Hitler’s revolution was a cultural undertaking as much as a political one. His aim was to reshape the Germans, eradicating the Kulturbolschewismus of the Weimar Republic, and to forge a community of ethnically pure Aryans, the Volksgemeinschaft, which would operate in unison in support of the Führer’s vision. In 1930, he had assured Joseph Goebbels, the Gauleiter of Berlin, that once in office he intended to carry through the party provisions of 1920, which called for a struggle against “tendencies in the arts and literature which exercise a disintegrating influence on the life of the people.” He would not waste time.
Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany at noon on January 30, 1933, the head of a coalition with the German National People’s Party. He had not seized power so much as been handed it, and high-ranking NSDAP officials could scarcely believe their good fortune. “Hitler is Reich Chancellor,” wrote a jubilant Goebbels. “Just like a fairy-tale.” Two other Nazis took key roles in the cabinet: Wilhelm Frick became interior minister, while Hermann Göring was given control of the police in the giant state of Prussia, which accounted for more than half of the country’s population. At 7:00 p.m. on the evening of Hitler’s appointment, Goebbels organized a torchlit parade of SA, SS, and “Stahlhelm” ultra-nationalists around Berlin, declaring that a million men had taken part, though in fact there were only a few tens of thousands. Göring announced on the radio that the mood in the country “could only be compared with that of August 1914, when a nation…rose up to defend everything it possessed.” The “shame and disgrace of the last 14 years” had been wiped out, he said.
Within hours of his appointment, Hitler began to consolidate his power. The next day, January 31, President Hindenburg agreed to dissolve the German parliament, the Reichstag, at Hitler’s request, pending a new national vote. The day after that, the Nazi leader kicked off an election campaign with his first address to the people. He chose the slogan “Attack on Marxism,” and squads of storm troopers now began literally to attack the two parties to which this label applied, the Communists and the Social Democrats, who also happened to be the NSDAP’s most powerful opponents in the Reichstag. Party offices were smashed up, newspapers were banned, activists were beaten and tortured, and this was only the beginning. On February 27, the Reichstag building burned, and Hitler used the fire as pretext for an emergency decree that suspended civil liberties, including freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of the arts, and freedom of the press. Nazi paramilitaries were authorized to carry firearms to enforce the new strictures and were enrolled as police auxiliaries.
All over Germany, storm troopers now visited bloody, unrestrained horror on their enemies. There was nothing sophisticated about their methods: They worked with jackboots and fists and truncheons, punching men and women alike, forcing Reichstag deputies to drink oil and urine, shooting those who resisted. They smashed their way around the country, robbing victims of cash and valuables and stealing their vehicles, roaring up and down city streets with banners flying and weapons on display. Tens of thousands of Jews, leftists, and liberals were dragged away under “arrest,” and even the makeshift jails began to spill over. This overcrowding problem was solved in mid-March, when Himmler established a new facility on the outskirts of Munich: the Dachau concentration camp.
As Germany recoiled, Hitler dissembled. He had long experience of commanding violence without implicating himself, and now he professed mild disapproval of the horrific acts his men were committing, blaming communist infiltrators or radical elements within the movement, while denouncing his enemies in extreme and violent terms. Local bands of storm troopers would, he knew, take the hint, and if specific directions were needed, Göring and other lieutenants could be relied upon to give them.
The NSDAP won 43.9 percent of the vote in the federal elections on March 5. Given the scale of the oppression wreaked by his followers, this was a poor result for Hitler: Of 45 million eligible voters, only 17 million had chosen him. Still, he was able to command a majority in the new parliament, and there was only one piece of legislation he now needed. The Enabling Act, which allowed the government to pass laws without the Reichstag’s approval, was put to a vote on March 23. Chanting storm troopers lined the Kroll Opera House, where the deputies now sat, jeering at those members of the opposition who had not yet been arrested or scared off. The atmosphere was so threatening that the leader of the Social Democrats, Otto Wels, carried a cyanide pill in his pocket in case he was dragged away by brown-shirted SA men. Only Wels spoke against the legislation, which passed by a large majority. The Weimar constitution was effectively void.
Over the following months, the SA, Stahlhelmers, and SS cut a swath through the remaining opposition, beating, murdering, and terrorizing with impunity. By June, Hitler had a near monopoly on power. “The road to the total state,” Goebbels crowed in his diary at the end of that month. “Our revolution has an uncanny dynamism.”
