Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci.

39 (2008) 434443

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci.

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsa

Pushing the limits of understanding: the discourse on primitivism in German

Kulturwissenschaften, 18801930
Doris Kaufmann
Universitt Bremen, Institut fr Geschichtswissenschaft/FB 08, Postfach 330 440, 28334 Bremen, Germany

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Keywords: This paper addresses the signicance of primitivism as a gure of thought during the emergence of Kul-
Kulturwissenschaften turwissenschaftenconsisting of different elds of knowledge and disciplinesin Germany at the begin-
Other forms of thought ning of the twentieth century. Two interrelated problems in particular shaped the scholarly discourse on
Art primitivism: rst, the question of the existence and modes of operation of other forms of thought and
Psychopathology
consciousness. Second, the epistemological question how these other forms of thought could be recog-
Subjectivity
nized if the researcher him or herself belonged to a particular historically determined European mode of
Creativity
Emphatic notion of schizophrenia thought and perception. In this context the art of non-European primitives and of the insane became a
central topic. Its cross-disciplinary investigation ultimately arrived at a redenition of a nexus of prob-
lems: the challenge to the old concept of art as well as to the dominant concept of psychopathology, that
is, the denition of normality and deviancy. Both the non-European natives and the European insane
received new importance as scientic objects for a wider range of elds of knowledge. This process
was connected with an articulated need to expand and strengthen the faculty of subjectivity and intuition
on the part of the Kulturwissenschaftler for means of investigation and understanding (verstehen). The dis-
course on primitivism in German Kulturwissenschaften reected the crisis of knowledge and methology at
the beginning of the twentieth century and was nally resolved by taking refuge in phenomenology and
holism.
2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

When citing this paper, please use the full journal title Studies in History and Philosophy of Science

1. Franz Boas and Bronislaw Malinowski. Kuper concludes that: The

In his book The invention of primitive society the English cultural
anthropologist Adam Kuper investigates the history of the search
for the primary forms of human society in the nineteenth century.1
He analyzes various models of primitive society, among them those
presented by Morgan, Maine, Tylor, Frazer, Durkheim and Levi-
Strauss. The theory of primitive society is about something which
does not and never has existed, Kuper writes.2 He explains the
continuity in constructing such theories or models up to now as
stemming from the wish to use them as an overlay for the interpre-
tation of modern society, a contextual framework that was also
shared by critics of such procedure, for example the anthropologists
idea of primitive society . . . could be used equally by right or left,
reactionary or progressive, poet and politician. The most powerful
images of primitive society were produced by very disparate politi-
cal thinkers . . . Yet all were transformations of a single basic model.3
This dichotomous model of primitive versus civilized, undevel-
oped versus developed, simple versus complex, continued to
predominate in scholarly work until the mid-1960sas demon-
strated by a critical linguistic analysis of British and American cul-
tural anthropological and ethnological introductory works.4 The
following terms served as a substitute for primitive: non-literate;
lower; simple; small-scale; isolated; arrested in development;
lacking in historical records; lacking in literature; non-urban and

