage from the centre of Vienna, and like Steinhof it is a modern villa-system asylum consisting of pavilions in a park on a hillside (1064).9 Musil has moved the location to Vienna, but he does not pin the place down with a name. This transfer shortens the journey into madness in a literal sense, but the distance from normal life is maintained, and this distance is underlined by the simultaneous vicinity and anonymity of the destination. Naming the asylum would put conventional preconceptions in the way of Musil’s empirical, inductive investigation by fictional means. Alexander Kosenina points out that the fictional investigation in The Man without Qualities carries on a literary tradition of the journey to the madhouse that confronts the normal world with the strangeness and expressive power of the world of the mad. Kosenina looks at the motif in authors ranging from Shakespeare and Swift to Heine, Hoffmann and Tieck. He finds it in the visual art of Hogarth and Goya, and in the modern writers Canetti, Bernhard and, as his final example, Musil. ‘Madhouse tourism’, both in literature and in real life, is a way to gain ‘bizarre borderline experiences’ (‘bizarre Grenzerfahrungen’).10 I would go a step further in Musil’s case and assert that the wish to experience the bizarre is only one of the perspectives created when Musil adapts the actual experience to his fictional purposes. This is not just madhouse tourism; it is a journey to the bizarre limits of what is commonly regarded as normal. How the experience in Rome is abstracted and incorporated into the novel can be shown by tracing the origins of the madhouse chapter in Musil’s writings: the 1913 diary passage already mentioned and a brief reference to the manicomio visit in an essay fragment of 1913. A comparison of this chapter with the diary shows that the fictional treatment opens with details that are lacking in the source. The asylum’s director greets the four visitors and introduces them to Dr. Friedenthal, their guide. Friedenthal has the visitors put on white lab coats so that they will look like doctors and not upset the patients. While they move through an administrative area, Stumm tries to converse with Ulrich about an impending session of the Parallel Campaign, and Clarisse replays some of Nietzsche’s ideas in her head. The group goes outdoors again and is startled by a horse’s neighing (which Clarisse thinks might be a madman’s cry) and unnerved by seeing an ordinary sunlit road instead of the inmates they were expecting. From this point on, details from the diary entry find their way into the madhouse chapter. There is a description, already mentioned, of pavilions ‘in a very large garden that slopes upward and stretches out at the far end to the left’ (158). In the novel version, this view is adapted in a way that is more suggestive of

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Steinhof than the original. The leftward rise is changed to ‘sloping up in one direction’, and the pavilions are described in more detail – ‘small white villa-like buildings’ – and placed among ‘groups of tall trees’ (1064). At the top of the rise, in front of the ‘sweep of the sky’, Clarisse sees ‘patients with attendants standing and sitting in groups, looking like white angels’ (1064). This might suggest the ethereal impression made by Otto Wagner’s famous church overlooking Steinhof, but Musil again refrains from such a specific reference. Then comes the women’s ward, where an inmate gives a letter to Musil’s guide, Sergio, to give to her husband. He ‘tears it up as soon as the matron has closed the gate behind us’ (158). In the novel, Musil changes this: Dr. Friedenthal tears up the letter in front of the woman, and Clarisse protests that the patients must be taken seriously. A ‘quiet ward’ is next in both texts. Here a patient’s noble expression is attributed to his degenerative condition, but in the novel the irony of associating madness and aristocracy is stronger. One of the inmates is a painter, whose work in progress Musil finds ‘just like the sketch a healthy person might make for a painting’ (158). He praises it: ‘Bellisimo’. In the novel it is Clarisse who makes this judgment, more elaborately: ‘It could have come from the National Academy’, she thinks, and says out loud: ‘What amazing craftsmanship!’ (1067). In both texts, the artist-patient, who thinks Clarisse is a man, accuses the psychiatrist host of not appreciating his work. The group moves on to the ‘idiots’, and in the novel Stumm is surprised to learn that there is a technical difference between ‘idiots’ and ‘cretins’, and vows to be more careful when applying these terms to subordinates. Stumm encourages Ulrich to try to reconcile the two main camps of the Parallel Campaign, those who preach universal brotherhood and those who preach military superiority, and Ulrich jokes that he should have Stumm admitted to the asylum. The irony and comic relief provided by the figure of Stumm are embellishments not present in the diary account. At this point in the novel, the narrator reflects in a brief essayistic passage (this book is laced with essays), on the similarities between insane asylums and hell, both of which are terrifying, but less so than one imagines, because ‘the premise of an inexorable change for the worse’ has the ‘fascination of an abyss’, but ultimately frustrates the imagination (1070). This explains Clarisse’s sense of disappointment: she had expected something more personal, more engaging, more outrageous. The diary contains none of this reflection, and proceeds immediately to the ‘disturbed ward’. The description of birdlike screaming and squawking features in both texts. In the diary, Musil is too eager to enter the ward: ‘One warder makes ready to open, I am about to go in first, Sergio holds me back’ (159). In the novel, Musil’s role is once again given to Clarisse: ‘Clarisse started to enter first, as she had done up until now, but Dr. Friedenthal pulled her back roughly’ (1071).

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Both texts mention the reassuring presence of the attendants, but the diary’s reference to ‘tactical’ movements (159) is expanded into Stumm’s amusingly military-minded appreciation: ‘Advance guard, rear guard, cover flank!’ (1071). Within the disturbed ward many of the details from the original visit are maintained. The description of patients strapped to the bed to prevent suicide is similar, as is the list of diseases in the ward: paralysis, paranoia, dementia praecox (159, 1071).11 In both texts, one patient asks, ‘Who is that gentleman?’ In the diary he means Musil; in the novel he means Clarisse, continuing the leitmotif of her androgyny. In the diary, Sergio says Musil is a doctor from ‘somewhere else’, while Friedenthal calls Clarisse a doctor ‘from Vienna’. The ruse of referring to the visitor as a ‘doctor’ (so as not to alarm the patients) occurs in both journal and fiction, but having the visitors wear white lab coats is exclusive to the novel (1063). In both versions, the patient rejects this identification of Clarisse. In the diary he insists that she is the ‘seventh son of the German kaiser’ (159), while in the novel this becomes merely the ‘seventh son of the kaiser’, presumably the Austrian emperor.12 In the diary, the group moves on to an older man who suddenly shifts from ‘sensible dialogue’ to obscenities and starts masturbating. In the novel, the patient who called Clarisse the kaiser’s son also masturbates in front of her, conflating the two events to underscore the intensity and sexual ambiguity of Clarisse’s interaction with the madman. The novel also mentions the older man, but he merely utters obscenities and does not masturbate (1073). The subsequent events in the novel are quite faithful to the diary passage. Both groups pass some visitors, who are striking in their normality. A young man covered with mucus starts to whine, pleading to get out of the asylum. The guide states that this is the director’s decision, and eventually the attendants force the young man onto a bench. The visitors in both texts then come to a ward for murderers and the criminally insane. The patients are disciplined to stay by the walls when visitors are present, and the slightest move is put down by the burly attendants. A marginal note in the diary comments that the inmates do not harm each other; it is the presence of strangers that makes them agitated and dangerous. In the novel, this insight is in Clarisse’s head – once again, she assumes what was originally Musil’s own role. Sergio tells Musil to ask one of the patients why he is there. The ensuing conversation, in which the patient angrily insists that the stranger already knows why, is the same in both versions, but in the fictional version it is Siegmund who asks the question and wonders aloud why the patient is being so impolite, as Musil had done in Rome. Clarisse grows angry with him for acting like someone teasing an animal in a zoo. In the diary, Musil calms the man by saying he is from Berlin. ‘Berlin – a beautiful city’, the man answers, and he is ‘quite altered’, but still gives the impression of ‘uncanny unpredictability’ (160). Clarisse, in the novel, is able to assuage the angry patient with a similar non sequitur: ‘I’m from Vienna!’ He settles down, reassured by the platitude ‘Vienna,

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city of dreams’, which he utters ‘with the smugness of the former petit bourgeois who has his clichés in order’ (1077). The diary contains further descriptions of the patients in this ward, but no significant new interactions between visitors and patients, which may explain why Musil stopped excerpting at this point: he was mainly interested in the variety of perspectives created by the contact between the normal and the mentally ill, rather than portraying individual patients. In the novel, at the moment when Friedenthal announces that their next stop is Moosbrugger, he is interrupted and called away on an emergency. The visit is thus broken off before reaching its goal, and a return visit is agreed upon.13 The last impressions come as Stumm von Bordwehr’s common-sense point of view displaces Clarisse’s pseudo-Nietzschean fantasies. Stumm interprets Clarisse’s silence as embarrassment and wonders whether he should have defended Clarisse’s honour in the face of the patient’s indecency, unaware of how little that ancient virtue has to do with Clarisse’s world, or the patient’s. Stumm recovers by smoking a cigarette, which he sees as one of the benefits of being in his right mind – smoking seems to be prohibited in the asylum. Comparing the source and the fictional text shows how the novel retains details of the inmates’ behaviour as well as the order of events. Thus the depictions of the mentally ill are grounded in reality, even if their significance is expanded and rearranged within the far longer fictional version.14 In a similar way, Musil derived the running stories of Moosbrugger and Clarisse from life: in Moosbrugger’s case, newspaper accounts of an actual trial provided the anchor in reality,15 while Clarisse’s decline reflects the life of Musil’s friend Alice Charlemont.16 The realistic substrate is complemented by imaginative abstracting, rearranging, and expanding of the true-to-life elements into a complex drama between a number of visitors and the patients, and among the visitors themselves. Musil also refers to his visit to the madhouse in an essay fragment of 1913, ‘Political Confessions of a Young Man’, comparing what he saw with the European political situation. He hopes for an ‘intensified and purer democracy’ (33),17 but this lies far off. In 1913, the political parties of Europe do not want to advance democracy. They insist on their ideologies, but ‘these ideas are never actually put into practice’ (35). Musil compares these parties with a patient he saw at the manicomio: ‘And so I have these depressing days. An hour ago I visited a Roman madhouse and then a church. So that it doesn’t look as if I’m setting up a point, I will say right away: Everything looked to me like the situation we’re in’ (36). One naked inmate constantly repeats the same movement, accompanied by the same gesture ‘as if he were trying to explain something to someone. Screaming something no one understood, always the same thing’ (36). In this patient Musil sees an allegory of the political actors in Europe: solipsistic, fixated on ideas, and trapped by their own delusions. This is a standard metaphor of mad-

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ness: the behaviour of supposedly normal people resembles that of the madman. The madhouse image in the novel, however, is far more complex. Even if facts lay the foundation and supply the inspiration for the madhouse chapter, Musil is much less interested in facts than in what he called ‘das geistig Typische’, that which is typical of minds or mentalities.18 Facts exist only in consciousness, and the nature of consciousness depends on the particular configuration of qualities of a given person, or, in the present case, a given literary figure. The reality of the madhouse does not exist per se. It is refracted and coloured by whatever interests, expectations, prejudices, fears, and desires the viewers bring to it. This explains why Musil expands the two points of view from his visit to the manicomio in 1913 into five perspectives that run fugue-like, paralleling and intersecting one another. One can arrange these perspectives on a continuum from most practical and least imaginative to least practical and most imaginative, or to put it in terms Musil establishes in the novel, from the strongest sense of reality (Wirklichkeitssinn) to the strongest sense of possibility (Möglichkeitssinn).19 The perspective at the extreme of the sense of reality belongs to General Stumm, who is realistic and practical and who exhibits the least imagination in response to what he sees in the madhouse. He applies either common sense or his military framework. Dr. Friedenthal, the host, is more imaginative, in that he applies scientific abstraction to his patients, yet he is also quite practical, since he seems to be tasked with maintaining order in the asylum rather than treating patients. Siegmund, Clarisse’s brother, is more theoretically oriented than Friedenthal, coming as he does from the school of psychoanalysis and its philosophical underpinnings. Yet he seems rather obtuse when confronted with the reality of mental illness. Ulrich is even more theoretical and philosophical, with his mathematical training and concept of essayism (discussed above), but for that reason he also hesitates to make judgments. At the opposite extreme from Stumm’s practicality is Clarisse’s position at the borderline of philosophy and madness, where the systematic and coherent discourse of philosophy is dissolved by a radical aestheticism into idiosyncrasy. There is one more voice to be accounted for: the narrator’s, which probably lies between Ulrich and Clarisse, blending the theoretical and philosophical with the aesthetic and poetical. The next and last portion of this study will elaborate on this continuum by examining the points of view of the five characters and the narrator, and their interactions. Stumm’s military background predisposes him to apply force to problems, and his conception of politics is black and white, without intellectual subtlety (although one of the satirical elements of his portrayal is his fascination with the world of the mind he encounters in the Parallel Campaign). The confrontation of his practical common sense with the irrationality of the mental patients is the source of most of the satirical humour in this chapter. We have already seen

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him revising his idea of what an idiot is on the basis of new information and appreciating the military-like discipline necessary to keep order in the madhouse. Even though it is the object of satire, his perspective is not discounted, for it is a foil for the less-practical attitudes of the others, particularly Clarisse. Practical people and intellectuals differ in their approach, but both are limited by a lack of understanding of other realms of experience. Stumm’s appreciation for order dovetails with Friedenthal’s task of creating and preserving order in the asylum, to which he applies his medical background. Friedenthal represents the asylum movement within Austrian and European psychiatry, with its wish to create a humane environment for the patients.20 His is the only voice in the chapter that is professionally involved with madness. The irony of his undertaking, repeatedly noted by Clarisse (echoing the Musil of 1913), is that he needs to employ physical restraint and brute force in order to create a humane and safe environment. Any compassion he might have had for his patients has been mostly eroded by this brutal necessity, and he treats them with condescension, tearing up the letter, not recognising the painter’s talents and urging Siegmund to tease the disturbed patient. Musil observed this professional behaviour in reality, and although it is a mere slice of experience and thus a caricature, it reflects a real attitude of the medical establishment. Siegmund, his name an all-too-obvious reference to Freud, is the slightest of the characters here, and hence the closest to caricature. He barely has a function, except to tease a patient and then react with moralistic dismay when the patient is rude. Perhaps this exchange can be read as a crude parody of psychoanalysis: Siegmund asks the patient why he is there, thus prodding him toward self-awareness. The joke (being played on him by the psychiatrist) is that depth psychology is useless in the face of psychosis, and Musil perhaps implies a shortcoming of psychoanalysis when Siegmund invokes as his therapeutic norm the superficial bourgeois virtue of politeness. There is probably a stronger connection on the continuum from reality to possibility between Friedenthal and Ulrich than between either of them and Siegmund. Friedenthal’s detachment from his patients, which is paradoxically necessary for the proper functioning of his humane institution, is intensified and generalised in Ulrich’s intellectual detachment from almost everything. True, his intellect is free, and thus often free of preconceptions, but he leans toward cynicism and cruelty. For instance, he resorts to a jaded cliché of the madhouse when he suggests that Stumm belongs there. While frequently close to the experimental perspective of the narrator, Ulrich is often the object of satire. Clarisse provides the bridge between the ‘normal’ world and the ‘mad’ world. She has one foot in the philosophy of Nietzsche and the aesthetics of modernism and the other in her own world of spontaneous associations. Like the inmates, she no longer shares the practical reality that allows the men to relate to each other in spite of different backgrounds; but unlike the inmates, she still dwells

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in the world of the sane, and participates, however fitfully, in bourgeois institutions like marriage, art and music, and social circles. This is partly because of her upper-middle-class circumstances, and partly because her psychosis has not progressed so far as to totally exclude her from society. One might be tempted to add the perspectives of the patients to these five, but they are mainly foils for the visitors, provoking responses from the delegates of the outside world. This chapter does not represent the experience of the mad from their own point of view. Nor do their brief appearances coalesce into anything like a theory or typology of mental illness. Musil does not want to compete with psychiatry; he wants to show its social function. His uncritical repetition of psychiatric terminology leads Ingram Hartinger to maintain that Musil is able to give credence only to ‘immanent messages’, that is, he respects modern science too much to be able to step outside of it and see its social power and ideological biases.21 But Musil does not quibble with the system of terminology itself. He is more interested in its intellectual typicality (how it is ‘geistig typisch’, as we have seen him describe his intentions). In the chapters dealing with Moosbrugger, Musil makes it clear how the combined power of law and psychiatry seals the criminal’s fate. Here he shows how the classification of the patients and the use of powerful attendants organises human experience in one way. Clarisse’s objections to the treatment of the patients show another way of thinking about it, one that is perhaps more humane but much less practical. Hartinger seems to want Musil to develop a totalising counternarrative that censures psychiatry, but if we read carefully, we see that the text does not totalise, it analyses. It does not present one voice objecting to the power of psychiatry, it presents psychiatry as one of many voices. This leads to a consideration of the narrator as the orchestrator of this array of voices. Besides the usual jobs of telling us what the characters are thinking and keeping the plot moving, this narrator inserts a short reflective essay: ‘Hell is not interesting, it is terrifying’ (1070). Dante tried to humanise hell (1070), but such attempts do not go beyond ‘childish tortures’. The real fascination of hell is its finality, ‘the premise of an inexorable change for the worse, impervious to any attempts to reverse it’ (1070). In spite of some progress and good intentions, this phrase pretty well describes the state of psychiatry in 1913. ‘Insane asylums are also like that. They are poorhouses. They have something of hell’s lack of imagination’ (1070). You can put hell into a nice park with white pavilions, but instead of making it less hellish, hell drags the asylum down. Hence, Friedenthal’s apparent cynicism is probably appropriate, and more in tune with the place than the temporary injection of Clarisse’s mad imagination: ‘Even Clarisse suffered a faint disappointment … It was quite the contrary with Dr. Friedenthal. He was used to these rounds’ (1070). Observing and knowing ‘without having a sufficient explanation for the overall problems was his intellectual portion’ (1070). Friedenthal the technocrat, not Clarisse the visionary, is our Virgil, our guide on

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this visit to the Inferno. He senses the horror of the asylum only when the normal world intrudes, as on this day, and his tour has a certain theatrical structure that keeps the horror at bay. Hell is not interesting, but you can dress it up a little. The narrator shows that Friedenthal – his name, perhaps a little too obvious, means ‘peaceful valley’ – is like the Wizard of Oz, a humbug in terms of the public’s expectations, with no magic up his sleeve, psychiatric or otherwise, but competent enough in managing his clients’ day-to-day needs. Yet this is not enough to outweigh the other characters’ attitudes, particularly those of Clarisse and Stumm. Indeed, it is not enough to outweigh the narrator’s explicit voice, which within the orchestration of perspectives becomes just one more – as valid and as invalid as any of the others, depending upon their context. Musil’s representation of the madhouse in The Man without Qualities goes beyond a simple analogy between irrational normal behaviour and literally insane behaviour that he drew in the essay fragment of 1913. It also differs from the romanticism of Michel Foucault’s connection of madness and modern art, in which the world ‘that sought to measure and justify madness through psychology must justify itself before madness, since it measures itself by the excess’ of works of modern art and philosophy.22 This binary opposition of reason and madness, scientific discourse and art, is less differentiated than Musil’s multiplicity of perspectives. Clarisse’s romanticising of madness is similar to Foucault’s, but she comes away disappointed. Nor is the text itself mad in the sense of Foucault’s examples of Van Gogh, Nietzsche or Artaud. The narrator’s voice is actually the most rational one in the chapter. Musil is also not trying, in the manner of Roy Porter’s A Social History of Madness, to grant the mad themselves a voice to tell their own stories. Porter writes that his aims are not psychiatric or psychoanalytic. He is neither attempting to ‘decode what mad people said’, nor ‘to discover the “real” (that is, unconscious) meaning of their actions’. He does not intend to examine ‘the unconscious of the mad but their consciousness’.23 Musil does neither: he does not try to reveal the deeper meaning of what the patients or Clarisse say, but he also does not try to show ‘what it was like to be mad or to be thought to be mad’.24 The madness Musil shows is inscrutable. It cannot even converse with itself: Clarisse can empathise with the inmates, but she cannot communicate with them. Rather than showing what madness means, Musil shows how it works within the system of meanings that society set up. It is physically removed from the world that regards itself as rational, in order to help keep not only civil order in society, but intellectual order as well. Yet at the moment when Musil’s novel takes place – the eve of the wholesale butchery of the Great War – both the civil order and the intellectual order in Austria are in a situation in which their members cannot converse with themselves. The madhouse chapter in The Man without Qualities, then, shows the fungibility of mental illness. What madness is depends on who is observing it, and

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none of the observers gets any closer than the others to its nature. But their shared relative rationality does not bring them closer to each other. In this way, and not because of a similar irrationality, madness becomes a mirror of society. The most important thing about the madman Musil describes in the essay fragment of 1913 turns out not to be his pointless repetition of the same words and gestures: it is his isolation. He does not share the same premises and vocabulary with his fellow humans, and the resulting frustration is what works him up and makes him act like a lunatic. A moment of connection – for example, the cliché of Vienna as the city of dreams – can cause the raving to abate. But such a connection – what the narrator elsewhere calls ‘the kitsch that unites all peoples’ (1126) – is superficial and artificial, and does not bind people meaningfully. One of these superficial binding agents is Kakania itself, the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And so the meeting of the ‘Parallel Campaign’ that takes place on the evening of the visit to the madhouse has something of the madhouse about it, as Musil’s narrator explains in the chapter ‘A Comparison’ (1101–09). In an attempt to find an Austrian idea, the top minds of the empire assemble, but they cannot communicate with one other beyond social niceties. As soon as they try to venture into their areas of expertise, the others can no longer understand them. It is not irrationality that makes this collection of individuals the mirror of a madhouse – they are all rational enough in their own way and make sense in terms of their own premises. Rather it is the isolation of these premises that makes normal people in the aggregate seem insane. In the chapter titled ‘A Comparison’, the narrator draws a comparison between idiocy and the inability of poets, politicians, scientists, soldiers, bureaucrats, businessmen and legal scholars (all of whom and more appear in the previous chapter) to communicate with each other.25 He writes that ‘it may be said that our world, regardless of all its intellectual riches, is in a mental condition akin to idiocy; indeed, there is no avoiding this conclusion if one tries to grasp as a totality what is going on in the world’ (1102). Even this insight does not confer on the person who propounds it immunity from idiocy: ‘It simply doesn’t depend in the least on the individual, or on the pursuits he is engaged in’ (1102). What it depends on is the pursuits of the society as a whole. But society has not developed a system that could coordinate the ‘totality of what is going on in the world’. As Stefan Kutzenberger writes, the crude pattern of linking concepts or events together in an additive way ‘prevents one from thinking of the concepts simultaneously; it prohibits one from grasping, sensing and understanding the world in its totality’.26 Rather than creating an individual perspective, Musil uses the narrator to place a multiplicity of perspectives – including those of the mad – in relation to each other, without a definitive arrangement, and without one perspective – whether psychiatric, antipsychiatric or otherwise – dominating the others.27 In this way, Musil’s madhouse chapter tells us something about madness itself and, at the same time, something about madness as metaphor. The metaphorical

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significance exceeds the content-oriented madness metaphor in the essay fragment of 1913. The prewar political parties (and the postwar ones, for that matter) had systems and projects that made sense to them; the irrationality of these ideas is relative, not absolute. The subtler version of the metaphor in The Man without Qualities is the madness of the total system, in which socialists and nationalists, lawyers and psychologists, bureaucrats and poets, and soldiers and philosophers pride themselves on not understanding what the others are saying or doing. Insanity is not the absence or opposite of reason as a system of representing the world. Insanity is the confrontation of systems that make sense on their own terms but are incompatible with each other. When such a system is the property of a single person, we call that person mad. When it is the property of a group, we call it a profession, a class, a political party or a nation. And so Clarisse’s promotion of Moosbrugger as the embodiment of the Austrian idea is perhaps not so crazy after all.

