The Vertigo Years

by Philipp Blom

  Whether or not this diagnosis was accurate, it is certain that Wagner’s own surviving writings, a collection of aphorisms veering between insane rants and extremely pertinent observations, are pervaded by revulsion against his own sexual desire: ‘the misery of the nerves [i.e. neurasthenia] is not due to alcohol, not to the workings of the great cities, not even to the haste and worry of commercial life; its main reason is sexual vice, sexual degeneration of every kind.’ He was obsessed by his urges, and so revolted by them that he could not bring himself to write them down: ‘everything in me is desire and lust’; ‘the “derailment” [bestiality]... has not been without trace on me. As little as the other one, onanism. I am of too weak a nature, my conscience can’t stand for it.’ ‘It is strange: I, who have committed quite a few swinish acts, I am so embarrassed to think about it that I cannot bring myself to analyse [this] a little.’ His lust was an illness, rotting him from the inside ‘You know, I am guilty of my own illness. I am very ill, have been for seventeen years [i.e. since the age of fourteen], sick beyond healing. It seems, however, that my illness is not lethal. I have to help it along, otherwise it will not finish with me.’

  When not wallowing in self-revulsion, he unleashed terrible scenarios of revenge and bloodshed in his head. In his dreams he was a Roman emperor (‘I would certainly have made history’), and more, a cosmic monster:

  I wish I were a giant as big and tall as the mass of the universe. I would take a glowing pike and would poke it into the body of the earth. From pole to pole, from the earth’s brow to its feet I would penetrate it. I would tap the belly of the equator; I would squeeze the punctured body of the earth and the lava would come gushing from all holes, I would not mind if I burned my hands. Do you hear me, old Jehova? Have I magnified you in vain? Do you not hear how the brood of philistines is laughing at me? Make the hairs of my strength grow like the longest comet’s tail …

  The crude sexual imagery of this passage is typical of Wagner’s writings. Everything, after all, was touched by Eros (‘I almost forgot that even electricity is sexual and its elements create connections.’), everything diseased. ‘A comprehensive reform of humanity is imperative. And just as ruined houses and streets are pulled down in old cities... I have a sharp eye for everything sick and weak. If you make me the executioner no bacillus shall escape. I can take 25 million Germans on my conscience without it being even one gram heavier than before.’ ‘Pity! - I have read my Nietzsche, of course, and I have read him with the pleasure a gourmet of the mind feels faced with such a text.... pity with the weak, the sick, the crippled is crime, is first and foremost a crime against those who are pitied themselves.’

  Wagner was not so blind to his own failings as to exclude himself from this universal indictment. ‘I am at the head of my own [death] list,’ he calmly noted, adding that he wanted to take ‘the entire death-ridden neurasthenic horde’ with him. In his calmer moments, he was even an excellent analyst of his own predicament: ‘the feeling of impotence gives birth to strong words, and the most dashing fanfares sound forth from a horn named paranoia.’ Then, however, darker thoughts would cloud his brain again, though he himself experienced it as quite the opposite: ‘More and more I understand the mysterium of blood sacrifice, it cleanses and “maketh us pure from all sin”. Murder seems a kind of worship, not in servitude to insanity, but at the temple of reason.’

  Headmaster Wagner lived another twenty-five years in the seclusion of the Winnetal asylum. He wrote a drama entitled Wahn (Madness) about the delusional world of Bavaria’s tragic King Ludwig II and kept up a steady correspondence with the psychiatrist whom he trusted and regarded as a friend. In later years, he seemed quite sane and declared himself horrified at his deed and his insanity. Having shaved off the handlebar moustache of a petty official, he looked kindly, more like a local curate than a mass murderer.