E-mail address: dkaufman@uni-bremen.de

1
Kuper (1988).
2
Ibid., p. 8.
3
Ibid., p. 240.
4
Hsu (1964).

0039-3681/$ - see front matter 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.shpsa.2008.06.013
 D. Kaufmann / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 434443
tribal; societies in which social relations are based primarily on kin-
ship; those endowed with an over-powering sense of reality; where
everyday facts have religious and ritual covering; those who endow
all nature with spirit life.5
I know of no comparable analysis for the German language area,
but one can assume that similar designations are also apparent in
the current debates about globalization and international politics.
The following analysis, however, will not examine the continuity
of the old model of primitivism in contemporary scholarly and
political discourse. Instead, it will center on a specic historical
period taken from the history of the relation between us and the
otherthat other which forms a triad in modern European
thought: the savage, the insane, the child.6
This paper is about the signicance of primitivism as a con-
ceptual frame or gure of thought during the emergence of the
eld of trans-disciplinary, historically oriented Kulturwissenschaf-
ten (cultural studies) in Germany,7 dating from before the turn of
the century until the 1930s. Then anthropologists, psychologists,
psychiatrists, sociologists, art historians, geographers, historians,
and philosophers started to examine contemporary social prob-
lems and issues, thereby crossing disciplinary boundaries. This
departure in the scholarly study of culture reected the crisis of
modernity, that the intellectual lites of the late German empire
were conscious of.8 This crisis was marked by the loss of consent
about a genuine middle-class way of life, norms of behavior, and
generally shared cultural values. The disorientation that appears
in several autobiographies of that time, especially the feeling of
being entrapped in the steel cages (Max Weber) of a growing
bureaucracy and of processes of rationalization, as well as of a
reduction of ones personal options and choices, corresponded
with a new scholarly discourse about culture. Its central focus
was, as Max Weber put it, the major substantive cultural prob-
lems of the present.9 This starting pointthe interest to investi-
gate current problems of modern societyestablished a mutual
acceptance and inclusion of methodological approaches and of
results of research in the above mentioned different elds of
knowledge. This new transdisciplinarity was also promoted by
the fact that some of these elds were still in the process of
taking shape as separate academic disciplines, such as sociology,
psychology, and art history.10
The wide range of objects under investigation by the new enter-
prise of Kulturwissenschaften became apparent in the conception of
culture introduced, for example, by Georg Simmel, Max Weber,
and, among the French, Emile Durkheim. Culture was dened as
the entirety of reciprocal interchange of forms of thought, ways
of behavior, social practice and the material culture (Objektivatio-
nen) in which they resulted, these included, among others, institu-
tions, social practices, religion, and art.11 The transdisciplinary
investigations centered on the ambivalence or the pathology of
modernitythe causes and manifestations of the oft-invoked crisis
of contemporary culture.12
One important topic of the evolving discourse after the turn of
the twentieth century was the debate about primitivism, which
cannot be reduced to an exclusively colonial discourse. The gener-
5
Ibid., p. 173.
6
See Foucault (2003).
7
Oexle (1996).
8
Vom Bruch, et al. (1989b, 1997); Lichtblau (1996); Hbinger (1997); Drehsen & Sparn (1996); Teich & Porter (1990); Schleier (2000).
9
Peukert (1989); Oexle (2001).
10
For sociology, see Lichtblau (1996); Nolte (2000). For psychology, Ash & Geuter (1985); Ash (1990). For art history, Sauerlnder (1977).
11
See Hbinger (2000); Vom Bruch et al. (1989a).
12
Ibid., p. 18.
13
Fischer (1981); Zimmerman (2001), especially pp. 217238; Penny & Bunzl (2003); Stocking (1991); Clifford & Marcus (1986).
14
Published in German as Das Denken der Naturvlker (Lvy-Bruhl 1921); Die geistige Welt der Primitiven (Lvy-Bruhl 1927); Die Seele der Primitiven (Lvy-Bruhl 1930).
15
Lowie (1937).
16
See MacGregor (1989).
435
ation of cultural anthropological knowledge in conjunction with
and as a means of domination and control of countries outside of
Europe is beyond question, as, for example, the German South
Sea expeditions from 1907 until 1910 reveal.13 The discourse on
primitivism carries, however, additional signicance as well. In the
period between 1880 and 1930, two interrelated problems in partic-
ular were important to the centrality of primitivism as a conceptual
frame in the emergence of transdisciplinary Kulturwissenschaften in
Germany: rst, the question as to the origin, existence, and modes
of operation of other forms of thought and consciousness, which
in contemporary terms were often characterized by a series of syn-
onymsas primitive, archaic, pre-logical, savage or mystical
thought. This question pointed at the European dimension of the
primitivism debate, namely the intensive German, English, and
American reception of Lucien Lvy-Bruhls books. The French philos-
opher published Les fonctions mentales dans les socits infrieures in
1910, La mentalit primitive in 1922, and Lme primitive in 1927.14
Second, the research interest in these other modes of thought gave
rise to a self-reexive epistemological question: how could the
other, that is, other forms of thought, be recognized if the researcher
him or herself belonged to a particular historically determined Euro-
pean mode of thought and perception? In the rst decades of the
twentieth century this epistemological problem applied to the
non-European primitives and the insaneand, in part, also to chil-
drenwith their cultural Objektivationen, that is, their forms of pro-
cessing reality. In the case of non-European primitives, studies on
primitive thought since the 1890s focused primarily on three areas:
language, religion, and art.15 Regarding the mentally ill, researchers
were mainly interested in their artistic expressions.16
In the following I shall concentrate on the discourse about so-
called primitive art, in which the epistemological problem men-
tioned earlier was initially raised by art historians before World
War I, and later was adopted by psychiatrists in the 1920s as a
guiding question in the context of their discussions about schizo-
phrenia as a form of primitive thought and a source of extraordi-
nary artistic creativity. Primitive artas the artistic expression of
the thought of the otherwas examined simultaneously in differ-
ent elds of knowledge, but among these elds, some took the lead
in giving impulses to the others. This role shifted within the dis-
course community. Besides ethnologists, whose object of study
by denition consisted of the material culture of non-European
peoples, it was, generally speaking, the art historians, experimental
psychologists, and Vlkerpsychologen (folk psychologists) as well as
sociologists and scholars of prehistory who were primarily inter-
ested in primitivism until the end of World War I. By the 1920s
the emphasis and leading role in the discourse moved to psychia-
trists, developmental and Gestalt-psychologists, and philosophical
anthropologists.
This shift of emphasis corresponded to a different keynote in
the discourse on primitive art. In the earlier period the main ques-
tion had been: what was the particular nature of the aesthetic? Did
the concept of art need to be revised? In the 1920s another ques-
tion came to the fore: was there a distinguishing characteristic of
schizophrenic creativity and what were the productive compo-
436 D. Kaufmann / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 434443
nents of the pathological? Did the concept of illness need to be
revised?
Yet two themes ran through the whole discourse on primitive
art: rst, the insight into the socialcultural character of the aes-
thetic sphere, that is, the examination of the social interdepen-
dence of artistic production, as the Swiss cultural historian Jacob
Burckhardt had already demonstrated in his work on the Italian
Renaissance;17 second, the question as to the autonomy of the aes-
thetic sphere and its signicance for modernity, which was linked to
the contemporary diagnosis of its crisis.
2.
In 1901 the historian Karl Lamprecht published an article, Prob-
lems of modern art, in which he asserted a correspondence be-
tween the life of the mind of prehistoric cultures and the inner
life of the present.18 As evidence, he referred to the related forms
of prehistoric and modern art. Though, in the rst case, Lamprecht
wrote, these artistic works were the result of simple urges, instinc-
tive creation,19 while in the present they were created consciously.
Lamprecht, who in his 18911909 major work German history traced
historical courses to the working of psychological laws and con-
structed an ascending succession of stages of culture (Kulturzeitalt-
er), afforded a great deal of space to sources of art history and
distinguished his Kulturzeitalter according to aesthetic categories.
He characterized the present as an age of subjective inner life,
whose origins laid in the period of sensibility.20 The modern ner-
vousness and irritability had evolved in the aftermath of the Roman-
tic era. Now, contemporary artists deliberately tried to rebuild a
non-separated sphere of emotional and rational life, that according
to Lamprecht had been characteristic for prehistoric times. As an
example and expression Lamprecht pointed to the signicance of
synaesthetic phenomena in modern art, that is, the way in which
sound waves arouse light sensations, stimulation of the sense of
touch bring about sensations of hearing, light waves trigger the
sense of taste.21 Lamprecht concluded, if the prehistoric age and
the present age could be characterized as periods of the dominance
of nerves, then the prehistoric age would stand for the beginning of
human history and the present for the age of its decline.
In his 1911 essay ber das Geistige in der Kunst (Concerning the
spiritual in art), Wassily Kandinsky also referred to the inner afn-
ity of contemporary artists to the primitives. Kandinsky outlined:
The similarity of the inner efforts in the entire moral and spiri-
tual atmosphere . . . that is, the similarity in the inner disposi-
tion of an entire age can logically lead to the application of
forms that successfully served the same desires in a past age.
Thereby emerged . . . our understanding of and our inner afnity
to the primitives. Just as we do, these unspoiled pure artists
sought to bring the most essential of their inner life into their
works.22
17
See Hardtwig (1990).
18
Lamprecht (1901); on Lamprecht, see Chickering (1993); Schorn-Schtte. (1984).
19
Lamprecht (1901), p. 737.
20
Ibid., p. 738.
21
Ibid., p. 739.
22
Kandinsky (2004), p. 25.
23
Worringer (1921a). On Worringer, see Bhringer & Sntgen (2002).
24
Worringer (1921a), p. 22.
25
Ibid., p. 23.
26
Ibid.
27
Ibid., p. 24.
28
Wundt (1997 [1900]), p. 247. On the intellectual connection between Wundt and Lamprecht, see Chickering (1997). On Vlkerpsychologie as a Kulturwissenschaft see Smith
(1991).
29
Wundt (1911), p. 18.
30
Wundt (1919), p. 11.
It was the contemporary crisis of culture, according to Kandinsky,
which had encouraged the discovery of this spiritual kinship and
fueled artists search for support from the primitives.
Three years prior to Kandinskys treatise, the art historian
Wilhelm Worringer attempted in his 1908 book Abstraktion und
Einfhlung (Abstraction and empathy) to give a more exact explana-
tion of the mutual mental powers that were supposed to be
responsible for the similarities between primitive and modern
art, especially abstract art.23 Worringer argued that the geometric
style, that is, the style of the highest abstraction and of the strictest
removal from life is characteristic of peoples in the most primitive
stage of culture.24 Because primitive man
is so lost and spiritually helpless in confronting the objects of
the external world . . . his urge is so strong to take the arbitrar-
iness from outside objects and . . . to transform them instead
into objects of value representing necessity and order.25
According to Worringer, primitive man possessed the strongest in-
stinct for das Ding an sich (thing-in-itself). At present, after the hu-
man spirit traversed the path of rational knowledge through
thousands of years of development, his awareness of the feeling
for das Ding an sich reawakes as a nal resignation of knowledge.26
He continued: Flung down from the arrogance of knowledge, mod-
ern man once again faces the world just as lost and helpless as prim-
itive man after recognizing that the visible world . . . is nothing but of
insubstantial appearance.27
Lamprecht, Kandinsky, and Worringer shared the assumption of
a correlation between the artists inner state and that of his age
with form and content of artistic production. This pointed to the
importance of psychology in the discourse community. Conse-
quently the experimental psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, one of
most inuential representatives of this eld of knowledge, pro-
vided the ongoing discourse on primitivism with a scientic
grounding. In his ten-volume Vlkerpsychologie (Folk psychology),
published from 1900 to 1920, he examined those mental and psy-
chic processes that are the basis for the general development of hu-
man communities and for the evolution of shared intellectual
achievements of universal value.28 Wundt tried to reveal the foun-
dational processes and laws of thought, feeling, and desire through
an analysis of intellectual production or so-called cultural Objektiva-
tionen. These mental manifestations were dependent on historical
change. All intellectual phenomena are subject to the stream of his-
torical passing, in which that which has proceeded . . . contains the
grounds from which will develop the valid laws for that to come.29
In his third volume of the Vlkerpsychologie about art, Wundt con-
structed an ascending succession of stages of humankinds develop-
ment and delineated characteristic artistic creations for each. The
object of Wundts study was explicitly not the aesthetic judgment
of art. He was interested in exploring the motives that lead to these
works, and the purposes they serve.30 Art had a primarily functional
meaning for Wundt. He saw artistic creativity and expression only in
 D. Kaufmann / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 434443 437

