Cranioklepty

by Colin Dickey

  It was a crushing blow, nearly devastating the young man, but it led to a moment of clarity. All this time the impediment had been the prince who held such power over him. Rosenbaum had worked for the Esterhazy family for ten years, but if he were free of the prince’s control, there would be nothing left to stand in the way of his marriage—the prince had no control over the lives of private citizens. Shortly after the Christmas incident, Rosenbaum raised that point with the prince, and on January 30 he received a curt letter that stated, “The supplicant’s petition to marry is hereby dropped; he is free, however, to conclude the preparations already made by proceeding directly to marry, which step will have as a consequence his immediate dismissal from service.”37

  It was not a great time to take such a risk. Since the heady days of the 1780s and ’90s Vienna had become a different place, an apocalyptic city. Rosenbaum was giving up one of the few secure jobs to be had in an increasingly unstable Austria, risking financial ruin and ridicule not just for himself but for Therese as well. Should her mother’s worst fears come to pass, one of the city’s most promising sopranos and one of its most eligible women would be doomed to folly and disgrace. But to Rosenbaum and Therese, their love was worth the chance. Rosenbaum resigned his post, and on June 11, 1800, he and Therese were finally married.

  ROSENBAUM AND HIS new wife woke up from their private misery to find that the Vienna around them had changed. The city was under massive strain, keeping up a thin pretense of prosperity as dark clouds threatened to the west. The year they were married, Vienna celebrated the millennial anniversary of the coronation of Charlemagne, the symbolic founding of the Hapsburg Empire. “It would be an affront to the inhabitants of the Imperial capital,” read the proclamation posted everywhere in the city, “to doubt that patriots of all stations will be present at this so rare observance.”38

  Meanwhile, a different sort of millennium was coming from France. The letters in the words “l’empereur Bonaparte,” as Pierre Bezukhov discovers in War and Peace, can be converted into numbers that add up to “666,” and it was Napoleon’s apocalyptic army that bore down on Vienna the night of its grand celebration. On Christmas Day, exactly a year after the prince had torn up his marriage petition, Rosenbaum spent the day watching frantic defense preparations along the outer walls of the city and then went to the millennial celebration in the evening. “It was quite full,” he noted, and Therese “sang with rare art . . . during the cantata people were talking of a defeat.”39

  It was the inauspicious beginning of a dark decade for Vienna. The splendor and gleam that had typified the city only a few years before were gone, replaced by the endless threat of war, high unemployment, and out-of-control inflation. Bread riots broke out, and bakeries were ransacked; the imperial guard had to be called out on numerous occasions to brutally suppress popular uprisings. In 1807 a freak hurricane destroyed the famous Augustinian Church, rolling up its massive iron clock dial like a sheet of paper. And for several days afterward a comet with a long tail was visible in the night sky.

  IMPROBABLY, THROUGHOUT ALL of this Rosenbaum and Therese prospered. Their marriage flourished—in part because of his business acumen, in part because of her talent and stardom, and not least because of their love for each other. For all her mother’s fears, Therese was provided a comfortable middle-class life. The couple remained devoted to one another for the rest of their lives. But Rosenbaum never forgot the anguish the prince had put them through.

  Haydn remained close to the young couple. Forty years their senior, he nonetheless visited and dined with them often, particularly in the few years immediately after their marriage. In 1801 they came to Eisenstadt for two weeks and saw Haydn nearly every day. He entertained them, showered Therese with compliments, drove them around in his carriage, and treated them to carousing dinners that lasted late into the night. As his health declined he saw them less, but in 1803 he steadfastly assured them both of his affection.

  Despite this close connection among the three of them, Rosenbaum would always remain the odd man out: the greatest composer of his day, the most-sought-after soprano in Vienna, and the accountant. At dinner together they talked of Therese’s art, of the reasons her voice was superior, and of how she might mentor other young singers. They talked of Haydn’s new compositions, of the medal he had received from the Paris Opera. They did not spend much time talking about Rosenbaum’s work.

