Culture wars, economic hardship and disdain for mental illness and learning disability – a dangerous mix.

Germany’s asylums between the world wars housed a mixed population – mainly of people with a learning disability or a severe and persistent mental illness. These people became the focus of Nazi interest for two reasons.

First – and this isn’t as widely known as it should be – residents of the asylums were the first large scale victims of the Nazi’s mass murder programmes. The technologies used later, on Jews, Roma, homosexuals, communists and others, were first developed in what is usually known as Aktion T4 (named prosaically enough for the original HQ address Tiergarten 4). That is, T4 developed gas chambers as an efficient method of killing, purpose-built crematoria for disposal of the bodies, and an associated propaganda programme that is hard not to see as enabling a sort of collusion with the general public. An estimated 200,000 people from the asylums were eventually killed in T4 and its sequelae. This history is covered in some detail in Michael Burleigh’s extraordinary 1994 book Death and Deliverance: “euthanasia” in Germany 1900-1945 (Cambridge UP, listed unbelievably as out of print now).

An apparently separate campaign waged by the Nazis took the form of what we would now call culture wars, with modern art as a particular target. The infamous Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibitions curated by party members and promoted by Goebbels are well known, but less so is the link to asylum art. A number of key modernists had been intrigued and influenced by the work of apparently mad people – so-called art brut – a significant collection of which had been accrued by Hans Prinzhorn at Heidelberg and valued as being artistically important in its own right, not simply as a window into the mind of the insane.

The Nazis exploited this association in carefully managed presentations associated with the message – look how modern art is no different to the art of lunatics and imbeciles and yet you are duped into paying huge sums for the public galleries to own it.  With the related message of course – it’s all part of a (Jew-orchestrated) conspiracy to undermine true Germanic society through undermining its culture.

The two stories inevitably intersect, with many (amazingly not all) of the asylum art works destroyed and the artists who made them perishing in the mass euthanasia programmes. This story is well told in a new book The Gallery of Miracles and Madness by Charlie English – unlike Burleigh a journalist rather than historian, with a predictably different but nonetheless well researched and engaging style.

The asylum artists who died in the T4 programme were caught in a perfect storm – of culture wars used by an authoritarian government to garner support for their wider political project; the motivating force of economic hardship coupled with the idea that alien enemies are to blame; the promotion of “euthanasia” as a solution to the societal problem of burdensome lives. Sound familiar?