advanced stages of culture with an accordingly advanced intellectual
development, namely a growing richness of the worldview and its
actuation.31
Already contemporary critics such as the sociologist Alfred
Vierkandt observed, that Wundt did not successfully complete
the task he had set for himself. Vierkandt criticized Wundts
assumption of universally prevailing stages of cultural develop-
ment. He also missed an analysis of the particular psychological
characteristics of the different cultural stages; Wundt had limited
himself only to the depiction of the objective world, that is, to
the forms of primitive art.32 Vierkandts critique of Wundt showed
that the challenge to investigate the connection between the socio-
logical explanation of group or collective behavior and the psycho-
logical explanation of the individuals consciousness and behavior
still had to be taken up.
In 1912 Richard Thurnwaldsociologist, ethnologist, folk psy-
chologist and later holder of the venia legendi in these three elds
at the University of Berlin33submitted an interdisciplinary research
program to tackle this very problem. In his article on Problems of
ethno-psychological research he suggested to investigate the main
current cultural phenomena in their actual causal connection.34
That meant: as with all social manifestations, we have to investigate
the mental processes, laws and intentions that are basis of the mo-
tives for behavior and wishes, both conscious and unconscious.35
Thurnwalds project built on experimental studies in anthropo-
logical eldwork. He eliminated the historical moment that had
been part in Wundts Vlkerpsychologie, and he only ascribed a lim-
ited importance to the collection of material culture, still the key ele-
ment of contemporary anthropological work.36 In order to
investigate the mental state of the so-called natives, the researcher
had to generate data through experimental investigation as Thurn-
wald demonstrated in his Ethno-psychological studies of the South Seas
peoples on the Bismark archipelago and the Salomon Islands.37 In
addressing the topic of pictorial expression within his examination
of higher mental activity he had conducted drawing experiments
with people who through their profession were used to contact with
foreigners. Thurnwald had given them stereometric bodies and plani-
metric gures to sketch and asked them to make drawings of imagi-
nary concepts, such as the afterlife. Thurnwalds research interest
was primarily directed toward the recently introduced intelligence
measurement. Only in passing he raised the question of the judge-
ment of the artistry of primitive drawings. His own criterion was
the minimum of expression that had to be applied to get the maxi-
mum of impression. Not surprisingly he could only nd that primitive
artists concentrated their attention on something other than the nor-
mal pattern, which divided our own from foreign art.38 On the basis
of this opinion though, Thurnwald made general statements about
primitive thought, in which primitive art was embedded. He trans-
formed pieces of Lvy-Bruhls theory about other thinking into ste-
reotypes that were opposed to the principles of our thinking.
Correspondingly, he wrote in his article Primitive thinking for
the Reallexikon der Vorgeschichte (Encyclopedia of prehistory):
Primitive thinking stems from a state of mind that is based on
fewer experience, minor skills and weaker control over the
environment and in this way maintains quite particular and
strange interrelations with emotional life . . . If one tries to
briey characterize primitive thinking, it has to be described
as a thinking that primarily adheres to the complexity of phe-
nomena, without analyzing them; it has not learned to differen-
tiate between the reality of thought and the reality of the object.
It pays no attention to controlling comparisons with reality,
thereby leaving the imagination without limitation and control.
It is concrete, but not true to reality.39
Thurnwald elsewhere explained that in examining the art of native
peoples one could not entirely give up a revised evolutionary ap-
proach with two points of reference: the growing advance of the
technique of the hand and the increase of the technique of the
mind, i.e. the accumulation of knowledge about things and con-
texts.40 Primitive thinking, he wrote, is not able to combine longer
chains of events. Therefore, many incidents would obtain a magical
character. Thurnwald was convinced that primitive thinking favored
egocentric relationships to external phenomena and constructed
simple supercial causal linkages between them.41 This opinion
was shared by the physiologist Max Verworn in his often quoted
book Zur Psychologie der primitiven Kunst (Towards a psychology of
primitive art):
The primitive thinking of the native is not like the critical think-
ing of the modern cultivated man . . . that, like a scientist, imme-
diately tests every new idea against the known facts of reality;
instead, it is still a very short-winded type of thinking, which is
unable to form any long, logical trains of thought . . . but instead
can only theorize in the closest connection to the momentary
situation and therefore continually generates contradictions.
The naive speculations of these peoples about the world around
them are far removed from any natural sense of truth and even
the wildest creations of an agitated imagination do not awake
any critical misgivings. This is true not only for their statements,
but also for their images.42
Yet, since the beginning of the discourse on primitivism there
also existed an intense debate about the question whether spiritual
manifestations could only be considered as art at a certain level of
culture, characterized by rational thought and specic technical
developments, as the aforementioned physiologist Verworn insinu-
ated. Moreover, the argument of the experimental psychologists
and folk psychologists was criticized who made essentially mate-
rial stimulation responsible for the intellectual evolution of
humankind and attributed all human expressions exclusively with
a use-value for economic, social or religious purposes.43 As early as

31
Ibid., p. 607.
32
Vierkandt (1925, 1914).
33
Melk-Koch (1989).
34
Thurnwald (1912).
35
Ibid., pp. 2627.
36
Also Hoyt (2001).
37
Thurnwald (1913).
38
Ibid., p. 74.
39
Thurnwald (1927), p. 296. For a detailed discussion, see also Thurnwald (1922).
40
Thurnwald (1925), p. 349.
41
Ibid., p. 353.
42
Verworn (1917), pp. 2526.
43
Riegl (1923), p. 10.
438 D. Kaufmann / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 434443

1893, the art historian Alois Riegl in his book Stilfragen: Grundlegun-
gen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik (Questions of style: Outlines of a
history of ornamentation) rejected this technicalmaterial theory of
evolution.44 He instead located a human inner artistic urge that stirs
within man and drives to fulllment.45 The artistic inner drive
(Kunstwollen) which seeks to expand its area of creation and to
heighten its capacity to give form wasaccording to Rieglthe main
creative agent in history, not tools or technology.46 This urge also
applied to the beginnings of art. Riegl expressly referred to Paleo-
lithic art and pointed to the striking gap between the outstanding
quality of the artistic creations of these half-cannibalistic troglodytes
of Aquitaine on the one hand, and the moral lowness of their cul-
tural level on the other hand.47 Art history, he wrote, had ignored this
art almost completely, focusing only on the history of the ancient
(classical) art. Riegl appealed to abandon this system of value and
to judge art according to the personal style and the style of the time,
that is, to measure works of art only against themselves and to give
them their own individual meaning. Riegls call was taken up by
the art historian Wilhelm Worringer. He outlined in Abstraction and
empathy:
Every style of art created as a result of an artistic urge and
according to the psychological needs of the time offers the
greatest delight to mankind. Therefore, this must become the
guiding line of objective art history. The possibly greatest defor-
mation from our point of view must have represented for the
respective artist the highest beauty and the fulllment of his
artistic urge. This means, all judging from the perspective of
our modern aesthetics and oriented to classical antiquity and
the Renaissance, turns into absurdity and atness.48
This considerate shift in the system of values in art history
into the sphere of the relative, as it was described in the 1927
Encyclopedia of prehistory49indicated a fundamental change of
the concept of primitive art. This no longer designated an imperfect,
underdeveloped stage in art history and a lower level in the Darwin-
ian scale of evolution, but an autonomous and distinct epoch of
artistic creation, endowed with its own meaning and signicance.50
Primitive art was now characterized as unique; its works had to be
analyzed in the context of their time (including the mental life of
the period under consideration) and had to be interpreted in a her-
meneutic effort.
This new cultural relativism in art history corresponded with a
new formation of, above all, American anthropology, by and
around Franz Boas, but was also in part supported by some German
anthropologists and ethnologists. Theodor Koch-Grnberg in his
book Anfnge der Kunst im Urwald (The origins of art in the jungle),
Karl von den Steinen in Die Marquesaner und ihre Kunst (The Mar-
quesians and their art), and Felix von Luschan of the Berlin Vlkerk-
undemuseum, in his study of the Altertmer von Benin (The
antiquities of Benin) limited themselves in their research strictly
to description of manifestations of material culture, but appraised
certain pieces of them as art.51 Luschan in 1898 explicitly wrote
about Benin art:
important to me is the insight that we have been made aware of
an indigenous great and monumental art in Benin in the 16th
and 17th centuries, which at least in some works is equal to con-
temporary European art. Moreover, Benin artists use a tech-
nique that is very much according to the latest knowledge.
Especially in regard to the current disrespect for the negroes,
particularly in so-called colonial circles, such evidence seems
to me to also have a more general and moral meaning.52
The investigation of primitive art, though, was not very preva-
lent among German anthropologists, but they did share the art his-
torians recognition of the epistemological problem posed by the
alleged different mental life of the others. Worringer raised this
question at the very beginning of his Abstraction and empathy. He
criticized the limited realm of psychologist Theodor Lippss theory
of empathy. Lipps had made the observers impression to the start-
ing point of his aesthetics. He had argued that it was a basic fact of
all psychology, and all aesthetics in particular, that, strictly speak-
ing, there was and never could be an object perceptible by the
senses: In so far as it exists for me . . . it is permeated by my
own activity and my own inner life.53 Worringer questioned the
general validity of Lippss claim that this process of empathy had al-
ways been the precondition for artistic creation.
I rather think that this theory of empathy leaves us helpless in
regard to the creations of many ages and peoples. It offers us, for
example, no help in understanding the enormous complex of art
that stands apart from the narrow context of Greco-Roman and
modern occidental art. Here the realization is forced upon us
that an entirely different mental process is involved, accounting
for the particular character of each style of art, which we only
regard negatively.54
The precondition for the possibility of understanding these
completely different mental processes was the assumption of
the psychic unity of mankind propagated by the historically ori-
ented German anthropology of the late nineteenth century.55 It
was also the basic assumption of Franz Boass cultural anthropolog-
ical approach at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the
twentieth centuries in the United States, which continued to operate
in Germany as well, despite the different developments in the eld
of anthropological knowledge in the two countries.56 Correspond-
ingly, Alfred Vierkandt for example explained in his essay on Prin-
zipienfragen der ethnologischen Kunstforschung (Questions of principle
in ethnological studies of art):
The presupposition of an equality of mental life [is] epistemo-
logically necessary and therefore of a priori certainty. It belongs
to the presuppositions of the rst order, while all presupposi-
tions about the inequality of mental life can only be acquired
from experience and remain presuppositions of the second
order: equality must be taken for granted, while inequality
must be justied by experience.
The burden of proof thereby shifted to the side of the advocates of
an inequality of mental life. When it came to this point, ethnologists