  The Inverted Judge

  Insanity holds up a warped mirror to its time. Individual elements are bloated, grotesquely out of proportion, while others appear to vanish altogether. In Ernst Wagner’s case, sexual anxiety and an acute feeling of self-loathing were dressed up in all the costumes his time could provide: eugenic ‘weeding out’ of the weak and the diseased; a pseudo-Nietzschean cult of power; a conception of the scientific universe as sexual (electricity with its positive and negative, male and female poles, and Wagner also referred to women as ‘negative people’); a diagnosis of neurasthenia and degeneracy (the two intellectual leitmotifs of the pre-War years) in terms of ungoverned and ungovernable lust. Independently of what he was contemplating, everything eventually became sexual, a reflection of his self-loathing and insufficiency as a sexual being. The violent megalomania engendered by his revulsion was explained best by the patient himself: ‘the feeling of impotence gives birth to strong words.’

  Another memoir of a psychiatric patient, a man at once very different from and yet similar to the murdering schoolmaster, made its author the subject of the most famous case of its kind in pre-War Germany. Daniel Paul Schreber (1842-1911) was highly articulate and highly educated, a successful man and a pillar of society. The son of a well-known pediatrician, Schreber had studied law and had become president of the Court of Appeal in Leipzig in 1893, at the then relatively young age of fifty-one. Already nine years earlier, when he had unsuccessfully stood for parliament, Schreber had suffered a mental breakdown. Now, with a demanding new job forcing him to work even harder in order to prove himself, his nervous troubles resumed, in a classic case of professional neurasthenia. He was unable to sleep and began to hallucinate. Soon, he was admitted to a mental hospital, where his real martyrdom began.

  Deprived of any visits or outside contact, the eminent judge soon began to live in a private world of supernatural beings, whispered messages, visions, and intermittent states of intense arousal. He was made a ward of court and transferred to another hospital, where his condition seemed to improve somewhat - so much so that he demanded to be released and began writing lengthy petitions to the relevant courts. He also set about writing a meticulous account of his beliefs, his sufferings, and his world-view, initially only to allow his wife to understand what was happening to him, but then also with a view to publication. After a protracted battle, his case was heard by a new judge who decided that, while Schreber’s world-view was obviously so eccentric as to be called insane, everybody had a right to his private insanity. Schreber was judged a menace neither to himself nor to other people, and was duly released. In 1903 he succeeded in publishing his memoirs, which he had entitled Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken (Engl. Edition: Memoirs of My Nervous Illness).

  Schreber’s revelations are all the more fascinating as they are the attempt of a highly rational, punctilious man to analyse the hallucinations and sensations which, as he realized, were seen as symptoms of an illness, but which to him seemed entirely real and reasonable. In twenty-two lucid chapters with copious footnotes, appendices and cross-references, and judiciously seasoned with quotations in French and Latin, the learned judge attempted to order his inner universe and to explain to the world that he had been chosen by God to play a key role in its salvation, so much so that the weather and other external events were influenced by him or sent by God only to give him signs: ‘as I am writing this I am quite conscious of the fact that other people might be tempted to take this for a diseased imagination on my part; for I know full well that especially the tendency to see everything in relation to oneself is frequent among the insane. In this case, however, the case is quite simply reversed,’ he remarked drily as he explained the salient facts.

  The human soul, Schreber explains, resides in the nerves, and it is through these nerves that any human being (indeed, any being) communicates with God, the purest, most intense form of nervous energy. A life in purity makes human nerves white and radiant; an impure life lets them turn black and finally deadens them. On earth, this phenomenon manifests itself by an increase in general nervousness and moral degeneracy, which must finally beco
me a danger to the divine realms themselves. Once most of humanity has degenerated, blackened nerves, God has no choice but to create a catastrophe and to start again with a handful of chosen, pure individuals.

  Schreber’s second, decisive bout of insanity had begun one morning when, still in bed, he was suddenly gripped by ‘the idea that it really must be very nice to be a woman submitting to sexual intercourse’. This idea had not left him. In the new beginning of the world, he believed, he was destined to be a woman who would be impregnated by God and bear children, a new mankind. In preparation for this event, the process of emasculation (Entmannung) had already begun through rays of divine nervous energy. Lying in his bed, Schreber felt waves of ‘female lust’ flood through his body and felt his sexual organs retreating into his body, his breasts swell, his very body shrink to be closer to a woman’s height - a miracle that was invariably ‘reversed’ in the morning due to a pollution by darker nervous energy.