Notes 1. R. Musil, The Man without Qualities, trans. S. Wilkins (New York, 1995). References to this text will be cited by book and page number in the text. 2. R. Musil, Diaries 1899–1941, trans. P. Payne, ed. M. Mirsky (New York, 1999), 209. Cited hereafter in the text. 3. The notion of being without qualities is of course developed throughout the novel. Crucial chapters are I.2, ‘House and home of the man without qualities’ (6–8); I.3, ‘Even a man without qualities has a father with qualities’ (8–10); I.4 ‘If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility’ (10–13); I.5, ‘Ulrich’ (13–16); I.8, ‘Kakania’ (26–31); I.13, ‘A racehorse of genius crystallises the recognition of being a man without qualities’ (41–44); and I.17, ‘Effect of a man without qualities on a man with qualities’ (58–66). The most important secondary literature specifically on the topic includes J. Schmidt, Ohne Eigenschaften: eine Erläuterung zu Musils Grundbegriff (Tübingen, 1975) and S. Jonsson, Subject without Nation: Robert Musil and the History of Modern Identity (Durham, NC, 2000). 4. The term in German is Kakanien, which Musil derives from the initials of the phrase kaiserlich und königlich, ‘imperial and royal’, which was associated with nearly every institution in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. See Man without Qualities, I.8, 26–31. 5. For a detailed analysis of the development of Clarisse’s madness, see R. Hassler-Rütti, Wirklichkeit und Wahn in Robert Musils Roman Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (Bern, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Paris, 1990), 177–230. On Moosbrugger’s madness and being ‘without qualities’, see Hassler-Rütti, Wirklichkeit und Wahn, 231–54. 6. K. Corino, Robert Musil: Eine Biographie. (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 2003), 445–46. Corino, who is interested in a psychological study of Musil, notes Musil’s own fear of paralysis and writing blocks as a possible motive for his interest. 7. Information from European Journeys (www.europeanjourneys.org), a website that documents nineteenth-century tours of European asylums: ‘Rome – Ospedale Santa Maria della Pietà alla Lungara (1548–1859)’ http://www.europeanjourneys.org/biogs/E000081b.htm (accessed Spring, 2010). There is more information on this asylum in the annotations of

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8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18.

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the German edition of Musil’s diaries, Tagebücher, 2 vols, ed. A. Frisé (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1976), 2:169, n57. An added notation by Musil’s stepson Gaetano Marcovaldi notes: ‘The asylum stood (as the diaries indicate) on the slope of the (hill) Gianicolo between the Church of S. Onofrio (where Torquato Tasso is buried) and the Tiber, closer to the church. It was called S. Onofrio (I don’t know if this was the official name as well); hence the meaningful expression: to go to S. Onofrio. (Now the insane asylum is on the Monte Mario in the Hospital S. Maria della Pietà.)’ (Translation by the author). The identity of the model for the asylum in the novel has been clarified since A. Frisé’s 1976 edition of the diaries (Tagebücher, 2:159, n57). It is also identified in H. Arntzen, MusilKommentar zum Roman ‘Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften’ (Munich, 1982), 343. A. Kosenina notes the similarities in ‘Von Bedlam nach Steinhof. Irrenhausbesuche in der Frühen Neuzeit und Moderne’, Zeitschrift für Germanistik 17, no. 2 (2007): 338 and writes that the visitors ‘apparently’ (offensichtlich) go to Steinhof, but also points to the diary source. For an analysis of the relationship between architectural and psychiatric principles at Steinhof and in Vienna in general, see N. Imrie and L. Topp, ‘Modernity Follows Madness? Viennese Architecture for Mental Illness and Nervous Disorders’, in Madness and Modernity. Mental Illness and the Visual Arts in Vienna 1900, ed. G. Blackshaw and L. Topp (Surrey, 2009), 76–99. Kosenina, ‘Von Bedlam nach Steinhof ’, 339. The 1995 translation has ‘manic depression’ for ‘dementia praecox’. Dementia praecox is generally considered the forerunner to the diagnosis schizophrenia, not the major moodrelated mental illness bipolar disorder or manic depression. The 1995 translation has ‘the seventh son of our Emperor’ (1072; my emphasis), thus including the logical inference that this is the Austrian emperor. Musil worked on the eventual encounter with Moosbrugger in unpublished studies (The Man Without Qualities, 1630–43). Scholars have noted how closely the passages in the novel correspond to the diary passages without examining the significance of the additions and the redistribution of reactions to various characters. S. Kutzenberger says the passage is ‘slightly transformed but essentially the same’, in ‘“Because That’s Pathological!” Manifestations of Madness in 1900 Vienna in the Works of Klimt and Musil’, in Crime and Madness in Modern Austria: Myth, Metaphor and Cultural Realities, ed. R.S. Thomas (Newcastle, 2008), 56. Kosenina notes that the diary account is taken over ‘almost word for word’ (‘fast wörtlich’) into the novel (338). Hartinger points out the redistribution of roles (Clarisse’s scepticism, for instance), but concludes that Musil and Clarisse are bound by their class membership to accept the classifications and authority of the psychiatric institution. See I. Hartinger, ‘Der Besuch im Irrenhaus oder Lang ersehnte Annäherung an Latein-Amerika (zu einem Tagebuchtext Robert Musils)’, in Robert Musil – Literatur, Philosophie und Psychologie. Internationales Robert-Musil Sommerseminar 1983, ed. J. Strutz and J. Strutz (Munich, Salzburg, 1984), 234. Hartinger is thus more interested in the similarity of the various characters’ (and Musil’s) reactions than their differences. I assert that the ideological critique that Hartinger misses is carried out precisely by this redistribution and recontextualisation of the original material. K. Corino, Robert Musil: Leben und Werk in Bildern und Texten (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1988), 358–60. Corino, Robert Musil: Eine Biographie, 449–66. Page numbers refer to R. Musil, Precision and Soul. Essays and Addresses, trans. and ed. B. Pike and D.S. Luft (Chicago and London, 1990). Musil formulated this idea in an interview about the emerging novel with Oskar Maurus Fontana: ‘Was arbeiten Sie? Gespräch mit Robert Musil [30. April 1926]’, Gesammelte Werke, 2:939.

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19. See Book I, Chapter 4: ‘If there is a sense of reality, there must also be a sense of possibility’, in Man without Qualities, 10–13. The sense of reality concentrates on the way things are, and the sense of possibility concentrates on the way they could be. 20. See Imrie and Topp, ‘Modernity Follows Madness?’ 83–84. 21. Hartinger, ‘Der Besuch im Irrenhaus’, 232–35. 22. Foucault, 289. 23. R. Porter, A Social History of Madness: The World through the Eyes of the Insane (New York, 1987), 1. 24. Ibid. 25. It should be noted that in accordance with the custom of his times (which is also reflected in the divisions of the population of the asylum) Musil here equates mental disability with mental illness, something that is no longer done, at least officially. What binds the two for his purposes is precisely the communicative isolation that I have emphasised. 26. Kutzenberger, ‘“Because That’s Pathological!”’, 54. 27. Hartinger (‘Der Besuch im Irrenhaus’, 233–34) seems disappointed that Musil’s journeys to the asylum, both real and fictional, did not provoke an antipsychiatric stance from him in the manner of R.D. Laing or Foucault. If we see that Musil’s novel and its narrator do not represent a stance, but many stances, we can see that this criticism is misplaced.

Chapter 9

REASON DAZZLED Klimt, Krakauer and the Eyes of the Medusa

d Luke Heighton

The path from man to true man passes through the mad man. The exact geography of this path was never clearly mapped out for itself by the thought of the nineteenth century, but it was constantly travelled.1 – Michel Foucault

F

or Foucault, writing in the nineteenth century, it was in the journey through madness ‘that man, even in his reason, could become a concrete truth and an object for his own gaze’.2 Indeed, madness has become something of a tool, frequently deployed in what can be termed the ‘measuring of modernity’, or at least those discourses we recognise as peculiarly ‘modern’. First appearing in 1961, Foucault’s monumental History of Madness is perhaps only the most visible of texts that have sought to shed light on modernity’s complex relationship with the irrational. Unreason, as Foucault sees it, is not madness itself, but rather one of the signs of it; not a form of reason that is ‘somehow diseased, lost or mad’, but ‘reason dazzled’.3 What we call madness then is only the manifestation of a ‘delirious discourse’, appearing as a strangeness in behaviour and speech; a discourse that functions and circulates within and against those of a normative nature, not least when normativity attempts to confront, or is confronted by, the discourse of madness.4 The History of Madness is not an account of mental illness in the medically defined sense, but rather of madness and the experience of madness, of

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madness as a crucial element in the formation of reason that allowed medical and judicial knowledge to constitute themselves as systems of thinking and, therefore, of thinking the modern world into existence.5 Rather than relying upon medical definitions either of schizophrenia – the term by which we commonly call madness today – or its fin-de-siècle equivalent, dementia praecox, my study of art in Vienna and of art of the insane foregrounds a reading of madness that embodies the so-called paradoxes of the reflexive characteristic of both madness and modern thought, when thinking begins to question the very structural bases on which it is constituted.6 This essay will examine a selection of images by one of Vienna 1900’s most famous artists, Gustav Klimt, alongside examples of work by a little-known patient artist known only as L. Krakauer, who was a private patient of the Viennese psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Wilhelm Stekel. My intention is not to posit the existence of a direct line of influence moving in either direction but rather to emphasise the differences between ‘insiders’ like Klimt and ‘outsiders’ such as Krakauer. I will look at some of the ways in which ‘madness’, ‘unreason’ or ‘reason dazzled’ can be seen as operating within Klimt’s work, evoking states of hyper-reflexivity and ontological indeterminacy, inter-subjectivity and plurality. Conversely, Krakauer’s work will be approached in terms of its close cultural, epistemological and formal similarities to contemporaneous modes of aesthetic practice. Since its ‘discovery’ at the beginning of the twentieth century, the art of the insane has occupied a position approximately parallel to that of the generally accepted modernist art canon, whilst remaining firmly fixed within the broader category of Outsider art.7 Despite increasing calls for a reconsideration of ‘mad art’s’ relationship to mainstream aesthetic creation, this is a position largely maintained by its development into a recognised genre, a protected area of production, consumption and discussion.8 Its legitimacy, then, is still very much determined by the degree to which it has been and continues to be assimilated by other forms of artistic practice such as once-marginal ‘movements’ such as Expressionism and Surrealism, or via its co-option into a position in which its presumed extreme otherness is regarded as a guarantor of its authenticity. Now, as before, the art of the insane is frequently characterised as embodying a purity of expression and a refusal of both traditional artistic codes and the contaminating effects of artistic influence, which sets it apart from, and gives it a certain legitimacy over, other more recognisable and supposedly more socially and culturally integrated forms of art practice. Krakauer’s work, when considered alongside that of Klimt, profoundly problematises these assumptions, revealing formal and art historical similarities which fit neatly into the socially constructed category of Outsider art and its insistence on the singular otherness of the art of the insane. My essay will argue that both Klimt and Krakauer’s works are framed by a shared interest in the themes of sex, death, madness and the oft-referred-to Viennese crisis of masculinity that has come to dominate contemporary readings

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of fin-de-siècle Viennese cultural production.9 Such similarities between insider and outsider art have hardly been acknowledged, least of all by generations of art historians who have either been blind to madness’s place in Vienna’s art history, or displaced it alongside the art of psychiatric patients into other, superficially better-suited ‘moments’ in modern European cultural history. The attempts by Viennese modernists to make their own subjectivity the measure of all things finds a parallel with the simultaneous fear of and attraction to sex, death and psychological alienation that is characteristic of the madman.10 Here, madness and modernity meet one another and undermine simplistic, dualistic conceptions of what is seen as rational or irrational, inside or outside, surface or interior. My starting point then is that from which, as Shoshana Felman has remarked, ‘madness becomes the insider, orbited by modern art forms and psychiatry, embraced by the former, invalidated by the latter’, as the motor and the measure of each.11 Within the Viennese modernist canon, the status of mentally ill artists – those whose work was produced primarily from within the confines of psychiatric institutions – is uncertain. Despite Gemma Blackshaw’s invaluable insight into the close working connections between Egon Schiele and his friend Erwin Osen (who visited Vienna’s Steinhof asylum to paint and draw its inmates), interest in madness’s relationship to Viennese aesthetic culture has thus far been limited to a consideration of mad bodies and iconography of madness, which stops short of examining either their art or its epistemological connections with that of contemporaneous artists.12 In 1914, however, Wieland Herzfelde’s essay, ‘Die Ethik der Geisteskranken’ (‘The Ethics of Madness’) appeared in the German journal Die Aktion a few months before Egon Schiele’s portrait of the French poet and essayist Charles Péguy was featured on its cover.13 ‘The mentally ill’, Herzfelde argued, are artistically gifted, ‘but since their sensibility differs from ours, the forms, colours and relationships of their works appear to us strange, bizarre and grotesque: crazy. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the possessed can work creatively … even though there is little tradition or influence on them’.14 For Herzfelde, mad art offered a useful perspective from which to ground his consideration of not only the nature of art but of the moral and political implications of recognising its relation both to the subject and to the world. Art, he suggests, should evade being captured by normality, just as it should avoid a blind adherence to mimicking the appearance of objective reality or artistic tradition. Only then, it is argued, can what is ‘true’ to the subject in modernity, and modernity itself, be revealed. What remains to be seen, however, is the question if mad artists really can be said to produce art ‘without tradition or influence’, and whether by 1914 there were already artists – and specifically Viennese artists – whose work partook in a comparable commitment to the outsider’s tendency towards the strange, bizarre and grotesque at the same time as it sought to transform aesthetic codes from within.

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Death, Desire and Madness: Gustav Klimt Artists such as Klimt, Richard Gerstl, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele actively shared a sense of their own alterity, the indeterminacy of identity and their own extreme ‘nervousness’, which allowed them to enter into delirious affinity with madness and to critique the narrowly empiricist, determinist tendencies in art history, theory and practice of their time.15 Placing considerable emphasis on death, desire and madness, the artists of Vienna 1900 sought to bring such ideas as perversity, absurdity and alterity back into the fold of the everyday. In the process, these ideas would themselves be invested with the liberatory force they felt was lacking in society. Death, desire and madness are linked together in Klimt through their status as nervousness-inducing aspects of the everyday and the unknown, agents of radical defamiliarisation with reason, social norms and with the self. And it is here that the ethical dimension of Klimt’s work is also to be found. He was, as Schorske describes him, ‘a questioner and a prober of the questionable, the problematical, in personal experience and in culture … But in the process Klimt became a kind of meta-psychologist in the world of vision’.16 Whilst resisting the temptation to read Klimt’s work in purely Freudian terms, it is nevertheless significant that between 1895 and 1900, when Freud was working on the Interpretation of Dreams, Klimt was embarking on what would eventually be seen as the work that most clearly enunciated his break with the academic painting tradition from which he emerged. It was Schorske who first undertook to read Klimt’s work via the language of Freudian psychoanalysis, viewing it as emblematic of a more widespread ‘crisis of the liberal ego’ affecting the artist and his middle-class contemporaries.17 For Schorske, the so-called politics of the psyche – in the visual arts, at least – constituted not a new form of politics per se, but rather a retreat from politics, and thus from ethics, into solipsism and aestheticism.18 Against this view, I believe it is worth recalling the words of Robert Musil, who wrote in 1923: Recall one fact above all: around 1900 … people believed in the future. In a social future. In a new art. The fin-de-siècle gave the period a veneer of morbidity and decadence: but both these negative definitions were only contingent expressions for the will to be different, to do things differently from the way people had done them in the past.19

With Musil in mind, I would like to suggest that far from retreating into antisocial apoliticism, Klimt actively advanced the idea that there could be no such thing as ethics or politics without consideration of the unknown, the unknowable, of the subject and his relationship to society’s moral codes. In 1894, Klimt received a commission from a committee drawn from the university senate for a series of works – Philosophy (1899–1907), Medicine (1900– 1907) and Jurisprudence (1903–1907) – to be organised around the theme of

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the triumph of light over darkness. Known collectively as the Faculty Paintings or University Paintings, the series received such negative criticism that he never completed it.20 The affair revealed a deepening divide within fin-de-siècle artistic practice, and between artists, critics and the public at large. In dividing academic and critical opinion, Klimt’s Faculty Paintings can be seen as having contributed most to the art-historical picture of a young political and artistic culture in Oedipal revolt against the mores and traditions of its forebears.21 Irit Rogoff has argued that part of the misapprehension of Klimt’s work and our tendency to denude them of subversive potential lies in the fact that as spectators ‘we still lack to some extent … an understanding of how attitudes are transformed into styles rather than into subjects, themes or symbols’.22 It is only by shifting our gaze away from the bounds of conventional contextual readings that it ‘becomes clearer that what has been perceived as sensuous and lascivious is in fact sexual and socially polemical, if not explicitly political investigation of social and cultural facades’.23 Klimt’s investigative impetus is conveyed, Rogoff suggests, not just by the centrality of morbidity and eroticism in his work, but by conflict – both as it is contained within eroticism itself, but also more explicitly in his works’ mythological-narrative content.24 Like Freud, Klimt was fascinated by myth, and in particular with the figure of Medusa. In Pallas Athena (1898), his third and best known representation of this figure, Medusa adorns Athena’s breastplate, warding off those who would challenge the symbols of this new age and its new art. Together, Athena, Medusa and the naked female figure atop the orb Athena is holding embody the virtues of truth and beauty, but also virtues connected with sensuality and death. For Freud, writing in 1922, the Medusa/Athena dialectic constitutes something even more complex, a mixing of horror, sexuality and the male fear of castration into a powerful symbol of death, desire and powerlessness in the face of the feminine.25 Here, the connection between sex, death and madness is reinforced by their simultaneous suggestion of conditions of extreme plenitude and absolute negativity, inscribed in the relationship between the body, language and aesthetics that in turn define the human as rational and at the same time irrational.26 Schorske is not alone in remarking on how – in works such as the Faculty Paintings, the Beethoven Frieze (1902), and Watersnakes (1904–07) – Medusa’s head of snakes is transposed into the long, coiling tresses of women in general, becoming indicative of the threat posed by female sexuality, with its connotation of excess, subjective dissolution and negativity.27 What I would like to argue, however, is that while such readings may indeed be valid, we need not necessarily conclude that the so-called crisis of masculinity identified amongst Klimt and many of his contemporaries was perceived as something genuinely threatening, or that it compelled male artists to fall back on narrowly defined, patriarchal and objectifying stereotypes of what women were and could be. I would also like to suggest – using Krakauer as an important example – that this ‘crisis of masculinity’ was not limited to those considered indubitably sane or common to the

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cultural field in which each worked. Just as death, desire and madness are transcultural, so too are the feelings of alienation and alterity. The crisis of masculinity, therefore, also expressed a more pervasive individual desire to test the limits of one’s own subjectivity, to enter into delirious affinity with that which exceeded rational explanation, and in the process to enter – consciously or otherwise – into a state of delirious affinity the subjectivity of others. If, then, Medusa/Athena represents the fear and horror of castration, I believe that we should add into this mixture a delight at this same horror, and a sense of erotic derangement in which such conflict is experienced as an internal, instinctual battle of reason and unreason. Klimt’s eroticised female is by no means singular or consistent. Rather he presents women in diverse ways; ways that problematise an oversimplified approach to the fin-de-siècle Viennese erotic imagination, and in so doing, can be seen both to reinforce and counter stereotypical representations of fin-de-siècle sexuality, both male and female. As Schorske has rightly remarked, Klimt’s Athena is an ambiguous, not to say ambivalent figure, encompassing the archaic and the modern, the quiescent and the threatening, the sensual and the erotically remote.28 Rather than standing simply for purity and virginity, she is instead presented alongside Medusa and the figure of Nuda Veritas as indivisibiliter ac inseparabiliter, the whole greater than the sum of its parts. The question is not, then, whether this is calculated to provoke an explicitly sexual response in the viewer, but rather what such a response might have to say about the nature of desire itself. At the very least, Klimt suggests that death and desire are indissolubly linked, that this fact constitutes its own truth – a complex, and not necessarily palatable truth perhaps, but an important one nevertheless. Here, the very complexity, unpredictability and inscrutability of desire points towards its essential otherness; its capacity for entering artist and viewer into a ‘delirious’ discourse with the work and with the Eros of estrangement. Klimt’s acknowledgment of desire’s perversity results in hybrid figures, intermediaries between what was considered acceptable as sexually attractive, and therefore safe, and what was not.29 The physical indeterminacy of these figures, which proliferate throughout Klimt’s mid-period works, stands in for the derangement of desire, which exceeds socially accepted limits. They can be read as simultaneously Medusa-like and threatening and conspicuously sensual, as exemplars of a different kind of informed sensuality. Klimt connects sex not only with death but also with disease. He objectifies women, but the manner in which he objectifies them allows him to explore what desire is and how it works. As depictions of ‘real’ bodies, then, Klimt’s oeuvre is as close to the antiaesthetic and expressive as it is to aestheticism and the allegorical. In presenting work that was altogether more modern than what was current, then, it was necessary that it should also be less pure.30 Klimt was a specialist in voyeurism. Thus, it is tempting to assume that much of his art partakes in a process of contemplative dominance and deferred control.

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Yet, when we look at his drawings of women masturbating it is also possible to detect a sense of the unbridgeable distance between the artist and the sexually objectified subject that belies such notions. This suggests the artist’s awareness of what are essentially private experiences, over which – despite their act of ‘penetrative’ looking – they have neither access nor total control. These drawings retain a positive sense of their subjects’ very otherness. As much as Klimt might have wanted to possess the women he drew, he knew that ultimately he could not. This is further attested by the text accompanying his fifteen illustrations for the 1907 luxury edition of Lucius’s satirical Hetärengespräche.31 This is a work that mocks men, in which Lucius and Klimt are able to use sex and gender as a means to self-critique, derisively unmasking masculine pretensions by reflecting them in the mirror of female sexual self-sufficiency and laughter. It was this fascination for the object of desire, as something distant and discrete, that drove Klimt’s work towards the indeterminacy of intersubjectivity. Occupying an instinctual, nonaffirmative, pre- or postlinguistic place at a considerable remove from social mores, death, desire and madness represented opposites to convention; the only states, in other words, adequate to describing the experience of the self-consciously, self-questioning modern subject.