44
Ibid., p. 32.
45
Ibid., p. 20.
46
Ibid., p. 24.
47
Ibid., p. 19.
48
Worringer (1921a), p. 17.
49
Khn (1927), p. 266.
50
Ibid., p. 267.
51
Koch-Grnberg (1904); Steinen (1925); Luschan (2001 [1898]).
52
Luschan (2001 [1898]), pp. 3132.
53
Lipps, quoted in Worringer (1921a), p. 7.
54
Ibid., p. 8.
55
See Koepping (1983, 1995); Massin (1996).
56
Kaufmann (2003).
 D. Kaufmann / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 434443 439

in particular stood on the side of equality in relating their personal
experiences in the eld, namely the experience of having been
there.57 In the introduction to his book on Primitive art, Franz Boas
emphasized that:
Anyone who has lived with primitive tribes, who has shared
their joys and sorrows, their privations and their luxuries,
who sees in them not solely subjects of study to be examined
like a cell under the microscope, but feeling and thinking
human beings, will agree that there is no such thing as a prim-
itive mind, a magical or prelogical way of thinking, but that
each individual in primitive society is a man, a woman, a child
of the same kind, of the same way of thinking, feeling and acting
as man, woman or child in our own society.58
Boas developed a cultural anthropological concept for under-
standing the other, which aimed at a connection between histor-
ical knowledge and natural scientic, biological knowledge, and
which was rooted in a regional and local analysis.59 The new rela-
tivistic approach in art history adopted some of these elements in its
concept of styleabove all, the precedence of historical context, the
principle of individuality of each culture, and the inclusion of psy-
chological research.
Intuition and historical divination of the researcher played an
important role in the investigation of style. Without historical div-
ination, wrote Worringer, all historical studies would remain poor
and subservient.60 Art historians attested with pathos to the imag-
ination, the capacity for empathy, and to the personality of the re-
searcher as a solution to the epistemological problem of foreign
times and foreign art.61 After all, the scholarly investigation was
ultimately about the understanding of the eternal of art, which is
connected to time, but also outshines it.62 The object of art history
therefore became the redeeming of art, the release from the con-
straints of life.63 This celebrated utopian character of the aesthetic
sphere served as a counterpoint to the criticized present. In the pres-
ent, described as insecure, without clear commitment and distinct
principle, the power and energy of primitive art was not grasped,
as the prehistorian Herbert Khn argued.64 The art of the primitives
is, in truth, not primitivethe man of that time lives primitively; his
economic system is primitivehis art is the purest expression of his
world, which is not primitive, only differently experienced and
viewed in different forms.65 Khns studies in art history were rep-
resentative for this perspective, which rejected the evolutionary,
functional approach and promoted a new estimation and apprecia-
tion for Paleolithic art.
It was also Khn, who in his article about primitive art for the
Encyclopedia of prehistory, summarized the most important result
of the transdisciplinary debate about primitive art:
Through the inclusion of primitive art, the concept of art itself
has undergone a complete change. The standard of beauty in
the sense of an idealized nature is no longer valid. The concept
of art appears to be captured most exactly, when characterized
as the formed expression of the relationship of oneself to the
world.66
This conclusion corresponded with the program and aesthetic prac-
tice of the contemporary artistic avant-gardefrom Expressionism,
Dadaism, to Surrealism.67 This altered denition of art, that is, the
inclusion in the realm and experience of the aesthetic of the non-
European, non-occidental, the so-called primitive art, broadened
the temporal, spatial, and mental concept of culture. The wholeness
of a culturein all other parts of life otherwise presumably broken
could still be captured in the examination of the eternal sphere of
art. Other, pre-logical, archaic, savage and mystical thinking now
belonged to the entirety of the human spirit as a result of the dis-
course about primitivism within German Kulturwissenschaften. It be-
came a key object of the research into the essence of a culture. Inner
processes such as intuition, premonition, and divination on the part
of the scholar acquired a great deal of signicance in this investiga-
tion. They correspondedit was assumedto the processes of pre-
historic or primitive inner experience.
3.
The question of being able to relate to and understand at rst
incomprehensible artistic manifestations as the outcome of strange
inner states occupied also the discourse on primitivism in the
1920s. This time, however, the main subject was not prehistoric
and so-called native peoples, but the mentally illparticularly
schizophrenicsand their artistic works.
In 1925 the psychiatrist Arthur Kronfeld described the creative
process in the journal Klinische Wochenschrift as a mental state
experienced by the creative subject as an instinctual activity, as
an inner liberation from the impact of the world upon the self.68
Kronfeld wrote of the parallelism of this creative state with that of
becoming psychotic, especially in certain cases of schizophrenia.
He continued:
In these psychoses the world forms itself anew. Within them is
objectied the tension between the self and the other. Archaic
levels of the soul, both magical and inspiratory, modes of crea-
tion rising from primordial instincts of an immense vitality give
the self an unlimited victory over the facts heretofore, which is
recast in original new forms, in hallucinatory experiences of a
revelatory or inspirational nature, in new synthetic and original
intellectual processes akin to the birth of a tremendous self-
made reality, the worldview of psychosis.69
Here, Kronfeld expressed an emphatic notion of schizophrenia pre-
valent throughout the cultural discourse of the 1920s. The fascina-
tion for this broken mental state70 came from at least three
sources: the schizophrenic worlds of experience that crossed the
boundaries of the mind, the alleged similar experience of isolation
and alienation sensed by the participants in discourse and the great
creative potential ascribed to schizophrenics. More than any other,

