The Architecture of the Biedermeier Soul 43

Illenau physicians frequently referred to mental illnesses as '.'illnesses ofthe Gemüth"

and t~easylum literature, both medical and popular, is swamped with references to Gemüth. Although they did not believe that all forms of mental illness were exclusively illnesses of Gemüths, they did believe all forms ofmental illness to entail illnesses of Gemüth. Indeed, in their view, all fonns of illness impaired the functioning of Gemüth to some degree, so that psychiatrie expertise could be applied to general medicine. For this reason, Roller arranged for an internship program for medical graduates which enabled doctors training to become general practitioners in Baden to study the operations of Gemüth at Illenau. ¹¹

defines itself by "grappling with exterior forces instead of being gathered up in an interior fonn, operating by relays instead of fonning an image"; it is comparable to "an event-thought. ..instead of a subject-thought, a problem-thought instead of an essence-thought" (p. 47). Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Nomadology: The War Machine. Translated by Brian Massumi. NY: Semiotext, 1986, p. 46-47.

11 According to the American psychiatrist Pliny Earle, who visited the asylum in the 1840s, most medical graduates cf Baden underwent this training. Roller had a special legislation passed in Baden to "take six physicians, immediately after they have completed their other medical studies, into the Illenau asylum as internes, and, after they

I

In 1874, Christian Friedrich Wilhelm Roller, Roller' s oldest son, wrote an entire book entitled On Gemüth based on his training and experience as a junior psychiatrist at IIIenau where he worked until becoming director ofthe Kaiserswerth asylum. (In order to distinguish father from son, I will refer to Rol1er's son as Christian Roller throughout this study.) Even though Christian Roller's book was intended for a specialist audience, it was written in the fonn of a long letter to his father _a~dbegan as only a scientific book itself composed under the influence of Gemüth could begin:

Dear Father! I herewith hand you pages whieh issue from the Gemüth and deal with Gemüth ....Above all else 1 want what I say in the following pages about Gemüth to meet with your approval. After aB, your Gemüth has reeently had to derhonstrate its extraordinary strength and loyalty as your grey head was, onee again, stooped down by great diffieulties. 12

From these opening lines, and from the fact that Roller dedicated his next book Zeitfragen to his son, we can safely conclude that Christian RoIler's discussion of Gemüth mirrored RoIler's own views on the subject.

Christian Roller defined Gemüth as "the deep, dark, not always intelligible core of human nature." He then proceeded to call it the "organ ofreceptivity" (Receptions­

organ) which has no specific location13 and perceives things in their "totality:"

The Gemüth is the yes-saying, the affinnative principle of the soul. 1t does not question, divide, isolate, separate, deny; rather, it simply absorbs what it is given. It reeeives things in their totality.

Division, exelusion is not its thing. ¹⁴

On Christian Roller's construal it was, as Kant and Kleist argued, an organ receptive to mental and physical as wel~ as individual and collective stimulation. In addition,

however, Christian Roller identified a third type of influence on the Gemüth, orte which

have remained a certain time, exchange them for six more, until all the medical graduates in Baden shall have had this opportunity." Memoires 01Pliny Earle, 1898, p. 184.

12Christian Roller, Vom Gemüth. Psychologische Skizzen. Karlsruhe: Müller'sche Hofbuchhandlung, 1874, p. v-vi.

13Ibid., p. 7.

14Ibid., p. 3.

transcended the earthly order of experience) namely God. All three areas of influence are densely packed into the following passage where the mental/physical duality is alluded to by means of "art and nature...the senses and nerves," the individual/collective duality by

"other Gemüths" and the religious element by "divine rays of light":

1t is so tolerant towards impressions that it can even bring together heterogeneous elements. They enter from the most diverse directions, from nature and art, from othet Gemüths, from above in the fonn of divine rays of light, and from below through the senses and nerves; a11 of these impressions demand to be accommodated. Yes, even impressions which cause it anguish cannot be refused by the Gemüth. ¹⁵

Chistian Roller did" not draw a qualitative distinction between the three types of

impressions absorbed by Gemüth. From the perspective of Gemüth, aesthetic, social, and religious impressions are all of a kind; they are "heterogeneous elements" which the Gemüth forms into a single totality cf experience.