Ex Libris Dr Wilhelm Stekel: Krakauer The artistic production of Viennese psychiatric patients was not only known at the turn-of-the-last century, it had even achieved a degree of public recognition. In 1898, the Irrenpflegeaustellung (Care of the Mentally Ill Exhibition) was held as part of celebrations commemorating Emperor Franz-Joseph’s fiftieth jubilee. Included in the Irrenpflegeaustellung was a selection of works by asylum patients. These consisted of examples of ‘women’s handicraft’ (sewing, knitting, embroidery and so forth), carpentry and carving, flower arranging, sculpture, painting, ‘works created with cardboard’, drawings and literary work. The visitor was explicitly informed that these were produced ‘under the influence of madness’.32 All but a few of these items are now lost, presumed destroyed.33 In 1908, another exhibition of patient art was staged at the Mauer-Öhling asylum.34 In an article appearing in the Neues Wiener Journal an anonymous author praised the Irrenpflegeausstellung as one of the most peculiar and most admirable exhibitions one can imagine. One can hardly believe that these items, handicrafts of all kinds, all forms of art, were created by the mentally ill. These testaments to the last remnants of creative strength, artistic sense and the spirit of invention are wonderful.35

The 1908 exhibition reveals a gradual gathering of interest in the art of the mentally ill, not only in Austria, but throughout Europe. August Marie, a French

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psychiatrist and former pupil of the great Jean-Martin Charcot at the Salpêtrière hospital in Paris (under whom Freud also briefly studied), began collecting patient art around 1900, and in 1905 founded his so-called Mad Museum.36 Unusual for the time, Marie’s interest was not purely diagnostic; rather, he saw in the art of the insane (several years before Hans Prinzhorn would write about it in similar terms) a visual language capable of giving form to new realities and new experiences. In 1910, Marie is also mentioned in an article in the Bulletin de la Société Clinique de Médecine Mentale as having delivered a report to the society on another museum devoted to the art of the insane in Lower Austria.37 The institution in question was Mauer-Öhling. In fact this ‘museum’ is not a museum at all. Rather, Marie reproduces three installation shots of the Irrenpflege exhibition of that year. In 1907, a book was published by a man now thought to have worked under Marie at the hospital at Villejuif. His name was Dr. Paul Gaston Meunier, and he is generally believed to have been the pseudonymous author of Marcel Réja’s L’art chez les fous.38 Such publications, along with Prinzhorn’s Bildnerei der Geisteskranken and the Swiss Walter Morgenthaler’s study of Adolf Wölfli, which may be said to form the foundational texts for all subsequent studies of the art of the mentally ill.39 Of these, Prinzhorn’s is by far the best known, and it is this book – along with the collection in Heidelberg from which its examples of patient artwork are drawn – which is thought to have had the single most profound influence on ‘insider’ artists and collectors such as Max Ernst, Paul Klee and Jean Dubuffet, who came into contact with Prinzhorn’s publication and collection from the 1920s onwards.40 Beginning in the summer of 1919, and again in 1920, the head of the University of Heidelberg’s psychiatric clinic, Karl Wilmanns, and his colleague Hans Prinzhorn began circulating a letter calling for the directors of public and private Irrenanstalten to send them any examples of the pictorial work of patients in their care. The letter was sent to institutions in Germany, Italy, Switzerland and Austria.41 Austria’s response was relatively lukewarm, certainly when compared with its German counterparts. The occasional sizeable portfolio did reach Heidelberg, such as that sent in 1920 by Prof. Dr. Heinrich Obersteiner – a key figure in the collection and display of patient artwork in the 1898 Irrenpflege exhibition and director of the Privatirrenanstalt Döbling bei Wien discussed by Anna Lehninger in this volume. There are also two works from the practice of a Dr Steckel [sic] attributed to an L. Krakauer, whose treatment – for what, precisely, is unknown – we know took place between 1912 and 1915.42 Krakauer’s surviving work is notable both for its graphic proficiency and its incorporation of several key elements of Jugendstil graphic design, reminiscent of the covers of early editions of the Secessionist periodical Ver Sacrum. Two works of around 1912 bears the highly stylized inscription: ‘Ex libris Dr Wilhelm Stekel’, suggesting they might have been intended as designs for a bookplate. This tells us as much about Krakauer’s social background and education as it does about

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the culture in which he lived, placing him alongside Klimt and the Secession as someone for whom graphic design played an important role in his aesthetic world. In one such design, a skull-headed figure, half-human, half beast, wearing a black hat and robes and carrying some form of spear or totem, stands at the centre of a calligraphic whirl of intertwining forms, in which the initials Dr W S can be discerned. Immediately above him sits a jester, or a fool, holding a violin, whilst below and to his right stands a smaller figure wearing a ruff – a caricature perhaps, of an actor, Shakespeare’s ‘poor player’, misled by feminine wiles, his strutting, his fretting and his works ultimately signifying nothing (Figure 9.1). At

Figure 9.1. L. Krakauer, ‘Ex libris Dr Wilhelm Stekel’, c. 1912. Sammlung Prinzhorn der Psychiatrischen Universitätsklinik Heidelberg.

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Figure 9.2. Gustav Klimt, Nuda Veritas, reproduced in Ver Sacrum, 1898

the very top of the image, half covering the sun, is an image of a woman’s face – half Medusa, half Nuda Veritas, the figure Klimt had reproduced in ink for the Secessionist magazine Ver Sacrum, in 1898 – inside a looking-glass-shaped object (Figure 9.2).43 Together, these figures rehearse the well-known danse macabre, in which death, the great leveller, may also appear as a jester, in a scene familiar throughout European iconography from at least the mid-fourteenth century. The scene is bordered by an array of plant-like forms such as are commonplace in Jugendstil graphic design; further evidence, surely, of the remorseless circularity of life and death. Nature, here, is by no means friendly. Krakauer succeeds in endowing this image with a combination of splenetic, ghoulish glee and something less antic, more hysterical. It pokes fun at the commonplace Panglossian dissemblances committed by society – within which, one should not forget, the Viennese medical establishment formed a prominent and powerful constituency. Yet it recognises also that in seeking to actively disassemble such pretensions one risks being cast into an oblivion partly of one’s own making; suggesting that to denounce one’s complicity with the legacies of Enlightenment thinking is at the same time to announce renewed complicity with the forces of disorder and death. In the second drawing (Figure 9.3), a monumental, Sphinx-like head looms above the naked upper torso of another Medusa figure, her own head thrown back, arms stretched widely, as if transported, half-crazed by her own lascivious power. Vines coil around and frame the central image, a flaming torch (in German, Fackel, the name also given to Karl Kraus’s scabrous satirical journal, infamous for its author’s insistence of telling the ‘truth’ behind the supposed facade of Viennese culture), on either side.44 The scene is suffused with an aura of mordant, not to say morbid sexuality; of a mobile, tentacular malevolence that activates the image, establishing a scene no-

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Figure 9.3. L. Krakauer, ‘Ex libris Dr Wilhelm Stekel’, c. 1912. Sammlung Prinzhorn der Psychiatrischen Universitätsklinik Heidelberg.

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table both for its revelation of superficially less palatable truths about the nature of man and the universe, and for its deliberate occlusions – who is this figure? What are her origins? What, if anything, does she tell us? In fact, both drawings rely for their symbolic language and narrative content and their aesthetic force on symbols we have already encountered in Klimt. Because we do not know anything about Krakauer – we do not know, for example, whether he was an artist by training – and because by virtue of his drawing’s very presence in the Sammlung Prinzhorn cannot assume he was not mentally ill, it is difficult to say whether for him they intended to carry the same meaning. His identification as a patient naturally leads us, though it is doubtful whether we have grounds to do so, to infer some additional, unknowable, ‘mad’ significance to them. Still, it is hard to resist the suggestion that that siren, Sphinx-like figure with the Medusa below is not a direct reference to Klimt’s Pallas Athena, or to the same coupling as it first appeared in Klimt’s ex libris lithograph for the Secession in 1899. It is also striking that Krakauer’s Sphinx/Athena possesses the material solidity of a tomb, for, as Schorske remarks, in Greek legend the Sphinx, ‘childeating mother’, represents the ‘buried instinctual forces which the Apollonian necromancer will summon in song from the tomb of time’.45 She is also the figure whom Oedipus must outwit before he can continue his journey towards the marriage with his mother that would lead him to gouge out his eyes – our means of perceiving the world, therefore of being in the world – and spend the rest of his life wandering through a real and metaphorical wilderness.46 Thus stand the ‘archetypical symbols of instinctual energies, to which art has mysterious access through the heavy stone lid of civilisation’s coffer’.47 Did Krakauer see himself as just such an Apollonian necromancer, summoning elemental forces from within the human psyche through his art? Was he merely referring to a discourse that the Secessionists had already begun? Was he borrowing the language of the nascent science of psychoanalysis to suit his or his doctor’s own ends? Did he see perhaps himself as a counterpart to Stekel, the Secessionists, or both? We do not, and perhaps cannot, ever know.

Conclusion How ‘mad’, then, does a work need to be before we are prepared to consider it a Outsider art, and how sane must our madman be before his work can no longer be considered ‘art?’ All too often the actual content of the art of the insane is rendered secondary to its presumed biographical or psycho-biographical content, and an idealisation of primitivism in service to our own need for an emotional, rather than a more theoretical as well as culturally and critically enlightened response. I would like to suggest that rather than separating pathological from non-pathological art on the grounds of biography, we should instead search for

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the places where the discourses established in these works might meet, as equally ‘marginal’ practices situated outside the realm of the everyday, but nevertheless having something to say not only about individual, subjective experience, but about the social terms on which that experience is grounded. In compiling the Bildnerei for publication, Prinzhorn selected for reproduction only those patient artists whom he considered ‘masters’ of their genre. Krakauer, it seems, was not one of them. One can speculate as to why this might have been, but it seems likely that his work was considered too close to mainstream modernism, and perhaps too outdated in its obvious debt to the Vienna Secession, to warrant inclusion. This is itself indicative of the manner in which even today we tend to approach the art of the insane as exactly that, rather than simply as ‘art’. We have a tendency (albeit, perhaps, an understandable one), to make demands of mad art, rather than allow it to make demands on us – as art historians, as critics, as casual spectators and even as practitioners. Our tendency is to lump, rather than to split, and by concentrating on what we assume to be universal, unchanging categories such as ‘madness’, we miss the specific context of individual works that might lead us back to their cultural origins, to what they share with discourse, rather than the points at which the two paths appear to diverge. This study has attempted to show that by approaching Klimt and Krakauer from the same contextual vantage point, it is possible to read the art of the insane alongside art made by more mainstream artists without questioning the status of either as art, or feeling the need to establish a hierarchy between ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ artists and their aesthetic practice. Seen from this perspective, Klimt and Krakauer’s work can indeed be read as further visual evidence of the pervasive ‘crisis of masculinity’ affecting Viennese (bourgeois) culture and society, from which we can posit a relationship between the madman’s simultaneous aestheticisation and eroticisation of femininity and death and Klimt’s treatment of related themes. Yet this was no coincidence. Far from being specific to the artists of the Secession or the mind of a man suffering from mental illness, these themes were common to the modern/modernist culture from which they both came. This is a view that serves to partially collapse the distance between mad and nonmad artists operating in the same cultural milieu, in which death, desire and madness, all of which resist rational interpretation, and all of which, as Foucault would no doubt argue, are both transhistorical and transsubjective, constitute realms of positive plenitude and negative uncertainty common to all those with the capacity to think reflexively. It may well be the case, as Louis A. Sass has suggested, that plenitude and negativity constitute the two central ‘paradoxes of the reflexive’ that give shape to schizophrenia, allowing the mad individual to operate within subjectively and culturally defined parameters. The same can still be said of his sane counterpart, who experiences his alterity, his desire and the certainty of his own death as a form of madness within a discursive space, outside the realms of normality and moral acceptability.48

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In Péter Hanáck’s treatment of what he calls the ‘alienation’ of death in Vienna at the turn-of-the-last century, we see evidence of a process analogous to that by which the care of the insane gradually shifted from within the city’s walls to its furthest outposts. ‘Death’, Hanáck argues, ‘once a self-evident part, an accepted event in the cycle of nature,’ became subject to the state and its rational, official form of organisation, ‘which could not tolerate the integral entanglement of life and death’.49 As with the mentally ill, even the dead came to exist in a space located somewhere between the private and public spheres, the family and the state, rather than the community. The recuperation of death and desire in Viennese aesthetics, Hanáck says, had the effect of taming them.50 Yet, it is arguable whether Klimt and Krakauer attempted to tame death or if their work aimed towards a critical reintegration into lived experience, via their rarefied, metaphorical presentation of life in all its confounding locutions. Man, Hanáck’s writes, ‘became deprived of his own personal death’.51 However, the fear of death, of madness and of the powerfully erotic threats and possibilities posed by Athena/ Medusa remained. They remain to this day: as moments of caesura from the rhetoric of harmony and synoptic unity put forward by prevailing orthodoxies – social, political, scientific and historiographical.52 It is therefore not surprising that they should have worked their way into the modernism of 1900, in which, as Jacques Le Rider has written, ‘the man of reason conceived as an ideal gave way to a more unstable, changeable individual on the lookout for new forms of life and in constant danger of seeing his individualism engulfed’.53 Yet, there is, too, an important paradox to be found here; for as much one’s individualism may be said to have been threatened, it was this same threat that called attention to the subject’s continued existence, and to the fact that no amount of external pressure was adequate to its erasure. It is important not overlook the second part of Le Rider’s argument: that the threat from the outside prompted a search for a new kind of individualism, and a new kind of subjectivity. This, I suggest, is what is in play in the art of Klimt and Krakauer – two forms of practice that recognise the limits of subjectivity itself, and the relative uselessness of conceiving oneself and the world narcissistically, at the same moment as they state the contrary: that there can be no such thing as an individual self without sharing a language and a discourse with those around it. The archaeology of that discourse, however, supersedes any overt concern with specific individuals or individual subjectivities. It is not in Klimt and Krakauer’s status as individuals or as artists that the borders between subjectivist and objectivist visions of the world, between reason and unreason, become momentarily permeable. Rather it is in their work, and in their work’s recourse to a common symbolic language always on the lookout for alternative forms of life and alternative states of mind it might express, that they begin to meet one another. Yet, Foucault was not concerned with affirming or denying the subject. Instead, he attempted to draw attention to those aspects of the experience of madness that he

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sought to capture ‘historically’. In the History of Madness the constitution of the subject is simultaneously the constitution of his or her subjection, thus Foucault saw it as more important to describe the means by which subjection occurs. It is not that the subject has no place outside of the effects of subjection in Foucault’s analysis; rather, it was imperative to dispense of the subject temporarily in order to perceive the structure around it.54 Such a view is not without its problems, since it runs the risk of rendering the mad themselves as little more than beings without agency, identifiable only through the implacable process of their gradual dehumanisation. Similarly, his binary conception of reason-unreason is not, of course, entirely unproblematic, however much it seeks to destabilise each. We can say, however, that the conjunction reason/unreason was never intended to effectively define ‘madness’, no less than it could ever fully describe it. Few excursions into the unknown reach their desired end without the help of the cartographer; still less so those without a point of origin. The significance of the History of Madness, therefore, lies in having identified the territory from which many subsequent enterprises could proceed. Thus, Foucault pointed toward one possible, though by no means exclusive, approach to the radical alterity immanent within post-Enlightenment thought. Yet, it was also important to Foucault that madness should be represented not only in its ‘otherness’. In emphasising the similarities between Klimt and Krakauer’s artwork, I hope that the madman can begin to emerge as more than a figure of undifferentiated subjection. As we recognise the manifest differences in their material and mental circumstances as well as in the art of Vienna 1900 and that of the insane, we are confronted with parallel journeys into the unknown and unknowable.

Notes 1 . M. Foucault, History of Madness, trans. J. Murphy and J. Khalfa (London, New York, 2006), 526. First published in French as Folie et Déraison: Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris, 1961). 2. Foucault, History of Madness, 526. 3. Ibid., 243. 4. Ibid., 237. 5. See G. Canguilhem, ‘On Histoire de la folie as an Event’, in Foucault and his Interlocutors, ed. A.I. Davidson (Chicago and London, 1997), 30. 6. See L.A. Sass, Madness and Modernism: Insanity in the Light of Modern Art, Literature and Thought (New York, 1992), 324–55. 7. R. Cardinal, Outsider Art (London, 1972); J. MacGregor, The Discovery of the Art of the Insane (Princeton, NJ, 1989); C. Rhodes, Outsider Art: Spontaneous Alternatives (London, 2000). 8. A.E. Bowler, ‘Asylum Art: The Social Construction of an Aesthetic Category’, in Outsider Art: Contesting Boundaries in Contemporary Culture, ed. V.L. Zollberg and J.M. Cherbo (Cambridge, 1997), 11–36; G.A. Fine, Everyday Genius: Self-Taught Art and the Culture of

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10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19.

20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25.

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Authenticity (Chicago, London, 2004); L. Rexer, How to Look at Outsider Art (New York, 2005); Gavin Parkinson, ‘“Very Stupid Stuff”: Making Sense of Adolf Wölfli’, in Creativity, Madness and Civilisation, ed. R. Pine (Newcastle, 2007), 234–64. See, for example, C.E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (New York, 1981), 224, 230–31, 240–41 and 251–52. See also J. Le Rider, Modernity and Crises of Identity, trans. R. Morris (Cambridge, 1993); David S. Luft, Eros and Inwardness: Eros and Inwardness in Vienna: Weininger, Musil, Doderer (Chicago, London, 2003); C. Sengoopta, Otto Weininger: Sex, Science, and Self in Imperial Vienna (Chicago, London, 2000). Sass, Madness and Modernism, 7–8 and 106–7. G.S. Jenkins, ‘Reality: A “Relatively” Private Anagram’, in Pine, Creativity, Madness and Civilisation, 216–33. See G. Blackshaw, ‘The Pathological Body: Modernist Strategising in Egon Schiele’s SelfPortraiture’, Oxford Art Journal, 30, no. 3 (2007): 377–401. Die Aktion 4, no. 42/43 (1914). Quoted in S. Gilman, Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race, and Madness (Ithaca, NY, 1985), 229. See M. Iverson, Alois Riegl: Art History and Theory (Cambridge, MA, and London, 1993), 6. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 226. Ibid., 208–78. Ibid., 3–23 and 116–80. In more recent years Schorske’s analysis of Vienna’s political culture, and in particular his assessment of the ‘failure’ of Austrian Liberalism, has been challenged. See, for example, M.S. Roth, ‘Performing History: Modernist Contextualism in Carl Schorske’s Fin-de-Siecle Vienna’, American Historical Review 99, no. 3 (1994): 729–45; S. Spector, ‘Beyond the Aesthetic Garden: Politics and Culture on the Margins of “Fin-deSiècle Vienna”’, Journal of the History of Ideas 59, no. 4 (1998): 691–710; T.R. Tholfsen, ‘Carl Schorske’s Theory and Practice’, History and Theory 39, no. 1 (2000): 98–106. R. Musil, ‘The German as Symptom’, unpublished draft essay, 1923. Reprinted in Robert Musil: Precision and Soul. Essays and Addresses, ed. B. Pike and D.S. Luft (Chicago, London, 1990), 150. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 151–57. See also P. Vergo, Art in Vienna 1898–1918: Klimt, Kokoschka, Schiele and their Contemporaries (London, 1993), 49–62; D. Guth, ‘“That Is Not a Sign of the Times, It Is a Sign of Extravagance”: The Scandal Surrounding Klimt’s Faculty Paintings’, in The Naked Truth: Klimt, Schiele, Kokoschka and Other Scandals, ed. T.G. Natter and M. Hollein (Munich, Berlin, London, New York, 2005), 67–76; W. Hoffman, ‘“Die Dichter stellen das Chaos immer her”: Nietzsche, Klimt, und die Wiener Jahrhundertwende’, Artibus et Historiae 20, no. 40 (1999): 209–10. See also T. Marlowe-Storkovich, ‘“Medicine” by Gustav Klimt’, Artibus et Historiae 24, no. 47 (2003): 231–52. See Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 208–19. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 31–32. Ibid. See S. Freud, ‘Medusa’s Head’, in Sexuality and the Psychology of Love, trans. James Strachey (New York, 1963), 212–13. First published posthumously as ‘Das Medusenhaupt’, Imago 25 (1940): 105. See F. Guven, Madness and Death in Philosophy (New York, 2005), 2 and passim. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 22–24. Ibid., 221–22. S. Gilman, ‘The Hottentot and the Prostitute: Towards and Iconography of Female Sexuality’, in Gilman, Difference and Pathology, 76–108. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 279–321 and 322–66.

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31. See B. Apke, ‘Gustav Klimt’, in Natter and Hollein, Naked Truth, 188. 32. Bericht des niederösterrecihischen Landesausschuses über seine Amtwirksamkeit vom 1. Juli 1897 bis 30 Juni 1898, B. IV (Vienna, 1898), 58. For a fuller account of the exhibitions and their contents, see L. Heighton, ‘Exhibiting Madness: Art and the Asylum: The Creation and Exhibition of Images by Psychiatric Patients in Vienna, 1890–1914’ (PhD diss., University of London, 2009), 80–135. 33. Ibid., 80–171. 34. Ibid. See also Josef Starlinger, ‘Die Jubilaeumsausstellung’, Mauer-Öhling Anstalts-Zeitung 2, no. 20 (1 June 1908): 1–2, and his ‘Die Jubilaeumsausstellung,’ Mauer-Öhling AnstaltsZeitung 2, no. 22 (1 August 1908): 1–10. 35. Neues Wiener Journal, 5 July 1908, 13. 36. See MacGregor, Discovery, 166. 37. A. Marie, Bulletin de la Société Clinique de Médecine Mentale 38 (1910): 28–42. 38. Reprinted as M. Réja, L’art chez les fous: le dessin, la prose, la poésie (Paris, 2000). See also M. Gisbourne, ‘French Clinical Psychiatry and the Art of the Untrained Mentally Ill’, in The Artist Outsider: Creativity and the Boundaries of Culture, ed. E. Metcalf and M. Hall (Washington, DC, London, 1994), 228–51. 39. W. Morgenthaler, Ein Geisteskranker als Künstler: Adolf Wölfli (Bern, 1921); H. Prinzhorn, Bildnerei der Geisteskranken (Heidelberg, 1922). 40. See H. Foster, ‘Blinded Insights: On the Modernist Reception of the Art of the Mentally Ill’, October 97 (Summer 2001): 3–30. 41. Letter reproduced in B. Brand-Claussen, ‘The Collection of Works of Art in the Psychiatric Clinic, Heidelberg – from the Beginnings until 1945’, in Beyond Reason: Art and Psychosis. Works from the Prinzhorn Collection, ed. B. Brand-Claussen and T. Röske (London, 1997), 8–11. 42. I am very grateful to Sabine Mechler at the Sammlung Prinzhorn for providing me with a copy and a transcript of this note. 43. Sammlung Prinzhorn, Inventory Number 3363; Gustav Klimt, ‘Nuda Veritas’, Ver Sacrum Year I, 8, (1898): 12. 44. Sammlung Prinzhorn, Inventory Number 3364. 45. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 221. 46. Though he described it as the ‘nuclear complex’ of all neuroses, Freud did not formalize the term until the publication of his Drei Abhandlungen zur Sexualtheorie (1905), by which time his work had already gained prominence. 47. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 221. 48. Sass, Madness and Modernism, 8. 49. P. Hanáck, The Garden and the Workshop: Essays on the Cultural History of Vienna and Budapest (Princeton, NJ, 1998), 98. 50. Ibid., 106. 51. Ibid., 103. 52. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, 209 and 273. 53. J. Le Rider, ‘Between Modernism and Postmodernism’, in Vienna 1900, From Altenberg to Wittgenstein, ed. E. Timms and R. Robertson (Edinburgh, 1990), 8. See also Le Rider, Modernity and Crises of Identity: Culture and Society in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna, trans. R. Morris (Cambridge, 1993). 54. See B. Han, ‘The Analytic of Finitude and the History of Subjectivity’, trans. Edward Pile, in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. G. Gutting (Cambridge, 2003), 176–209; I.D. Balbus, ‘Disciplining Women: Michel Foucault and the Power of Feminist Discourse’, in After Foucault: Humanistic Knowledge, Postmodern Challenges, ed. J. Arac (New Brunswick, NJ, 1991), 145, and J. Sawicki, ‘Feminism and the Power of Foucauldian Discourse,’ in Arac, After Foucault, 161–78.