57
Vierkandt (1925), p. 342.
58
Boas (1955), p. 2.
59
See Stocking (1968), pp. 133233.
60
Worringer (1921b), p. 167.
61
Khn (1923), p. 8.
62
Ibid., p. 175.
63
Ibid., p. 176.
64
Ibid., p. 7.
65
Ibid.
66
Khn (1927), p. 269.
67
On this point, see Kster (2003); Pan (2001).
68
Kronfeld (1925), p. 29.
69
Ibid.
70
Prinzhorn (1927), p. 141.
440 D. Kaufmann / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 434443

the psychiatrist and art historian Hans Prinzhorn supported this
view of schizophrenia with his widely read book of 1922, Bildnerei
der Geisteskranken (Works of the mentally ill), in which he gave his
interpretation of the Heidelberg collection of about 5,000 works of
patients in mental institutions.71 Main topic was the highly creative
power that sprang from schizophrenia.
Prinzhorn took up the new questions and concentration of psy-
chiatric research on schizophrenia. His work belonged to the inu-
ential circle in German psychiatry of the 1920s known as the
Heidelberg School, which was associated with such names as Karl
Wilmanns, Hans Gruhle, and the philosopher Karl Jaspers, who
started his career as a psychiatrist and published the basic work
Allgemeine Psychopathologie (General psychopathology) as a re-
search assistant there in 1913.72 Besides the work on the clinical
system of mental illness, the psychiatrists at the University of Hei-
delberg developed a psychological, hermeneutic approach that
incorporated methods such as participant observation. Patients were
encouraged to self-observation and the collection of their narratives
provided means to gain access to unknown mental modes of experi-
ence. One main research interest centered on the analysis of the
schizophrenic personality, its thinking and forms of mental experi-
ence. This approach to schizophrenia also produced critical com-
ments within the psychiatric community of the early 1920s. The
well known Leipzig professor of psychiatry Oswald Bumke, for
example, warned in his article Die Ausung der Dementia Praecox
(The dissolution of Dementia Praecox/schizophrenia):
The more we have shifted our research from the crude anoma-
lies of thinking and the most noticeable emotional disorders of
Dementia praecox to the more rened shades of the schizo-
phrenic personality, the more the very concept of this illness
has slipped through our ngers. In dealing with Dementia prae-
cox today, one only wants to see it as a pathological intensica-
tion of normal mental reactions.73
Bumkes warning was also a reaction to the increasing adoption
of phenomenological perspectives and psychoanalytic contents in
psychiatric researcha development that was particularly criti-
cized in psychiatric brain research.74 Much discussed examples in-
cluded Paul Schilders book Wahn und Erkenntnis (Delusion and
cognition) of 1918 and Alfred Storchs 1922 volume on Das archa-
ischprimitive Erleben und Denken der Schizophrenen (On archaic
primitive experience and thought of schizophrenics).75 Building on
Freuds thesis in his Totem and taboo about the correspondence in
the mental life of savages and neurotics, they attempted to incorpo-
rate ethnological studies, in particular, the work of Lvy-Bruhl, to
nd analogies between the thinking of schizophrenics and the mag-
ical thought of the primitives. The goal was to understand the at
rst entirely incomprehensible forms of experience and modes of
thinking of schizophrenic patients through a comparison with archa-
ic-primitive ways of thinking.76 Compared were the notions of rein-
carnation, the melding of the self with external objects, magical
gender transformations, cosmic identications, and mystical
ecstatic contemplation. The subtitle of Storchs book Entwicklungs-
psychologisch-klinische Untersuchungen zum Schizophrenieproblem
(Developmental-psychological clinical investigations of the problem of
schizophrenia) pointed to the psychogenetic conceptual framework
of the research program. Its results supported the empathic notion
of schizophrenia in the Weimar Republic:
In this mental disorder a primordial, archaic mode of thinking
and experience emerges that was unable to survive in the rise
to contemporary culture and was overcome, though it still lies
dormant in every one of us and can one day be awakened
through unknown, fatal events in our organism. Even the
healthiest mind harbor these primordial powers in the depths
of the soul, which constantly shine through in countless
instances of the superstition, symbolism, occultism, and reli-
gion of our age as well as in some of the strange emotional
states of modern man.77
The new psychiatricanthropological approach to schizophre-
nia stressed on the one hand the discovery of still existing archaic
forms of thought and experience, and emphasized on the other
hand the great creative powers released in the course of the illness.
The last aspect was underlined by the ourishing genre of Patho-
graphien (medical histories) of famous artists since the turn of cen-
tury.78 The existence of artistic talent was, however, a precondition,
as Karl Jaspers outlined in his book on Strindberg und van Gogh.79
Then Jaspers was convinced that:
Just as a sick mussel gives birth to pearls, experiences of schizo-
phrenia could give rise to unique art. As unaware as who takes
pleasure in the pearl is of the mussels illness, the one who
senses the life savoring power of art is of schizophrenia, which
was perhaps a condition of its creation.80
Jaspers answered the question he posed to himself about whether
something specically schizophrenic could be found in art by
questioning the concept of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia, he wrote,
was not a clearly dened, but rather an innitely rich concept,
which took on different meanings in different contexts. He added,
that schizophrenia covered an enormous reality, which can only
be analyzed and understood as mental entirety.81
Could the productive components of schizophrenia be deter-
mined? An answer to this problem required both, psychiatric and
art historical knowledge. Trained in both elds, Hans Prinzhorn
seemed to have been made for the task.82 His main assignment in
the context of the Heidelberg clinic, however, was in the rst place
to collect as many works as possible from the mentally ill patients
in order to establish an empirical basis upon which a new diagnostic
viewpoint and new general insights into psychotic states could be
gained.
However, Prinzhorn more or less abandoned this program. The
lack of knowledge about the nature of creative activity on the part

71
Prinzhorn (1994). On the Prinzhorn collection, see for example Gercke & Jarchov (1980); Hayward Gallery (1997).
72
Janzarik (1998, 1979); Bormuth (2002); Sauerland (1995).
73
Bumke (1924); from the opposite perspective, see Kronfeld (1929).
74
See Kleist (1925): Ich habe bei Jaspers und seinen Geistesverwandten immer den Eindruck, als ob sie die Geisteskrankheiten als eine Art Schauspiel betrachten, dem sie mit
Staunen und Ergriffenheit, Mitleid und Bewunderung folgen. Sie werden selbst hingerissen und reden in klingenden Worten vom festlichen Zug der Visionen und sind glcklich,
wenn sie dem diese rtselhaften Welten durchschreitenden Kranken eine Strecke weit nachfolgen knnen. Es ist das eine intuitive knstlerische Haltung, die am deutlichsten aus
Prinzhorns bewundernder Darstellung der Bildnereien der Geisteskranken spricht. Wissenschaft ist aber doch etwas wesentlich anderes, ist klare, kalte Unberhrtheit, die in der
Flle der bunten und erregenden Einzelheiten die einfachen Linien des Allgemeinen und den sicheren Schritt der Gesetzlichkeit sucht (ibid., p. 19).
75
Schilder (1918); Storch (1922a,b); Bychowski (1923); Lurje (1923); Langelddeke (1924); Levy-Suhl (1925).
76
Storch (1922a), p. 6.
77
Levy-Suhl (1925), p. 72.
78
For a bibliography of all Pathographien published until 1928, see Lange-Eichbaum (1928), pp. 464494.
79
Jaspers (1926), for example pp. 9697.
80
Ibid., p. 100.
81
Ibid., p. 142.
82
On Prinzhorns biography and work, see Rske (1995).
 D. Kaufmann / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 434443 441

