The Inkblots

by Damion Searls

  Art Forms in Nature, which Rorschach used to illustrate his Scaphusia talk, was a visual compendium of structure and symmetry throughout the natural world, suggesting harmonies between amoebae, jellyfish, crystals, and all sorts of higher forms. Published in book form in 1904, though the hundred illustrations were originally published in ten sets of ten between 1899 and 1904, it was popular and influential in both science and art, creating a kind of visual vocabulary for Art Nouveau while superimposing that vision onto nature. The fact that horizontally symmetrical forms look “organic” to us is partly a legacy of his way of seeing. Art Forms in Nature was a household showpiece in German-speaking Europe and beyond; the Rorschachs surely owned at least some of the illustrations. Ulrich’s “Outline of a Theory of Form,” though it doesn’t mention Haeckel by name, is practically a prose analogue to Haeckel’s book, filled with his vocabulary of “forms.”

  Top: Two of the black-and-white images from Ernst Haeckel, Art Forms in Nature: “Brittle Stars” and “Moths,” engraved by Adolf Giltsch after Haeckel’s drawings. Bottom: Ulrich Rorschach, design. Credit 2

  Also central to Haeckel’s reputation was his crusade against religion. It was likely due in large part to Haeckel’s personal antireligious activism that Darwinism became the ultimate atheistic science, at the heart of the feud between science and religion, even though geology and astronomy and other fields of knowledge contain equally nonbiblical facts. This, too, Hermann admired. Like his father, he was a tolerant freethinker on matters of faith but refused to see the natural world through religious eyes. In one of his Darwin talks, according to the Scaphusia secretary, “Klex tried to dismiss completely the argument against Darwinism that it undermines Christian morality and the meaning of the Bible.”

  Already working as a tutor, Rorschach was considering becoming a teacher like his father but was uneasy about being required to teach religion. He took the unusual step of writing to Haeckel for advice, and the eminent anti-Christian wrote back, “Your misgivings seem misplaced to me….Read my Monistic Religion, a compromise with the official church. Hundreds of my students do this. One must diplomatically make one’s peace with the reigning orthodoxy (unfortunately!).”

  The seventeen-year-old’s bold overture was later exaggerated into something more. In the recollections of several people close to Rorschach, he had asked Haeckel whether to study drawing in Munich or pursue a career in medicine, and the great man advised science. It is unlikely that Rorschach would have put his whole future in a stranger’s hands, and there seems to have been only the one letter to Haeckel. Yet a founding myth for Rorschach’s career was born. A practical question about teaching had been turned into a symbolic choice between art and science, and the most influential artist-scientist of the older generation had passed the baton to the artist-psychologist of the new one.

  “As far as I’m concerned, that whole blister on the mountainside could slide into the lake with a crash and the smell of brimstone, as Sodom and Gomorrah did in olden times”—Rorschach was not a fan of Neuchâtel, in French-speaking western Switzerland, where he spent several months after graduating from high school in March 1904. Many German-speaking Swiss took a semester before starting university to improve their French; Rorschach wanted to be able to give French lessons as well as tutor in Latin, to send money home to his family. He was desperate to go straight to Paris, but his rigid stepmother refused to let him. Compared to Schaffhausen, where Rorschach had felt like “a real ‘scholar,’ ” the Académie de Neuchâtel was tedious: “There was nowhere stupider I could have ended up than that dreary mish-mash of Germany and France.”

  The Académie’s one advantage was its two-month language course in Dijon, France. There, Rorschach made occasional trips to the legal French brothels, which he was mostly too poor to make use of. “Aug. 30,” he scribbled in his private diary, with key passages further concealed in shorthand: “Visit to the Maison de tolérance: red lanterns in the narrow alley, dark, nice house…the whores all around, [illegible]; tu me paye un bock? Tu vas coucher avec moi? [Buy me a beer? Are you going to sleep with me?].”

  It was also in Dijon that Rorschach’s interests took a decisive turn. Inspired by the Russian writers he had read in Schaffhausen, he sought out Russians for company: “Everyone knows the Russians learn foreign languages easily,” he reported to Anna, and, more important to a young man abroad on his own, “They like to talk and they make friends easily.” He soon grew interested in one man in particular, a political reformer and “personal friend” of Tolstoy’s. “This good fellow has gray hair already,” Rorschach wrote, “and not for nothing.”