  During this time Rosenbaum began to develop another, more controversial interest. In the six years since he had first heard of Gall’s theories, he had grown steadily more fascinated with the principles of phrenology. He began to spend more time with people like his childhood friend Johann Nepomuk Peter, who had a similar interest in studying the brain’s machinations, and who liked to refer to the founder of phrenology by the diminutive nickname “Gallschen.” Together they discussed the latest discoveries, differences between Gall’s system and that of his pupil Spurzheim, and the ways in which the Austrian penal system might be improved if phrenological reforms were instituted. This new science of the brain, both were convinced, was the way of progress and the future.

  There was a great deal about this new science that would appeal to someone like Rosenbaum. He was essentially a man of numbers who worked in a world of quantifiable facts and known outcomes. He knew at all times what he was worth and kept meticulous records of what he was owed. He had gotten this far in life through analytic rationality. And yet the world he loved was one of ineffable beauty, spectacular excess, and musical genius.

  According to Immanuel Kant, genius is something that can be identified but not defined: A genius is “a talent,” Kant wrote, “for producing that for which no definite rule can be given.” For Kant, the genius “does not know himself how he has come by his ideas; and he has not the power to devise the like at pleasure, or in accordance with a plan, [or] to communicate it to others in precepts that will enable them to produce similar products.”40 At the same time that Gall was working out his theories, Kant was explaining genius as an invisible force that drives the engine of progress, as a thing whose products can be seen but which itself remains elusive.

  It was in this sense that phrenology—alone of all the sciences—might be useful, in giving one a tool for understanding genius. With phrenology, it seemed, one could map the unknown and invisible territories of the brain. And this was perhaps its most appealing aspect: Just as it could decode and explain pathology, it could also reveal the truth about genius in a way that even the genius him- or herself could not. The discussion surrounding the physical location of genius in the brain and its manifestation on the skull became a recurrent source of debate. For phrenologists, the only true way to know for sure was through exact measurements of the actual heads.

  It was the promise of understanding something as ineffable as creative genius that resonated most strongly with Rosenbaum. Even as he dutifully recorded in his diary exactly what Therese’s performances earned her—how many people attended each performance, the admission prices, and her percentage—there was no way to put a price on a voice so high and trembling that it terrified the empress. He could gather every known fact on Haydn and weigh each available datum and still never understand why one’s spirits soared almost to the point of terror when the chorus sang, “And there was light.”

  It was phrenology, Rosenbaum came to understand, that could bridge these two worlds.

  ON MARCH 27, 1808, a tribute was held in Haydn’s honor. The seventy-six-year-old composer at first did not think he was up to attending but in the end was cajoled into it. He donned his Paris medal, and servants carried him into the hall on an ornate armchair. To universal applause he was welcomed by the prince; his fellow composers Salieri and Beethoven knelt and kissed his hand. By the end of the first half of the concert, the strain was too much and he had to leave. But he stood and bade his farewell to the musical society of Vienna, greatly moved.

  That night Rosenbaum noted in his diary, “Thus Haydn was, after all, ho
nored during his lifetime.”41 He knew the composer was dying and knew he might soon be given the chance of a lifetime: to know the mind of the greatest composer the world had yet seen! To be able to get the exact measurement and proportions of his head, to quantify each segment of that magnificent mind. What alchemy! To convert those adagios and crescendos into centimeters and grams, to assemble a picture of the man in terms not of art but of science. Haydn would live for another year, but Rosenbaum was already making preparations.

  It’s not clear at what point he decided to steal Haydn’s skull, but he began planning the theft long before the actual death. He knew in advance how difficult it would be, and he decided to take a practice run.