Hitler laid out his cultural intentions even as he seized political control. In one of his first speeches as chancellor, at the Sportpalast on February 10, he declared that he would “bestow once more upon the Volk a genuinely German culture with German art, German architecture, and German music.” This would “restore to us our soul,” he said, and “evoke deep reverence for the accomplishments of the past, a humble admiration for the great men of German history.” In his Enabling Act speech of March 23 he announced a “thorough moral purging” of society, in which the education system, the theater, the cinema, literature, the press, and the radio would all be bent to the maintenance of the “eternal values residing in the essential character of our people.” There would also be a new direction for German painting and sculpture, since the heroic, racially hygienic Nazi era called for heroic, racially pure art, free from dirty “cosmopolitan” modernism:
Art will always remain the expression and mirror of the yearning and the reality of an era. The cosmopolitan contemplative attitude is rapidly disappearing. Heroism is arising passionately as the future shaper and leader of political destinies. The task of art is to give expression to this determining spirit of the age. Blood and race will once more become the source of artistic intuition.
In pursuit of this new art, Hitler commissioned a great new gallery, the Haus der deutschen Kunst (House of German Art), to be constructed in Munich. This first monumental Nazi building was designed by Paul Ludwig Troost, an architect Hitler had met at the Bruckmanns’ salon, who was most famous for designing the interiors of ocean liners.
Much as the SA did not need direct orders from the leadership but “worked toward the Führer,” state officials, party newspapers, and organizations needed little encouragement to take action in the cultural field. Weeks after Hitler’s appointment as chancellor, Alfred Barr, the director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), attended a public meeting of the Kampfbund in Stuttgart, where he heard the leadership announce that since the revolution was “above all cultural,” there must be “no remorse and no sentimentality” in “uprooting and crushing” National Socialism’s artistic enemies. In mid-March, Barr discovered that a major Oskar Schlemmer retrospective had been shut down by the city authorities after a vitriolic attack in the Nazi press. He bought one of Schlemmer’s works for MoMA “just to spite the sons of bitches.”
The critique of modern art continued to revolve around the unholy trinity of “Jewish,” “Bolshevik,” and “mad,” as a programmatic article in the Völkischer Beobachter made clear on February 25. Under the headline “From the German Artistic Kingdom of the Jewish Nation,” the Nazi art historian Wilhelm Rüdiger poured sarcasm over three categories of modern art, including “psychopathic art” and the parallel grouping “art connected with the degradation of all values.” Savaging by name Paul Klee (a “truly lamentable” artist, who “has Arab blood in him”), Hans Arp (“once a Dadaist—you know, the oxen are sitting on telephone wires playing chess”), and Max Ernst (simply “alarming”), as well as George Grosz, Otto Dix, Max Beckmann, and Marc Chagall, Rüdiger noted:
What some call surrealism is what the other (healthy) people call having a screw loose. (See Prinzhorn, Die Bildnerei der Geisteskranken.) In fact, here the “Limits of Reason,” as a picture by Klee is titled, are not only reached, but far exceeded!
Aware that their moment had arrived at last, a group of völkisch art organizations, including chapters of the Kampfbund and Bettina Feistel-Rohmeder’s Deutsche Kunstgesellschaft, came together in Weimar in early March to form the umbrella organization Führerrat der Vereinigten Deutschen Kunst- und Kulturverbände (Führer’s Council of the United German Art and Cultural Associations). Immediately after the March 5 elections, the council published an appeal, “What German Artists Expect of the New Government,” demanding that the “proven soldiers of the cultural struggle” be given their reward for the battle with art Bolshevism they had been fighting for a decade or more. The council, which represented 250,000 members, spelled out five demands to the new government that would “precisely delineate the stages of the Nazi struggle against the avant-garde.” These were:
1. That all art showing “cosmopolitan and Bolshevik signs” be removed from German museums and collections. These should be put on public display, along with the sums spent on them, and the names of the officials responsible. Thereafter, the works should be burned, and their heat used “to warm public buildings.”
2. All museum directors guilty of “unscrupulous waste of public funds,” and who had hidden “truly German” works of art in storage, must be immediately suspended.
3. The names of all artists who had been “swept along by Marxism and Bolshevism” should no longer be mentioned in any printed publication.
