The Gallery of Miracles and Madness
Insanity, Modernism, and Hitler's War on Art
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Narrated by:
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Enn Reitel
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By:
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Charlie English
About this listen
The untold story of Hitler’s war on “degenerate” artists and the mentally ill that served as a model for the “Final Solution”.
“A penetrating chronicle...deftly links art history, psychiatry, and Hitler’s ideology to devastating effect.” (The Wall Street Journal)
As a veteran of the First World War, and an expert in art history and medicine, Hans Prinzhorn was uniquely placed to explore the connection between art and madness. The work he collected - ranging from expressive paintings to life-size rag dolls and fragile sculptures made from chewed bread - contained a raw, emotional power, and the book he published about the material inspired a new generation of modern artists, Max Ernst, André Breton, and Salvador Dalí among them. By the mid-1930s, however, Prinzhorn’s collection had begun to attract the attention of a far more sinister group.
Modernism was in full swing when Adolf Hitler arrived in Vienna in 1907, hoping to forge a career as a painter. Rejected from art school, this troubled young man became convinced that modern art was degrading the Aryan soul, and once he had risen to power he ordered that modern works be seized and publicly shamed in “degenerate art” exhibitions, which became wildly popular. But this culture war was a mere curtain-raiser for Hitler’s next campaign, against allegedly “degenerate” humans, and Prinzhorn’s artist-patients were caught up in both. By 1941, the Nazis had murdered 70,000 psychiatric patients in killing centers that would serve as prototypes for the death camps of the Final Solution. Dozens of Prinzhorn artists were among the victims.
The Gallery of Miracles and Madness is a spellbinding, emotionally resonant tale of this complex and troubling history that uncovers Hitler’s wars on modern art and the mentally ill and how they paved the way for the Holocaust. Charlie English tells an eerie story of genius, madness, and dehumanization that offers readers a fresh perspective on the brutal ideology of the Nazi regime.
©2021 Charlie English (P)2021 Random House AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“English takes us through uncharted artistic waters in a narrative of great humanity: a gripping journey into art, madness and modern history." (Jonathan Jones, art critic, The Guardian)
“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 centers on the complicated psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn 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)
“In this fascinating account, journalist English (Book Smugglers of Timbuktu) unpacks Hitler’s mad campaign against mentally ill artists.... In musing on the definition of art, limitations of clinical psychology, and the rise of fascism, English’s story feels strikingly relevant. While shedding new light on this piece of history, English also provides a cautionary tale for the future.” (Publishers Weekly)
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Where are the photos?
- By Cassandra on 01-17-22
By: Harald Jähner, and others
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Hitler's First Hundred Days
- When Germans Embraced the Third Reich
- By: Peter Fritzsche
- Narrated by: Jim Seybert
- Length: 14 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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Amid the ravages of economic depression, Germans in the early 1930s were pulled to political extremes both left and right. Then, in the spring of 1933, Germany turned itself inside out, from a deeply divided republic into a one-party dictatorship. In Hitler's First Hundred Days, award-winning historian Peter Fritzsche offers a probing account of the pivotal moments when the majority of Germans seemed, all at once, to join the Nazis to construct the Third Reich.
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Whoa! This Is Too Tense To Be A Horror Novel!
- By Ted on 07-02-20
By: Peter Fritzsche
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Those Who Forget
- By: Geraldine Schwarz
- Narrated by: Kathe Mazur
- Length: 11 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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During World War II, Géraldine Schwarz’s German grandparents were neither heroes nor villains; they were merely Mitlaüfer - those who followed the current. Decades later, while delving through filing cabinets in the basement of their apartment building in Mannheim, Schwarz discovers that in 1938, her grandfather took advantage of Nazi policies to buy a business from a Jewish family for a low price. Weaving together the threads of three generations of her family story with Europe’s process of post-war reckoning, Schwarz explores how millions were seduced by ideology.
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Not what it purports to be
- By DPM on 10-10-20
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Adolf Hitler
- A Captivating Guide to the Life of the Führer of Nazi Germany
- By: Captivating History
- Narrated by: Duke Holm
- Length: 2 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
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Explore the rise of Adolf Hitler. Was Hitler, as Ian Kershaw asked, a natural consequence of German history, or an aberration? Not that Hitler had been in hiding, waiting to attack. The Führer had actually been following an aggressive and savage foreign policy for almost 10 years, and been named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1938.