To conjure an image ofthe healthy Gemüth and describe the configuration ofthe soul in its entirety, Christian Roller employed an elaborate, and by his own admission not entirely apt, visual metaphor of a building on a sea share:

Below the dark ocean of Gemüth surges and swells, rarely placid, often agitated, even stormy, wild, throwing waves that reach far beyond the shore, often surging up frorn the deepest depths, from an unknown dark bonorn. On the coast stands a light, strong, fonnidable building which has been erected by intellectual activity, it is mirrored in the sea which reaches all the way to its foundations and which could easily gush forth and even destroy the building. Above clouds are moving through the sky, grey and heavy or light and pink. These have been collected by the imagination which sometimes draws thern in clear beautiful forms but at other times wild and jagged. These too shine forth from the depths of the sea. It is best when one thing above all else shines forth from the dark botton1: the eye of God. ¹⁶

This image captures the state of Gemüth deemed by Illenau physicians to be the healthy state: placid, calm and balanced. The ocean can serve as a surface for reflecting its immanent and transcendent environment only when it is still. Any agitation ofthe Gemüth will immediately distort the quality ofthe reflection and, in extreme cases, can

15Ibid., p. 3.

16Roller, Gemüth, p. 4-5.

46

undennine the foundations of the building, i.e. personality. The task of an" Illenau psychiatrist was to still the ocean of Gemüth so that it could offer a clear surface for reflecting the immediate environment in its aesthetic, spiritual and religious nuances. ¹⁷ And, of course, that environment must be structured in such a way as to produce a reflection conducive to sanity.

The problem with this metaphor is that it portrayed the Gemüth as an entity that was separate from personality when, in fact, Christian Roller believed the Gemüth to penneate every dimension ofpersonality. The picture ofthe building on a share

ultimately fails because the Gemüth was not merely a passive recipient of impressions; it was also an active creator of those impressions. In order to capture this creative

dimension of Gemüth, Christian Roller employed a different image, namely that ef the

"w~rkshop"of experience (Werkstätte der Gefühle) which, he says, functions as fellows:

Although the Gemüth is the most passive of all soul-faculties, although it is that which receives ...it is also a factor which presses its stamp upon the whole temperament of a person and whose composition determines action in the most fundamental sense. 18 .

The "workshop" image suggested that even at the deepest levels of perception, at the point ofpure receptivity to external and internal impressions, the soul still had agency, because the very absorption of experience was, in some sense, an active process.

Christian Roller said, "Gemüth is like light" it illuminates the objects in the world while imparting to their appearances a particular perspective.¹⁹ This observation was not peculiar to the sense of sight, it applied to aB senses, individually and in their entirety.

17The imagery of the ocean was carried forth in the conception of illness. The Weekly reported that mentall illnesses have a wave-like progression, their ebb and flow only gradually being contained within the parameters of asylum life. Sometimes stonns errupt and it seems as if the apparent progress were a11 undone hut when the clear weather returns it is apparent that the Gemüth has found astate of greater equilibrium. In: "Ein Wort über Genesung unserer Kranken." IW, Nr. 37, 1872.

18Ibid., p. 8. A possible translation of Gemüth might be 'phenomenon,' with the proviso that a phenomenon, in this sense, is not an event which occurs in the world but an event which occurs in the "workshop" of the soul.

19Roller, Gemüth, p. 20.

The light metaphor was commonly used in contemporary literature on Gemüth to capture the active dimension ofperception. Novalis, for example, developed it at length in his unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen, where he elaborated the metaphor into a larger claim about the operation of sense perception in general, saying that our senses both "proliferate new worlds" and "absorb the existing world."2o

The ocean and the workshop image are metaphors for portraying different aspects of Gemüth. Both of these aspects together distinguished the operations of Gemüth from reason (Vernunft); reason "analyzes and divides," the Gemüth "absorbs and unifies."