  CHAPTER THREE

  “SO WAS SHE, SO SHE IS NOW”

  The subject of Joseph Carl Rosenbaum’s first foray into cranioklepty was the actress Elizabeth Roose, who died in childbirth in October 1808. Roose was from a family of actors; she, her father, and her husband had all come to Vienna in 1798 and had made a huge impression on the theatergoing public. Of Elizabeth, a reviewer noted that she had a “magnificent head and an expressive face,” and it was this magnificent head that Rosenbaum and his conspirators would cut from her corpse a week after her death, this same expressive face that they would cut away with a scalpel and burn off with lime.42

  WHEN ROSENBAUM REMOVED Betty Roose’s head from her body in November 1808, he joined a long line of body snatchers in a practice that had grown rampant over the past several hundred years. As doctors began to abandon the model of the four humors in favor of direct observation of the workings of the body, the corpse became the primary site of education. Anatomists were free to dissect the bodies of executed criminals, who had forfeited their souls, but as demand outpaced supply, doctors and schools increasingly turned to grave robbers, known as “resurrectionists.”

  By the eighteenth century a thriving trade in grave robbing had taken root. In 1728 the anonymous author of a pamphlet titled “A View of London and Westminster” noted that the Corporation of Corpse Stealers “support themselves and Families very comfortably; and that no-one should be surprised at the Nature of Such a Society, the late Resurrectionists in St Saviours, St Giles’s and St Pancras’ Churchyards, are memorable Instances of this laudable Profession.”43

  This desire for corpses was to last well into the nineteenth century. As late as 1890, for example, the Kentucky School of Medicine was accused of plundering various graveyards, including that of the Asylum for the Insane in Anchorage, Kentucky. The school was unapologetic: “Yes, the party was sent by us,” a school official told the press. “We must have bodies, and if the State won’t give them to us we must steal them. The winter classes were large and used up so many subjects that there are none for the spring classes. The Asylum Cemetery has been robbed for years, and I doubt if there is a corpse in it. I tell you we must have bodies. You cannot make doctors without them, and the public must understand it. If we can’t get them any other way we will arm the students with Winchester rifles and send them to protect the body-snatchers on their raids.”44

  This was only ten years before the turn of the twentieth century.

  This extensive history of grave robbing had gone a long way to divest the gravesite of its sanctity—despite religious prohibitions, men of learning and progressive thought could believe that grave robbing in the name of science, while not quite legal, was morally acceptable, even laudable. This change in belief helps to explain why Rosenbaum and his friends were able to speak so openly about their actions and why they thought nothing of displaying their trophies in glass cases in their living rooms.

  Among those who fell victim to the resurrectionists was Laurence Sterne, author of Tristram Shandy. When he died of tuberculosis in 1768, Sterne, who had often gone by the nickname “Yorick,” was insolvent, and buried in a pauper’s grave. As such he was easy pickings: A few days later his body was stolen by grave robbers and turned up on a dissection table. It was only by chance that he was recognized by the doctor who received his body and was quickly returned to the ground. Sterne’s situation was unfortunate, but it highlights the difference between an average resurrectionist and a cranioklept such as Rosenbaum. Sterne’s was just one fresh body among many, his genius and wit inconsequential. In contrast, the cranioklepts were looking for something specific. Whereas the anatomist wanted the whole body, the cranioklept wanted only the head—cleaned, bleached, impervious to time and radiating its mystery. The skull, for men like Rosenbaum, was something like a scientific fetish, a secular relic.

  In this regard men like Joseph Carl Rosenbaum had much earlier antecedents. The ancient Christian cult of relics had long since put a premium on the remains of the dead, and in particular of dead saints. Their tombs were privileged places where Heaven and Earth met; the bones of the saints were the physical evidence of the coming resurrection, a tangible proof of Christ’s promise in the form of the undecayed corpse.