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Awesome little book
- By Bryan T. on 02-02-19
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Weimar Germany
- Promise and Tragedy, Weimar Centennial Edition
- By: Eric D. Weitz
- Narrated by: Robert G. Slade
- Length: 18 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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Weimar Germany brings to life an era of unmatched creativity in the 20th century - one whose influence and inspiration still resonate today. Eric Weitz has written the authoritative history that this fascinating and complex period deserves, and he illuminates the uniquely progressive achievements and even greater promise of the Weimar Republic. Weimar Germany also shows that beneath its glossy veneer lay political turmoil that ultimately led to the demise of the republic and the rise of the radical right.
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Ended up returning this one
- By Amazon Customer on 04-22-21
By: Eric D. Weitz
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The Man in the Glass House
- Philip Johnson, Architect of the Modern Century
- By: Mark Lamster
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 17 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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Award-winning architectural critic and biographer Mark Lamster's The Man in the Glass House lifts the veil on Johnson's controversial and endlessly contradictory life to tell the story of a charming yet deeply flawed man. A roller-coaster tale of the perils of wealth, privilege, and ambition, this book probes the dynamics of American culture that made him so powerful and tells the story of the built environment in modern America.
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Disappointing!
- By David G Dempsey on 07-12-19
By: Mark Lamster
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Crucible
- The Long End of the Great War and the Birth of a New World, 1917-1924
- By: Charles Emmerson
- Narrated by: Charles Emmerson
- Length: 25 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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In Petrograd, a fire is lit. The Tsar is packed off to Siberia. A rancorous Russian exile returns to proclaim a workers' revolution. In America, black soldiers who have served their country in Europe demand their rights at home. An Austrian war veteran trained by the German army to give rousing speeches against the Bolshevik peril begins to rail against the Jews. A solar eclipse turns a former patent clerk into a celebrity. An American reporter living the high life in Paris searches out a new literary style.
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Splendid in all respects
- By Paul Custer on 02-11-20
By: Charles Emmerson
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Paris, City of Dreams
- Napoleon III, Baron Haussmann, and the Creation of Paris
- By: Mary McAuliffe
- Narrated by: Tim H. Dixon
- Length: 12 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Acclaimed historian Mary McAuliffe vividly recaptures the Paris of Napoleon III, Claude Monet, and Victor Hugo as Georges Haussmann tore down and rebuilt Paris into the beautiful City of Light we know today. Paris, City of Dreams traces the transformation of the City of Light during Napoleon III’s Second Empire into the beloved city of today.
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Superb
- By Cheri Stocking on 02-17-23
By: Mary McAuliffe
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Hitler's True Believers
- How Ordinary People Became Nazis
- By: Robert Gellately
- Narrated by: Paul Heitsch
- Length: 15 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Understanding Adolf Hitler's ideology provides insights into the mental world of an extremist politics that, over the course of the Third Reich, developed explosive energies culminating in the Second World War and the Holocaust. Too often the theories underlying National Socialism or Nazism are dismissed as an irrational hodgepodge of ideas. Yet that ideology drove Hitler's quest for power in 1933, colored everything in the Third Reich, and transformed him, however briefly, into the most powerful leader in the world.
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Fascinating listen
- By Amy Neff on 12-15-22
By: Robert Gellately
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Weimar Culture
- The Outsider as Insider
- By: Peter Gay
- Narrated by: James Anderson Foster
- Length: 6 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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First published in 1968, Weimar Culture is one of the masterworks of Peter Gay's distinguished career. A study of German culture between the two wars, the book brilliantly traces the rise of the artistic, literary, and musical culture that bloomed ever so briefly in the 1920s amid the chaos of Germany's tenuous post-World War I democracy, and crashed violently in the wake of Hitler's rise to power.
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Engaging book, terrible narrator
- By Beth Simone Noveck on 05-08-21
By: Peter Gay
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1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows
- A Memoir
- By: Ai Weiwei, Allan H. Barr - translator
- Narrated by: David Shih
- Length: 13 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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Once a close associate of Mao Zedong and the nation’s most celebrated poet, Ai Weiwei’s father, Ai Qing, was branded a rightist during the Cultural Revolution, and he and his family were banished to a desolate place known as “Little Siberia,” where Ai Qing was sentenced to hard labor cleaning public toilets. Ai Weiwei recounts his childhood in exile, and his difficult decision to leave his family to study art in America, where he befriended Allen Ginsberg and was inspired by Andy Warhol and the artworks of Marcel Duchamp.
