The Gallery of Miracles and Madness
Insanity, Art and Hitler’s first Mass-Murder Programme
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The Gallery of Miracles and Madness
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Narrated by:
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Crawford Logan
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By:
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Charlie English
About this listen
The little-known story of Hitler’s war on modern art and the mentally ill.
In the first years of the Weimar Republic, the German psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn gathered a remarkable collection of works by schizophrenic patients that would astonish and delight the world.
The Prinzhorn collection, as it was called, inspired a new generation of artists, including Paul Klee, Max Ernst and Salvador Dali. What the doctor could not have known, however, was that these works would later be used to prepare the ground for mass-murder.
Soon after his rise to power, Hitler—a failed artist of the old school—declared war on modern art. The Nazis staged giant ‘Degenerate Art’ shows to ridicule the avant-garde, and seized and destroyed the cream of Germany's modern art collections. This action was mere preparation, however, for the even more sinister campaign Hitler would later wage against so-called "degenerate" people, and Prinzhorn's artists were caught up in both.
Bringing together inspirational art history, genius and madness, and the wanton cruelty of the fanatical "artist-Führer", this astonishing story lays bare the culture war that paved the way for Hitler's first extermination programme, the psychiatric Holocaust.
©2021 Charlie English (P)2021 HarperCollins Publishers LimitedCritic reviews
"Dazzling. The Gallery of Miracles and Madness explores a little-known chapter of World War II - the story of psychiatric art and the rise of the Third Reich. This poignant narrative centres on the complicated psychiatrist Hans Prizhorn and the eccentric patient artists whose work helped usher in a new epoch of the modernist avant-garde only to become fodder for Hitler's hateful ideology of “degeneration”. Richly wrought, and deeply researched, it's also a salient reminder to beware of pseudoscience." (Susannah Cahalan, author of Brain on Fire and The Great Pretender)
"A riveting tale, brilliantly told." (Philippe Sands)
"Engrossing.... The work of these artists, much of which miraculously survived the war, lives on as testament to the variety of human experience, and of ways to communicate what it feels like to be alive." (Economist)