  There were dark powers, of course - one of their emissaries was the doctor treating him - and there were also illusory and confusing beings sent to bewilder him, most commonly the ‘hastily cobbled-together men’ (flüchtig hingemachte Männer) and ‘little men’ (kleine Männer), who were nothing but ephemeral spirits in body form, the former apparently of normal size, the latter only millimetres tall. Other traumatic adversities in his epic fight for a new world included his being used ‘like a female whore’ by patients and warders, being called ‘Miss Schreber’ by mocking voices, and experiencing the conflict between his own voluptuous femininity and the revulsion of his male pride against the progressing emasculation.

  When Schreber was released from the clinic, he was convinced that he was becoming a woman. Wearing women’s clothes was therefore nothing but sensible preparation for his future role. ‘Since that day, I have consciously made it my business to take care of my femininity and will continue to do so, as far as consideration for my surroundings makes this possible; may other people, to whom the transcendental reasons are obscure, think about me what they will. I would like to see the man who, confronted with the choice of being either a stupid man with male appearance or a spirited woman, would not prefer the latter. This, and only this, however, is the question.’ After several years living peacefully at home, the former presiding judge suffered a stroke and spent the remaining miserable and haunted months of his life in yet another mental hospital. He died in 1911.

  Much has been written about the Schreber case, not least by Sigmund Freud, who in the year of Schreber’s death published an essay about the patient in which he argued that Schreber’s desperate wish to be loved by his overwhelming father (whom, according to Freud, Schreber equated with God) resulted in his attempt to become a woman in order to be loved by him in the most literal sense. It is likely that Freud was right to assume that the relationship to a strong father had a part to play in Schreber’s illness, but the analysis seems too smooth, too simple. There are traces of paternal maltreatment in Schreber’s hallucinations - one of the phenomena experienced by him, the ‘miracle of chest constriction’ during which he had the feeling that his rib cage was crushed by an external force, is disturbingly reminiscent of a childhood experience.

  Schreber père was a child educationist whose fanatical belief in disciplining children and controlling their ‘crude nature’ was the overwhelming influence on his children’s upbringing. ‘The idea should never cross the child’s mind that his will might prevail,’ wrote Moritz Schreber. In books such as the popular Der Hausfreund als Erzieher und Führer zu Familienglück und Menschenveredelung (The Domestic Friend as Educator and Leader to Family Happiness and Ennobling Men, 1861) he advocated contraptions to ‘correct’ children, their physical stand and their behaviour: bed straps, chin bands, and an apparatus to ensure a straight back. His son Daniel was regularly forced to submit to being strapped into this torture implement, to make him sit upright during dinner. All, of course, was done in his own best interest. One is reminded of young Wilhelm II’s boyhood martyrdom, with mechanical devices, animal carcasses and endless riding lessons to steel the sickly boy and force his stunted arm to grow.

  Moritz Schreber was not only the great tyrant of Daniel’s childhood. He was also universally revered as a scientist and a sage for having founded a medical institute, being a prolific author, and having pioneered a movement of vegetable garden allotments for worker’s children, the Schrebergärten. The influence of a cruelly dominating father certainly was an important element in Schreber’s illness (his brother committed suicide in his thirties) but there appears to be another important cause, undoubtedly linked to the godlike and inhibiting father figure. Like Ernst Wagner, Daniel Schreber was obsessed by his own sexual inadequacy. He and his wife had not had any children, a continuing and pervasive sadness in his life. Some passages in his memoirs hint at impotence.

