[Relationships. Art-affined physicians, gifted artist patients and the debate on art from a psychiatric context after 1945]

BACKGROUND

In 1945 the artist and art collector J. Dubuffet coined the term Art brut for original works by psychiatric inmates that had been created outside of traditions and art movements. In the following decades these works were at the center of negotiation processes in which not only psychiatrists but also exhibition organizers, gallery owners etc. increasingly became involved.

OBJECTIVE

Based on the evaluation of four exemplary pairs of psychiatrists and artist patients (H. Müller-Suur-P. Goesch; M. in der Beeck-E. Spießbach; J. Porret-Forel-A. Corbaz; L. Navratil-R. Limberger), this study explores the field of tension between art and psychiatry after 1945.

MATERIAL AND METHODS

The results of the subproject "Normal#Crazy Art. Works from a Psychiatric Context between Diagnostics and Aesthetics after 1945" of the German Research Foundation (DFG) research group "Normal#Crazy" (FOR 3031) are based on the evaluation of archival material, estates, interviews with contemporary witnesses and contemporary media.

RESULTS

It is shown that different attitudes of the psychiatrists towards "their" artist patients strongly influenced their entry into the art world. In this context, impulses from beyond psychiatry were important in order to expand purely diagnostic views of the works with other approaches.

DISCUSSION

The renewed interest in the individual creativity of patients after 1945 can be understood as a reaction to their dehumanization under fascism and National Socialism; however, the focus on the pathologized personality of artist patients could obscure alternative perspectives on their art, just as the disposal of their works by psychiatrists could hinder their dissemination.

[Murdering the sick in the name of progress? The Heidelberg psychiatrist Carl Schneider as a brain researcher and "therapeutic idealist"]

The biography of the Heidelberg Professor of Psychiatry Carl Schneider (1891-1946) represents a combination of a quest for psychiatric reform, pronounced interest in brain research, and commitment to the first systematic extermination of a minority during the Nazi era, the murder of psychiatric patients. Guided by a biological concept that included the individual and his environment and thus interpreting the interactive and social sphere from a purely biological viewpoint, Schneider considered cure and extermination as two sides of the same coin. Psychiatric patients should receive intensive "biological" therapy, but if they were incurable and could not be integrated into society, they lost their reason for existence also in the biological sense. This can be illustrated by Schneider's research department in Heidelberg (1943/1944) where 52 children and adolescents were subjected to an extensive diagnostic program. Twenty of these children were murdered in the name of research at the Eichberg psychiatric asylum.

[Victims of Nazi euthanasia, the so-called T4 action. First results of a project at the German Federal Archives to disclose records of killed patients]

In 1990, previously unknown documents dated from the Nazi era were found in Berlin. They had been preserved in the central archives of the Ministry for State Security (MfS), the secret service of the now former German Democratic Republic (GDR). Nearly 30,000 psychiatric patient files turned out to comprise the smaller part of the records of patients who had been murdered in the 1940/41 "T4 action". More than 70,000 patients of psychiatric asylums were killed by gas in this first campaign of extermination during Nazism, and their files were believed to have been lost. Based on a project to be funded by the German Research Association, this paper offers a brief survey of the developments in historical research about Nazi "euthanasia" and the theories interpreting historical information. The paper will also present a research project dedicated to the memory of the victims of the "T4 action" and to the rediscovered files now conserved in the German Federal Archives in Berlin. The aim is to offer a systematic analysis of 3,000 records in an effort to contribute to the perception of the victims as individuals. The analysis will also include an examination of the selection criteria stipulated by the Nazi psychiatrists (hereditary illness, incurability, and incapacity to work productively) to select patients for extermination. In this way, the decision-making process, criteria, and motives that led to the killing should become more clear. This empirical analysis will help to answer questions concerning the proportion of eugenic and economic motivations and the Nazi rationale behind the extermination campaigns. The project will build upon an earlier preliminary study of a nonrepresentative sample of 185 files. As a preliminary result, it can be said that most of the victims had been hospitalised over long terms and classified as schizophrenic or feeble-minded. A third of the patients killed were considered invalid and not working, and almost 50% were described as working "mechanically". Five per cent of the victims were working "productively".

[Hereditary psychological research in the context of "euthanasia": new documents and aspects on Carl Schneider, Julius Deussen and Ernst Rüdin]

Ernst Rüdin (1874-1952), director of the Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Psychiatrie in Munich, was one of the leading psychiatrists in Nazi Germany. Prevailing historical research on Rüdin's relation to the systematic annihilation of psychiatric patients is dominated by the only hitherto available biographical account which suggests that Rüdin privately disapproved of the "euthanasia" program, but did not make this disapproval public. According to this account, neither Rüdin nor any of his co-scientists were in any way actively involved in the systematic killings. In contrast to this image, a general evaluation of the historical sources on the systematic killing of patients clearly shows that due to the fragmentary character of the evidence, any exculpation of particular individuals or institutions is premature to date. Furthermore, the reevaluation of already known archival material and new documents presented here proves that Rüdin had a genuine interest in research which on the one hand made profitable use of the killings, and on the other hand was aimed at formulating scientific criteria for the systematic selection and "euthanasia" of those supposedly unworthy to live. Julius Deussen (1906-1970), since 1939 head of the department for hereditary psychology at the Deutsche Forschungsanstalt, was also a close co-worker of Carl Schneider (1891-1946) at the University of Heidelberg. He coordinated the research on children carried through in the context of the "euthanasia"-programme between 1943 and 1945. This research sought to systematically correlate clinical and laboratory findings with the histopathological data of the victims' brains. From the beginning, it included the killing of the patients. Central elements of the research programme had been formulated by Deussen already in Munich. Rüdin supported the activities of Deussen in Heidelberg and repeatedly pointed out that they were of importance for the health and population policy of the Nazi regime.

[Innovation and extermination--psychiatric research and "euthanasia" at the Heidelberg Psychiatric Clinic 1939-1945]

The history of German psychiatry is characterized not only by innovative thought in the tradition of Kraepelin and Jaspers, but also by the "euthanasia" program that resulted in the killing of more than 100,000 psychiatric patients and mentally handicapped people. Exemplified by the Psychiatric Department at the University of Heidelberg, the relation between psychiatric research and the systematic killing of patients during the time of National Socialism is analysed. The first part of the paper summarizes the historical background of the general condition of German psychiatry in the 1930s and 1940s. The second part gives an outline of the biography and work of Carl Schneider (1891-1946), head of the Psychiatric Department at Heidelberg until 1945. It can be shown that the call for intensive therapy for those patients who were to be reintegrated into society was connected with the killing of those who were considered to be beyond reach of any active therapeutic approach. This is also the context of C.Schneider's research program concerning mentally handicapped children. The historical reconstruction of research activities, drawing on the patients' files and other documents, reveals that out of 52 children who had been examined, 20 were killed in the asylum of Eichberg in order that their brains might be examined in Heidelberg. The findings are discussed in view of the ongoing historiographical debate on the relationship between the politics of National Socialism and contemporary science.