Moreover, the Gemüth "passes judgen1ent on all things that affect the inner life" but "it maintains the right to judge every specific situation on its own merits." According to Christian Roller, it was in the nature of Gemüth to respond subjectively to new

impressions, not "objectively." Nevertheless, he believed the Gemüth could be a positive aid to reason. When it is calm and placid, it enables the intellect to apprehend things in their totality which the intellect can never do on its own. But when the Gemüth is agitated, it obstructs thought and reflection and, indeed, "it is probably best not to try thinking in such circumstances."21

Unlike the relationship between Gemüth and reason, which was one of polite distance with intennittent collisions and co-operation, the relationship between the Gemüth and the "1" (Ich) was intimate and fraught. Christian Roller described the

Gemüth. as the mother of the land the 1itself as "an extremely spoilt sone^"22 After giving birth to the I, the Gemüth finds that the I wants to dominate. All that is directed towards

2ÜNovalis, Ofterdingen, p. 205. Another compelling elaboration this idea can be found in Middlemarch where Eliott compares subjectivity to the circular pattern of reflection cast by a candle on a polished meta} surface. George Eliott, Middlemarch. Penguin Books, p. 264.

21Ibid., p. 49.

22Ibid., p. 10.

48

the outside and others is associated with the movements of the Gemüth, whereas all that is directed towards the inside and towards the self is associated with the I.

We feel, that there is an original contradiction between the direction of our Gemüth and our I ...the operations of the I are centripetal while those of the Gemüth are centrifuga1.²³

Although the mother feels responsible for her son and tries to supervise his actions, she tends to be too trusting of the I who is terribly cunning and capable of disguising self­

interest as altruism:

It is completely normal for the I to dominate. More often than one would like to admit, the I is given complete control. And how the I has learned to establish itself in that position! It claims to have no interest in ruling, no, no, it mere]y wants to serve a higher purpose, it only wants to fulfil its job, it only \vants to further the well-being of others in the family, community, state, it defends the interests of science - and the despondent Gemüth believes all of that and fails to notice that it has merely come to serve as a mirror for the land that it lies prostrate in worship before the same...the I has become a great Dalai Lama to whom all is sacrificed.²⁴

This passage pIaces the contrast between Gemüth and I in a religious context by pitching the heathen God of the "great Dalai Lama" against the Christian God to whose influence the Gemüth was susceptible. Allowing oneself to be dominated by the I was a secularized fonn ofidolatry.

2.2 Individual Being As Collective Being

Of the three kinds of receptivity which characterized Gemüth, i.e. aesthetic, social and religious, the social had the peculiarity ofbeing both individual and collective. Individual Gemüths could merge with each other thereby fonning a collective Gemüth. Neither instantiation of Gemüth could be explained as a simple function ofthe other. At any given point the collective Gemüth was constituted by and itself constrained the individual Gemüths it comprised. To further complicate matters, the scope ofthe collective Gemüth

23Ibid., p. 26-27.

24Ibid., p. 80.

comprised groups of almost any size. The merging of Gemüths was not exclusive; each individual Gemüth was related to a variety of collective· Gemüths at the same time. By experiencing things in the same way, Gemüths came to'be unified in experience.

Solidarity of sensibility characterized the collective Gemüth. In this respect, it was more like process than a thing and :the image of musical tuning is more apt than that of a soul­

organ.

Members of the Illenau community took this attunement of Gemüths to occur in much the same fashion as described in Kleist's conversation with his sister. The

relationship between Hergt and Roller, for example, was portrayed by a fellow member of the asylum community as an "affinity of spirit" caused by "their ability to understand each other without many words, know each others needs without asking and provide each ot4er support without noticing."25 Due to the interactive nature of Gemüths, Hergt

believed that it was important to always presume the best about other people because that would tend to exercise an improving influence:

We do not know why other people do what they do, we do not know how they feel in their hearts, we do not even know what they mean by what they say and do. Perhaps there is more compatibility benveen us than we suspect. Surely by far the greatest source of conflict between people arises from misunderstandings; we should try to communicate before we fight. Our lack of knowledge about the hearts of others pennits and demands that we form a good opinion about them and assume people to be good. When the good opinion is made impossible by unambiguous facts, only then can it be dropped. But this illusion is better than the opposite and even when our good opinion has been disappointed we will welcome every ray of light. Having a good oinion of people and conducting ourselves accordingly has the advantage of moving people to correspond to the impression in question. When _~netakes people to be better they are better.²⁶

Mental health entailed the cultivation of such affinities at all levels ofthe asylum population and beyond. Christian Roller said that affinities occurred when a Gemüth

"belangs to a large community that is similarly tuned and that perceives in the same way." The "immediate certainty of sharing a common feeling with many others gives the

25Schüle, Jubelfest.