  His world, like that of the mass murderer Wagner, was a sexual world, though under different auspices. Whereas Wagner hallucinated about all-powerful manliness, about being a Caesar and a cosmic giant penetrating planet earth (the goddess Gaia of Greek myth, as he would have known) and killing everyone weak and diseased, including his pitiful self, Schreber had gone in the opposite direction. Unable to shoulder his role as a man and the social and professional responsibilities that went with it - both of his bouts of insanity were caused by overwork and external expectations, once as a prospective member of parliament, once as president of the Court of Appeal - he had retreated into what he conceived to be the truer and easier identity: a woman’s body.

  Men on the whole are not very impressive in Schreber’s writings. The ‘hastily cobbled-together men’ whom he visualized in the hospital wards and later in the streets were little more than a sign that men themselves were ephemeral, liable to dissolve into thin air, figments of (women’s) imaginations. In a period of changing social models and therefore of changing male identities, Schreber did not believe that he and others could survive as men. Becoming a woman appeared the obvious solution.

  There are more similarities between the murdering schoolmaster and the gentle judge. Both cast their imaginings in scientific terms, and both believed that the end of the world would be brought on by the twin evils of nervousness and moral degeneracy. Nerves were the central concept in Schreber’s theology, and they were central to the wider public discussion and scientific thinking about the effects of modern life. Neurasthenia was an illness which disproportionately affected not only technology workers such as train-drivers and telephonists, but also middle-class professional men like Schreber. In the same vein, other patient reports showed the overwhelming issue of sexual anxiety and ‘deviance’ (masturbation, homosexuality) as driving factors of many patients’ troubles. From the convalescents on Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain to rioting suffragettes, sex and ‘nervousness’ were always there, just under the surface.

  The Influencing Machine

  Two men, two German professionals, are anything but a representative sample of insanity and its imaginings around 1910. What did a woman imagine when her mind was deranged? One answer at least is given in the case of Natalija A., a Russian student of philosophy, who was examined by the Freudian psychiatrist Victor Tausk. In her hallucinations, another facet of the period reveals itself: the pendant, perhaps to male ideas of omnipotence or total impotence. Dr Tausk noted:

  She declares that for six and a half years she has been under the influence of an electrical machine made in Berlin.... It has the form of a human body, indeed, the patient’s own form, though not in all details... The trunk has the shape of a lid, resembling the lid of a coffin, and is lined with silk or velvet.... She cannot see the head - she says that she is not sure about it and she does not know whether the machine bears her own head.…The outstanding fact about the machine is that it is being manipulated by someone in a certain manner, and everything that occurs to it happens also to her … At an earlier stage, sexual sensations were produced in her through manipulation of the genitalia of the machine.r />
  Risky as it may be to extrapolate from one case to a general condition, the case of Natalija A. nevertheless shows traits discernible in other women’s writings, such as the childhood memories of Lida Gustava Heymann quoted earlier. There were numerous autobiographical accounts of young girls feeling shut in, as if buried alive, controlled by outside forces, and resenting this control. In A.’s mind, this sensation has become a concrete metaphor of the age of mechanization and central control: she is immured in a coffin-like machine, manipulated from elsewhere, and experiences every kind of touch as disgusting, disturbing her self-possessed activities such as thinking, reading and writing. While men felt out of control, women like Natalija A. and the early feminists felt they could not escape the faceless coercion dominating all aspects of their lives.

  The great influencing machine experienced by Natalija A. was not unique to her, indeed it was not even unique to women. In the controlled, controlling environment of the modern city, remote control had become a fact of life. Another psychiatric patient, Robert Gie, made drawings of the machines controlling him, a perfect image of its time. Part god, part emperor and part industrial plant, the central, all-controlling head with its frightening teeth is attached to a machine with regulator, chimney, and reservoir. From his mouth and forehead emanate cable-like connections with the underlings, depicted with the archaic force of a Maya temple frieze. It is their intestines and their heads which are being controlled according to currents apparently measured out by a metric table to the left. They all hold weapons and are striking aggressive poses. One impulse of the central mechanism will suffice to set everything in motion.