of psychiatrists, he believed, led them only to discover already
known symptomssuch as the construction of stereotypes in the
patients works.83 Prinzhorns sceptical opinion about a functional
medical perspective on schizophrenia was a reection of the con-
temporary psychiatric discourse, which increasingly followed an
emphatic notion of the illness. This development was supported by
the comparison between modes of thinking and behavior of mentally
ill and of so-called natives, which indicated a new understanding of
illness.
Prinzhorn interpreted his collection of patients works taking up
the perspectives and results of the ongoing transdisciplinary de-
bate on primitivism by art historians, anthropologists and psychi-
atrists. He came to the conclusion that mental forms of expression
and corresponding creations existed,
which would necessarily be the same among all people under
the same conditions, similar to physiological processes. Under
the inuence of civilizing customs and restrictive rules, such a
normal course of events is disturbed and inhibited. Exceptional
situations of all kinds . . . can drive primordial congurations to
the surface.84
According to his ndings, this applied to both primitives and
schizophrenics, whose artworks demonstrated an extremely close
afnity in form and expression.85
Prinzhorn studied not only the outbreak of a genuine creative
power with schizophrenics, but was specially interested in the
artistic quality of their works. The sick person could under the spe-
cic inuence of schizophrenia achieve a creative power which
would otherwise have been denied to him, when processes took
place in his mind that are otherwise reserved for the artist.86 This
thesis authorised Prinzhorns conviction that certain paintings and
sculptures in his collection were of a high artistic standing. They be-
came art due to the perception of the observer, through the intensity
of his or her feelings in viewing these paintings and sculptures, as
well as through the comparison with established art. In fact, contem-
porary expressionists such as Emil Nolde and Paul Klee conrmed
Prinzhorns estimation. In the process of contemplation, Prinzhorn
himself became an artist:
Figures shaped by the hand of human beings ascend into their
own sphere of value which can only be experienced directly,
namely in that spiritual condition known as the aesthetic,
which essentially differs from all other states of mind. Every-
thing depends upon whether one is enabled to assume this aes-
thetic completely pure posture . . . Who is unable to experience
a piece of art without becoming victim of an inner compulsion
to analyze and unmask it, may be a good psychologist, but will
necessarily be oblivious to the essence of creative work.87
Prinzhorn noticed a close afnity between the schizophrenic expe-
rience of the world by the mentally ill and the emotional state of
contemporary artists. But he described an important difference be-
tween the two:
The experience of schizophrenics is imposed on them by fate.
The alienation of the perceptual world weighs upon him as a
harrowing, inescapable doom against which he often battles
until he submits and slowly feels at home in his delusionally
enriched autistic world. The modern artist however, turns away
from his familiar reality also under in inner compulsion in the
best case, but more or less as an act based on consciousness
and decision.88
Prinzhorns volume found immediate entry into the psychiatric
discourse. In 1923 Richard A. Pfeifer, later professor of psychiatry
in Leipzig, published the so to speak Anti-Prinzhorn. In his book
Der Geisteskranke und sein Werk (The mentally ill and his work), Pfei-
fer tried to proof that the artistic creativity of a schizophrenic per-
son was solely due to those parts of his or her mind that were still
healthy.89 He argued that the mentally ill were by no means uncon-
sciously in contact with the deepest of insights under the inuence
of schizophrenia. Karl Birnbaum, Privatdozent of psychiatry at the
University of Berlin, contradicted Pfeiffer in his 1924 book Kulturpsy-
chopathologie (The pathology of culture). Birnbaum particularly
emphasized the originality and productivity of psychosis. According
to him, abnormality possessed a specic spiritual independence
and ingenuity with a unique cultural characteristic, thus revealing
a completely new mental sphere.90 Certain forms of experience in
schizophrenia, Birnbaum wrote, had an especially signicant cul-
tural value.
The topics importance was also demonstrated by a long contri-
bution on Die knstlerischen Arbeiten Schizophrener (The artistic
works of schizophrenics) in the 1923 volume on Schizophrenia of
the manual Das Handbuch der Geisteskrankheiten (Manual to mental
illnesses). Author was Hans Brger-Prinz, who after World War II
became one of the leading German psychiatrists. On the contrary
to Prinzhorn and others Brger-Prinz wanted to leave the schizo-
phrenic artist in his hospital.91 But he also shared the opinion that
the outbreak of schizophrenia with the heightened attention to
ones own inner life, to increased sensibility and sensitivity, and to
increased capacity for empathy, tends especially towards the artistic,
to a mode of expression that transcends the everyday.92
The debate about the artistic works of schizophrenics stimu-
lated a nearly embittered methodological discussion about Die
Wandlungen der wissenschaftlichen Denkformen und neue Psychia-
trie (The transformations of scientic modes of thought and a new
psychiatry).93 Parallels with the debate about the art of natives
are highly evident. The psychiatrist Kronfeld for example demanded
to make intuitive experience and hermeneutic approaches produc-
tive for psychiatry by examining the correlation between personality
and creativity: Empathetic and psychological-phenomenological
examination of psychotic experience and creation analogous to
artistic creativity will allow psychiatry to gain a number of new in-
sights.94 The discussion in psychiatry centered on an interpretative,
hermeneutic knowledge of the whole (verstehende Ganzheitserkennt-
nis) in contrast to an analytic view that breaks the whole into
pieces. Behind this approach of the new psychiatrists stood,

