Abstract
Drawn with Georg Grosz’s fluid strokes, the wild-eyed man grimaces on his inky run across the cover of Frederic Schwartz’s new book The Culture of the Case. It is unclear whether the man is in pursuit or being pursued. In a quirky twist, the beginning of his flight is shown in the endpapers, making him appear as if he has journeyed backwards through the book and emerged on the cover, losing his hat in the slipstream of one’s turning of the pages. It is a fitting way to present a book which shows how the lines between sane and insane, or legal and illegal, were precarious and hurriedly drawn in Germany’s Weimar Republic (1919–1933). Schwartz’s book makes it increasingly clear that once in contact with the law or with the medical profession, it was not necessarily given that one would come out unscathed on the other side.
The Culture of the Case reads as law and humanities scholarship of the best kind—cross-disciplinary, wide-ranging, associative, and well-researched in archives and scholarship in both German and English. Focusing on the case as both a productive form and a method of analysis, Schwartz shows how the case was a prominent “cultural form” (21)—across and producing different discourses of medicine, law and media—at a time when the public “thought in terms of ‘cases’, whether legal, medical or scandalous” (22). Schwartz’s central claim is that cases meant “a certain kind of social work could be done when the institutions that otherwise sought to achieve knowledge, consensus or justice – the courts, the sciences, the press – were not up to the job” (23). In emphasising the ability of the case to emerge in different genres, practices and for different purposes, Schwartz brings to life the fluid, vivid, cross-disciplinary interactions and negotiations between the burgeoning print media, artists and writers, their audiences, and the various restrictions enforced by the discourses of law and medicine at the time. His task is to follow the development of a ‘public sphere’ that is articulated simultaneously as public sites for the production of knowledge, ways to make sense of experience in different public realms, and “public conditions of many kinds of practices” (72).
With five main chapters loosely arranged around five case studies, Schwartz follows cultural avant-gardes, including Adolf Loos, Oscar Panizza, George Grosz, Rudolf Schlichter and Bertolt Brecht, plotting them within their milieu and tracing their interaction with, production of, or response to forms of the case. The first chapter takes us to Vienna, following two criminal trials and other ‘cases’ connected to the architect Adolf Loos and his supporter, the writer Karl Kraus. Involved as a character witness in the controversial 1905 trial of his patron, Theodor Beer, who was convicted of homosexual acts with two boys, Loos himself was convicted in 1928 of solicitation and indecency regarding three girls. Both trials were scandals in the media and involved murky interactions between the public interest, the privacy of desire, the boundary between art and pornography and the testimony of medical experts. In his analysis, Schwartz is concerned with how these (and other) cases illuminate the “spaces of public discussion” (70). His focus is on the ways matters could become public—shaped by the shifting relations between the press, the state, the courts and the general politics of the time—and what it meant to address a public. He observes that both Loos and Kraus use the form of the case in order “to create or call forth a public, episodically, punctually, by the means available at specific points in time” (71).
Chapter two follows two cases, that of Oskar Panizza, a writer who was put in an asylum, as well as the case of Otto Gross, a doctor who was declared mad and put in an asylum by his father. Again, Schwartz notes the “historical possibilities of publicity” (110), emphasizing how Gross in particular could be better understood as a “character” at the center of certain subcultures (116). Developing the point further, Schwartz intricately tracks how the artist Georg Grosz took up the slippages between his name and the name of the patient (when he made the illustrations for a book about the Gross case) before moving to a discussion of Grosz’s Lustmord (sexual murder) paintings.
In chapter three, Schwartz notes his discomfort with the Lustmord paintings as he discusses the images made by Grosz and Otto Dix, and the milieu with which they are associated. The Lustmord paintings have been the subject of feminist re-readings and it is not clear to this reader whether Schwartz’s acknowledgement of their “disturbing signs of violence and the forms of visual pleasure they evoked” (171) is enough to justify re-circulating them or their corresponding crime scene photographs. In his reading of the Lustmord paintings, Schwartz shows the way artists and their audiences exploited the interstices of changing laws, carving out space to produce and to view new works of art. Noting “[w]hether we like it or not, there was something banal about the topic of murder at the time” (229), Schwartz convincingly uses the production and circulation of these images as a way to discern the contours of the terrain of representability which was created by the specific legal codes in place during the period. Legal regimes often have a repressive function but Schwartz demonstrates how legal conditions are also generative—enabling new approaches to representation, and ultimately, new approaches to creating the public sphere.
The confronting images continue in chapter four, which sets up the feedback loops of sexual science “cases” and fetishists, following how fetishists became cases themselves. Focusing on Rudolf Schlichter, the chapter ultimately highlights “how the subjectivity of the ‘deviant’ was mediated through the sexological literature of the time” (268). The book concludes with Bertolt Brecht and his fascination with court cases, tracking his unsuccessful court action in 1930 against the Nero Film company. Brecht claimed the legal action was a “sociological experiment” and “a battle between artistic freedom and capital in the public forum of the court of law” (298). Whilst he was unsuccessful in court, Schwartz shows how Brecht’s practice of montage and use of the media was significant in creating a cultural form of the case.
These short summaries do not capture the intricate webs of association in which Schwartz situates his chosen studies of the case. Each chapter teems with colour images, with references to other artists, writers and contemporaries, to media and court reporting, as well as to the relevant academic scholarship. It is a testament to Schwartz’s skill that this additional material does not feel extraneous but works to create a sense of the experience of each case in its own time and place, emphasizing the whole point of the book. However, we are shown only a very masculine milieu. There are only male figures as case studies, and this choice is not remarked upon. Given the role of the “New Woman” as a visual and media phenomenon at the time, it would have been fascinating for Schwartz to bring his sharp eye to analyzing the gendered dimension of the public sphere and to explore how the histories of women as “cases” also coalesced (or were challenged) during this period.
But this is only a minor point of critique about a major and exceptional book. The Culture of the Case manages to pull off the rare feat of matching the creativity of its subjects and topic with its own creativity of thought and high-level scholarly analysis. Hats off—just like the bald man on the cover.