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This book changed my life
- By Johnny Nopolis on 08-16-22
By: Ai Weiwei, and others
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Nazi Wives
- The Women at the Top of Hitler's Germany
- By: James Wyllie
- Narrated by: Dalya Raphael
- Length: 9 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Goering, Goebbels, Himmler, Heydrich, Hess, Bormann - names synonymous with power and influence in the Third Reich. Perhaps less familiar are Carin, Emmy, Magda, Margarete, Lina, Ilse, and Gerda. These are the women behind the infamous men - complex individuals with distinctive personalities who were captivated by Hitler and whose everyday lives were governed by Nazi ideology. Throughout the rise and fall of Nazism these women loved and lost, raised families, and quarreled with their husbands and each other, all the while jostling for position with the Fuhrer himself.
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Scary
- By Three River on 05-15-21
By: James Wyllie
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Balkan Ghosts
- A Journey Through History
- By: Robert D. Kaplan
- Narrated by: Nigel Patterson
- Length: 12 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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From the assassination that triggered World War I to the ethnic warfare in Serbia, Bosnia, and Croatia, the Balkans have been the crucible of the 20th century, the place where terrorism and genocide first became tools of policy. Chosen as one of the Best Books of the Year by the New York Times, and greeted with critical acclaim as "the most insightful and timely work on the Balkans to date" (The Boston Globe), Kaplan's prescient, enthralling, and often chilling political travelogue is already a modern classic.
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Anti religious/anti catholic hit piece
- By Daniel Calvert on 05-04-21
By: Robert D. Kaplan
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In Europe's Shadow
- Two Cold Wars and a Thirty-Year Journey Through Romania and Beyond
- By: Robert D. Kaplan
- Narrated by: Paul Boehmer
- Length: 10 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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In Bucharest, Romania's capital, Kaplan discovered that few Westerners were reporting on the country - one of the darkest corners of Europe during the Cold War. In an intense and cinematic travelogue, Kaplan explores the history and culture of the only country in the West where the leading intellectuals have been right-wing rather than left-wing; a country that gave rise to the dictator Ion Antonescu, Hitler's chief foreign accomplice during WWII; a country where the Latin West mixes with the Greek East, producing a fascinating fusion of cultures.
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Wrestling with History
- By David on 03-07-16
By: Robert D. Kaplan
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Oblivion or Glory
- 1921 and the Making of Winston Churchill
- By: David Stafford
- Narrated by: Gerard Doyle
- Length: 10 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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This is an engaging and original account of 1921, a pivotal year for Winston Churchill that had a lasting impact on his political and personal legacy. After the tragic consequences of his involvement in the catastrophic Dardanelles Campaign of World War I, Churchill’s political career seemed over. He was widely regarded as little more than a bombastic and unpredictable buccaneer until, in 1921, an unexpected inheritance heralded a series of events that laid the foundations for his future success.
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Great explanation if this great m Chirchill’s an
- By David Hitchins on 10-25-20
By: David Stafford
What listeners say about The Gallery of Miracles and Madness
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Algernon Moncrieff
- 04-21-24
Outstanding material presented well
This is simultaneously one of the best books I’ve read about art and one of the best books I’ve read about Hitler and the Nazi program. Extremely well narrated too
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- Joselo
- 03-21-24
A grim story well researched
In the 1920s, German psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn curated a collection of artworks made by psychiatric patients, many of them schizophrenic. These pieces were powerful and spontaneous, often delving into the untamed, mysterious depths of the subconscious. A book showcasing the Prinzhorn Collection became a massive hit among artists, particularly Expressionists and Surrealists, and had a serious influence on Modernism and Western Art. In the 1940s, French artist Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut (or "raw art") to describe this type of untrained, unpolished, and uncompromising work.
Not everyone was a fan. Adolf Hitler, an artist himself, viewed it as degenerate, and was appalled by prominent contemporary artists' embrace of it. He considered it a symptom of cultural decay that demanded correction at any cost. Upon assuming power In the 1930s, Hitler initiated a clandestine program to systematically exterminate thousands of psychiatric patients, including many whose works were featured in the Prinzhorn Collection. The goal was to remove what he perceived as impurities in the German population and culture. Over time, the criteria for extermination broadened, resulting in hundreds of thousands of murders. That this campaign, an open secret, was met with such little public resistance emboldened Hitler to pursue genocide on an even larger scale.
Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Propaganda Minister, devised a plan to scorn and ridicule not only the Prinzhorn Collection, but also the work of established Modernists, which was antithesis to the conservative Nazi aesthetic. The Degenerate Art Exhibition took place in 1937 and was attended by one million people during in its first six weeks.
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