26IW Nr. 32, 1876.

50

Gemüth enonnous sustenance and bolstering support."27 This commonality of feeling can be generated in communities of any size, the ward of an asylum, an asylum population, a single state or even the Gennan nation:

Correspondence in the structure of feelings is, more than anything else, what gives a community its strength. Intellectual insight is objective. All communities can obtain it. But the life of the Gemüth is subjective. The operations of the Gemüth of a population cannot be detennined or anticipated in advance. The tone that is sounded when the strings of Gemüth are struck differ from one Volk to another. Religion, poetry, music receive profoundly different expressions in each population...The Gemüth can only add its ring to a full chord when it is in hannony with other Gemüths tuned to the same key.28

The Gemüth detennines the individuality and specificity of a population, what we would call its culture. Yet the strength of the collective Gemüth is itself dependent upan the

"degree of affirmation it receives from all the individual Gemüths which belong to it."29 Christian Roller believed Gennans to be especially prüne to the influence of Gemüth. His evidence for this claim was that the German Volk behaved in a manner comparable to the behaviour of a person in the grips of Gemüth; hence the population was governed by a collective Gemüth. The political history ofthe Gennan territories is associated with the composition of its collective Gemüth:

Everything I have said above about the penetration of impressions into the Gemüth, about the resonance of the same within it, abaut the lack of objective judgement, about the process of thinking as compared with the perception of Gemüth ...all that applies to the Gennan Volk which also happens to be the only Volk which has a word for 'Gemüth.' This does not mean that we have Gemüth and other people don't, hut it does mean that the Gemüth dominates us more than other people, it is especially malleable in us, especially easily influenced...In the past centuries, the German Volk has experienced all the advantages and - God only knows! - all the disadvantages associated with a Gemüth thus configured.³⁰

Ta a modern reader, this nationalist language invoking a Gennan Volk is strongly associated with essentializing theories ofracial purity and cultural supremacy. Some of

27Ibid., p. 18 28Ibid., p. 18-19.

29 Ibid., p. 32.

30 Ibid., p. 56-57.

Christian Roller's assertions confinned such associations. He claimed, for example, that the image of "the blond hero who destroyed the Roman Empire" inevitably causes every Gennan Gemüth to bound with inner joy."31

The fundamental orientation ofthe doctrine of Gemüth was, however, orthogonal to such essentializing theories since it construed psychological reality as relational, relative and contingent. The collective Gemüth was not monolithic, not even in Gennany.

Roller senior claimed, for example, that the influence of Gemüth was stronger in southem Gennany than northern Germany:

Without a doubt, the northern German Christians have more intelligence, elegance, energy, cultivation; [but] the southem Germans have more Gemüth .. .c~mbined with something very natural and familiar in the tone and manner they adopt towards their people, especially the rural ones; they have a strong desire to uplift and merge with one another.32

At the inner most core of Gemüth there are no essences, no core struetures. Any partieular inner state was the outeome of aseries of physical, social and religious operations which were entirely Ioeal and particular to a given situation. People could have a different degree of susceptibility to the influences of Gemüth, which is why southern Germans were more prene to its mevements than northem Germans, but insofar as they were govemed by Gemüth they were entirely impressionable. To fully hannonize with its environment, eaeh Gemüth had to surround itself with other Gemüths that feIt as it feIt, perceived as it perceived, blended as it blended:

The Gemüth is the organ which is entirely constituted by the circumstances in which we find ourselves and which it unreflexively embraces.. .In the following, we must emphasize the relationship of Gemüth to Gemüth. In all circumstances that can be described as echt gemüthlich an immediate correspondence occurs. And this correspondence is also feIt. It cannat be understood by reason, but it can be feIt directly in the Gemüth ...Surely, the most important role is played by the immediate comprehension of how the other person's Gemüth is configured. This seems to get telegraphed instantly from Gemüth to Gemüth and detennines whether they ring in harmony or disharmony. Profound intellectual differences are compatible with a deeper syrnpathy as long as the structure of experience is in correspondence; that is to say, the manner in which

31 Ibid., p. 21.

32Letter from Kayser to Wiehern, May 6, 1850. Lötseh, unpublished manuscript, p. 196.

Im Dokument A fool's paradise (Seite 54-74)