Chapter 10

MAPPING THE SANATORIUM Heinrich Obersteiner and the Art of Psychiatric Patients in Oberdöbling around 1900

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n 1920, Professor Heinrich Obersteiner (1847–1922), former director of the Privatheilanstalt für Nerven- Gemüts- und Geisteskranke zu Oberdöbling in Vienna, received a letter from Dr. Hans Prinzhorn (1886–1933), assistant at the Psychiatric University Clinic in Heidelberg. In keeping with the many letters he sent across Europe at this time, Prinzhorn inquired after artistic works by psychiatric patients. In the following months and years, thousands of art works were sent to Heidelberg to create what was to become known as the collection of the ‘artistry of the mentally ill,’ (‘Bildnerei der Geiseskranken’), today compromising the Prinzhorn Collection.1 In response to this request, Obersteiner searched old medical files and sent works that eleven of his clinic’s patients (four of them women) had created there from around 1885 to 1905. By 1922, Prinzhorn had collected approximately 4,500 works and published his now classic book: Artistry of the Mentally Ill,2 yet Obersteiner’s contribution was not included in this or any of Prinzhorn’s later publications, nor were the works mentioned in the following decades in the exhibitions or publications of the Prinzhorn Collection. Interestingly, it wasn’t until the 1980s that single works from Obersteiner’s clinic began to feature in the collection’s exhibitions.3

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Professor Obersteiner, founder of the famous Neurological Institute in Vienna, seems to have taken little personal interest in these works, yet he sent them to Prinzhorn. A copy of Artistry of the Mentally Ill can also be found in the Obersteiner Library at the Medical University of Vienna, but as Obersteiner died in 1922, the year Prinzhorn’s book came out, it is unlikely that he had actually read this text. Furthermore, there are very few trails that give insight into Obersteiner’s own views on his patients’ works. Patient protocols from the clinic in Oberdöbling covering the time from 1824 to 1911 were recently found in the archive of Steinhof4 and transferred to the Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv.5 From 2006 onwards, scholars have been searching for traces of the eleven patient artists to put the images in Heidelberg into a framework of biographical information, and to provide descriptive glimpses into the clinic and its patients’ lives. The works in Heidelberg illustrate the female and male patients’ perceptions of the atmosphere of this reformist private clinic of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, thus enabling the viewer to embark upon a visual ‘journey’ through the sanatorium. As I will go on to explore, the subversive and critical content of the works also gives access to what we might term anti-psychiatry discourses of the late nineteenth century. These images can be placed into the context of a greater movement encompassing other psychiatric patients who raised their voices against omnipotent institutions, often accusing them of unjust committals: Between 1890 and 1914, dozens of ‘mad’ people from the respectable bourgeoisie – businessmen, civil servants, pastors, academics, lawyers, doctors, writers – went public with the most intimate and stigmatising details of their private lives. The stories were frightening and desperate: healthy people branded as insane, deprived of their legal capacities, and incarcerated in insane asylums as a result of the machinations of doctors, police officials, judges, and family members.6

As Gemma Blackshaw and Leslie Topp have pointed out with regard to the collages of Frau St. from Oberdöbling, patients’ works can usefully be located in critical discussions around 1900 of psychiatric institutional power, although such voices were hardly heard at the time: While psychiatry in Vienna had considerable public prestige, there also existed a concerted resistance to it (in the form of an embryonic anti-psychiatry movement) which was in turn rejected by psychiatrists who became concerned with their public image. The anti-psychiatry movement publicised accounts of individuals who claimed to be wrongly confined and, in some cases, abused in public and private psychiatric institutions. These are rare glimpses into the lives of the ‘subjects’ of psychiatry.7

Some of these ‘rare glimpses’ into patients’ lives have been preserved by Obersteiner, who provided Prinzhorn with examples of his patients’ art works for his special collection. Along with the twenty-five works from Oberdöbling, Ober-

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steiner sent a short list of information about the patients, giving their initials and diagnosed illnesses. Based on this data and on the recently discovered patient protocols in Vienna, the identities of the patients can be revealed, thus opening paths to new sources for the interpretation of their works. In this essay, I will first consider Obersteiner and his clinic, describing the environment in which these particular works were created. I will then focus more closely on two specific works; one artist, Herr Sz., can be identified, whilst another, Frau A., still remains anonymous. Such problems highlight both the possibilities and limitations of interpreting these art works.

Heinrich Obersteiner: Researcher, Creator, Teacher After studying medicine at the University of Vienna, Heinrich Obersteiner entered the clinic through family connections. He was the son of Heinrich Obersteiner senior (1820–1891), who had taken up the directorship of the Privatheilanstalt für Nerven- Gemüts- und Geisteskranke zu Oberdöbling in 1860, alongside Maximilian Leidesdorf (1816–1889).8 In 1872, Obersteiner senior retired, and his son became director of the clinic.9 Obersteiner was a highly regarded researcher and teacher: ‘His original research contributed enormously to the normal and pathological morphology of the nervous system. He became the constructor of neuropathology as an academic discipline’.10 His published works are still viewed as ‘pioneering achievements in the field of brain research’.11 In addition to heading up ‘the most significant private institution of Vienna in Oberdöbling’,12 he founded the Institut für Anatomie und Physiologie des Zentralnervensystems in 1882 (known as the Neurologisches Institut from 1905 to 1919), a private neurological institute for the research of the central nervous system and ‘the first such research centre of its kind’.13 In 1905, he donated parts of his extensive library and collections to the University of Vienna, now housed in the Obersteiner Library.14 Otto Marburg, Obersteiner’s assistant for many years, wrote his obituary in 1923, admiringly calling him ‘a researcher, a creator and a teacher like no other’, who had embodied great kindness and the ‘high culture of Vienna’, dearly loved by his students and friends. 15 Despite this professional and personal reputation, little is actually known about Obersteiner’s private life and his views on art. In 1923, part of Obersteiner’s art collection was sold, and the auction catalogue lists several paintings and sculptures by Old Masters and lesser-known artists of the nineteenth century.16 He loved music and theatre, collected old porcelain and spoke several languages.17 Obersteiner’s interest in culture shaped the clinic’s mission to support patients’ interests and supply them with ideas for leisure activities. Patients were encouraged to play music in the clinic’s dedicated music room, to perform private con-

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certs and to take roles in the clinic’s own theatre plays. They were also provided with books, magazines and international newspapers.18 The fine arts were only a marginal feature in the clinic’s agenda, with patients being encouraged to draw from nature or copy from the Old Masters, yet they were rarely invited to take their practice further than this.19

A Family Home: The Privatheilanstalt in Oberdöbling around 1900 Obersteiner is listed in psychiatric lexicons and special literature on Viennese psychiatry around 1900, yet in the past, the clinic itself has rarely been the subject of historical research.20 Contemporary publications, most of them by Obersteiner himself, give further insight into the institution itself, its daily routines and its general atmosphere.21 The clinic was founded by Bruno Georgen in 1819 as a private, fee-paying institution and was dedicated from the outset to a non-restraint policy, offering a pleasant, restful accommodation for its inhabitants.22 In 1831, the clinic was transferred from its original place in the Gumpendorferstraße in the city of Vienna to the suburb of Oberdöbling (Figures 10.1 and 10.2).23 There, the buildings were situated in a spacious garden, trips to theatres and concerts were regular distractions for quiet patients and the furnishings of the patients’ rooms strived

Figure 10.1. Die Privatheilanstalt zu Oberdöbling, View of the Main Building, around 1890, Leipzig-Vienna, 1891).

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Figure 10.2. Map of the Privatheilanstalt zu Oberdöbling, around 1890, LeipzigVienna, 1891).

‘in every way to replace the patients’ family home; that is why everything that resembles a hospital is avoided and a comfortable accommodation is sought for’.24 The rooms were built to withstand potential patient destruction, but were furnished in an elegant fashion, decorated with carpets, curtains, paintings and mirrors, pianos, flower tables and birdcages. Thus, life in the clinic was meant to be made as homely as possible.25 Nevertheless, this was a psychiatric institution, where noisy or violent patients could be isolated in separate parts of the clinic’s buildings and cross-barred beds were in use for ‘erratic, unhelpful patients who will not stay in bed’.26 Bruno Georgen, who was a passionate advocate of the nonrestraint method, was, however, keen to emphasise the alternative possibilities for the observation and control of the patients by the staff.27 There were only a few wealthy inhabitants in the clinic (around fifty during Obersteiner’s time), and they were treated more as sanatorium or hotel guests than patients of a psychiatric institution. Despite this treatment, they were classified according to their diagnosed mental illness and labelled with terms such as melancholia, hysteria, depression or paranoia. It is therefore not surprising that the clinic and its often quite famous patients were frequently the subject of contemporary newspaper articles and other writings concerning the controversial committals of some of the clinic’s inhabitants. For example, in 1969 Franz Englisch dedicated an article in the Wiener Geschichtsblätter to the clinic’s particularly notorious inhabitants and their scandals: ‘Quiet and inconspicuous the buildings

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of the sanatorium stand in Döbling, only known by few Viennese who do not suspect what shocking tragedies have taken place inside those walls.’28 The article seems to refer to scandalous cases like the Princess Louise of Sachsen-Coburg affair. Her committal to the clinic in Oberdöbling and following transfer to another clinic in Germany caused a stir in politics and newspapers and was well documented in the clinic’s records.29 In many newspaper articles the case was seen as the committal of an innocent person of royal descendance by her family in order to get rid of her with the help of psychiatrists. This shows the discrepancy between the clinic’s view of itself as a place of recreation and healing, and its perception from the outside as a place of human tragedy and suffering. According to patient protocols, some inmates of Oberdöbling regarded themselves as under observation or even as prisoners, deprived of their legal rights. However, they implied this rather indirectly; Herr Sz., for example, referred to the clinic’s doctors as ‘prison doctors’ who collaborated with his family to shut him up and keep him from his rights.30 This perception can be attributed to the interaction of three different moments in their histories as patients: the scene of their committal, the psychiatric classification of their condition in the anamnesis (medical or case history) and their subsequent treatment. Combined, these three seemed to confirm their perception as inmates in an institution of confinement, as opposed to free, individual subjects. The labelling of the patients in the preprinted protocols took place by filling in the (supposed) illness, such as dementia praecox, paranoia or progressive paralysis. It can be assumed that the mostly Latin classifications were not always understood by the patients who received them. Some diagnosed illnesses where later replaced by others, still classifying the patients in the professional jargon. Through this medical terminology, a distance was created between the psychiatrist and the ‘case’. Thus the individual’s complex personal history was neatly arranged into linguistic categories, revealing the strong connection between language and power.31 This language of separation and classification resulted in the exploration of mental illnesses around 1900 and can be found in specialist publications of the time.32 The patients’ multifaceted perception of their categorisation is noticeable in their letters, books and artistic works, but is also revealed in their records. These give an insight into the complex relationships between doctors and patients, which were further marked by contemporary discourses on psychiatric treatment. In the late nineteenth century, the professionalisation of psychiatry was still in its infancy, as Joachim Radkau pointed out with reference to the reciprocative relation between medical protocols and the patients’ own documents.33 While a noticeable bureaucratisation manifested itself in an increasing production of protocols and files, the definitions and descriptions of illnesses were often unclear because of the continuous changes in medical knowledge and psychiatric therapies. At the same time, patients themselves, in Radkan’s example

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those suffering from ‘neurasthenia’, took an active part in describing and verbalising their illnesses, often with the help of their own recordings.34 This illustrates the ambiguity of analysing and observing mental illnesses at this time. As I will now show, the patient art works and protocols from the Obersteiner clinic are excellent examples of this ambivalent perception.

Mapping the Patient: Case Histories as Biographical Framework The casebooks from Oberdöbling date from 1824 (a few years after the foundation of the clinic by Bruno Goergen in 1819) until 1911, six years before the clinic was sold by Obersteiner. More than two thousand reports were amassed there, giving an insight into the clinic’s day-to-day life, admission policy and treatment regimes. For many years the whereabouts of these books were unknown.35 Obersteiner sold the estate in 1916 to the Terra-Erwerbsgesellschaft, which later built several mansions in parts of the garden.36 In 1917, the clinic was finally closed, and during the two world wars the buildings were used as a military hospital.37 Before the Second World War, the medical reports were transferred from Oberdöbling to the archive of Steinhof and today are kept in the Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv in Vienna.38 Not all volumes of the medical reports have been preserved (the reports from January 1863 until April 1872 are missing), but it can be assumed that Obersteiner did not use works from the time before he became director for his selection for Prinzhorn. As can be seen from the handwriting in the identified reports, he only chose material from patients he had known personally, which is also indicated by the dates on some of the works.39 Each volume is a pre-printed book, bound in leather, with a volume number and an alphabetical index of the patients. In the casebooks, the following pieces of information for each patient are recorded on a double page: patient number received upon admission, date, name, ‘character’ (meaning profession), age, marital status, religion, birthplace, place of residence, as well as information on who committed the person and the name of the legal guardian. Finally, the diagnosis and its supposed cause were noted, together with the duration of the person’s condition before admission into the clinic. After this basic data had been recorded, more space was dedicated to the anamnesis and the ‘status praesens’, meaning the further progression of the illness in the clinic. In some cases additional numbered pages with further comments were loosely attached to the book. The form provided space for notes on the medical treatment and other remarks and lastly a few lines were dedicated to the patient’s release date or death. The forms put the life stories of hundreds of people into a manageable schedule, reconfiguring an individual into facts and dates, and transforming each person with their complexities into a ‘case’ that could be worked on.40 This admin-

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istrative aspect of the files supplied a framework for further knowledge to be added, whilst giving an insight into the clinic’s working methods. Protocols like the ones from Oberdöbling were used as working tools for the attending psychiatrists and were not meant for publication. They thus give what we might think of as unfiltered or uncensored information on the clinic’s practices, which converted individual subjects into patient cases.41 As Ulrike Hoffmann-Richter and Asmus Finzen have pointed out, case histories of a clinic cannot be understood and interpreted regardless of their history of origin or their use in the clinic’s daily routine. Thus, certain knowledge on psychiatry and the institution is required, as well as a methodology for their interpretation.42 A careful approach to those files is advisable, especially as there are only a few other sources and publications on the clinic, Obersteiner and his patients, to which I will now turn.

Case Histories: Art Works from Oberdöbling in the Prinzhorn Collection Eleven of the clinic’s patients left visual documents, which were commented on by Obersteiner. Because of this additional information, their case reports do not remain ‘undecipherable’,43 as the files clarify their identities. For example, Obersteiner’s summary to Prinzhorn, ‘5. Herr H. important painter 40 y. P.p., dementia simplex’,44 can be cross-referenced with the protocols, identifying the patient as Gustav Holweg (1855–1890), a former professional painter. He was institutionalized in Oberdöbling from 1885 until his death in 1890. There, he created several drawings of palaces.45 Holweg’s biography before the committal gives clues to understanding some remarks in his protocol and vice versa; they complement each other in certain ways. Generally speaking, finding the persons behind the works, starting from Obersteiner’s information and the casebooks in the Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv, is a veritable paper chase. Problems appear in particular in the research on the four female patient artists, as no information about their marital status or their profession (which they most probably did not have) is given in Obersteiner’s list. Apart from his slight inaccuracies regarding the age and diagnosis of the artists – which still enables us to identify male patients – this lack of professional characterisation presents a real problem in the search for the women’s reports. Obersteiner’s selection of art works for the Prinzhorn collection dates mainly from around 1900. At this point in time, only a certain numbers of patients were admitted to the clinic, and Obersteiner knew them all personally. Even though he had had a personal relationship with these individuals, he sent a much-reduced description to Prinzhorn, revealing very little information about them; it is difficult to ascertain if he did this to protect their identities or because he was indifferent to them. When the art works entered Prinzhorn’s collection, they were

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even further anonymised, as single artists were given a case number in addition to the inventory number of each work and Obersteiner’s initial description. The Prinzhorn Collection in Heidelberg houses twenty-five drawings, collages and texts by eleven patients of the Privatheilanstalt in Oberdöbling. Some of them have been part of recent exhibitions and publications like the newspaper collages of Frau St.46 or the frail drawing and text of the academic painter Gustav Holweg.47 However, Obersteiner’s contribution to the Prinzhorn Collection has not been examined as a whole, especially with regard to the circumstances in the sanatorium, the doctor’s view on the art works and the patients’ voices behind them. Roy Porter’s assumption from 1985 that ‘you can only know about the sick through doctor’s eyes, their case histories and hospital records; all else is mute prehistory’48 shall thus be questioned. In this context, the juxtaposition of works and protocols form an expressive kaleidoscope in which the personalities of the artists, the public and psychiatric discourses in Vienna in 1900 intermingle to become part of a complex historical pattern.

An Unsolved Case: Frau A.’s View of the Clinic The first case on Obersteiner’s list is ‘Frau A. about 30 years old Catatonia, image of the clinic. A photograph is enclosed for comparison’.49 The image is painted in gouache above a pencil drawing and shows a view of the main building of the clinic (Figure 10.3). The main building was surrounded by a spacious park overlooking the city of Vienna. In contrast to the vastness of the real villa, Frau A. gave the building the appearance of a massive block, compressing the single details like the risalits, chimneys, doors and windows as well as decorative elements like the three prominent flagpoles on the roof into a much more compact form. The ball-shaped basis of the central flagpole captured her attention, enforcing the impression of a fortress or a prison. The small windows and doors are cross-barred, excluding virtually all the light and air as indicated by the blue sky surrounding the house and the gleaming sunlight on the left side. Even though the colours in this picture are warm and light, an atmosphere of claustrophobia and anxiety is created by the house’s seclusion, reinforced by the tentacular shaped forms ‘climbing up’ the wall in the middle of the building. These were actually the overgrown columns of the central veranda. Frau A.’s interpretation of the building’s architectural elements adds to the threatening aura of the house. None of the plants or trees surrounding the clinic are shown, contrary to contemporary photographs that always depicted this shrubbery in order to underline the institution’s reformist image rather than being an institution of confinement. However, Frau A.’s image does not resemble the ‘family home’50 that Obersteiner described in 1891. On the contrary, it leaves the viewer with a gloomy feeling of oppression and calls to mind patient accounts of the time

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Figure 10.3. Mrs A. (Case Nr. 284), Untitled (View of the Main Building), undated, pencil and coating paint on paper, 18.4 x 27.5 cm, Inv. Nr. 3391, Sammlung Prinzhorn der Psychiatrischen Universitätsklinik Heidelberg.

describing even sanatorium-like institutions as prisons and its doctors and nurses as criminals.51 Frau A.’s picture can be interpreted as an expression of ambiguous or even negative feelings of a patient towards the institution. As previously mentioned, Oberdöbling was more like a sanatorium than a ‘madhouse’, with a large park and elegant rooms, surrounding its inhabitants with all possible comfort. Nevertheless, once a patient had entered the clinic, it was not easy to leave. The conclusiveness of being shut up as ‘insane’, the release depending on the authorities, met with an increasing public uneasiness towards psychiatric power around 1900. A growing movement against arbitrary committals was supported by a mainly middle-class public. As Ann Goldberg has observed, By the 1890s, ‘mad’ people were increasingly seeing the individual events of their lives as emblematic of a broader pattern and in terms of national narratives of systematic abuse and corruption. This was both cause and effect of the fact that the ‘mad’ had the ear of the nation: individual cases became public scandals widely reported in the press and the subject of parliamentary debates.52

Psychiatrists had to position themselves against the image of corrupt and conscienceless bureaucrats who had people committed to psychiatric institutions at their will:

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In the late nineteenth century, psychiatrists and government officials were preoccupied with image making, and particularly with the image presented to the wider public. In the face of attacks from an early anti-psychiatry movement, they saw asylum architecture as a vital tool for convincing the public that asylums were not places of secrecy, cruelty and injustice.53

The image discussed here illustrates this shift in attitude towards psychiatric power. We might interpret it as a visual comment made by a psychiatric inmate on the institutional powers of the clinic, which isolates its inhabitants from the outside world. It is not the artist herself who in this picture ‘symbolises the social and human exclusion of madness’54 in Robert Castel’s sense, but the bricks and mortar of an architectural entity. The images of the main building and views of the rooms were, ironically, used to promote ideas of non-restraint and reform.55 Frau A.’s picture gives us an insight into the perception of a woman who lived behind these walls, although this insight is an incomplete one as it can not be compared to her patient protocol. The appropriation of personal space in the clinic was essential for psychiatric patients of all times and social classes, especially for women.56 Monika Ankele has shown this through Eugénie P.’s drawing of a literally transparent middle-class room, entitled ‘ma petite chambre 1912–1919’57 where Eugénie P. probably had lived before her committal. This room features walls of glass and all details are drawn with great care. This seems like the opposite of Frau A.’s hostile image of Oberdöbling. Frau A.’s work also goes further than acquiring private space in the clinic: on the one side characterising it as threatening and locked, on the other side mocking the almightiness of the Anstalt by representing the large building in a small picture, reducing it to its mere façade. Following Philipp Sarasin’s argument that most ‘experiences’ of the speaking subject in ‘ego-documents’ (as Frau A.’s work might be described) refer back to the discursive conditions that formed those experiences, Frau A.’s work can be usefully located in the above-mentioned discourses on psychiatry. As Sarasin has noted on autobiographical texts, this image ‘shows the border of those symbolical structures, unveiling the place where the net of representation is torn’.58 Frau A.’s work can thus be regarded as a subversive act of negation and refusal of the clinic’s self-perception and representation, contributing to what we might think of as an emergent antipsychiatry movement. In the following section I will explore this issue in more detail by way of further works produced by another Oberdöbling patient.

‘[He] Scribbles His Aphorisms on Shoals of Notebooks’: The Caricatures of Herr Sz. Ten drawings were attributed by Obersteiner to another patient, number 7 on his list, a certain ‘Herr Sz., cavalry captain, 50 years old, typical paranoia’.59 While

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Obersteiner’s description of Frau A. does not provide researchers with sufficient coordinate points to locate the person that this data describes, the note on Herr Sz., cross-referenced with Obersteiner’s medical report, leads to Count Carl Philipp Maria Széchényi.60 He was a nephew of the Hungarian statesman Count Stephan Széchenyi (1791–1860) who had been a patient in Oberdöbling from 1848 to 1860.61 Count Carl Philipp Maria Széchényi was born in Sopron (Ödenburg, Hungaria) on 8 May 1853.62 In 1873, he graduated from the Law Faculty of the Catholic University of Leuven.63 The casebook reveals that he became a cavalry captain in the army, and subsequent conflicts with his family on money and the family estate are documented in the anamnesis. Széchényi went to court against members of his family because he felt betrayed, and in the course of the trial was committed to the clinic in Oberdöbling. Two pages of the case report and four loosely attached extra pages, mostly in Obersteiner’s handwriting, chronicle Széchényi’s life at the clinic between 1894 and 1917. An additional collection of letters and newspaper articles on the case gives insight into the public reception of Széchényi’s committal, which was a huge scandal and became the subject of several discussions in the Hungarian houses of parliament. The report stops in 1914, and the last entry is dated March 1917, when Széchényi was transferred to the PrivatHeil- und Pflegeanstalt für Gemüts- und Geisteskranke in Tulln near Vienna. After this, no further traces of him can be found, but with the information in his patient files from Oberdöbling, his drawings and texts can be placed in a biographical framework, offering a wide range of possibilities for their interpretation. Two double and three single pages have drawings and texts on all sides. The texts are written in regular and fine handwriting in black ink. Simply but carefully executed, expressive illustrations of the texts in pencil are inserted between the sentences. The sentences form little dialogues that seem like keys to those scenes in which two or three persons are involved in a crucial moment before a committal, when a person is marked as ‘insane’. The drawings and texts can be categorised into three thematic groups. The first group concerns the topic of committal and the different forms of mental illnesses that are named as the reason why a person ‘should be committed to the clinic of Professor Obersteiner’.64 The second group consists of ‘Zeitungsenten’; stories published by newspapers that turn out to be untrue. These stories involve the celebrities and politicians of Széchényi’s time, like Princess Pauline von Metternich, Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria, or Otto von Bismarck. The third group is a description of the fantastic journey of Frau Schnabeles and her two daughters in order to find husbands for the girls, which takes them all the way to the moon and back. It is the first group, with scenes of committal of people who upon seemingly strange behaviour are regarded as mentally ill, which is of particular interest: You should be committed to the clinic of Professor Obersteiner in Oberdöbling! Observing psychiatrist: Windows smashed with a stick. For observation if you are raving mad, you should be committed to the clinic of Professor Obersteiner in Oberdöbling

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… Runs away from butchers. For the purpose of observation if you are not paranoid, you should be committed to the clinic of Professor Obersteiner in Oberdöbling.65

The following caricatures describe similar scenes on suggested illnesses as paranoia, raving madness or delirium tremens (Figure 10.4): Look at this dandy, he thinks of himself as good-looking, he suffers from megalomania. You should be committed to the clinic of Professor Obersteiner in Oberdöbling … The man goes on smoking my cigar and leaves his own which is much bigger and finer. You are absent-minded, confused, you should be committed to the clinic of Professor Obersteiner in Oberdöbling.66

Figure 10.4. Count Carl Széchényi (Mr Sz., Case Nr. 290), Sie gehören zum Profeßor Obersteiner nach Oberdöbling, undated, pencil and ink on paper, 21 x 34 cm, Inv. Nr. 3404 fol. 2r, Sammlung Prinzhorn der Psychiatrischen Universitätsklinik Heidelberg.