83
Prinzhorn (1984), pp. 56.
84
Ibid., p. 306.
85
Ibid., p. 323.
86
Ibid., p. 345.
87
Ibid., pp. 332333.
88
Ibid., p. 347.
89
Pfeifer (1923).
90
Birnbaum (1924), pp. 2930.
91
Brger-Prinz (1932), p. 672.
92
Ibid., p. 676.
93
This is the title of A. Storchs 1927 article, which answers the contributions of the professors of psychiatry Hoche, Bumke, Ziehen and Stransky to the debate.
94
Kronfeld (1925), p. 30.
442 D. Kaufmann / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 434443
according to its protagonist Storch, the will to push the limits of
understanding beyond the present border.95 A methodology in-
formed by the humanities had to join with a scientic analytical
examination and inquire into contexts of meaning. This was the
most important key to knowing and understanding the otherthe
primitive as well as the mentally ill.
The discourse on primitivism of the 1920s was even more
marked than the pre-war discourse by the perception of a method-
ological crisis and a methodological self-reection. Above all there
was the call to expand the scientic endeavor as well as ones own
inner experience into new and unfamiliar elds of subjectivity.
The discourse of primitivism ultimately arrived at a change and
redenition of a nexus of problems: the challenge to the old con-
cept of art as well as to the dominant concept of psychopathology.
Both objects at the center of the discourse, the non-European na-
tives and the European insane, received new value and new
importance. This enhancement was connected with an articulated
need to expand the experience of subjectivity on the part of the
civilized and sound participants in the discourse on primitivism.
The crisis of culture and the crisis of knowledge and methodology
in the rst decades of the twentieth century was eventually re-
solved in the German Kulturwissenschaften by taking refuge in phe-
nomenology and holism.96
References
Ash, M. G. (1990). Psychology in twentieth-century Germany: Science and
profession. In G. Cocks & K. H. Jarausch (Eds.), German professions, 18001950
(pp. 289307). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ash, M. G., & Geuter, U. (Eds.). (1985). Geschichte der deutschen Psychologie im 20.
Jahrhundert. Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag.
Birnbaum, K. (1924). Grundzge der Kulturpsychopathologie. Mnchen: J. F.
Bergmann.
Boas, F. (1955). Primitive art. New York: Dover Publications. (First published 1927)
Bhringer, H., & Sntgen, B. (Eds.). (2002). Wilhelm Worringers Kunstgeschichte.
Mnchen: W. Fink.
Bormuth, M. (2002). Lebensfhrung in der Moderne: Karl Jaspers und die
Psychoanalyse. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog.
Bumke, O. (1924). Die Ausung der Dementia Praecox. Klinische Wochenschrift, 3,
437440.
Brger-Prinz, H. (1932). ber die knstlerischen Arbeiten Schizophrener. In K.
Wilmanns (Ed.). Handbuch der Geisteskrankheiten, Vol. 9. Die Schizophrenie (pp.
668704). Berlin: Springer.
Bychowski, G. (1923). Metaphysik und Schizophrenie. Eine vergleichend-
psychologische Studie. Berlin: Karger.
Chickering, R. (1993). Karl Lamprecht. A German academic life (18561915). Atlantic
Highlands, NJ: Humanities.
Chickering, R. (1997). Das Leipziger Positivisten-Krnzchen um die
Jahrhundertwende. In R. Vom Bruch, F. W. Graf, & G. Hbinger (Eds.), Kultur
und Kulturwissenschaften, Vol. 2. Die Spannung zwischen Idealismus und
Positivismus (pp. 227245). Stuttgart: Steiner.
Clifford, J., & Marcus, G. E. (Eds.). (1986). Writing culture: The politics and poetics of
ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Drehsen, V., & Sparn, W. (Eds.). (1996). Krisenwahrnehmung und Krisenbewltigung
um 1900. Berlin: Akademische Verlag.
Fischer, H. (1981). Die Hamburger Sdsee-Expedition: ber Ethnographie und
Kolonialismus. Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat.
Foucault, M. (2003). Die Anormalen. Vorlesungen am Collge de France, 19741975 (M.
Ott, Trans.). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Gercke, H., & Jarchov, I. (Eds.). (1980). Die Prinzhorn-Sammlung. Bilder, Skulpturen,
Texte aus psychiatrischen Anstalten (ca. 18901920). Knigstein im Taunus:
Athenum.
Hardtwig, W. (1990). Jakob Burckhardt und Max Weber: Zur Genese und Pathologie
der modernen Welt. In idem, Geschichtskultur und Wissenschaft (pp. 189223).
Mnchen: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag.
Harrington, A. (1996). Reenchanted science: Holism in German culture from Wilhelm II
to Hitler. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Harwood, J. (1993). Styles of scientic thought: The German genetics community 1900
1933. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hayward Gallery (Ed.). (1997). Wahnsinnige Schnheit. Prinzhorn-Sammlung.
Heidelberg: Wunderhorn.
Hoyt, D. L. (2001). The reanimation of the primitive: Fin-de-sicle ethnographic
discourse in western Europe. History of Science, 39, 331354.
95
Storch (1927), p. 685.
96
For similar scientic approaches in the Weimar Republic, see Harrington (1996); Harwood (1993).
Hsu, F. L. K. (1964). Rethinking the concept primitive. Current Anthropology, 5,
169178.
Hbinger, G. (1997). Konzepte und Typen der Kulturgeschichte. In W. Kttler (Ed.),
Geschichtsdiskurs, Vol. 4. Krisenbewutsein, Katastrophenerfahrungen und
Innovationen, 18801945 (pp. 136152). Frankfurt am Main: Fischer.
Hbinger, G. (2000). Die Rckkehr der Kulturgeschichte. In C. Cornelissen (Ed.),
Geschichtswissenschaften (pp. 162177). Frankfurt am Main: Fischer.
Janzarik, W. (Ed.). (1979). Psychopathologie als Grundlagenwissenschaft. Stuttgart:
Ferdinand Enke.
Janzarik, W. (1998). Jaspers, Kurt Schneider and the Heidelberg school of psychiatry.
History of Psychiatry, 9, 241252.
Jaspers, K. (1926). Strindberg und van Gogh. Versuch einer pathographischen Analyse
unter vergleichender Heranziehung von Swedenborg und Hlderlin (2nd ed.).
Berlin: Springer.
Kandinsky, W. (2004). ber das Geistige in der Kunst. Bern: Benteli. (First published
1911/1912)
Kaufmann, D. (2003). Rasse und Kultur: Die amerikanische Kulturanthropologie
um Franz Boas (18581942) in der ersten Hlfte des 20. Jahrhundertsein
Gegenentwurf zur Rassenforschung in Deutschland. In H.-W. Schmuhl (Ed.),
Rassenforschung an Kaiser-Wilhelm-Instituten vor und nach 1933 (pp. 309327).
Gttingen: Wallstein.
Kleist, K. (1925). Die gegenwrtigen Strmungen in der Psychiatrie. Allgemeine
Zeitschrift fr Psychiatrie und psychisch-gerichtliche Medizin, 82, 141.
Koch-Grnberg, T. (1904). Anfnge der Kunst im Urwald. Berlin: Wasmuth.
Koepping, K.-P. (1983). Adolf Bastian and the psychic unity of mankind. Brisbane:
University of Queensland Press.
Koepping, K.-P. (1995). Enlightenment and Romanticism in the work of Adolf
Bastian: The historical roots of anthropology in the nineteenth century. In H. F.
Vermeulen & A. A. Roldn (Eds.), Fieldwork and footnotes: Studies in the history of
European anthropology (pp. 7591). London: Routledge.
Kronfeld, A. (1925). Der knstlerische Gestaltungsvorgang in psychiatrischer
Beleuchtung. Klinische Wochenschrift, 4, 2930.
Kronfeld, A. (1929). ber den Wandel des Schizophreniebegriffes. Monatsschrift fr
Psychiatrie und Neurologie, 73, 140166.
Kuper, A. (1988). The invention of primitive society: Transformations of an illusion.
London: Routledge.
Khn, H. (1923). Die Kunst der Primitiven. Mnchen: Delphin.
Khn, H. (1927). Primitive Kunst. In M. Ebert (Ed.), Reallexikon der Vorgeschichte,
(Vol. 10, pp. 264292). Berlin: de Gruyter.
Kster, B. (2003). Picasso und Matisse als Kulturreisende: Primitivismus und
Anthropologie um 1900. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.
Lamprecht, K. (1901). Fragen moderner Kunst. Neue deutsche Rundschau, 12,
734741.
Lange-Eichbaum, W. (1928). Genie, Irrsinn und Ruhm. Mnchen: E. Reinhardt.
Langelddeke, A. (1924). Zur Frage des archaisch-primitiven Erlebens und Denkens
in der Psychiatrie. Zeitschrift fr die gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie, 93,
299308.
Lvy-Bruhl, L. (1921). Das Denken der Naturvlker. Wien: Braumller. (First
published as Les fonctions mentales dans les socits infrieures, 1910)
Lvy-Bruhl, L. (1927). Die geistige Welt der Primitiven. Mnchen: F. Bruckmann. (First
published as La mentalit primitive, 1922)
Lvy-Bruhl, L. (1930). Die Seele der Primitiven. Wien: Braumller. (First published as
Lme primitive, 1927)
Levy-Suhl, M. (1925). Neue Wege in der Psychiatrie: Eine vergleichende Betrachtung
