Voyages dans la folie

Journeys into Madness. Mapping Mental Illness in the Austro-Hungarian Empire

Gemma Blackshaw is Reader in Art History at Plymouth University. She is currently working on a Leverhulme-funded book on portraiture in Vienna circa 1900. She co-curated the exhibition Madness and Modernity: Art, Architecture and Mental Illness in Vienna 1900 (London and Vienna, 2009–10) and co-edited the exhibition catalogue.

Sabine Wieber is Lecturer in Art History at the University of Glasgow. She has published on German and Austrian design culture, German national identity and constructions of gender in Vienna circa 1900. She co-curated the exhibition Madness and Modernity: Art, Architecture and Mental Illness in Vienna 1900 (Vienna, 2010).

Berghahn Books

222 pages, 23 ills, bibliog., index

ISBN   978-0-85745-458-4 Hb

Published (June 2012)

At the turn of the century, Sigmund Freud’s investigation of the mind represented a particular journey into mental illness, but it was not the only exploration of this ‘territory’ in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Sanatoriums were the new tourism destinations, psychiatrists were collecting art works produced by patients and writers were developing innovative literary techniques to convey a character’s interior life. This collection of essays uses the framework of journeys in order to highlight the diverse artistic, cultural and medical responses to a peculiarly Viennese anxiety about the madness of modern times. The travellers of these journeys vary from patients to doctors, artists to writers, architects to composers and royalty to tourists; in engaging with their histories, the contributors reveal the different ways in which madness was experienced and represented in ‘Vienna 1900’.

Contents

Note on Contributors

Introduction            
Gemma Blackshaw and Sabine Wieber

Chapter 1. The Mad Objects of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Journeys, Contexts and Dislocations in the Exhibition “Madness and Modernity”
Leslie Topp

Chapter 2. Solving Riddles: Freud, Vienna and the Historiography of Madness
Steven Beller

Chapter 3. Symphonies and Psychosis in Mahler’s Vienna
Gavin Plumley

Chapter 4. Creating an Appropriate Social Milieu: Journeys to Health at a Sanatorium for Nervous Disorders
Nicola Imrie

Chapter 5. Travel to the Spas: the Growth of Health Tourism in Central Europe 1850-1914
Jill Steward

Chapter 6. Vienna’s Most Fashionable Neurasthenic: Empress Sisi and the Cult of Size Zero
Sabine Wieber

Chapter 7. Peter Altenberg: Authoring Madness in Vienna circa 1900
Gemma Blackshaw

Chapter 8. “Hell is not interesting, it is terrifying.” A Reading of the Madhouse Chapter in Robert Musil’sThe Man without Qualities
Geoffrey Howes

Chapter 9. Reason Dazzled: Klimt, Krakauer and Eyes of the Medusa
Luke Heighton

Chapter 10. Mapping the Sanatorium: Heinrich Obersteiner and the Art of Psychiatric Patients in Oberdöbling around 1900
Anna Lehninger

Chapter 11. The Wuerttemberg Asylum of Schussenried: a Psychiatric Space and its Encounter with Literature and Culture from the Outside
Thomas Mueller and Frank Kuhn

Bibliography