Journeys into Madness: Mapping Mental Illness in the Austro-Hungarian Empire by Gemma Blackshaw and Sabine Wieber (review)

This engaging collection of essays in the field of medical humanities, originally collected in conjunction with the exhibition “Madness and Modernity” at the Wellcome Institute in London, invites readers to reconsider the relationship between art, culture, and mental health. As Leslie Topp puts it in her excellent written tour of the show, “The Mad Objects of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna,” “progressive visual arts in Vienna circa 1900 were linked in concrete ways to the practices and spaces of psychiatry and to mental illness as filtered through both psychiatry and popular culture” (11). One might alter such a premise by adding that when one is studying Vienna, it’s not only visual arts that can be fruitfully assessed through the lens of madness. The editors of this volume are dedicated to the idea of travel between boundaries—neurosis/psychosis most explicitly, but also city/sanatorium, insider/outsider, and subjective/scientific. As they ask in their introduction, is madness a “collective, culturally situated phenomenon” or rather “an individual, embodied experience?” (5).

One of the most popular approaches to madness in this collection is through art. Gemma Blackshaw’s article “Peter Altenberg: Authoring Madness in Vienna circa 1900” uses the satirical drawings of a friend of the artist to explore the self-understanding of Altenberg as a mad genius and survivor/imbiber of the famous Viennese sanatorium Steinhof. These are a wonderful entry point into the “journey” that Altenberg ended up making from spas for nervous disorders to clinics that specialized in more serious psychiatric conditions. Luke Heighton also uses visual sources to explore madness, comparing the famous paintings of Gustav Klimt to those of a patient of Wilhelm Stekel known only as L. Krakauer. His essay, “Reason Dazzled: Klimt, Krakauer, and the Eyes of the Medusa,” shows that both insiders and outsiders were interested in the fin-de-siècle themes of sex, madness, troubled masculinity, and death. It also illuminates the rich tradition of collecting art from the mentally ill. Gavin Plumley highlights music as a means of insight into mental health in his chapter “Symphonies and Psychosis in Mahler’s Vienna.” He argues that Mahler’s frequent retreats into the country air were a means of balancing the madness of Vienna and finding asylum in music. Finally, Geoffrey C. Howes uses literature as a means of mapping mental illness with his entry “‘Hell Is Not Interesting, It Is Terrifying’: A Reading of the Madhouse Chapter in Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities.” This is a close read of both Musil’s published chapter and his diary from a trip to Italy in which he visited a mental hospital. The “normal” and the “mad” world are bridged by Musil through his characters as well as by Howes, as he plays with madness as a metaphor for the insanity of the Habsburg Empire on the eve of World War I.

Several of the entries in this edited volume use sources drawn at least in part from the visitors to and the inmates of the institutions themselves. Jill Steward’s evocative contribution, “Travel to the Spas: The Growth of Health Tourism in Central Europe, 1850–1914,” focuses on clinics specializing in “nervous” patients, clinics that were thus able to market themselves as specializing in “organic” disorders that were not psychiatric in origin. The heart of her chapter explores four famous cases of such health travelers, drawing on their letters and diaries to illustrate the conditions in their cure stations. Anna Lehninger’s chapter “Mapping the Sanatorium: Heinrich Obersteiner and the Art of Psychiatric Patients in Oberdöbling around 1900” features the artistic output of several patients, which she reads in the context of the antipsychiatry movement at the turn of the century. In one powerful case, she is able to identify a patient’s subversive sketches and mocking commentary, allowing her to give a deep background to fascinating ego...