  Ivan Mikhailovich Tregubov, born in 1858, had been exiled from Russia and, like Rorschach, was in Dijon for the French course. Rorschach called him “a very deep soul” and wrote, “I hope to profit further from my acquaintance with him.” Tregubov was not just a personal friend of Tolstoy’s but at the heart of his inner circle, as a leader of the Dukhobors, the extreme pacifist sect that Tolstoy had been involved with for decades. This was Rorschach’s first encounter with such a traditionalist spiritual movement. Russia had long been swept by them—from Old Believers, Flagellants, Hermits, and Wanderers to Jumpers, Milk-Drinkers, and Self-Castrators—all without civil rights until the 1905 Revolution and more or less harassed or suppressed by the tsarist church and state. The Dukhobors were one of the most venerable of these groups, dating back at least to the mid-eighteenth century.

  In 1895, Tolstoy called the Dukhobors “a phenomenon of extraordinary importance,” so advanced that they were “people of the 25th century”; he compared their influence with the appearance of Jesus on earth. In 1897, four years before the awarding of the first Nobel Peace Prize, Tolstoy wrote an open letter to a Swedish editor arguing that Nobel’s money should go to the Dukhobors, and he came out of self-imposed retirement to write his last novel, Resurrection, so that he could give all of the proceeds to the sect. By that point, Tolstoy was not merely the author of Anna Karenina and War and Peace but a spiritual leader advocating “the purification of the soul.” He inspired people around the world to wear simple white robes, turn vegetarian, and work for peace—to become Tolstoyans. What he represented, to Rorschach and millions of others, was not merely literature but a moral crusade to heal the world.

  Tregubov opened Rorschach’s eyes. “It is finally becoming clear to this young Swiss man,” he wrote from Dijon, describing himself in the third person, “to someone who in general couldn’t care less about politics, what politics really means—especially thanks to the Russians, who have to study so far away from home in order to find the freedom they need.” Before long Rorschach would write, “I think we will see it turn out that Russia will be the freest country in the world, freer than our Switzerland.” He started to learn Russian, apparently mastering the language in two years without taking classes.

  It was in this context that Rorschach found his calling. He already wanted to be a doctor if he could—“I want to know if it wouldn’t have been possible to help Father,” Anna recalled him saying. But in Dijon he learned that “I never again want to read just books, the way I did in Schaffhausen. I want to read people….What I want is to work at a madhouse. That is no reason not to get a complete training as a doctor, but the most interesting thing in nature is the human soul, and the greatest thing a person can do is to heal these souls, sick souls.” His pursuit of psychology was rooted not mainly in professional or intellectual ambitions but in a Tolstoyan impulse to heal souls and an affinity with Russians such as Tregubov. When Rorschach left the blister on the mountainside, it was to pursue his studies at a world-class school of psychiatric medicine with one of the largest communities of Russians in Europe.

  —

  Rorschach had finally been able to scrape together enough money to go to university. Because his father had been a citizen of two Swiss cities, Arbon and Schaffhausen, Hermann could apply for financial aid from both: in concrete terms, this was the greatest gift his parents’ mo
bility would ever give him. In the fall of 1904, a few weeks shy of his twentieth birthday, Hermann showed up in Zurich with a handcart of belongings and less than a thousand francs to his name.

  He was five foot ten, slim and athletic. He tended to walk quickly and purposefully, hands clasped behind his back, and to talk quietly and calmly; he was lively, serious, nimble with his fingers whether sketching out quick drawings or making meticulous cutouts or wood carvings. His eyes were light blue, almost gray, though the color is listed as “brown” or “brown-gray” in some official documents, such as his military-service record, the booklet that every Swiss male keeps for life. Hermann would be declared unfit to serve, like many young men superfluous in a country with universal military service. The reason given was poor eyesight: 20/200 in his left eye.

  Rorschach had left his birthplace of Zurich too young to remember living there, but he had returned on visits with his parents. In his first letter to Anna after arriving in 1904, Rorschach wrote that he “went to two art exhibits yesterday, thinking again about our dear father. A few days ago, I also went looking for a little bench I used to sit on with him, and I found it.” But a new life replaced the memories soon enough.