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In Széchényi’s patient protocol one entry from 1902 alludes to these works as ‘[He] scribbles his aphorisms on shoals of notebooks’.67 It is also recorded that he started writing early in his life in Oberdöbling, but immediately destroyed most of his texts. One of the best known psychiatric patients who published their biographies, the German judge Daniel Paul Schreber (1842–1911), also referred in his famous Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903) to putting notes into his notebooks. In contrast to Széchényi, however, he kept the notes as he regarded them as highly important for future readers.68 Schreber also described his hallucinations of persons entering his room or walking in the garden as based on humorous images from the satirical weekly magazine Fliegende Blätter.69 Aphorisms – the term that Obersteiner used to describe Széchényi’s writings – were an inherent part of the Fliegende Blätter that appeared from 1844 to 1944.70 It is very likely that Count Széchényi was a frequent reader of this magazine too. The patient protocol also mentions a humorous calendar he received as a Christmas gift in 1894 that highly amused the count, who thought to have identified the characters in the calendar as some of his acquaintances.71 Széchényi himself and the scene of his own committal are not the obvious subject of his drawings and texts – the characters remain anonymous or refer to comical stereotypes. The dandy for example is a figure of ridicule, as can be seen in many caricatures of young men, dressed in the latest fashion, spending a lot of money on their clothes and appearance.72 The Oberdöbling caricatures are notable for such socio-critical comment. Thomas Roth put this aspect of the drawings into focus, observing that they sketch with few words and spare strokes a series of everyday situations which develop under the gaze of the ‘observing psychiatrist’ into moments of decision on normal or ‘insane’ behavior. Psychiatrist and environment place themselves as judges in using the phrase: ‘You should be committed to the clinic of Professor Obersteiner in Oberdöbling!’, thus deciding the verdict on somebody who does not behave in what is considered a normal way.73

Roth has already mapped out the key characteristics of Széchényi’s drawings and texts, pointing out the count’s reduced formal style in drawing and writing. This seems like the visual translation of the described scene in which, in a couple of seconds, the judgement is passed, compressing it into a few lines of cartoon-like illustrations.

The Patients’ Views: Re-mapping the Environment Széchényi’s caricatures fit precisely into contemporary critical discourses on psychiatry, even though his drawings and texts seem to have a more personal character than other critical writings of his time. In fact, dozens of individuals who had been diagnosed as insane turned, as Goldberg put it, ‘to the public with their

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stories of wrongful incarceration and incapacitations, in order, paradoxically, to reclaim reputation and citizenship, in a word, personhood’.74 Such narratives, disseminated in diverse forms of publications had the purpose of reestablishing the authors’ social status and dignity, which had been undermined by the psychiatric diagnosis: ‘This was the key to erasing the stigma and shame of an insanity diagnosis, to reclaiming legal capacity, and to picking up the pieces of a shattered life’.75 Obersteiner seems to have felt the urge to defend himself and other psychiatrists against such public accusations gaining momentum since the committal of Princess Louise of Sachsen-Coburg to Oberdöbling in 1898 to which I have previously referred.76 In a commentary on draft legislation regarding the mentally ill in 1911,77 he wrote extensively about the committal of innocent individuals. From his point of view no director of a psychiatric institution would detain a sane person and take the risk of losing their reputation and livelihood. Rather unexpectedly, he added that detention in a private asylum with all its facilities was still less painful than being incarcerated in a prison cell.78 It seems from this that Obersteiner acknowledged that mistakes were made in the process of institutionalising people, but in the subsequent pages he returns to emphasising the importance of preventing genuinely ‘insane’ people from doing harm, whatever the cost. If imminent danger could be prevented, psychiatrists should be allowed to admit patients without unnecessarily long and complex formalities. With reference to the large number of cases reported in the papers, where insane people would waste all their money or otherwise ruin their families, he underlined his argument and added that great misfortunes had been brought by mentally ill persons on their families and friends, which was not communicated entirely to the public.79 In the end, it seems as if Count Széchényi was more interested in ridiculing his surroundings, rather than making direct public accusations. Nevertheless, his drawings can be interpreted as subversive documents of a satirically biased psychiatry critique. His and other patients’ drawings and collages were preserved with virtually no comment. While Széchényi’s drawings can be interpreted in a new way by consulting his patient protocol and biographical background, the work of Frau A. lacks such a biographical framework that would give more insight into the exact time of the image making and its circumstances. The methodologies used by scholars quoted earlier in this essay represent a critical perspective on psychiatry and its power around 1900. They bring to light the deep entanglement of the exertion of institutional power over individuals, and the erasure of their biographical background in order to create patients without a past. However, in the protocols, personal histories of patients were recorded in great detail, to be used either as administrative or medical tools. Thus, the notion of a protocol as a form in which a life was split into dates and facts, has to be unveiled and revised in order to further understand its function to secure

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power. The protocol also reveals knowledge about the artists as well as the institution to which their artworks might refer by carefully listing the daily events in the patients’ lives and their interactions with the attending doctors, as well as the observations of the latter. Finally, the works – visual ‘ego-documents’ in their own mocking and often subversive sense – add a new side to the spectrum of the mentioned historical sources, opening new paths towards the history of psychiatry, mirroring it ‘through the looking-glass’ of autobiographical art. I would argue that in order to achieve a more nuanced understanding of the interaction of the artworks and the few surviving sources that enable us to place them in a wider historical context, these two sources need to be put into a new and different relationship. The artworks from Oberdöbling provide us with an opportunity to refine and complement Porter’s provocative dictum by adding two crucial aspects. Firstly, one can look at the mentally ill through the psychiatric institution’s eyes, (without excluding information on their prehistory). And secondly, one can also look at the psychiatric institution through the patients’ eyes. In order to ensure the most critical attitude towards the image of psychiatry around 1900, one side cannot exist without the other. By contrasting patient artworks and patient files, the virtual journey through the clinic starts from two points. These two lines overlap each other, just as the medical forms overlap with the drawings of the patients. Thus, a multifaceted view of the psychiatric institution is created, shaping an image of the Anstalt from the outside point of view of the psychiatrists as well as from inside through the patient artists’ eyes.

Notes 1. www.prinzhorn.uni-hd.de (accessed January 2011). 2. See H. Prinzhorn, Artistry of the Mentally Ill, ed. E. Brockdorff, 2nd ed., (New York, 1995). 3. See T. Roth, ‘“Liebe Mutter, ich habe wieter meine Freiheit verloren!” Über einige Briefe und Bildergeschichten in der Prinzhorn-Sammlung’, in Die Prinzhorn-Sammlung. Bilder, Skulpturen, Texte aus Psychiatrischen Anstalten (ca. 1890–1920), ed. H. Gercke and I. Jarchov (Königstein/Taunus, 1980), 70–84; B. Brand-Claussen, C. Douglas and L. Busine, eds., Beyond Reason. Art and Psychosis. Works from the Prinzhorn Collection (London, 1996), 173; B. Brand-Claussen and I. Jádi, eds., Vision & Revision einer Entdeckung (Heidelberg, 2001), Cat. Nr. 20; G. Steinlechner, ‘Gestaltungen eines Möglichkeitssinns, Die CollageArbeiten von Frau St.’, in Irre ist weiblich. Künstlerische Interventionen von Frauen in der Psychiatrie um 1900, ed. B. Brand-Claussen and V. M. Michely (Heidelberg, 2004), 66–71; A. Lehninger, ‘Gustav Holweg (1855–1890) – An ‘Important Painter’,’ in Artists off the Rails, eds. B. Brand-Claussen and T. Röske (Heidelberg, 2008), 48–53; G. Blackshaw and L. Topp, ‘Scrutinised Bodies and Lunatic Utopias: Mental Illness, Psychiatry and the Visual Arts in Vienna, 1898–1914,’ in Madness and Modernity. Mental Illness and the Visual Arts in Vienna 1900, ed. G. Blackshaw and L. Topp (Surrey, 2009), 15–37. 4. Today the Sozialmedizinisches Zentrum Baumgartner Höhe Otto-Wagner-Spital.

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5. Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv, Bestand Krankenhaus Obersteinergasse (2.9.4.3), B6 Protokolle 1824–1862, 1872–1911 1–9 (Standpl. 303/7/24). 6. A. Goldberg, ‘A Reinvented Public: “Lunatics’ Rights” and Bourgeois Populism in the Kaiserreich’, in Psychiatrie im 19. Jahrhundert. Forschungen zur Geschichte von psychiatrischen Institutionen und Praktiken im deutschen Sprachraum, ed. E.J. Engstrom and V. Roelcke (Basel, 2003), 189. 7. Blackshaw and Topp, ‘Scrutinised Bodies’, 19. 8. Obersteiner senior was not active as a researcher, but had travelled extensively and published a book on his travels in Spain and Portugal. H. Obersteiner, Nach Spanien und Portugal. Reise-Erinnerungen aus den Jahren 1880 und 1882 (Vienna, 1882). 9. Maximilian Leidesdorf was Obersteiner’s father-in-law. After Leidesdorf had died in 1889 Obersteiner took over the clinic as sole director and stayed in this position until 1917. Z. Bechmann, ‘Heinrich Obersteiner. 1847–1922. Leben und Werk’ (Med. diss., University of Tübingen, 1999), 8–31. 10. F. Seitelberger, ‘Heinrich Obersteiner and the Neurological Institute: Foundation and History of Neuroscience in Vienna’, Brain Pathology, no. 2 (1999): 163–68. 11. H. Gröger and S. Kasper, ‘The Dominance of the Organic-Biological View in the Psychiatry of the Vienna Medical School and the Early Days of Psychopharamcology’, in On the History of Psychiatry in Vienna, ed. H. Gröger, E. Gabriel and S. Kasper (Vienna, Munich, 1997), 16. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid. 14. Bechmann, ‘Heinrich Obersteiner’, (1999), 8–31. 15. O. Marburg, ‘Gedenkrede für Heinrich Obersteiner’, Schweizer Archiv für Neurologie und Psychiatrie 12 (1923): 175. This and all further quotations in German were translated into English by the author. 16. A. Kende, Nachlass Hofrat Prof. Dr. Heinrich Obersteiner, Wien, I. Abteilung, ferner ein Teil des Nachlasses Alexander Girardi und Wiener Privatbesitz (Vienna, 1923). 17. Bechmann, ‘Heinrich Obersteiner’, 8–31. 18. Die Privatheilanstalt zu Oberdöbling, Wien, XIX. Bezirk, Hirschengasse 71, II. Bericht über die Leistungen der Anstalt vom 1. Juli 1875 bis 30. Juni 1891 (Leipzig, Vienna, 1891), 103–4. 19. Ibid., 102; Steinlechner, ‘Gestaltungen’, 66. 20. See F. Englisch, ‘Die Döblinger Privatirrenanstalt. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Wiener Pflegeanstalten für Geisteskranke’, Wiener Geschichtsblätter, no. 1 (1969): 398–406; E. Gabriel and M. Gamper, eds., Psychiatrische Institutionen in Österreich um 1900 (Vienna, 2009), 12. 21. See Die Privatheilanstalt für Gemüts- und Nervenkranke zu Ober-Döbling bei Wien seit ihrer Gründung (1819) nebst einem Berichte über ihre Leistungen in der fünfzehnjährigen Periode vom 1. Juli 1860 bis 30. Juni 1875 (Vienna, 1876); Privatheilanstalt zu Oberdöbling 1891; Heinrich Obersteiner, ‘Privatheilanstalt für Nerven-, Gemüts- und Geisteskranke in OberDöbling,’ in Irrenpflege in Österreich in Wort und Bild, ed. H. Schlöss (Halle an der Saale, 1912), 232–39. 22. Bechmann, ‘Heinrich Obersteiner’, 8–31. 23. Privatheilanstalt zu Oberdöbling 1876, 6. 24. Ibid., 21. 25. Ibid., 24. 26. Ibid. 27. B. Goergen, Privat-Heilanstalt für Gemüthskranke (Vienna, 1820), 18. 28. Englisch, ‘Döblinger Privatirrenanstalt’, 406.

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29. See Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv, Bestand Krankenhaus Obersteinergasse (2.9.4.3), Alte Krankengeschichten 1851–1912, Prinzessin Louise von Sachsen-Coburg, A4, 1. 30. Patient protocol of Carl Graf Széchényi, Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv, Bestand Krankenhaus Obersteinergasse (2.9.4.3) B6, vol. 7, Pr. Nr. 1915, 3. 31. R. Krause, Abstraktion – Krise – Wahnsinn. Die Ordnung der Diskurse in Robert Musils Roman ‘Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften’ (Würzburg, 2008), 129. 32. Cesare Lombroso referred to patients who created artistic works by using their diagnosis as main personal description. C. Lombroso, Genie und Irrsinn in ihren Beziehungen zum Gesetz, zur Kritik und zur Geschichte (Leipzig, 1887), 185–219. 33. J. Radkau, Das Zeitalter der Nervosität. Deutschland zwischen Bismarck und Hitler (Munich, Vienna, 1998), 78. 34. Ibid., 78–79. 35. Bechmann, ‘Heinrich Obersteiner’, 31. 36. Englisch, ‘Döblinger Privatirrenanstalt’, 402. 37. Bechmann, ‘Heinrich Obersteiner’, 30. 38. A letter to a patient relative from 1940 is addressed from Steinhof, telling that the files from Oberdöbling have been put there. See Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv, Bestand Krankenhaus Obersteinergasse (2.9.4.3), B6 Protokolle 1824–1862, 1872–1911 1–9 (Standpl. 303/7/24), vol. 8, 222, attached letter of 15 February 1940. 39. The drawing of Gustav Holweg can be dated around 1885 according to the patient protocol. Lehninger, ‘Gustav Holweg’, 51–52. ‘Hauptmann Z.’ dated his text himself with 1889, while the newspapers that Frau St. used for her collages bear the date of 1891. Another undated drawing is signed by Baron Ludwig Redl, a recurrent patient between 1897 and 1916. 40. S. Brändli, B. Lüthi and G. Spuhler, ‘“Fälle” in der Geschichte von Medizin, Psychiatrie und Psychologie im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert’, in Zum Fall machen, zum Fall werden. Wissensproduktion und Patientenerfahrung in Medizin und Psychiatrie des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. S. Brändli, B. Lüthi and G. Spuhler (Frankfurt, 2009), 13. 41. Ibid., 25. 42. U. Hoffmann-Richter and A. Finzen, ‘Die Krankengeschichte als Quelle. Zur Nutzung der Krankengeschichte als Quelle für Wissenschaft und psychiatrischen Alltag’, Bios. Zeitschrift für Biographieforschung, Oral History und Lebensverlaufsanalysen 2 (1998): 281. 43. Brändli, Lüthi and Spuhler, ‘“Fälle”’, 19. 44. Note from Heinrich Obersteiner to Hans Prinzhorn, Case Nr. 288, Inv. Nr. 3402, Sammlung Prinzhorn der Psychiatrischen Universitätsklinik Heidelberg. 45. Lehninger, ‘Gustav Holweg’. 46. See Brand-Claussen and Michely, Irre ist weiblich; Blackshaw and Topp, Madness and Modernity. 47. See Brand-Claussen and Röske, Artists off the Rails. 48. Roy Porter, ‘The Patient’s View. Doing Medical History from Below’, Theory and Society, no. 2 (1985): 182. 49. Note from Heinrich Obersteiner to Hans Prinzhorn, Case Nr. 284, Inv. Nr. 3391, Sammlung Prinzhorn der Psychiatrischen Universitätsklinik Heidelberg. 50. Privatheilanstalt zu Oberdöbling 1891, 21. 51. Karin Nolte describes this perception, giving the example of the German Landesheilanstalt Marburg, which consisted of several pavilions situated in a large park. The secret letters of female patients from 1900 draw a different picture, describing it as a ‘madhouse’ and prison. K. Nolte, Gelebte Hysterie. Erfahrung, Eigensinn und psychiatrische Diskurse im Anstaltsalltag um 1900 (Frankfurt and New York, 2003), 87.

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52. Goldberg, ‘A Reinvented Public’, 202. 53. L. Topp, ‘The Modern Mental Hospital in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany and Austria. Psychiatric Space and Images of Freedom and Control’, in Madness, Architecture, and the Built Environment. Psychiatric Spaces in Historical Context, ed. L. Topp, J.E. Moran and J. Andrews (New York, London, 2007), 241. 54. R. Castel, Die psychiatrische Ordnung. Das goldene Zeitalter des Irrenwesens (Frankfurt, 1979), 261–62. 55. See Obersteiner, ‘Privatheilanstalt’. 56. See Brand-Claussen and Michely, Irre ist weiblich. 57. M. Ankele, Alltag und Aneignung in Psychiatrien um 1900. Selbstzeugnisse von Frauen in der Sammlung Prinzhorn (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar, 2009), 155–56. 58. Philipp Sarasin, ‘Mapping the Body. Körpergeschichte zwischen Konstruktivismus, Politik und “Erfahrung”’, Historische Anthropologie. Kultur, Gesellschaft, Alltag, no. 3 (1999): 450. 59. ‘7. Herr Sz. Dr. phil. Rittmeister 50 J. typische Paranoia’, note from Heinrich Obersteiner to Hans Prinzhorn, Case Nr. 290, Inv. Nr. 3404–3407, Sammlung Prinzhorn der Psychiatrischen Universitätsklinik Heidelberg. 60. Patient protocol of Carl Graf Széchényi, Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv, Bestand Krankenhaus Obersteinergasse 2.9.4.3 B6, vol. 7, Pr. Nr. 1915, 12. 61. A. Oplatka, Graf Stephan Széchenyi. Der Mann, der Ungarn schuf (Vienna, 2004), 402–44. 62. He was a grandson of Count Paul Széchényi, the second eldest brother of Stephan Széchenyi and the first child of Count Kálmán Széchényi and Countess Karoline Grünne. János József Gudenus, A magyarországi főnemesség XX. századi genealógiája, vol. 4, Budapest, 1998, 39. Information by Kinga Körmendy, Archives of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, 9.12.2009 63. Annuaire de l’Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain 1873, 167; and 1874, 197. After his studies he became chamberlain at the imperial court in Vienna. Joseph Wils, Les étudiants des régions comprises dans la nation germanique à l’Université de Louvain, tome II (Louvain 1910), 9. Information from Mark Derez, University Archives of the Catholic University of Leuven, 17.11.2009. 64. Count Carl Széchényi (Herr Sz., Case Nr. 290), undated, pencil and ink on paper, 21 x 34 cm, Inv. Nr. 3404 fol. 1r, Sammlung Prinzhorn der Psychiatrischen Universitätsklinik Heidelberg. 65. Ibid. 66. Count Carl Széchényi (Herr Sz., Case 290), Sie gehören zum Profeßor Obersteiner nach Oberdöbling, undated, pencil and ink on paper, 21 x 34 cm, Inv. Nr. 3404 fol. 2r, Sammlung Prinzhorn der Psychiatrischen Universitätsklinik Heidelberg. 67. ‘1902 … Schreibt Unmengen von Heften mit seinen Aphorismen voll.’ Patient protocol of Carl Graf Széchényi, 3. 68. D.P. Schreber, Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken: nebst Nachträgen und einem Anhang über die Frage: ‘Unter welchen Voraussetzungen darf eine für geisteskrank erachtete Person gegen ihren erklärten Willen in einer Heilanstalt festgehalten werden?’ 2nd ed. (Berlin, 2003), 137–38. 69. Ibid., 171. 70. F. Spicker, Der Aphorismus. Begriff und Gattung von der Mitte des 18. Jahrhunderts bis 1912 (Berlin and New York, 1997), 236. 71. Patient protocol of Carl Graf Széchényi, 2. 72. G. Wolter, ‘Modische Männer – Stutzer, Gecken, Elegants’, in Ridikül! Mode in der Karikatur 1600–1900, ed. Adelheid Rasche and Gundula Wolter (Cologne and Berlin, 2003), 291.

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73. 74. 75. 76.

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Roth, ‘Liebe Mutter’, 76. Goldberg, ‘Reinvented Public’, 197–98. Ibid. Karl Kraus dedicated a whole issue of Die Fackel to this case, taking the side of the princess. See K. Kraus, ‘Irrenhaus Österreich’, Die Fackel, no. 166 (6 October 1904): 1–21. 77. H. Obersteiner, ‘Der Geisteskranke, und das Gesetz in Österreich. Vergangenheit, Gegenwart, Zukunft’, Juristisch-Psychiatrische Grenzfragen. Zwanglose Abhandlungen 7, no. 5 (Halle an der Sale, 1911): 23–42 and 23–26. 78. Ibid., 29. 79. Ibid., 30.

Chapter 11

THE WÜRTTEMBERG ASYLUM OF SCHUSSENRIED A Psychiatric Space and Its Encounter with Literature and Culture from the ‘Outside’

d Thomas Müller and Frank Kuhn

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his essay deals with the social history of an upper Swabian asylum at the close of the nineteenth century, its internal living conditions and the encounters of asylum inmates with the ‘outer’ world as well as the representation of these perspectives in different media and literature. In the first section, we shall introduce the history and characteristics of the treatment facility itself. In the main section, we shall analyse different journeys between the worlds ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the asylum walls as well as their literary and material manifestations in order to discuss the characteristics of everyday life in the asylum of Schussenried. Based on the results of this study, we shall discuss in the third section the implications of the source materials presented here for writing a social history of psychiatry.