des Seelenlebens der Wilden und der Geistesstrungen des Kulturmenschen.
Stuttgart: Ferdinand Enke.
Lichtblau, K. (1996). Kulturkrise und Soziologie um die Jahrhundertwende: Zur
Genealogie der Kultursoziologie in Deutschland. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.
Lowie, R. H. (1937). The history of ethnological theory. New York: Farrer & Rinehart.
Lurje, W. (1923). Mystisches Denken Geisteskrankheit und moderne Kunst. Stuttgart:
Pttmann.
Luschan, F. von. (2001). Alterthmer von Benin. In M. Prussat, & W. Till (Eds.), Neger
im Louvre: Texte zur Kunstethnographie und moderner Kunst (pp. 1536).
Amsterdam: Verlag der Kunst. (First published in Zeitschrift fr Ethnologie,
30, 1898)
MacGregor, J. M. (1989). The discovery of the art of the insane. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Massin, B. (1996). From Virchow to Fischer: Physical anthropology and modern
race theories in Wilhelmine Germany. In G. W. Stocking (Ed.), Volksgeist as
method and ethic: Essays on Boasian ethnography and the German anthropological
tradition (pp. 79154). Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Melk-Koch, M. (1989). Auf der Suche nach der menschlichen Gesellschaft: Richard
Thurnwald. Berlin: Staatliche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz. pp. 250259.
Nolte, P. (2000). Die Ordnung der deutschen Gesellschaft: Selbstentwurf und
Selbstbeschreibung im 20. Jahrhundert (pp. 30187). Mnchen: C. H. Beck.
Oexle, O. G. (1996). Geschichte als Historische Kulturwissenschaft. In W. Hardtwig
& H.-U. Wehler (Eds.), Kulturgeschichte Heute (pp. 1440). Gttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Oexle, O. G. (2001). Max Weber: Geschichte als Problemgeschichte. In O. G. Oexle
(Ed.), Das Problem der Problemgeschichte (pp. 937). Gttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht.
 D. Kaufmann / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 434443
Pan, D. (2001). Primitive Renaissance: Rethinking German expressionism. Lincoln, NE:
University of Nebraska Press.
Penny, H. G., & Bunzl, M. (Eds.). (2003). Worldly provincialism: German anthropology
in the age of empire. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.
Peukert, D. (1989). Max Webers Diagnose der Moderne. Gttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht.
Pfeifer, R. A. (1923). Der Geisteskranke und sein Werk: Eine Studie ber schizophrene
Kunst. Leipzig: A. Krner.
Prinzhorn, H. (1927). Schizophrenie: Zur Geschichte des Wortes und zur
Psychologie seines Einbruches in das Zeitbewutsein. In idem, Um die
Persnlichkeit: Gesammelte Abhandlungen (pp. 125143). Heidelberg: Niels
Kampmann.
Prinzhorn, H. (1994). Bildnerei der Geisteskranken: Ein Beitrag zur Psychologie und
Psychopathologie der Gestaltung. Wien: Springer. (First published 1922)
Riegl, A. (1923). Stilfragen: Grundlegungen zu einer Geschichte der Ornamentik. Berlin:
R. C. Schmidt. (First published 1893)
Rske, T. (1995). Der Arzt als Knstler: sthetik und Psychotherapie bei Hans Prinzhorn
(18861933). Bielefeld: Aisthesis.
Sauerlnder, W. (1977). Alois Riegl und die Entstehung der autonomen
Kunstgeschichte am Fin de sicle. In R. Bauer et al. (Eds.), Fin de sicle. Zu
Literatur und Kunst um die Jahrhundertwende (pp. 125139). Frankfurt am Main:
V. Klostermann.
Sauerland, K. (1995). Heidelberg als intellektuelles Zentrum. In H. Treiber & M.
Bormuth (Eds.), Heidelberg im Schnittpunkt intellektueller Kreise (pp. 1230).
Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag.
Schilder, P. (1918). Wahn und Erkenntnis: Eine psychopathologische Studie. Berlin:
Springer.
Schleier, H. (2000). Historisches Denken in der Krise der Kultur: Fachhistorie.
Kulturgeschichte und Anfnge der Kulturwissenschaften in Deutschland.
Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.
Schorn-Schtte, L. (1984). Karl Lamprecht: Kulturgeschichtsschreibung zwischen
Wissenschaft und Politik. Gttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht.
Smith, W. D. (1991). Politics and the sciences of culture in Germany 18401920 (pp.
115128). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Steinen, K. von den (1925). Die Marquesaner und ihre Kunst: Studien ber die
Entwicklung primitiver Sdseeornamentik nach eigenen Reiseergebnissen und dem
Material der Museen. Berlin: Reimer.
Stocking, G. W. (1968). Race, culture, and evolution: Essays in the history of
anthropology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Stocking, G. W. (Ed.). (1991). Colonial situations: Essays on the contextualization of
ethnographic knowledge. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press.
Storch, A. (1922a). Das archaisch-primitive Erleben und Denken der Schizophrenen:
Entwicklungspsychologisch-klinische Untersuchungen zum Schizophrenieproblem.
Berlin: Springer.
Storch, A. (1922b). ber das archaische Denken in der Schizophrenie. Zeitschrift fr
die gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie, 78, 501511.
Storch, A. (1927). Die Wandlungen der wissenschaftlichen Denkformen und neue
Psychiatrie. Zeitschrift fr die gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie, 107, 684698.
443
Teich, M., & Porter, R. (Eds.). (1990). Fin de sicle and its legacy. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Thurnwald, R. (1912). Probleme der ethno-psychologischen Forschung. In
Vorschlge zur psychologischen Untersuchung primitiver Menschen (pp. 127).
Beihefte zur Zeitschrift fr Angewandte Psychologie und Psychologische
Sammelforschung, 5. Leipzig: J. A. Barth.
Thurnwald, R. (1913). Ethno-psychologische Studien an Sdseevlkern auf dem
Bismarck-Archipel und den Salomo-Inseln. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift fr
Angewandte Psychologie und Psychologische Sammelforschung, 6. Leipzig: J.
A. Barth.
Thurnwald, R. (1922). Psychologie des primitiven Menschen. Mnchen: E. Reinhardt.
Thurnwald, R. (1925). Mitbericht. In A. Vierkandt (Ed.), Prinzipienfragen der
ethnologischen Kunstforchung (pp. 349355). Zeitschrift fr Aesthetik und
Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, 19. Berlin: H. Stubenrauch-Verlag.
Thurnwald, R. (1927). Primitives Denken. In M. Ebert (Ed.), Reallexikon der
Vorgeschichte (Vol. 10, pp. 294317). Berlin: de Gruyter.
Verworn, M. (1917). Zur Psychologie der primitiven Kunst (2nd ed.). Jena: G. Fischer.
Vierkandt, A. (1914). Der gegenwrtige Stand der Vlkerpsychologie. In Neue
Jahrbcher fr das Klassische Altertum. Geschichte, deutsche Literatur und fr
Pdagogik (pp. 625641). Leipzig: Teubner.
Vierkandt, A. (1925). Prinzipienfragen der ethnologischen Kunstforschung. In idem,
Prinzipienfragen der ethnologischen Kunstforchung (pp. 338349). Zeitschrift fr
sthetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft, 19. Berlin: H. Stubenrauch-Verlag.
Vom Bruch, R., Graf, F. W., & Hbinger, G. (1989a). Einleitung: Kulturbegriff,
Kulturkritik und Kulturwissenschaften um 1900. In R. vom Bruch, G. Hbinger,
& F. W. Graf (Eds.), Kultur und Kulturwissenschaften um 1900: Krise der Moderne
und Glaube an die Wissenschaft (pp. 924). Stuttgart: F. Steiner Verlag
Wiesbaden.
Vom Bruch, R., Graf, W., & Hbinger, G. (Eds.). (1989b). Kultur und
Kulturwissenschaften um 1900: Krise der Moderne und Glaube an die
Wissenschaft. Stuttgart: Steiner.
Vom Bruch, R., Graf, F. W., & Hbinger, G. (Eds.). (1997). Kultur und
Kulturwissenschaften, Vol. 2. Die Spannung zwischen Idealismus und Positivismus.
Stuttgart: Steiner.
Worringer, W. (1921a). Abstraktion und Einfhlung: Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie
(11th ed.). Mnchen: Piper. (First published 1908)
Worringer, W. (1921b). Von Transzendenz und Immanenz in der Kunst. In W.
Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfhlung. Ein Beitrag zur Stilpsychologie (11th ed.)
(pp. 159179). Mnchen: Piper. (First published 1908)
Wundt, W. (1911). Probleme der Vlkerpsychologie. Leipzig: E. Wiegandt.
Wundt, W. (1919). Vlkerpsychologie: Eine Untersuchung der Entwicklungsgesetze von
Sprache, Mythus und Sitte, Vol. 3. Die Kunst (3rd ed.). Leipzig: A. Krner.
Wundt, W. (1997). Vlkerpsychologie: Eine Untersuchung der Entwicklungsgesetze
von Sprache, Mythus und Sitte, Vol. 1. Die Sprache, Einleitung. In G. Eckardt
(Ed.), Vlkerpsychologie: Versuch einer Neuentdeckung. Texte von Lazarus,
Steinthal und Wundt (pp. 239270). Weinheim: Beltz. (First published 1900)
Zimmerman, A. (2001). Anthropology and antihumanism in imperial Germany.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.