4. Modernist architecture, including “residential boxes” and “churches that look like greenhouses,” should be banned.
5. Statues or sculptures in public spaces that offended public sentiment, including those by the Expressionists Ernst Barlach and Wilhelm Lehmbruck, should be removed as quickly as possible to make room for “German” works.
Almost all of these demands would eventually be met, though in truth, the influence of the Kampfbund and the völkisch groups was now on the wane, as the assault on modernism could now be led by the state itself. Under the policy of Gleichschaltung (coordination), all aspects of German life were to be brought in line with Hitler’s ideas. The principal tool in this reorganization was a powerful new government department charged with centralizing control of German culture and uniting the country behind the idea of national revolution: the Reich Ministry for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda. The man appointed to run it was the creative Berlin Gauleiter who had already amply demonstrated his love for Hitler, Joseph Goebbels.
At thirty-five, Goebbels was eight years younger than Hitler and a rare beast in the upper echelons of the party: a physically disabled and highly educated intellectual. Born with a congenitally deformed right foot, he had earned a Ph.D. from Heidelberg and spent much of the 1920s trying to become a novelist. He had long been sympathetic to modernism: In 1923 he penned a fictionalized autobiography, Michael, whose eponymous hero described Van Gogh as a “star” and “the most modern of the moderns,” brushing off the artist’s alleged insanity with “we, really all of us, are mad when we have an idea.” Visiting a museum in Cologne in 1924, he had admired the modern sculpture of Ernst Barlach, and described the “wonderful colors” of Emil Nolde. As he grew closer to Hitler, however, he was learning to adjust his views. When Albert Speer remodeled Goebbels’s Berlin apartment in the summer of 1933, borrowing some of Nolde’s paintings from the National Gallery to hang in it, Joseph and his wife, Magda, were “delighted,” Speer recalled—until Hitler paid a visit. Then they were mortified. “The pictures have to go at once,” Goebbels told Speer. “They are simply impossible!” In matters of artistic taste, it seemed there was only one opinion that really mattered. “We were all in the same boat,” Speer remembered. “I, too, although altogether at home in modern art, tacitly accepted Hitler’s pronouncement.”
Goebbels was hated by the more reactionary tendency within the Nazi cultural establishment. He would fight a long battle with Rosenberg over the regime’s artistic direction, while Schultze-Naumburg despised him almost on sight, calling the limping intellectual an “evil spirit” and an “angry snake.” His appointment was not welcomed by the arch-conservatives in the cabinet that spring, but it was one of Hitler’s inherent contradictions that he recognized the need for modern methods and technologies to deliver an age of allegedly eternal values, and he knew Goebbels and his propaganda ministry could be relied upon to devise them. The Volk had to start “to think as one, to react as one, and to place itself in the service of the government with all its heart,” Goebbels explained. “Technology must not be allowed to run ahead of the Reich: The Reich must keep up with technology. Only the latest thing is good enough.”
Aided by a slew of new laws, Gleichschaltung was applied with swift brutality. Until 1933, Germany had been a cultural powerhouse: Its writers and poets, musicians, filmmakers, and architects were recognized across the world, and its artists were feted most highly of all. This would be swept away in the coming cataclysm. Ernst Barlach wrote to a friend on the eve of Hitler’s takeover of power: “We all feel as if we are sitting on a volcano.” The radio “hurls rage, hatred and revenge, and snorts murder,” and people were fleeing abroad to avoid the rancid ideology, the threat of violence, and the parade-ground bellowing that could be heard from every direction. “The nationalist terror will probably outlast me,” he predicted.
Paul Klee was reluctant to recognize Hitler’s threat. A professor at the Düsseldorf academy in 1933, he tried not to let the new regime faze him. He “refused to be upset,” his son, Felix, recalled, and tried to carry on as though nothing had happened. But when a swastika was run up over the academy in March, he knew he could no longer continue to show up for work. Storm troopers rifled the family home in Dessau, turning everything upside down and taking whatever they wanted. The most hurtful loss was of their correspondence. A native of Bern, Klee left for Switzerland for a few weeks at that point, remarking: “They say the Bernese are slow moving, but I’d like to see them catch up with this one.” His wife, Lily, a stern and energetic Bavarian, went to the SA headquarters with a van and made them return the letters and postcards, proclaiming her triumph over the “blockheads” to all and sundry. Her victory was short-lived. Klee was declared “degenerate” and “subversive,” and suspended from the academy on May 1. Lily repeatedly told him: “You must leave Germany, there is nothing left for you to do here,” but he hung on until Christmas, when they emigrated to Switzerland for good.