Introduction This essay takes a specific psychiatric institution (Schussenried) as a point of reference. It was established in a former monastery of the Premonstratensian order in the second half of the nineteenth century, a monastery that had itself been

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founded at this location in the twelfth century. This order had its origins in Prémontré, in a valley close to Laôn in Picardy in northern France, and was founded in 1210 by Saint Norbert of Xanten. Schussenried is a small rural market town in southwestern Germany on the river Schussen. After secularisation,1 its relevance beyond the locality was limited, and today it is primarily known as a spa and health resort. It also offers psychiatric and rehabilitative medical services. The psychiatric institution, which is the object of analysis here, was opened in 1875 as a so-called treatment facility. In the entire south-western region and thus also in Schussenried, a large number of former monasteries were converted into hospitals or psychiatric hospitals during secularisation in 1803 or as a consequence of post-revolutionary developments in the early nineteenth century.2 In this context, the Schussenried asylum was established rather later than other establishments. As far as the economic aspects of post-revolutionary developments are concerned, there are valid ecclesiastical perspectives that have often referred to misappropriation or loss of documents and to a cultural decline. But it is important to bear in mind that associated responsibilities changed hands along with property and real estate in the secularisation phase of the monasteries.3 In addition to spiritual guidance, the new owners of monasteries, in so far as the new owner was the state, also assumed appropriate duties including assistance to the poor and the mentally ill. Thus, in many Central European regions the secularisation of Christian monasteries initiated the development of secular assistance to the sick and poor, or at least generated the impulse. The main thesis of the history of psychiatry in the early nineteenth century proposes that as a result of the political repercussions of the French Revolution or under the influence of several renowned psychiatrists, such as Pinel in France, there was a lessening, in France, of the tendency to exclude the so-called irrational. One should be wary of turning Pinel or this phase of French psychiatry into a myth. Historiography does not gain much by associating this development with a fixed date like 1794, the year when patients were liberated from their chains. There is no point in associating such a view of the history of psychiatry with reference to reliable sources or in extending this stereotype to psychiatric care.4 These should be viewed as differing aspects of a history of psychiatry as a type of positivist history of progress, a type of ‘whig history’ that aligns itself with histories of progress in other medical disciplines describing the triumphant advances of bacteriology, the wonders of pharmacology5 or the development of so-called image-guided (radiological) procedures. However, the development of psychiatry as well as the writing of its history demands a critical approach and a widening of issues that should be considered if one wishes to understand the complexity of the process by which psychiatry in the nineteenth century was established and developed. The present case study is concerned with this goal.

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Schussenried as ‘Psychiatric Space’: The Asylum, Its Inhabitants and the World ‘Outside the Asylum Walls’ Represented in Contemporary Literature The House Journal of the Music Teacher Uhl The journal Sound Waves (Schallwellen, 1897–1936) was founded as Schussenried’s internal asylum paper by the music and asylum teacher Albert Uhl under the direction of the Schussenried psychiatrist and medical director Dr Friedrich Kreuser. Journals like this regularly featured in several fin-de-siècle psychiatric institutions of the region and indeed of Central Europe. The word combination ‘sound waves’ is instructive since the paper was, on the one hand, intended to spread like sound waves, i.e. to reach a broad public quickly. At the same time, the commission for printing the paper was given to Jakob Schall (Schall being the German translation of ‘sound’). The intended target audience of this publication was the staff and patients of the asylum. Its purpose was to entertain, but, at the same time, to instruct. From the outset, it was divided into two sections: one carrying official information and the other entertainment and instruction. Especially during the first years of publication, Sound Waves repeatedly served as a platform for the music teacher and occasional man of letters Albert Uhl to publish his humorous lyrical and aphoristic poems. However, Sound Waves increasingly detached itself from is-

Figure 11.1. Albert Krezdorn (left) and Albert Uhl (right), c. 1910. All rights with the authors.

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Figure 11.2. The asylum’s newspaper and magazine, the ‘Schallwellen’, 1890s to 1930s.

sues dealing directly with the asylum and turned effectively into an aesthetically oriented collection of essays by its editors, especially after the turn of the century and more so after the lean First World War years and the death of Albert Uhl in 1916. With the ‘enforced coordination’ (Gleichschaltung) of the press by the National Socialists, the journal came to a rather abrupt end in 1936.

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In 1922, the director of the asylum, Robert Gross, described the aim of this journal and the circumstances of its development in an anniversary issue celebrating twenty-five years of the publication’s existence. Along with ‘instructive’ and ‘uplifting’ contributions ‘the paper considered that its task included the publication of home-grown and historically important contributions for Schussenried. In this way it opened up a modern direction for its readers such has more recently become evident in local history and conservation movements’.6 As one of the few possible media for publication, the asylum paper did indeed play a significant role in the early phase of upper Swabia’s regional historiography. On the one hand, Schussenried’s Sound Waves showed that it was clearly directed, both thematically and conceptually, toward a target group located outside the asylum walls. On the other hand, however, the journal also represented an academic and middle-class mentality, which was prevalent inside the walls of this treatment facility (as a result of urban patients having been referred to a rural asylum), and so was atypical for the rural region of upper Swabia in the first half of the twentieth century.7 With its striking content of historical and cultural topics, this asylum journal can provide an insight into the different interests of managerial staff and friends of the asylum as well as local enthusiasts of history who did not necessarily have to be close to the town. Sound Waves can be understood as a compensatory mechanism8 that derived from the lack of an adequate social context for this group of readers and authors. As an administrative official of Württemberg, a medical officer, a teacher, a forest ranger or a preacher in rural and provincial upper Swabia, one created one’s own cultural medium and environment. In this sense, the Schussenried asylum’s Sound Waves not only oriented itself towards the ‘outside’ as just explained but was also directed toward a target group that literally reflected the elitist stratum described and presented itself in a wide variety of lectures, theatre performances and its own published journal. With its specific culture, the asylum functioned as a platform for social self-confidence without crossing the seemingly insurmountable threshold between the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of the psychiatric context. In a certain sense this provides an ironic turn to the motif of the exclusion of the irrational in psychiatric history that was mentioned in the introduction. The rational world outside the asylum accesses the economic and intellectual resources of the asylum world in order to provide itself with an identity. The border between inside and outside is not removed, but the socially motivated threshold and its aura of fear is eased.

The Outside World and Its Entry into the Asylum At the Schussenried asylum, seasonal traditional festivities such as carnival (Fasching) celebrated by the outside community were organised regularly on the premises of the institution. These festivities provided another stage for Albert

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Uhl. Artists of outstanding merit were invited to participate in these carnival festivities. Beginning in 1875 and until the 1970s, the only place for the community to meet was the ballroom on the second floor of the northwestern wing of the main monastery building. This part of the building belonged to the asylum’s Heilanstalt (sanatorium), a rather large room with a stage and seating for about 100–120 people. Patients of the Heilanstalt were integrated into the activities described above. In this context, the Kartoffelfest, literally ‘potato feast’, which was established by Albert Uhl, should also be mentioned. At the time Uhl also participated in various activities ‘outside’ the asylum. For example he conducted a choir, whose members again consisted of the educated inhabitants of Schussenried. Viewed from a political perspective, Uhl made a significant contribution towards establishing what could be referred to as the good reputation of the asylum in the community of Schussenried. This certainly helped members of this community to accept and tolerate his humorous sallies, which were, in fact, rather difficult to put up with. For example, he gave sharp and ironic carnival speeches poking fun at decent inhabitants and representatives of the town.9 Just as the townspeople celebrated within the grounds of the asylum, so some of the asylum patients entertained the ‘outside world’. Evidence for this is provided by poems and other writings of Schussenried patients written with psychiatric as well as wider readerships in mind, as well as scientific talks given to the Schussenried community by patients on the road to recovery. Otto Binder was one of the assistant medical doctors at Schussenried. The printed version of a presentation he gave at the local doctors’ association in the small neighbouring town of Aulendorf seems to be an attempt to link the Schussenried culture to contemporary scientific discourse concerning the relationship between genius and madness.10 In his lecture Binder offered rich material including some of the poems that will be quoted here. These poems were formally related to typical contemporary traditions concerning late romantic notions of art and poetry, and they did, on occasion, reflect the patient-doctor relationship in a sometimes witty, sometimes funny or sometimes even in a more critical way11: Wärter: Weil Narrheit hier so Mode ist, so höret auch, was Goethe spricht: Mit Narren leben, das wird Dir nicht schwer, Versammle nur ein Tollhaus um dich her, Und denk’ dabei, das macht dich gleich gelind, Dass Narrenwärter selbst auch Narren sind.

Minder: Since madness is here in vogue, Just listen to what Goethe says: You won’t find it hard to live with fools, Just gather a madhouse around you, And just think, that’ll keep you quiet, That minders are themselves fools too.

Another poem addressed the medical doctor, Dr. Binder, who was himself doing the presentation:

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Dem Secundararzt: Neujahrswunsch eines Stromers. Der Doctor Binder Hat etwas an sich von einem Schinder, Er hat kein Gewissen, Doch stellt er sich gut beflissen, Aber trauet einem solchen Menschen nicht zu sehr, Denn die Spitzbubereien kennet er.

To the Deputy Doctor: New Year’s wish from a tramp. Doctor Binder Has something of the slave-driver, He has no conscience, But presents himself as very assiduous. But don’t trust such a man too much As he knows all the roguish tricks.

Another poem, rather sharp in tone, also focussed on Dr. Binder: Dem Doctor Binder. Epigramm. Ein Glück ist’s, dass keine Wissenschaft Dich jemals zählt zu ihren Fürsten, Als Therapie gilt dir: lange Haft Bei Hunger und Corridorbürsten.

To Doctor Binder. Epigram It’s a good job that no science Has ever claimed you as a leader. By therapy you mean; lengthy custody Starvation diet and corridor sweeping.

Again another poem, signed by a patient called Fl. W., reflects the general atmosphere as perceived by this patient. The poem also relates to the place of the patient’s former residency: Zellen, Mauern, kahle Wände Bietet uns die Anstalt dar, O dass ich es ändern könnte, Dass ich wäre, wo ich war.

Cells, barriers and cold, cold walls That’s what the institution offers. If only I could change it all And find myself where I used to be.

Was ich seh’, kann ich nicht lieben, Was ich hör’, wird mir zur Pein, Wär’ in Stuttgart ich geblieben, Frei nur kann ich glücklich sein.

What I see I cannot love, What I hear is an agony. If only I had stayed in Stuttgart, I can only be happy when I’m free.

Aber ach die höchsten Gaben, Meiner Seele Element, Frieden, Ruh’ sind nicht zu haben, Schussenried dies Wort nicht kennt.

But oh, alas!, the highest gifts Of my soul’s element, Peace and repose, they are not here, Schussenried knows not these words.

Another patient got even more critical towards ‘his’ doctor: Der Doctor Binder, Der Menschenschinder, Hat in Tübingen studirt Und die Professoren geschmiert. Ich sage es unverhohlen, Wo hat er seinen Doctor gestohlen?

Doctor Binder The oppressor of men, Studied in Tübingen And bribed the professors. I’ll say it out aloud, Where did he manage to steal his doctorate?

Other poems presented anonymously by Dr. Binder reflect some patients’ feelings when having to say good-bye to a friend who was transferred to another

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asylum. Yet others refer to general topics such as birth, marriage, death, seasons of the year, etc. Poems at times also expressed cultural and political notions such as anti-French feelings, ‘Rhine romanticism’, or spoke of psychiatry and asylum life itself, e.g. in respect to diagnostic questions or the idea that certain diseases were hereditary.

Schussenried Asylum – Exemplary Institution or a ‘Modern Bastille’ The relatively high ‘permeability’ of the Schussenried asylum walls did not prevent the asylum from functioning as a regulatory authority. The close of the nineteenth century has entered the history of psychiatry, and not merely the German history of psychiatry, as an extremely ‘dense’ period. Psychiatry seemed to expand, a tremendous number of new institutions were established, ever bigger buildings were built on psychiatric estates during the last decades of the century13 and psychiatry established itself as a discipline at a considerable number of universities. Information regarding new psychotherapeutic approaches, specifically that of Freud’s psychoanalysis, concealed the fact that therapeutic possibilities were limited even if a number of neuropsychiatric and neuroanatomical discoveries offered promising results.14 Without a doubt, psychiatry had gained in importance, and not only by following quantitative evidence. The evaluation of medical-juridical expertise that was being actively pursued by psychiatrists also had an impact on overall impressions within research developments. At the same time, however, critical voices in society not only denounced alleged or obvious deficiencies in the field of psychiatry with regard to patient care but also with regard to the consultative aspects of psychiatric activities and expertise.15 What made the situation more complicated was the fact that voices of medical colleagues were part of the chorus criticising psychiatric activities. We may formulate this with some caution by saying that the interpretative authority and expertise of psychiatry were quite clearly questioned. With regard to the solidarity between psychiatric patients and representatives of the middle classes and their common criticisms concerning psychiatry, one has to remember that many patients were not as incapable of speaking for themselves as is often assumed, but were often able effectively to concern themselves with their need to articulate their situation. This was only acknowledged in research as historiography managed to integrate the perspective of the patients.16 While patients’ opportunities to influence social processes and phenomena from within the asylum walls were clearly limited,17 oppositional tendencies, whether justified or not, were certainly not welcomed by the asylum administration. If, however, critical comments about psychiatry such as were contained in printed brochures, for instance, did reach the ‘outside’, then they had a lasting effect. With regard to its scope and reach, this so-called anti-psychiatric literature

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of the 1890s was important and influential. It was produced in a great number of smaller, regional printing houses and had a large market. For the presentation of psychiatry to the outside world this literature proved to be very disadvantageous. These writings and critical polemics often represented the experiences of former patients during their psychiatric treatment and accommodation, or confinement. These statements included factual descriptions of compulsory measures implemented at the time or events that led to conflicts with wardens and physicians as well as contacts with social representatives of the law. The example presented within the framework of this essay is the text of a Schussenried patient by the name of Wilhelm Kuhnle, published in 1894 in Stuttgart by Robert Lutz. Wilhelm Kuhnle was a farmer and wine grower from Beutelsbach in Württemberg. The text is entitled ‘Four Years Innocent in Württemberg Asylums’ (Vier Jahre unschuldig in württembergischen Irrenanstalten) and the subtitle reads: ‘Secret Vehme18 and Modern Bastille. Based on an Experience Told by Wilhelm Kuhnle, Farmer in Beutelsbach, D.A. Schorndorf (Württemberg)’. ‘Small Colportage Edition for 30 Pfennig.’ Robert Lutz wrote a preface to the autobiographical text of Wilhelm Kuhnle, observing: Here we are dealing with a man from the country, who incorporates the most solid characteristics of our unsophisticated Swabian tribe. Without his thick Swabian head, his rugged natural force, his urge for freedom, his unswerving belief in God and his right – and a valuable dose of humour which helps to prevent melancholy and embitterment, the severely persecuted and abused man19 could not have sustained or asserted himself or regained his freedom.20

If one believes this document, large parts of which had obviously been written inside the asylum, then the farmer from Beutelsbach was the victim of a village feud between two mayors who stood for election in 1879. In this context, one of the two village mayors, whose name was Schaufler, was able to count on the support of a considerable number of farmers in the forthcoming election. According to our chronicler, negative and defamatory rumours were supposed to have been circulated by the other village mayor named Schlör, which caused the favoured candidate Schaufler to lose the election by a small margin. Only the honest countryman Kuhnle opposed the defamatory rumours, for which he was subsequently resented by others. According to the chronicler working in the psychiatric institution, the actual scandal was an alleged witch-hunt organised by sympathisers of the winner Schlör and his supporters. In the course of this witch-hunt, all electoral delegates of the rival candidate were supposed to be punished for insisting on their right to vote. The farmers affected suffered material damage as well as physical harm. These violations of the law remained unpunished since the wardens, who were local police servants, allegedly sided with the attackers, and the self-defence of those attacked was described as an act of resistance against the state authority in

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subsequent legal proceedings. Assuming that our farmer’s reports are true, it is not surprising that he was bitter, since he was apparently ambushed in his own house, its door destroyed by an axe as he was fleeing, and to make matters even worse, he was then abused in the worst way possible at the police station and exposed to death threats, unless he was willing to emigrate to America. The fact that the ‘disciplinary authority’ in the guise of the local police sided with the new mayor who had gained control after a drinking binge following the election gave the farmers little faith in lawful jurisdiction in the Kingdom of Württemberg. Even the physicians in charge of the psychiatric asylums in Schussenried and Winnenthal, where the farmer was imprisoned after his attempt to escape, seemed to go along with the official account. A central point of the text lies in the fact that the physician of the regional hospital in Cannstatt, Hofrat Dr Beiel, who had examined Kuhnle after one of his failed escapes, regarded him as completely ‘normal’, i.e. as psychiatrically normal, while Dr Ast, the director of the asylum at Schussenried, placed him into a padded cell when the opportunity arose. However, at no point was Kuhnle stripped of his right to speak for himself, which emerges from a document filed with the royal district court in Schorndorf.21 In addition, numerous physicians, amongst them Wunderlich of Stuttgart, Kreuser of Winnenthal as well as the chief warder named Jäckle and the asylum preacher of Winnenthal, were not without sympathy and tried to convince Kuhnle that ‘if he stops complaining then he could go’, which means that he could be discharged from the asylum in accordance with the regulations. The two asylums in question were the asylum in the former castle in Winnenthal close to Backnang near Stuttgart, which had been opened in 1834, and the asylum at Schussenried (Heil- und Pflegeanstalt Schussenried ), which is at the centre of analysis here. The question of whether Schussenried is an exemplary institution in the second half of the nineteenth century or, following the account of this former patient, a ‘modern Bastille’ can be determined by the manner in which the patient clientele are assigned to the particular departments of this asylum. As can be seen, it is not at all satisfactory to take up a relatively general position with regard to psychiatry in the late nineteenth century. Furthermore, even historical analysis of individual institutions needs to be looked at more closely since not all areas of a given institution adhered to the same principles, regulations and therapeutic-administrative measures. The patient we are interested in here, the wine grower Kuhnle of Beutelsbach, continued to describe the circumstances as he experienced them and wrote petitions to the king as well as medical and judicial authorities. This is the reason why he was diagnosed with so-called querulous insanity or Querulantenwahnsinn, a classic diagnosis for these types of cases in contemporary debates that were critical of psychiatry.22 When the king of Württemberg ceded to Kuhnle’s petitions and ordered an investigation of the case, Kuhnle earned further antipathy from the representatives of the law, public order and health. Indeed, Kuhnle’s persis-

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tence only served to emphasise the diagnosis of querulous insanity in the eyes of these authorities. In the end, it was not possible to retract the four years spent in the asylum and with regard to material compensation the authorities kept a low profile. The publisher Robert Lutz finally concluded that there was ‘no order’ and that it seemed as though one was ‘relocated to the times of the most brutal cultures that followed on after the Thirty Years’ War’.23 With a certain amount of drama, the danger of an all-powerful parish council (allmächtigen Schulzenthums) was evoked. In a similar manner, Lutz emphasised the ‘need to reform the nature of the police and asylums’ and demanded appropriate action. That this was not a meaningless local case to be mocked becomes obvious in newspaper reports published even outside the region: in the Bayerischer Kurier und Münchner Fremdenblatt mit Handels-Industrie- und Gewerbe-Zeitung on Monday 17 September 1894, there is the following headline: ‘Four Years Innocent in Asylums’. And in the closing sequence, it declared: It will be a matter of concern for the administration of justice in Württemberg to bring this dark issue to light and reassert the law – especially as Kuhnle speaks of thirteen fellow sufferers who, in his opinion, languish innocently in asylums of the region. According to the author of this newspaper article, the details Kuhnle mentions in his brochure are of such extreme nature that one is reminded of the statement of the senior medical councillor Landenberger in the Hegelmaier lawsuit, which received considerable attention in Württemberg: ‘I would not have thought that such things occur in Württemberg!’24

Before the anti-psychiatric writing of Kuhnle was published, a further newspaper article appeared on the cover page of the Schwäbische Tagwacht (formerly the Schwäbisches Wochenblatt) on 9 March 1891 by A. Agster and entitled ‘In the Asylum’. This latter contribution reveals once more the range of issues involved in antipsychiatric literature, which often refers to the case of Wilhelm Kuhnle. The medical record of the asylum at Schussenried indicates that Kuhnle’s writing was discussed at a meeting of the criminal division III of the Royal District Court of Württemberg on 4 February 1899,25 and Robert Lutz was eventually sued, apparently at the instigation of the Royal Medical Council.26 Selected passages from a brochure of the anti-psychiatric patient literature available to the public serve as a timely description of an affected person where the course of events (i.e. the official psychiatric justification for particular actions) is published alongside the personal, divergent perspective of the patient. Medical records are documents prepared during the patient’s course of treatment. While they might be written with the best of intentions and integrity, we cannot consider them to be ‘true’. The content of medical records should thus not be viewed as a factual report. In the first place, they are considered to be primary, subjective documents that shed light on the particular experience. Divergent interpretations

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of historical events in a village in Württemberg and more so the appraisal of the manner in which the guilty person dealt with his situation must now be contextualised. We need to consider both the Swabian wine grower Kuhnle whose notes from the asylum were transferred into ‘readable German’ and the psychiatrists who were asked by the judiciary to provide their opinion. Kuhnle’s diagnosis of ‘querulous insanity’ was closely linked to the legal and political changes around the middle of the nineteenth century as well as the differentiation and specialisation taking place in the medical field. The number of psychiatric evaluations in criminal and civil law increased significantly around the turn of the last century, even if so-called querulous behaviour had become part of specialist literature and been known since the Middle Ages. Despite interesting attempts at finding a clear definition, for instance by Casper, Krafft-Ebing and especially by Kraepelin, a clarification of the nosological classification was difficult. The diagnosis of a ‘pseudoquerulous person’ caused equal ambiguity and misunderstandings. Nonspecialist critics of psychiatry used the diagnosis of ‘querulous insanity,’ to point out the inadequacies of psychiatric diagnosis, and they also pointed to the possible or even attributed misuse of power by the psychiatrists who were associated with the legal authorities and whose victims were contemporaries such as the wine grower from Württemberg portrayed here. In the debate surrounding ‘querulous insanity’ psychiatry was brought to a wide audience in debates, talks and print media, challenging the interpretative sovereignty of the discipline’s diagnostic methodology.

The Asylum and Community of Schussenried in the Heimatnovel of Wilhelm Schussen The author Wilhelm Schussen,27 who was born in Schussenried in 1874, published his roman à clef with the subtitle ‘Heimat-History’ in 1908.28 The novel draws an ironic picture of his community and its relationships with the asylum and its inhabitants.29 There is no doubt that the town described in the novel as ‘Steinau’ is Schussenried. The author presents both the asylum and the community as being so closely involved with each other as to be inseparable: ‘The city and mental home are tightly interlocked. And no person from Steinau would be able to present a case for the asylum not being there’.30 With the historical background of Schussenried in mind, this statement has rather more serious implications. The establishment of the asylum made a considerable contribution to the region in terms of its development, and economic and social factors changed for the better in this upper Swabian region that had low population numbers and weak economic structures.31 A significant increase in industrialisation was brought about by the opening of an iron smelting plant in 1840 and the connection to the so-called

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Südbahn, the southern branches of the Württemberg train network, in 1849. The establishment of the asylum in 1875 in turn strengthened the field of public and private services. In addition to the already-existing rural elites, e.g. preachers, foresters and administrative personnel, an independent administrative and infrastructural apparatus quickly established itself. Administrative staff, medical and caring personnel and, last but not least, patients, many of whom came from bourgeois family backgrounds and had been referred to the asylum by the neighbouring towns of Buchau and Laupheim but also from the capital Stuttgart, moved to the town and caused a considerable increase in the population and a change in its structure. The asylum dominated the town: around 1900 every tenth person of the approximately three thousand inhabitants of Schussenried was a patient of the institution.32 To this day, the independent social structure that developed in this way makes the town of Bad Schussenried a ‘special case’ in the region. In addition, new therapeutic concepts alleviate the traditionally strong exclusionary tendency in psychiatry. Especially under the second director of the asylum, Dr. Friedrich Kreuser, as mentioned at the opening of this essay, so-called free treatment was instituted: leisure time activities, festivities, events and family care were intended to stimulate the patients and consequently help to reintegrate them into society – at least far as the Heilanstalt patients were concerned, in contrast to the ones from the Pflegeanstalt sections and wards.33 The literary version by the local author Schussen now reads as follows: We have a reasonable asylum director … He treats his patients as though they were healthy or almost healthy and as though all that they were lacking was only a very, very small amount of what makes a normal person … We have … here fools that live in the same way that normal people do. Many enjoy complete freedom and come and go as they please.34

It should also be mentioned that as a poet, Schussen was a regular contributor to Schussenried’s Sound Waves; indeed, he was honoured with a special issue of the journal.