  He had planned to stay at an inn run by a family friend, helping out with chores in exchange for rent, but took a classmate’s advice and moved in to more independent lodgings. A dentist and his wife were renting out two bright and spacious spare rooms on the fourth floor of Weinplatz 3, steps away from the Limmat River running through the center of Zurich (and, as it happens, on the site of ancient Roman baths from Zurich’s previous life as “Turicum”). Rorschach rented the rooms with a fellow medical student from Schaffhausen and a music student. They set up a common bedroom and a workspace and shared books—which “I get more out of than they do,” Rorschach admitted. The medical student, Franz Schwerz, woke up at 4 a.m. to go to anatomy class and was asleep by nine at night, while the musician was out on evenings and weekends; Rorschach could do his work later in the mornings and at night. His only complaint was that his bedroom window was right under the tower of St. Peter’s Church, with the largest church clock in Europe; the bells woke him up.

  But it was cheap, seventy-seven francs a month including two meals a day, which Schwerz remembered as delicious and enormous and which Rorschach told his stepmother were “very good, almost exactly like your home cooking.” (Zurich housing generally ran four francs a day at least, and an affordable restaurant lunch was one franc.) The students were responsible for their own lunch on Sundays, so on Saturday night they would buy Schübling sausages from the butcher shop around the corner and roast them in the apartment the next morning, filling the building’s stairway with a smell that worked up their appetite. There was little to do on weekends but walk the city streets, good weather or bad—they could afford no bars, no movies, no theater. The roommates would often “return home bored and frozen, to dig into sausage number two.”

  Every opportunity to earn some extra money was welcome. When Rorschach, an extra in the student theater, remembered that the student union was sponsoring a contest for theater posters, he dashed off a caricature of a professor, adding a rhyming couplet underneath from Wilhelm Busch’s children’s book about a mole; two weeks later, ten much-needed francs arrived in the mail: Third Prize.

  Despite a punishing schedule at one of the best medical schools in the world—ten courses in his first winter semester (October 1904 to April 1905) and another twelve his first summer semester (April to August 1905)—Rorschach did not keep his nose entirely to the grindstone. His best friend at the university, Walter von Wyss, remembered Rorschach as a voracious reader, curious about everything. There was time for art, conversation, and browsing at the excellent used bookstores in “Athens on the Limmat,” as Zurich was called.

  Rorschach often spent the long Saturday afternoons at the Künstlergütli, Zurich’s only public art museum, across the river and up the short hill toward the university. He and his friends explored the galleries of mostly Swiss and not yet modern art: peasant scenes by nineteenth-century Switzerland’s Norman Rockwell, a genre painter named Albert Anker; nature scenes by the neo-Romantic Paul Robert; sentimental works like Old Monk of the Hermitage by Carl Spitzweg. The collection included realist master Rudolf Koller’s most famous painting, the exceptionally dynamic St. Gotthard Mail Coach, and a River Scene by Zurich’s greatest writer and Rorschach’s favorite poet, Gottfried Keller. A few works pointed the way to the future: Ferdinand Hodler’s Procession of Gymnasts, a nightmarish War by Art Nouveau pioneer and proto-Surrealist Arnold Böcklin, who had been one of the subjects of Rorschach’s high school “Poetry and Painting” talk.

  In the conversations afterward, Rorschach took the lead and asked his friends about how they saw the art. He liked to compare the different effects each piece had on each person. Böcklin’s outrageously psychosexual Spring Awakening, with its hairy, pipe-playing, goat-footed satyr, a topless woman in a red skirt towering over the landscape, and a river of blood between them: What might this be?

  Rorschach was starting to categorize people while priding himself on remaining individual. After passing his preliminary exams with flying colors in April 1906—“I was the only one who took them after four semesters,” he bragged to Anna, “the others had five, six, seven, eight, but two five-semester students and I got the best results”—he cast a cold eye over his classmates:

  I was especially happy because I’d been doing quite a lot “different” before and during the exams, although I did work a lot. There is a very common type among medical students, you know: someone who drinks beer, almost never reads the newspaper, and whenever he wants to say anything respectable talks only about illnesses and professors; who prides himself on frightfully much, especially the job he is planning to land, who thinks fondly in advance about a rich wife and a fancy car and a walking stick with a silver handle; this type finds it very unpleasant when someone else does things “differently” and can pass his exams anyway.