The litany of artists targeted at this time is a roll call of great German names from the early century. Otto Dix was sacked from the Dresden academy, and Max Beckmann from Frankfurt’s; Oskar Schlemmer was accused by students at his Berlin art school of being Jewish (he wasn’t), then dismissed. Berlin was also the scene of the final demise of the Bauhaus. After relocating from Weimar to Dessau, it had once again fallen afoul of far-right politicians and was shut in 1931. Mies van der Rohe reopened it in a disused factory in Berlin the following year, but in April 1933 it was raided by police and closed permanently. In May, the Prussian Academy of Arts asked ten members to resign, including Dix, Schmidt-Rottluff, Kirchner, Kokoschka, and Mies van der Rohe. Kollwitz, the first woman appointed to the academy, was also the first to be dismissed. Barlach left in protest at Kollwitz’s removal. The academy’s Jewish president, eighty-six-year-old Max Liebermann, was also pushed out, as was Emil Nolde, whose membership in the Nazi party did not protect him.
Gallery and museum directors were targeted, too: Around thirty were removed from office in 1933. Gustav Hartlaub, an associate of Prinzhorn’s from his Heidelberg days, had amassed one of the best collections of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art in Germany at the Mannheim Kunsthalle, including three works by the Prinzhorn artist Paul Goesch. The Kunsthalle had already been subjected to a long-running attack in the pages of the Nazi propaganda sheet Hakenkreuzbanner (Swastika banner) by the Kampfbund’s Otto Gebele von Waldstein. No fewer than seven articles had appeared, dismissing Hartlaub’s entire buying activity and declaring again and again that he did not collect “genuine German art” at all. In January 1932, Hartlaub had complained to the director of the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, Alfred Hentzen. If such attacks were occurring everywhere, he told Hentzen, “we should think about how to defend ourselves together.”
By the spring of 1933, the moment for any such action was long past. Hartlaub was sacked on March 20 and Gebele appointed director instead. It was the new director’s job, the Nazis declared, to “uncover and eliminate” the gallery’s “Bolshevik art policy.” Gebele would put on a show to highlight the errors Hartlaub had made, as well as the role of Jews in the “disappearance of city funds.” On April 3, he marched into the gallery with a unit of armed SS and set to work. The following day, he opened the exhibition Kulturbolschewistische Bilder (Images of cultural Bolshevism) in two upper rooms. The first show in art history whose sole purpose was defamation, it featured almost a hundred works by Klee, Schlemmer, Chagall, Dix, Nolde, Beckmann, and others. They had been stripped of their frames, of which they were said to be “unworthy,” and hung deliberately badly. Captions gave each piece’s purchase price (which often dated from the time of hyperinflation, and so was misleadingly high) and, in some cases, information about the race of the artist or dealer. To give the show an illicit air, people under twenty were barred from entry. The propaganda accompanying Kulturbolschewistische Bilder encouraged the general public’s disapproval of avant-garde art, inviting the people with their “healthy sense” to judge the works themselves. Twenty thousand went to see it.
Not content with shaming modern art in the gallery, Gebele decided that a portrait of a rabbi by Chagall, who was of Jewish origin, should be paraded around town in a vehicle, accompanied by a large photograph of the Hartlaubs and a poster with the painting’s purchase price. This procession, reminiscent of the medieval pillory, traveled two miles from the Kunsthalle to the Hartlaubs’ family home before continuing to a well-known Mannheim store, where it was installed for public ridicule in the window, along with a sign that read “Taxpayer, you should know where your money has gone.” It remained there for several weeks. “The people gathered in huge crowds,” Hartlaub recalled, “and read a poster next to it, which stated that I had acquired this horrible creation for 3,500 reichsmarks of taxpayers’ money.” At one moment during this affair, Gebele asked Hartlaub how he could possibly have bought a painting of a Jew by a Jew—and an eastern Jew at that. Hartlaub replied that one of Hitler’s favorite artists had portrayed the same subject. “Mr. City Councilor,” he said, “Rembrandt also painted rabbis and Jews.”