  But that didn’t mean one couldn’t steal them. Relic theft had long been an accepted practice in medieval Christianity. Indeed, such actions were not considered thefts at all—the term for this process was simply “translation,” and it was almost universally praised and considered an act of Christian virtue. As Patrick J. Geary explained, “A real conviction that the relic was the saint, that the relic was a person and not a thing, undoubtedly helped mitigate the more blatantly immoral aspects of stealing. Paralleling the customs of ritual ‘kidnappings’ of brides by their prospective husbands, the theft of relics was at once a kidnapping and a seduction; overcome by the force of the thief’s ardor and devotion, the saint allowed himself to be swept away to a new life in a new family.”45 This attitude captures the motives of men like Rosenbaum much more closely than the pure-profit motive of the typical resurrectionist. The stealing of Haydn’s skull was in many ways an act of love: reverence by way of defilement. Why hide such a worthy skull out of the sight of humankind when it could be proudly displayed, a testament for centuries to come?

  Any piece of a saint might be potent and valuable, but by the end of the Middle Ages the skull in particular had developed an iconic exceptionality. Associated with the trope of vanitas, or memento mori, the skull embodied a complicated union of ideas and themes, from bodily decay and physical death to penance and ultimately salvation. As Thomas Browne himself wrote, “In these moral acceptions, the way to be immortal is to die daily: nor can I think I have the true Theory of death, when I contemplate a skull . . . with those vulgar imaginations it casts upon us; I have therefore enlarged that common Memento mori [Remember you must die], into a more Christian memorandum, Memento quatuor Novissima [Remember the four last things], those four inevitable points of us all, Death, Judgement, Heaven, and Hell.”46 By the time Browne’s own skull was put on display, it was perhaps contemplated for different reasons, but certainly phrenology and cranioklepty contain the echoes of this much earlier legacy.

  Perhaps because of this tradition, it would seem that to possess another’s skull allowed for a unique connection that could last beyond death. Saint Francis of Assisi, who himself would come to be iconically associated with skulls, recorded the lament of a Brother Julius, who, upon the loss of a close friend and fellow monk, cried, “Alas, woe is me; for there is no good left me now, and all the world is darkened to me by the death of my sweet and most loving brother Amazialbene! Were it not that I should have no peace from the brethren, I would go to his grave and take out his head, and out of his skull I would make me two vessels; from the one I would always eat, in memory of him, for my own devotion, and from the other I would drink when I was thirsty.”47

  Many of the more prominent thinkers of the Enlightenment, of course, had tried to put an end to this kind of sentimental attachment to human remains. Voltaire decried the worshipping of relics as a “superstition” left over from “our ages of barbarity,” when they had appealed to “the vulgar: feudal lords and their imbecile wives, and their brutish vassals.”48

  But even
so rational a thinker as G. W. F. Hegel, from whom so much of modern philosophy derives, was susceptible to the aura of the skull. In 1807 he published his opus The Phenomenology of Spirit, which included a lengthy section on phrenology. Although he ultimately concluded that phrenology as a science was dubious at best, he nonetheless recognized the cultural importance of the skull: “The skull-bone does have in general the significance of being the immediate actuality of Spirit. . . . If now the brain and spinal cord together constitute that corporal being-for-self of Spirit, the skull and vertebral column for the other extreme to it, an extreme which is separated off, viz., the solid, inert Thing. When, however, anyone thinks of the proper location of Spirit’s outer existence, it is not the back that comes to mind but only the head.”49

  THE THEATER WORLD in Vienna was small, and if the Rosenbaums did not know Elizabeth Roose directly, they certainly had many friends in common with the actress. Her unexpected death during childbirth was a tragedy for her family and a blow to the theatrical world, but Rosenbaum saw it as an opportunity. He was clearly not thinking of the possibility of stealing her skull before her death, and he made no mention of her in his diary before the “dull, melancholy” day of her burial on October 26, 1808. But when he heard the news of her death, something clicked in him, and he quickly saw that she was the perfect specimen.

  Roose was in many ways an ideal subject for phrenological study. When her family had come to Vienna (both her husband and father were also well-known actors), they brought with them a new style of acting. A contemporary reviewer wrote that “with the appearance of this family a proper conversational tone came to the theatre, and naturalness replaced the stilted, strutting style of play-acting.”50 And while Betty’s father was known for his awkward gait, his stout frame and gangly limbs, her own genius was largely in her face and expressions.