  Many sensitive twenty-one-year-olds have had such thoughts, but this was not a letter Rorschach would have written without his Dijon experiences.

  The most obvious sign of his “difference” was the time he spent with the exotic foreigners in the city. Zurich was full of Russians, with Switzerland’s political freedom attracting countless anarchists and revolutionaries. Vladimir Lenin lived there in exile between 1900 and 1917, and preferred Zurich to Bern because of “the large number of revolutionary-minded young foreigners in Zurich,” not to mention the excellent libraries, with “no red tape, fine catalogues, open stacks, and the exceptional interest taken in the reader”: a model for the future Soviet society. There was a “Little Russia” neighborhood near the University of Zurich, with Russian boardinghouses, bars, and restaurants: as the respectable Swiss put it, the debates in Little Russia ran hot and the meals were served cold.

  In Rorschach’s time, half of the more than a thousand university students were foreign, many of them women. Two Swiss women had studied philosophy in Zurich in the 1840s, paving the way for women to study medicine there as early as the 1860s. The first woman ever to get a doctorate in medicine, in 1867, was a Russian in Zurich: Nadezhda Suslova. Meanwhile, Russian universities continued to exclude women until 1914, German universities until 1908.

  These foreigners were, in turn, the majority of female students in Zurich, because Swiss fathers wouldn’t let their well-bred daughters mingle with the riffraff. Emma Rauschenberg, the Schaffhausen heiress and Carl Jung’s future wife, had graduated first in her high school class but was not allowed to study science at the University of Zurich: “It was simply unthinkable for the daughter of a Rauschenbach even to contemplate mingling with the great variety of students who enrolled in the university,” according to a recent biographer of Carl Jung. “Who could predict what ideas a girl like Emma would assimilate from being in such company….A university education would make her unfit for marriage to a social equal.” Russian women flocked
to Zurich, though, braving not only the sexism of male Swiss students and professors but also protests from the few Swiss women students that this “wave” of “semi-Asian invaders” was stealing spots from more deserving locals and turning the university into a “Slavic finishing school.”

  When not being caricatured as bluestockings or wild-eyed revolutionaries, Russian women in Zurich were often worshipped as beauties. One raven-haired Russian named Braunstein was known around Zurich as “the Christmas angel”; strangers came up to her on the street to ask to take her photograph, but she always refused. When some chemistry students invited her to the annual department party, they addressed the envelope with a street name and “MnO2”—the chemical formula for manganese dioxide, or in German, Braunstein—and the zealous mailmen did not rest until they found her. She still declined. Rorschach, who wanted to draw her portrait, succeeded where others had failed by inviting her and a friend up to his rooms with the promise to show them a handwritten letter from Leo Tolstoy. He spoke passable Russian, respected Russian women in a hostile environment, and presumably his looks didn’t hurt. That Saturday afternoon, the art at the museum was neglected and an easel was set up at Weinplatz 3 instead.

  The Russians in Zurich were a diverse group. Some were young, some older; some truly were revolutionaries, like one female classmate who had been forced to flee through Siberia to Japan, eventually returning by ship to Europe the long way around, while others were “thoroughly bourgeois, modest, hardworking, and anxious to avoid politics.” Some were rich, like Jung’s patient, student, colleague, and mistress Sabina Spielrein, who came to Zurich in 1904, like Rorschach. Some were poor, including a pharmacist’s daughter from Kazan named Olga Vasilyevna Shtempelin.

  —

  Like Hermann, Olga was the oldest of three children, forced by circumstances into the role of head of the family. She was born to Wilhelm Karlovitch and Yelizaveta Matveyevna Shtempelin on June 8, 1878, in Buinsk, near Kazan, a center for trade on the Volga River and the Russian empire’s “gateway to the East.” Although girls’ schools in Russia were for the daughters of the wealthy, she had been able to study for free at Kazan’s Rodionov Institute for Girls, a perk stemming from her great-grandfather’s services in the military. She arrived in Berlin in 1902, took time off to work and support her family, and transferred to the Zurich medical school in 1905. She would be remembered by those who knew her in Zurich as by far the smartest in her class.