Reflections on Historiography Evoked by the Material Examined The material presented in this essay calls for reflection and at the same time challenges some of the more common narratives of the historiography of psychiatry. There is little doubt that the perspectives provided by the school of Michel Foucault were and still are highly valuable.35 In our opinion, however, these perspectives do not sufficiently reflect the complex picture of the establishment and advancement of psychiatry in the long nineteenth century. They might even result in the exclusion of relevant perspectives. In this regard we would like to

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suggest an extension of the available methodological and indeed historiographical literature – rather than ending up in an anti-Foucault campaign, which would not do justice to the whole scenario (though we sometimes hear a cry of ‘Oubliez Foucault!’, mainly in Anglo-Saxon circles). The study described in this essay integrates micro-history with patient-history and a classical history of the institution. We have tried to set a regional study and its findings into a wider Western European setting. Still we may dare to conclude that no ‘best method’ exists in the history of psychiatry.36 Surely this is of no surprise to the reader. What is indeed striking, though, is the diversity of results we encounter concerning the assessment of a change in perspective as part of our methodological approach.37 Such a change in perspective necessarily provokes us to abandon the teachings of historic-psychiatric dogmas.38 A second problem concerns the terminology that was used and indeed continues to be used in the history of psychiatry. This terminology, especially concerning transnational questions, requires more attention to precision, definition and possible translatability than these terms have received in the past. However, this does not only apply to aspects of the ‘spatial turn’, as has been shown by one of the authors of this chapter elsewhere,39 but also and more specifically to the terminology that concerns social interaction and counteraction, as well as the positions and entanglements of social and communicative issues, ‘inside’ and ‘outside the walls of the asylum’, to use Bartlett and Wright’s words.40 There is a lack of terminology with which the complexity of social functions within the context of psychiatric history described here can be captured. The realms of experience of this Upper Swabian ‘community of destiny’,41 which have been illustrated here through the example of Schussenried, do have their own complex social dynamics. One fundamental aspect of this phenomenon is that a middle-class or educated middle-class urban culture was transplanted into the provinces. A third issue the authors would like to raise in this sense could work as an example for what has just been presented: We tend to call it, somewhat ironically, a German question. The matter of separated institutions in asylum psychiatry versus the so-called connected or integrated institutions, the verbundene Heil- und Pflegeanstalten, for both patients considered curable and those considered incurable. The importance of this seems to us to be undervalued, as we suggest that the presence of the sanatorium-like Heilanstalt conditions (as well as its patients, its staff and its infrastructure) influences, and as a rule appears to improve the conditions of Pflegeanstalt patients. It also improves the quality of the working conditions for staff and last but not least the entire economic situation of a mental hospital at the end of the nineteenth century (and beyond). We argue that this aspect of asylum history has not yet received the attention it deserves, thus creating a challenge for the international comparison of psychiatric histories. A fourth and final aspect is related to the economic history of the region under scrutiny. We are concerned with the economic improvement of a rural region

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that became poorer after secularisation owing to the growth of an institution that was located there for contemporary therapeutic reasons. The distance from urban settlement areas does at the same time have a symbolic character that concerns the need for distance between the so-called normal population and mental illness and its representations. The existence of both phenomena at the same time did enable the development of a regional self-awareness, which curiously enough came to this region from the outside.

Conclusion A relatively complex and also contradictory picture is thus presented of German psychiatric institutions in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, a picture that does not fit into commonly accepted psychiatric schemata. Such schemata leave little room for interpretation in that they either present asylum histories as exemplary stories within the context of a positivist history of progress, or, alternatively, read them as examples of the debilitating and inhuman practices of keeping patients under lock and key.

Notes 1. Secularisation was the redistribution to secular states of the secular lands held by an ecclesiastical ruler such as a bishop or an abbot. The process occurred in Germany from 1795 to 1814, during the latter part of the era of the French Revolution and then the Napoleonic Era. Mediatisation was the process of annexing the lands of one sovereign monarchy to another, often leaving the annexed some rights. 2. In the kingdom of Württemberg, for example, the Benedictine monastery at Zwiefalten (1812) and the Premonstratensian monasteries at Schussenried (1875) and Weissenau (1892) were transformed into mental hospitals during the nineteenth century. Near Stuttgart a former castle, Schloss Winnenthal (Winnenden), became a Heilanstalt. Only the establishment of Weinsberg in 1903 saw, in part, the construction of new buildings planned specifically for medical purposes from the outset. Health politics in this sector cannot be considered as monolithic or just continuous, as once in a while and according to the needs of this state, private initiatives were also enhanced and supported: Huge private asylums that earned some fame were the ones built at the towns of Pfullingen (1844) and Göppingen (1857). 3. The document determining the mediatisation or secularisation of clerical ownership, the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss of 25 February 1803, enacted in paragraph 35 that by receiving these holdings and assets, the owner also took over the material and nonmaterial duties, as far as religious, teaching and other caritative institutions (‘für Gottesdienst, Unterrichtsund andere gemeinnützige Anstalten’) were concerned. Now the state was considered to be in charge of caring for the mad and the poor, in accordance with the conviction that taking possession of holdings formerly belonging to the clergy now placed obligations on the follow-up institutions and state authorities. Apart from many other aspects enhanced by this

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6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13.

14. 15. 16.

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ruling, the prerequisites for establishing a public health sector were provided. Caring for the mad, the Irrenpflege, was one of the initiatives launched. C. Müller, ‘Wer hat die Geisteskranken von den Ketten befreit?’ in Skizzen zur Psychiatriegeschichte: Edition das Narrenschiff (Bonn, 1998). It is difficult not to think of Edward Shorter’s hymn on the age of Prozac here, and the reception this monograph received among historians of psychiatry: E. Shorter, A History of Psychiatry: From the Era of the Asylum to the Age of Prozac (New York City, 1997). See Schallwelle 26, no. 1 (1922): 3. F. Kuhn, ‘Die Schallwellen’, in OEW: Schwabenspiegel. Literatur vom Neckar bis zum Bodensee 1800–1950, ed. M. Bosch (Biberach, 2006), 1082. Ibid. See also ‘Zum Sängerausflug der Anstalt nach Musbach’ (Schussenried, 12 July 1898). To mention a few sources from of a rich collection of twentieth-century works: H. Türck, Der geniale Mensch, 5th ed. (Berlin, 1901); B. Springer, Die genialen Syphilitiker, 2nd to 4th ed. (Berlin, 1926); W. Lange-Eichbaum: Genie, Irrsinn und Ruhm: Genie-Mythus und Pathographie des Genies, 6th ed. (Munich, 1967). For more information on this matter see T. Mueller, ‘Zur Ethik der Diagnosestellung am Beispiel der psychopathologischen Begriffe “Genie” und “Wahnsinn” im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert’, in Yearbook of the German Schopenhauer Society, vol. 86, ed. M. Koßler and G. Baum (Würzburg, 2005), 73–91. For selected primary sources and literature see: O. Binder, Die Dichtkunst bei Geisteskranken in ihren Beziehungen zu der Frage ‘Genie und Irresein’ (1893). These lines refer to the ‘24. Zahme Xenie’ by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. D. Blasius, Der verwaltete Wahnsinn. Eine Sozialgeschichte des Irrenhauses (Frankfurt, 1980) as well as ‘Einfache Seelenstörung’, in Geschichte der deutschen Psychiatrie 1800–1945 (Frankfurt, 1994) and ‘Der gebändigte Kranke. Zur Geschichte der Psychiatrie im 19. Jahrhundert’, Sozialpsychiatrische Informationen 4 (2006): 9–12. B. Brückner, ‘Psychiatriegeschichte und Patientengeschichte: Eine Literaturübersicht zum Stand der deutschsprachigen Forschung’, Sozialpsychiatrische Informationen 4 (2006): 26–30. See for example W.U. Eckart, Geschichte der Medizin (Berlin and Heidelberg, 1990). R. Schwoch and H.-P. Schmiedebach, ‘“Querulantenwahnsinn”: Psychiatriekritik und Öffentlichkeit um 1900’, in Medizinhistorisches Journal 42 (2007): 30–60. Early and well-received Anglo-Saxon publications are P. Buckley and F. Sander, ‘The History of Psychiatry from the Patient’s Viewpoint’, American Journal of Psychiatry 13, no. 10 (1974): 1147–50; R. Porter, ‘The Patient’s View: Doing Medical History from Below’, Theory and Society 14 (1985): 175–98. The importance of these early and challenging papers concerning historiography finds its repercussions in the French and German history of psychiatry. See for example A. Fauvel, ‘Le Crime de Clermont et la remise en cause des asiles en 1880’, Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 49 (2002): 195–216. By the same author: ‘La voix des fous: Hector Malot et les “romans d’asile”’, Romantisme. Revue du 19e siècle 3, no. 141 (2008), and ‘A World-famous Lunatic: The “Seillière Affair” (1887–1889) and the Circulation of Anti-alienists’ Views in the Nineteenth Century’, in Transnational Psychiatries: Social and Cultural Histories of Psychiatry in Comparative Perspective, c. 1800–2000, ed. W. Ernst and T. Mueller (Newcastle, 2010). See again Schwoch and Schmiedebach, ‘“Querulantenwahnsinn”’, 30–60, or T. Mueller: ‘Vier Jahre unschuldig in württembergischen Irrenanstalten’, in Zur anti-psychiatrischen Literatur des Fin-de-siècle, Proceedings of the German Society for the History of Neurosciences, vol. 15, ed. B. Holdorff (Würzburg, 2009), 579–88. Blasius, ‘Der gebändigte Kranke’. The Vehmic courts, holy vehme, or just the Vehm are names given to a tribunal system of Westphalia active during the later Middle Ages. The proceedings were sometimes secret. Those condemned by the tribunal were done away with by secret means.

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19. In the years after the establishment of Schussenried mental hospital, ‘treatment’ by isolation was a daily practice. Bedside treatments and various applications of bathing did follow in the decades to come. As in Anglo-Saxon countries, the application of synthetic drugs again followed the latter-mentioned treatments. The so-called net-bed at Schussenried mental hospital was applied no earlier than 1928. 20. W. Kuhnle, Vier Jahre unschuldig in württembergischen Irrenanstalten. Geheime Vehme und moderne Bastille. Auf Grund eigener Erlebnisse erzählt von Wilhelm Kuhnle, Bauer in Beutelsbach, O.-U. Schorndorf, Württemberg (Stuttgart, 1894), 4. 21. Ibid., 28–29; on Wunderlich, ibid., 30. 22. See again Schwoch and Schmiedebach, ‘“Querulantenwahnsinn”’, 30–60. 23. Lutz quoted in Kuhnle, Vier Jahre, 3–4. 24. Bayerischer Kurier und Münchner Fremdenblatt mit Handels-Industrie- und Gewerbe-Zeitung, Monday 17 September 1894, 2. 25. St.J.A. Schussenried, Direction, 4 Feb. 1899, No. 182. 26. St.J.A. Schussenried, Direction, 31 May 1897, No. 637. 27. Gruber in M. Bosch, 219–23. 28. Kuhn, ‘Die Schallwellen’, 1079. 29. In 1834, 1,105 inhabitants of Schussenried were counted, rising to 1,570 in the year 1849. In the following years, an iron-producing firm, Wilhelmshütte, had been established. Connection to the southern German railway system made a difference, too, a few years later. The opening of the mental hospital in 1875, however, changed life in the small town dramatically, as for example concerning the growth of the population. Around 1900, Schussenried statistics report roughly 3,000 inhabitants. See Landesarchivdirektion Baden-Württemberg: Der Landkreis Biberach. Sigmaringen: Landkreis Biberach, 1987, vol. I. 30. W. Schussen, Meine Steinauer. Eine Heimatgeschichte (Stuttgart und Leipzig, 1908), 12. Schussen’s real name was Wilhelm Frick (1874–1956). The former teacher was born at Kleinwinnaden near Schussenried, which today belongs to this town administratively, and was a former teacher. He had published more than twenty regionally relevant monographs on poetry and prose. Schussen, during the 1930s and until his death, showed that he was faithful to Hitler and German National Socialism, having signed the ‘Gelöbnis treuester Gefolgschaft’, printed in the Vossische Zeitung of 26 October 1933, and propagated by the Preußische Akademie der Künste in Berlin. He had been friends with the German writer Hermann Hesse. On this relationship see H. Hesse, ‘Vorwort’, in W. Schussen, Der verliebte Emerit und Vinzenz Faulhaber (Berlin, 1927), 7–10; on Schussen (Frick) and National Socialism see E. Klee, Das Kulturlexikon zum Dritten Reich. Wer war was vor und nach 1945 (Frankfurt, 2007), 557. 31. Wolfgang Wüst, ‘Die Provinzialisierung der Region: Identitätsverlust durch Säkularisation und Mediatisierung’, in Mikro-Meso-Makro. Regionenforschung im Aufbruch, ed. W. Wüst und W. Blessing (Erlangen, 2005). 32. Given this development, it comes as a surprise that in contrast to this turn-of-the-century novel by Schussen, we know of later literature in the twentieth century, also by local agents, for example an autobiographical text of an amateur historian, who makes practically no mention of the asylum. It might very well have to do with the fact that this latter author, Alfons Kasper, published a series of travel guides on Upper Swabia, in which at that time the description of asylum or mental hospital buildings might have been considered unfavorable, at least by this author. A. Kasper, Kunstwanderungen im Nord-Allgäu / Kreuz und quer der Donau, vols. 3 and 4 (Bad Schussenried, 1964–1966). 33. Johannes May, ‘Die Geschichte des Landeskrankenhauses’, in 100 Jahre Psychiatrisches Landeskrankenhaus Bad Schussenried 1875–1975, ed. E. Fünfgeld (Bad Schussenried, 1975), 16. For more information on data referring to Schussenried mental hospital see also H.-O.

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36. 37.

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Dumke, Von der königlichen Heil- und Pflegeanstalt zum Zentrum für Psychiatrie. 125 Jahre Psychiatriegeschichte in Oberschwaben, Jubiläumsschrift anlässlich des 125-jährigen Bestehens des Psychiatriezentrums Bad Schussenried, 1875–2000 (Bad Schussenried, 2000). The German term Heilanstalt is usually translated as ‘sanatorium’; Pflegeanstalt is ‘mental hospital’. Schussen quoted in Frick, 14–15. M. Foucault, Folie et déraison, histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris, 1961), followed by L’histoire de la folie à l’âge classique (Paris, 1998). For a new translation, see: History of Madness (London, 2006). W. Ernst and T. Mueller, ‘Introduction’, Transnational Psychiatries. Such a change of perspective is part of the historiographical practice of histoire croisée, as Werner and Zimmermann showed instructively. See M. Werner and B. Zimmermann, ‘Beyond Comparison. Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity’, History and Theory 45 (2006): 30–50. E.J. Engstrom, ‘Beyond Dogma and Discipline: New Directions in the History of Psychiatry’, Current Opinion in Psychiatry 19 (2006): 595–99. T. Mueller, ‘Community Spaces and Psychiatric Family Care in Belgium, France and Germany. A Comparative Study’, in Madness, Architecture and the Built Environment: Psychiatric Spaces in Historical Context, ed. L. Topp, J. Moran and J. Andrews (London, 2007), 171–89. P. Barlett and D. Wright, Outside the Walls of the Asylum: The History of Care in the Community 1750–2000 (London, 1999). Kuhn, ‘Die Schallwellen’.

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Stewart, Janet. Fashioning Vienna: Adolf Loos’s Cultural Criticism (London, 2000). Topp, Leslie, ‘Otto Wagner and the Steinhof Psychiatric Hospital: Architecture as Misunderstanding’, Art Bulletin 87, no. 1 (2005). ———. ‘An Architecture for Modern Nerves: Josef Hoffmann’s Purkersdorf Sanatorium’, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 56, no. 4 (December 1997). Topp, Leslie, and Jonathan Andrews, eds. Madness, Architecture and the Built Environment: Psychiatric Spaces in Historical Context (London, 2007). Thomas, Rebecca, ed. Crime and Madness in Modern Austria: Myth, Metaphor and Cultural Realities (Cambridge, 2008). Timms, Edward, and Ritchie Robertson, eds. Vienna 1900: From Altenberg to Wittgenstein, Austrian Studies 1 (Edinburgh, 1990). Traum und Wirklichkeit Wien, 1870–1930. 2nd ed. (Vienna, 1985). Vasko-Juhász, Desiree. Die Südbahn: Ihre Kurorte und Hotels. Semmering Architektur, vol. 1 (Vienna and Cologne, 2006). Worbs, Michael. Nervenkunst: Literatur und Psychoanalyse im Wien der Jahrhundertwende (Frankfurt, 1983). Wrigley, Richard, and George Revill, eds. Pathologies of Travel (Amsterdam, 2000). Wunberg, Gotthart. Die Wiener Moderne: Literatur, Kunst und Musik zwischen 1890 und 1910 (Stuttgart, 1981).

CONTRIBUTORS

d Steven Beller is an independent scholar based in Washington, DC. He has written extensively on many aspects of Central European modern history and Central European Jewish modern history, with an especial emphasis on the connections between the two in the field of modern culture. Along with various articles and essays, he has written the following books: Vienna and the Jews, 1867–1938: A Cultural History (Cambridge, 1989); Herzl (London, 1991, 2004); Francis Joseph (London, 1996); A Concise History of Austria (Cambridge, 2006); and Antisemitism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2007). He is also the editor of the collection Rethinking Vienna 1900 (Oxford, 2001). Gemma Blackshaw is Reader in Art History at Plymouth University. She cocurated the exhibition ‘Madness and Modernity: Mental Illness and the Visual Arts in Vienna 1900’ in both London and Vienna (2009–10), and co-edited the accompanying catalogue. She is currently writing a book on portrait exhibitions in Vienna circa 1900, supported by the Leverhulme Trust. She is also curating an exhibition on Viennese portraiture 1867–1918 for the National Gallery, London, in 2013. Luke Heighton completed his PhD at Birkbeck College, University of London, in 2009. As part of the AHRC-funded research project ‘Madness and Modernity’, his work examined multiple aspects of the material, visual, intellectual and political culture of Vienna circa 1900. Other research interests include: Foucault’s approaches to historiography, disciplinarity and the subject in modernity; outsider art; modes of art historical writing; and contemporary art. He lives and works in Berlin and London. Geoffrey C. Howes is Professor of German at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, USA. He has published widely on Austrian literature, including contribu-

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tions on R. Musil, J. Roth, I. Bachmann, T. Bernhard, P. Rosei, P. Turrini, C. Lavant and others. From 2000 to 2005 he was co-editor with Jacqueline Vansant of the journal Modern Austrian Literature. He has translated texts by Peter Rosei, Doron Rabinovici, Lilian Faschinger and others. He is currently working on a book-length study of the representation of madness in Austrian fiction. Nicola Imrie completed her PhD at Birkbeck College, University of London, in 2008, and has since worked as a freelance exhibition researcher, German-toEnglish translator and on the visitor services team at the Wellcome Collection in London, where her interests in collaborative medical science and arts projects were further developed. In May 2010, she took up a three-year AHRC-funded post-doctoral research post at the Hunterian Art Gallery at the University of Glasgow on the project ‘Mackintosh Architecture: Context, Making, Meaning’. Frank Kuhn studied literature studies and philosophy at the University of Constance and the University of Freiburg. He is a member of the research unit for the history of medicine at the University of Ulm’s Center for Psychiatry I (ZfP Südwürttemberg). He has published on the architectural and social history of Württemberg monasteries with a focus on Praemonstratensian monasteries, as well as on the social history of psychiatry in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Württemberg. Anna Lehninger is research associate at the Archive of Children’s Drawings of the Stiftung Pestalozzianum/University for Teacher Education in Zurich. She studied art history at University of Vienna and University of Bern. She curated several exhibitions on the Austrian painter and graphic artist Ida Sofia Maly (1894–1941) in Graz, Hartheim, and Washington, DC, and served as editorial assistant of the Swiss publication Album for the Biennale in Venice. Thomas Müller is director of a research unit in the history of medicine at the University of Ulm’s Center for Psychiatry I (ZfP Südwürttemberg), and a visiting fellow at the Institute for the History of Medicine at Charité Berlin. His publications include From Charlottenburg to Central Park West. Henry Lowenfeld and Psychoanalysis in Berlin, Prague and New York (Frankfurt, 2000); Psychotherapy and Body Therapy in Berlin. Histories and Practices of Implementation (Husum, 2004) and Transnational Psychiatries: social and cultural histories of psychiatry in comparative perspective, c. 1800–2000, co-edited with Waltraud Ernst (Cambridge, forthcoming). Gavin Plumley has written, broadcast and lectured widely on twentieth-century music. His recent projects include a talk on Viennese music at the time of Klimt for Tate Liverpool (2008); a lecture on Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress at Tate

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Britain’s Hogarth exhibition (2007), on which he also wrote for the Guardian; and a seminar on Janáček for the Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon (2008). He has written for opera houses and concert halls across the globe, including this season for Wigmore Hall, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, the LPO and the Royal Opera House as well as giving talks at Glyndebourne, Garsington Opera, the Barbican Centre and BBC Radio 3. He contributes regularly to Classical Music and Opera Now. Jill Steward is a Visiting Fellow in the School of Historical Studies at Newcastle University. Her research interests are in the history of urban tourism, particularly health tourism in central Europe, and the role of the media and exhibitions in the promotion of tourism. She contributed to The City in Central Europe (Aldershot, 1999) and co-edited The City and the Senses: Urban Culture since 1500 (Aldershot, 2007). Other publications include articles and book chapters on spas and tourism history in collections such as New Directions in Urban History (Münster, 2000), Creative Urban Milieus: Historical Perspectives on Culture, Economy and the City (Frankfurt, 2006), and Emotion in Motion (Aldershot, 2012). Leslie Topp is Senior Lecturer in History of Architecture in the Department of History of Art and Screen Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of Architecture and Truth in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Cambridge, 2004), co-editor of Madness, Architecture and the Built Environment (London, 2007) and co-curator of the exhibition ‘Madness and Modernity’ (London and Vienna, 2009–10). Sabine Wieber is Lecturer in History of Art at the University of Glasgow. She has published on German and Austrian design culture, German national identity and constructions of gender in Vienna circa 1900. She co-curated the exhibition ‘Madness and Modernity’ (Vienna, 2010) and is currently working on Viennese Death Masks as well as German Jugendstil Tapestries.