The Hakenkreuzbanner was euphoric about the show of “shamed” art, pronouncing that it had “opened the eyes of the Volk to the way their spiritual values were played down.” The conservative newspaper Neue Mannheimer Zeitung also generally approved, asking why the gallery had bought the “smut” of Klee and Grosz, but objecting to the inclusion of works by such Nordic artists as Munch and Beckmann. The more liberal Neues Mannheimer Volksblatt complained that it was “violence” to take paintings out of their frames and defended “good pictures by Rohlfs, Nolde, Marc, Heckel, [and] Munch,” demonstrating that it was still possible to oppose party actions against “cultural Bolshevism” four months into Hitler’s rule.
From Mannheim, the “abomination exhibition” was sent on tour, to Munich in early July, where it was given the title Mannheimer Schreckenskammer (Mannheim chamber of horrors), and then to Erlangen. In Erlangen, the Nazis experimented for the first time with a new discrediting technique: contrasting the modern works with those of unknown provenance by psychiatric patients. The observer was meant to regard the creations of the professional artists and the patients as similar, and conclude that the artists were also “ill,” “broken,” or “decomposed,” thereby discriminating against both groups. The exhibition was not a success: It ran for just three weeks, and the local chapter of the Kampfbund was disappointed, noting that “participation in cultural life is still quite low” and that there was a large amount of work to do “to hammer the meaning of cultural life into these circles.” Nevertheless, the Völkischer Beobachter art writer Franz Hofmann was prompted to call for drastic measures to be taken against such art, just as action had been taken against proscribed books. Evidence of the Mannheim purchases had struck the public suddenly with “what threatened us in Germany,” Hofmann wrote, as had the contents of the modern wing of the Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Book burnings had already dealt with “dirt, shame, and decomposition” in literature, yet no such action had taken place against Bolshevik art, even though it was “more dangerous by the immediacy of its effect.” Hofmann had no time for those who tried to defend Hartlaub. In fact, anyone who had bought or created modern art deserved to be sent to the new facility outside Munich. “We can only wish them a stay in Dachau, in the concentration camp,” he wrote.
Not every party member agreed. In the summer, the National Socialists’ Students Association began to mount an exhibition in Berlin, Dreißig deutsche Künstler (Thirty German artists)—including Barlach, Macke, Nolde, Marc, and Schmidt-Rottluff—with the aim of reclaiming Expressionism as a truly German art. Naturally, Rosenberg and the Kampfbund protested against the idea, describing it as an “act of sabotage.” The exhibition received a favorable critical response on its opening but was shut after only three days on the orders of Frick. The student leaders who had promoted it were expelled from the union.
Visual art was just one target of Gleichschaltung. Similar purges and acts of censorship occurred in the music, theater, literature, and film worlds as Goebbels’s ministry took German life in its grip. “Cultural chambers” were set up to oversee each industry and to weed out Jews, leftists, and artistic modernists. The result was an extraordinary exodus of national talent: An estimated two thousand Germans active in the arts emigrated after 1933, including many of the most skilled and virtuosic creators of the era. Fritz Lang left after his film Das Testament des Dr. Mabuse (The Testament of Dr. Mabuse) was banned in the spring of 1933: Coincidentally, the film showed numerous works from the Prinzhorn collection. Lang moved to Hollywood, where he joined a substantial community of German refugees that would include Billy Wilder, Bertolt Brecht, Erich Maria Remarque, and Alfred Döblin. Thomas Mann remained in exile in Switzerland from February 1933 on. “I was expelled [from Germany],” he wrote bitterly. “Abused, pilloried and pillaged by the foreign conquerors of my country, for I am an older and better German than they are.”
There were cultural figures who stayed and tried to operate within the regime’s increasingly draconian restrictions, or even, like Gottfried Benn, to become champions of it. One of Prinzhorn’s friends, the dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann, was among the few celebrated writers who remained. He would come to regret his decision. Asked in 1938 why he hadn’t left, he shouted: “Because I’m a coward, do you understand? I’m a coward.”
