The Gallery of Miracles and Madness: Insanity, Modernism, and Hitler’s War on Art by Charlie English
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
This extraordinary piece of work might be read in conjunction with Mary Lane’s Hitler’s Last Hostages (my review here). While Lane’s excellent book covers some of the same ground, it focuses more on the Nazi looting of museums and private art collections to feed Hitler’s own art obsession and desire for glorification of a new Aryan culture. English delves into the dark flip side (did you think it could get even darker ?): the demonization of modern art as exemplified in the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition, specifically as a propaganda tool. This was built in association with a collection of art works – drawings, paintings, sculptures, and whatever media was available – done by the inmates of psychiatric institutions across Germany, assembled by an art historian turned psychiatrist named Hans Prinzhorn. Prinzhorn collected, studied, examined and published a book of hundreds of these works, and championed them as more than just proof or examples of the patients’ pathologies, but as worthy works of creativity and artistry. Modern European artists were astounded and inspired by them. Hitler’s cronies seized on the “art of insanity” and deliberately exhibited them side by side with the “degenerate” modern art they loathed as an object lesson in the imminent destruction of German culture: Look! These degenerate artists want us all to be like this! Crazy, ugly, insane – bet you can’t pick out the ones by the lunatics from the so-called ‘real’ artists! This is what THEY want us to be! This is what these museums are spending your tax money on! It was all part of a carefully crafted campaign to vilify “the Other” and herald the new age to come of sunlit soldiers, beautiful blonde mothers, and apple-cheeked children in sunny meadows. Which meant that all those defective people – disabled, mentally ill, ugly – were “lives not deserving lives,” “ballast lives,” only undermining Germany’s future and costing txpayers money. In fact, they were so expensive that it was recommended to asylum administrators to starve or beat them to death because it was cheaper than shipping them to the gas chambers (which they also did, loading up postal service buses to ferry them in). The hospitals and asylums were emptied of 70,000 disabled and mentally ill people, including children, who were then methodically murdered. And then their families were to be checked out, since they “produced” these defective people, it seemed likely they carried the defects also, and so… As much as we already know about Nazi horrors, it seems there are always more depths to which they went. And still, there were heroes who resisted them: the president of the German psychiatrists association objected, and helped hospitals hide their endangered patients. His name was Karl Bonhoeffer, father of Dietrich (and another son besides – also butchered by the Nazis).
English introduces us to Prinzhorn and many of the artists, their work, and what became of them all (virtually every artist he collected was killed by the Nazis). It is an astonishing story, and fleshes out the role of art: not just as loot and bragging rights, but as a tool for the inculcation, explication, and justification of evil. The writing is brisk and vivid, as befits a veteran Guardian journalist covering the arts and international affairs. I wish the notes had been handled differently: supporting notes are collected in the back of the book, but not linked to pages or specific references, and rather are prose passages themselves. A good writer like English could have woven some of the supporting facts into the text, and then done a standard bibliography / footnote list, rather than make me keep flipping back and forth!
In the 1960s, a psychiatry trainee at the Heidelberg hospital opened up a myseriously locked cupboard in a side room. There were the stacks and bundles of the fragile art works of the murdered inmates of Prinzhorn’s era. They have been cleaned, restored, and now have their own museum, library, and exhibition space. As they should. Ruhe in Frieden.
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