INDEX

d A Aaron, 38, 40 Adler, Victor, 32 Adorno, Theodor, 44, 47, 50, 55–57, 125, 129 aesthetics, aestheticism, aestheticisation, 13, 31, 89, 99, 101, 131, 137–38, 146–50, 153, 156–60, 185 Akhnaten, 39 alienation, 20, 31, 147, 150, 158 Alighieri, Dante, 139 Altenberg, Peter (real name: Richard Engländer), 4–5, 7, 22, 109–29, 161 Märchen des Lebens, 115 Pròdroˇmoˇs, 126 Semmering 1912, 119, 128 Wie ich es sehe, 122, 126 Aly, Götz, 30, 41 anaemia, 99, 101–2 Andrian, Leopold von, 32 Angerer, Ludwig, 95–96, 107 anorexia nervosa, 5, 100–101, 107–8 anti-semitism, 27, 30–31, 39, 40 anxiety, anxiety attacks, 2, 47, 49, 54, 84, 86–87, 99, 111, 170 aphorism, 172, 175, 180 Arendt, Hannah, 39, 89 Armstrong, Michael, 36–37, 42 art, 3–5, 7–8, 10–14, 16–17, 19–26, 31, 34, 41, 49, 52, 55, 65, 85, 87, 108, 127, 129, 133, 139–40, 146–52, 156–65, 167–71, 173, 175, 177, 179, 181, 187. See also portrait, portraiture Artistry of the Mentally Ill, 8, 162–163, 177 assimilation, 36

asylum, 1, 7–9, 16–18, 20, 24, 26, 50–51, 64, 70, 76, 88–89, 101, 109, 115, 117– 188, 130, 132–40, 142–44, 147, 151, 159, 161, 172, 176, 182–87, 189–99. See also clinics, sanatorium Gugging asylum, Lower Austria, 17, 24 Mauer-Öhling Asylum, Lower Austria, 24, 151–152, 161 Schussenried, Württemberg, 8, 182–99 Steinhof (Lower Austrian State Provincial Institution for the Cure and Care of the Mentally and Nervously Ill), 1, 3–4, 8–9, 16–18, 23, 26, 50, 57, 109–10, 115–28, 132–34, 143, 147, 163, 168, 179 Austro-Marxism, 38 Azzuri, Francesco, 132

B Bad Ischl, See sanatorium Bad Kissingen, See sanatorium Bahr, Hermann, 31–32, 128 Bambi, 90 Barker, Andrew, 110, 112, 118, 126–28 Baroness Rothschild, 104 Baths of Hercules, See sanatorium Baudelaire, Charles, 123–24, 129 ‘On the Essence of Laughter’ (1855), 124 The Painter of Modern Life (1863), 123 Beard, George, 66, 110–11, 126

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beauty, beauty regime(s), 7, 29, 82, 89, 91–92, 94–99, 104, 107, 118, 149 Berlin, 3, 9, 26, 33, 56, 69, 72, 75, 79, 82, 85–89, 107–8, 111, 126–29, 135, 160, 180, 197–98 Bernhard, Thomas, 133 Bickerstaff, David, 14, 16 Bildung, 33–34, 36 Binder, Otto, 187–88, 197 body politics, 94 Breuer, Josef, 47, 56 Broch, Hermann, 34 Bruce, Bessie, 109, 111, 119–20, 128 Bulletin de la Société Clinique de Médecine Mentale, 152, 161 Butler, Judith, 92, 106

C Canetti, Elias, 133 caricature, 5, 7, 78, 110–15, 120–21, 123– 26, 129, 138, 153, 172, 174–75 Catholic, Catholicism, 6, 34–36, 45, 173, 180 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 4, 32, 152 Charlemont, Alice, 136 Chemistry of Concepts and Sensations, 31 Christian Social Party, 30–31 Christian, Christianity, 24, 30–31, 39–40, 56, 61, 85, 183 Christomanos, Constantin, 97, 107 clinics, 8, 16, 19, 21, 24, 58, 61, 64, 65, 69–70, 75–81, 85–88, 101, 108, 111, 115, 126, 152, 161–81. See also asylum, sanatorium hydrotherapy clinics, 58, 115 nervous clinics, 61, 69, 111, 126, 202 private clinics, 61, 64–65, 69–70, 75–76, 78–81, 87–88, 101, 111, 126, 163 closed thought systems, 30, 39, 41 Corfu, 81, 91, 102, 104, 108 Corino, Karl, 132, 142–43 Corti, Egon Caesar Conte, 103 Counter Reformation, 35 Crown Prince Rudolf (1858–1889), 95, 102, 107

D da Vinci, Leonardo, 34 dandy, 174–75

Das Fremdenblatt, 97 death, 24, 32–34, 45, 48, 49–52, 56, 69, 76, 91, 102–3, 106, 116, 123, 146–51, 154, 157–58, 160, 168–69, 185, 189, 191, 198 Death of Virgil, 34 Degenerate Art Exhibition, 22 deicide, 39 dementia praecox, 132, 135, 143, 146, 167 democracy, 37, 136 Der liebe Augustin, 111–15, 120, 124–26 Die Aktion, 147, 160 Die Fackel, 2, 9, 119, 129, 181 diet, diet regime(s), 5, 75, 79, 81–84, 88, 98, 109–10, 188 discourse, 13, 23–24, 45, 48, 50, 52, 57, 100, 101, 128–29, 137, 140, 145, 150, 156–58, 161, 187 Döbling, Vienna, 152, 178 Doctor Faustus, 43, 49, 56–57 Dörmann, Felix, 31 dualism, 147 Dubuffet, Jean, 152 Dujardin, Edouard, 33

E Edmundson, Mark, 38, 42 Egypt, 27, 39 Elektra, 33 Elisabeth (Sisi), Empress of Austria, 5, 90–108 and neurasthenia, 5, 90–91, 93, 95, 97, 99, 101–3, 105–8 body (image of ), 91, 94, 97, 99, 101, 106. See also weight Elisabeth with Diamond Star Ornament (1865) by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, 93 in film, 90 marriage to Franz Joseph, 91, 95, 98–99 Portrait of Empress Elisabeth (1864) by Ludwig Angerer, 96 Sisi Museum, Vienna, 91, 98 weight, 97–98, 108. See also body (image of ) Ellmann, Maud, 106, 108 England, 31, 34–35, 100 Engländer, Georg, 116, 120, 128 Ernst, Max, 152

Index

eros, 56, 150, 160 Erwartung, 34, 44, 47 ethics, 29, 40, 147–48 exercise, 5, 12, 63, 65, 67, 76–79, 81, 83– 85, 97–99, 101, 106, 109, 110, 124 exhibitions, 3, 4, 9–26, 57, 122, 128, 151– 52, 161–62, 170 Hagenbund, 3, 9, 23, 26, 121–24, 128 Irrenpflegeausstellung (the Care of the Mentally Ill Exhibition), 151–52 Madness and Modernity: Mental Illness and the Visual Arts in Vienna 1900 (2009–10), 3–4, 10–26, 56–57, 69, 108, 127–28, 130, 143, 147, 177, 179

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Gerstl, Richard, 148 God, 35, 39–40, 52, 78, 121, 190 Gödöllo, See sanatorium Goergen, Bruno, 168, 178 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, 132, 187, 197 Gogh, Vincent van, 122–123, 140 Goya, Francisco de, 133 Grand Hotel, 6, 59–63, 67–70, 75, 80, 83, 109, 201 Graphische Sammlung Albertina, 22 Greek, 27, 33, 36–37, 103, 108, 112, 156 Gugging asylum, Lower Austria, See asylum Gull, Sir William Withey, 100, 108 Guys, Constantin, 123–24 gymnastics, gymnastic regime(s), 76, 81, 85, 97. See also exercise.

H F Fango, See sanatorium Feifalik, Fanny, 96 femininity, 5, 7, 91–92, 94, 99, 157 Ferenczy, Ida, 104 Festetics, Countess Marie, 103–4, 108 fin-de-siècle, 4, 9, 10–11, 13–25, 30, 41, 89, 126, 160–61, 197 final solution, 41 Fischer, Samuel, 116, 128 Foucault, Michel, 125, 128, 140, 144–45, 157–59, 161, 194–95, 199 Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austria, 91–92, 95, 97–98, 102–3, 108, 131, 151 Franzos, Lotte, 23, 116, 125 Frau St., 24, 26, 163, 170, 177, 179 Freud, Amalia, 36 Freud, Sigmund, 5–6, 8, 12, 19–20, 27–47, 52–57, 100–102, 108, 138, 148–49, 152, 160–61, 189 consulting rooms, Vienna, 20 The Interpretation of Dreams, 28, 30, 32–35, 42, 56, 101, 148 Moses and Monotheism, 30, 35, 40, 42 Totem and Taboo, 35, 42

G Galicia, 36 gaze, the, 145, 175 gender, 20, 89, 92, 106, 131, 151, 206 Geneva, 104–5 genocide, 141

Habsburg, 10, 34–25, 42, 74, 87, 89, 91–92, 94–95, 131 Hagenbund, See exhibitions hair, 91–92, 95–98 Hamann, Brigitte, 89, 102–4, 107–8 Hartinger, Ingram, 139, 143–44 health resort, See resort Health tourism, 5, 6, 72–89, 101, 206 Hebrew, 35 Heidelberg, 24, 26, 152–53, 155, 161–63, 170–71, 177, 179–80, 197 Heine, Heinrich, 133 Helene, Duchess of Bavaria, 95 Hennebichler, Josef, 119 Henning, Karl, 17, 26 Hermes Villa, 103 Herzen, Alexander, 39, 42, 126 Herzfelde, Wieland, 147 Herzl, Theodor, 32 history art, architecture, design, 5, 12, 19, 68, 147–148, 168 cultural, 27, 40–41, 48, 87–89 medical, psychiatry, science, 5, 12– 13, 16, 25, 69, 87–89, 183, 186, 189, 193, 195–97, 199 social, 12–13, 48, 69, 87–89, 140, 145, 147 Hitler, Adolf, 39, 41, 46, 50, 56, 179, 198 Hofburg, Vienna, See Vienna Hoffmann, E. T. A., 133 Hoffmann, Josef, 19, 20, 55, 58, 68

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Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 31–33 Hofoper, 45, 48, 51 Hogarth, William, 133 holistic [approach to] treatment, 65–66, 75 Hollitzer, Karl, 121, 128 Holweg, Gustav, 169–70, 177, 179 hunger edema, dropsy, 99 hyper-reflexivity, 7, 146

Kosenina, Alexander, 133, 143 Krakauer, L., 7, 145–47, 149, 151–59, 161 Krafft-Ebing, Richard von, 66, 101, 108 Über gesunde und kranke Nerven (1885), 101, 108 Kraus, Karl, 1–2, 23, 34, 38, 42, 117, 119, 123, 125, 129, 154, 181 Kutzenberger, Stefan, 141, 143–44

I

L

Ibsen, Henrik, 31 insane, insanity, 3, 7, 14–15, 29–30, 117, 120, 124, 130, 132, 134–35, 139–46, 152, 156–59, 163, 171, 173, 175–76, 191–93. See also madness, mental illness insider, 7, 146–47, 152, 157 intellectuality (Geistigkeit), 39 inter-subjectivity, 7, 146 Internationale Klinische Rundschau, 32 Inzersdorf, See sanatorium irrational, 28–33, 38–39, 41, 46, 48, 55, 91, 137, 140–42, 145, 147, 149, 183, 186 Irrenpflegeausstellung (the Care of the Mentally Ill Exhibition), See exhibitions

l’anorexie hysterique, 100 Lacan, Jacques, 94, 106 Lasègue, Ernest-Charles, 100, 108 laughter, 124, 129, 151 Lebensreform, 75, 80, 82, 84–85, 87, 89, 110, 126 Leiden, 53–54, 57 Leidesdorf, Maximilian, 164, 178 Lensing, Leo, 3, 9, 122–23, 126–29 Levenson, Edgar, 37 liberalism, 5, 30–31, 160 Lieben, Ernst von, 119, 127 Löffler, Berthold, 121, 128 logical positivism, 38 London Clinical Society, 100 Loos, Adolf, 1, 109, 119–21, 123, 128 Lower Austrian Provincial Museum, 1, 16, 24, 26, 116, 127, 132 Lucheni, Luigi, 104, 106 Lueger, Karl, 30 Luksch, Richard, 20, 26

J Jacobs-Brumberg, 100, 107–8 Jagerspacher, Carl, 126 Jagerspacher, Gustav, 22, 112–15, 120–21, 123, 126, 128 Janikowski, Ludwig Ritter von, 1–4, 9, 23, 117–19 Jews, jewish, judaism, 6, 20, 27–28, 31–32, 35–37, 39–42, 45, 78, 88–89, 126, 128 “Jewish trajectories”, 40 and Freud, 31–32, 35–37, 39–42 history, identity, 6, 27, 30, 32, 35–37, 88–89 judicial, 146, 191 Jugendstil, 108, 152, 154

K Killen, Andreas, 86–89, 101, 108 Klee, Paul, 152 Klimt, Gustav, 7, 48, 51, 143, 145–61 Pallas Athena, 149, 156 Kokoschka, Oskar, 1–4, 9, 21–23, 26, 48, 110, 121–24, 129, 148, 160 Korngold, Erich Wolfgang, 44, 47–48, 51, 54

M Madeira, 98, 102, 107 madness, 3–5, 7–19, 21–41, 44–45, 50, 52, 56–57, 69, 79, 88, 94, 108–34, 137–38, 140–51, 157–61, 174, 177, 179–80, 187, 199. See also insane, insanity, mental illness Madness and Modernity: Mental Illness and the Visual Arts in Vienna 1900, See exhibitions Mahler, Alma (neé Schindler), 5, 48, 50–54, 57, 82–83 127 Mahler, Gustav, 6, 32, 43–57, 82–83, 89 Malmberg, Helga, 109, 126 Mann, Thomas, 43–44, 50, 52, 54, 56, 68 Marburg, Otto, 164, 178 Marie, August, 151

Index

Marischka, Ernst, 106 Mauer-Öhling Asylum, Lower Austria, See asylum medical, medicine, 4–5, 8, 12, 17–23, 32–33, 60, 63, 65, 67–70, 73–76, 86, 88–89, 100, 108, 126, 132, 138, 146, 152, 162–63, 167–68, 172–73, 176–79, 183–84, 186–199 Medusa, 145, 147, 149–51, 154–59, 161 mental illness, 2–15, 23, 25–27, 32, 41, 56, 61, 64, 69, 79, 80, 94, 96, 155, 122, 124–25, 127–28, 137, 139–40, 143–45, 157, 166, 177, 196. See also insane, insanity, madness Messerschmidt, Franz Xaver, 14, 26 Meunier, Dr. Paul Gaston, 152 Miramar, 103 modernism, modernity, 3–7, 10–27, 30–31, 33–34, 38–42, 44–45, 50–51, 56–58, 65, 69, 72–74, 77, 86, 88, 108, 110–11, 119, 122–23, 125–33, 138–40, 143–47, 157–61, 177, 179 Morgenthaler, Walter, 152, 161 Moses, 6, 27, 30, 35, 38–40, 42 Moses and Aaron, 38, 40, 42 Museo Laboratorio delle Mente (Rome), 133 Musil, Robert, 7–8, 34, 38, 72, 130–44, 148, 160, 179 diaries, 130, 132–36 The Man without Qualities, 7, 130–144 ‘Political Confessions of a Young Man’, 136–137

N Narrenturm, Vienna (model of ), 14–15, 17–18, 26 National Socialism, 30, 39, 198 nationalism, 38, 40 Navratil, Leo, 24, 26 nervous, nerves, nervous ailments, 1, 6, 16, 19, 21, 23, 26, 45, 50, 52, 58–73, 77– 80, 82–85, 95–101, 106, 108, 111–12, 115, 119, 122, 124, 126–27, 132, 143, 148, 164 neurasthenia, neurasthenic, 66, 79–80, 83, 88, 90–108, 110, 111, 115, 126, 168 Neurath, Otto, 38, 42

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211

Neurological Institute, Vienna, 163–74, 178 neurotica, 31 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 31–33, 44, 49, 50, 55, 132–33, 136, 138, 140, 160 The Birth of Tragedy, 32 normative, 145 Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpetrière, 20 Nuda Veritas, 150, 154, 161

O Oberdöbling, Privatheilanstalt, See sanatorium Obersteiner Clinic, 8, 162, 164, 168 Obersteiner, Dr Heinrich, 8, 24, 79, 152, 162–81 Oedipus and the Sphinx (by Ingres), 28 Oedipus and the Sphinx (by Sophocles/ Hofmannsthal), 33 Oedipus Complex, 27–28 open thought systems, 38–39 opera, 38, 44–49, 51, 54, 56–57 Oppenheimer, Max, 22 Osen, Erwin Dom, 17, 147 outsider, 70, 20–21, 146–47, 159–61

P Paneth, Josef, 32 Pappenheim, Marie, 34 paradox, 4, 13, 23, 49, 104, 138, 146, 157–58, 176 patient poems, 187–89 Péguy, Charles, 147 Pendl, Erwin, 16, 26, 117, 127 performance, 33, 44, 46, 50, 57, 92, 94, 117, 186 Pfabigan, Alfred, 33, 42 Poe, Edgar Allan, 123 politics, 9, 11–12, 25, 41–42, 94, 102, 137, 148, 160, 167, 196, 202 Porter, Roy, 88, 140, 144, 170, 177, 179, 197, 202 portrait, portraiture, 1–5, 7, 9, 12, 17, 21–24, 26, 91–92, 95–96, 110, 112, 115–16, 120–26, 128–29, 147, 160. See also art Possenhofen, Lake Starnberg, Bavaria, 94 Prince Ferdinand of Bulgaria, 173 Princess Louise of Sachsen-Coburg, 167, 176, 179

212

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Index

Princess Pauline von Metternich, 173 Prinzhorn Collection, Heidelberg, 153, 155–66, 161–162, 169–71, 174, 177, 179–80 Prinzhorn, Hans, 163, 168–70, 177, 179–80 Protestantism, 34–35 psychiatry, 4, 5, 8, 10–17, 26, 56, 79, 88–89, 100, 125–26, 129, 133, 138–39, 147, 161, 163, 165, 167, 169, 172–78, 182–83, 189–95, 197–99 critique of, 176 university psychiatry/psychiatrists, 101 psychoanalysis, 5–6, 12–38, 40–41, 44, 52, 55, 101, 137–38, 148, 156, 189 Purkersdorf Sanatorium, Lower Austria, See sanatorium

Q Querulantenwahnsinn (querulous insanity), 191, 197–98

R Rabbinic interpretation, 37 Rädler, Josef Karl, 24, 26 railways, 1, 60 rational evil, 39, 41–42 reason (in relation to madness), 54, 140, 142, 145–61 Rechberg, Count Louis, 98 reflexive, 146, 157 Reinhardt, Max, 33, 127 Réja, Marcel, 152 resort (health, spa), 67–69, 73–74, 77–79, 82–83, 85–86, 117, 120, 183 Rogoff, Irit, 149 Rome, 8, 107, 132–133, 135, 142 Roth, Josef, 117–18, 127 Rozet and Fischmeister, 92

S S. Maria della Pietà (S. Onofrio), 132, 142–43 Sachs, Hanns, 33 Salberg, Jill, 36–37, 42 Salpêtrière, 4, 20, 152 Salten, Felix, 90–91, 106 sanatorium, 1–9, 19–20, 26, 58–71, 83–86, 101–2, 109–11, 115–19, 123, 125, 17,

163, 166–67, 170–7, 187, 195, 199. See also asylum, clinics Fango, 3, 115 Bad Ischl, 74, 95, 102 Bad Kissingen, 101–102 Baths of Hercules, 101 Gödöllo, Hungary, 91, 102 Inzersdorf, 115–16, 121–23, 127 Oberdöbling, Privatheilanstalt, 8, 162–181, 201 Purkersdorf Sanatorium, Lower Austria, 19–20, 26, 58, 68 Steinhof, 1, 3–4, 8–9, 16–18, 23, 26, 50, 57, 109–10, 115–28, 132–34, 143, 147, 163, 168, 179 Sulz, 115 Schall, Jakob, 184 Schallwellen (Sound Waves), 184–85, 197–99 Schiele, Egon, 12, 17, 20–22, 26, 147–48, 160 schizophrenia, 131, 143, 146, 157 Schnitzler, Arthur, 7, 9, 31–34, 109, 119– 20, 128, 129 Schoenberg, Arnold, 34, 38, 40, 42, 43, 44, 46–48, 51, 55, 57 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 32–33, 197 Schorske, Carl E., 5, 8, 11, 30–31, 41, 148–50, 160–61 Schratt, Katharina, 103, 108 Schreber, Daniel Paul, 175, 180 Schreker, Franz, 44, 46–48, 51, 54, 56–57 Schussen, Wilhelm, 193 Schussenried, See asylum Schwarzenberger, Xaver, 90, 106 Secession, See Vienna Seeburger, Dr, 95 Semmering, 69, 74, 87, 109, 116–17, 119–20, 127–28 Sergi, Quirino, 132 sex, 146–47, 149–51, 160 Shakespeare, William, 133 Sinai, 39 Sisi, See Elisabeth (Sisi), Empress of Austria size zero, 90–108 Skoda, Dr Josef, 100 somatic, somatic disorder, 19, 61, 64, 100–101 Sommerfrische, 65, 73, 87, 95, 102 Sophie, Archduchess of Austria, 95, 107

Index

Sophocles, 33 Soviet Union, 39 spa, See resort Spain, 178 Spanish Armada, 34–35 spatial organisation, 6, 15, 20, 23, 59, 62, 68, 79, 195 Sphinx, the, 27–28, 33, 154, 156 Stalin, Joseph, 39 starvation, 78, 98–100, 106, 188 State Museum of Pathological Anatomy, Viena, 18 Steinhof (Lower Austrian State Provincial Institution for the Cure and Care of the Mentally and Nervously Ill), See asylum, sanatorium Stekel, Wilhelm, 146, 151–53, 155–56 Studies in Hysteria, 31, 47, 56 Sulz, See sanatorium syphilis, 1, 5, 77, 79, 197 Széchényi, Count Carl Philipp Maria, 8, 173–76 Széchényi, Count Stephan, 173, 180

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Vienna, 1, 3–7, 9–17, 19–53, 55–58, 60–61, 68–70, 72–76, 78–79, 82, 85, 95, 97–99, 101–3, 105, 107–11, 113, 115–23, 125–30, 132–33, 135, 141, 143, 146–48, 157–66, 168, 170, 173, 177, 180 Hofburg, 91, 93, 97–98 Secession, 20, 25, 45, 48–49, 128, 153–154, 156–157 Vienna Circle, 38 Vienna University, 32, 86 Wien Museum, Vienna, 3, 11–12, 16, 22, 24–25, 57, 121, 125, 127–28 Vignon, Esthère, 120, 128 Virgil, 34, 139 The Aeneid, 34

W

Uhl, Albert, 184–185, 187 unconscious, 6, 28, 30–31, 33–34, 36–37, 39, 41, 45–47, 55, 140 unreason, 41, 145–46, 150, 158–59 Upper Swabia, 182, 186, 193, 195, 198

Wagner, Otto, 4, 16, 26, 50, 55–57, 117, 127, 134, 177, 203 Wagner, Richard (and Wagnerian), 32, 45–47, 49, 52, 56–57 Wallersee, Marie Freiin von, 99, 107 wasp-waist, 91, 96 weight, 97–98, 108. See also Elisabeth (Sisi), Empress of Austria, weight Wellcome Collection, London, 4, 9, 11–15, 18, 21, 25, 57, 88, 205 Wiener Werkstätte, 12, 19 Wilmanns, Karl, 152 Winterhalter, Xaver, 92–95, 103 Elisabeth with Diamond Star Ornament, 92–95 Wittels, Fritz, 28, 41 Wittelsbach, 94 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 38, 56, 127, 161 Wölfli, Adolf, 152, 160–61 Worbs, Michael, 31, 33, 41–42

V

Y

Valerie, Marie, 107 Van Gogh, Vincent, 122–23, 140 Venice, 12, 25, 46, 50, 74, 102, 120 Ver Sacrum, 152, 154, 161. See also Vienna Secession

Yiddish, 36

T Talmud, 36–37 Third Reich, 39 Tieck, Ludwig, 133 Toblach, 45, 51 totalitarianism, 39, 125 truth, 38–40, 46, 91, 145, 147, 149–50, 154, 156

U