It was the students—Prinzhorn’s vaunted German youth—who drove Gleichschaltung forward in the universities, leading book burnings and harassing Jewish staff and anyone deemed to represent the “un-German spirit.” In Heidelberg, young Nazis marched through the town with flaming torches, flanked by storm troopers, SS, and Stahlhelmers, carrying books to throw on bonfires and singing far-right anthems. Karl Wilmanns was targeted for a lecture he had given at the psychiatric clinic in November 1932 in which he had described Hitler’s wartime blindness as “hysterical,” provoking the loud disapproval of National Socialist students. Wilmanns wasn’t easily silenced, and he continued to criticize Hitler, stating openly that he did not consider him a capable leader. His alleged insults were conflated with other “suspicious” behavior, such as a research trip he had once made to the Soviet Union, and the fact that his wife, Elisabeth, though a Protestant, was classed as 75 percent Jewish under the Nazi system of racial profiling. Wilmanns also employed several Jewish assistants.
The university began to move against him in April 1933, withdrawing various privileges. Storm troopers raided the family house several times in the middle of the night, turning over every room, screaming that he was a friend of the Jews and a communist. During the third such raid they arrested him, and after his release, the family received nightly death threats. He was formally dismissed from his post on June 22 and replaced by a party member, Carl Schneider. Wilmanns’s pension was halved, and he and Elisabeth fled Heidelberg, eventually settling in Wiesbaden. He maintained that he was proud of being the first non-Jewish professor of psychiatry to be sacked.
His daughter, Ruth, stayed on in Heidelberg to continue her medical studies. She was forced to wear a card announcing she was “37.5% Jewish.” As she walked to a lecture at the university hospital one day, a staff member tried to run her down with his car: She threw herself out of the way, and he shot past, screaming anti-Semitic threats. Ruth left the country soon afterward. She would complete her medical degree in Switzerland before moving to the United States. There, in 1972, she was appointed clinical professor of psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine.
As Germany fell under Hitler’s control, Prinzhorn went on holiday. That spring, he stayed with a twenty-two-year-old girlfriend in a Roman palazzo a friend had rented, and he returned, tanned and healthy, via Perugia and Venice. A few days after arriving back in Munich, he fell ill with typhoid fever and was taken to a hospital. On May 13, struggling with a cloudy “typhus brain,” he wrote to Klages. He was still working to promote the philosopher and had arranged a visiting professorship for him at Berlin via his friend Hugo Bruckmann, now an NSDAP deputy in the Reichstag. Klages wished him a speedy recovery. By May 23, writing had become too difficult for Prinzhorn, and he had to dictate his next letter. He had a “penetrating headache,” he told Klages, and found it hard to stand. On May 30, he’d “had a setback”: His temperature was 103°F, he felt dazed, and he spent much of his time dozing.
Four days later, with the danger of his situation clear, he begged Klages to visit. The philosopher stalled, and then declined: “I have come to the conclusion that we do better to postpone our reunion a few more moons,” he wrote. “I am convinced that for the time being you would need the utmost calm for at least fourteen days.” Prinzhorn never read this final brush-off. Klages, or perhaps his secretary, mixed up two envelopes, and sent the letter to the wrong person. Prinzhorn waited in vain for a reply from the man to whom he had been devoted for much of his intellectual life, and who, in those last days, meant more to him than anyone. At last he could wait no more. He died on June 14, at the age of forty-seven.
This last scene, with Klages’s apparent ambivalence and the muddle over his final letter, was somehow fitting. Although Prinzhorn pursued life’s meaning with all of the great intellect, passion, and energy at his disposal, in crucial decisions—about his relationships, his choice of mentor, politics—he reliably took the wrong turn. These choices left him unhappy, unable to capitalize on his achievements or win the admiration of his peers. Yet he was fortunate in one respect: that his three years of flurried, obsessive activity at Heidelberg produced a legacy that grew far beyond him.
One admirer, at least, was devastated to hear of Prinzhorn’s demise. Recalling the strange power of the German’s personality and his “noble nature,” the American David L. Watson found himself weeping as bitterly as he had at Prinzhorn’s rendering of Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden”:
This was one of the significant literary men of our time. His scientific, philosophic training had been transmuted by his artist mind into novel and beautiful patterns. What he might have told us as a common man, after leaving the platform of the scientist, we shall, alas, never know.
Never before had Watson understood why Shelley had written, on the death of John Keats, “I weep for Adonais—he is dead!” Now he did. Prinzhorn was gone, and only his books remained.