Michaela Clark reviews an exhibition that explores and complicates the social and psychiatric norms of post-war Germany.
Heidelberg, Museum Sammlung Prinzhorn, 18.05.2025 – 28.09.2025
Curated by Dr. Thomas Röske and Dr. Ingrid von Beyme, the exhibition Normal#Verrückt: Zeitgeschichte einer erodierenden Differenz presents the results of a DFG-funded research project (2021–2024) on the shifting boundary between ‘normal’ and ‘crazy’ in psychiatry and society in post-war Germany. Through a careful selection and arrangement of artefacts, original documents, artworks, and audiovisual material, the exhibition offers insight into how the ‘normal/crazy’ binary has been constructed, challenged, and redefined over the course of the second half of the twentieth century.
Entering the Exhibition
The exhibition’s critical attention to spatial arrangement is impressive. Upon entering the first exhibition space, visitors immediately become active participants: the title “Normal#Verrückt” is projected on the floor as a light installation, forcing those who enter to distort the words with their bodies. In doing so, the gallery and audience work together to visually enact the core thesis of the exhibition, that the psychiatric and societal border between sanity and madness is fundamentally unstable and permeable.
Right: Installation view on ground floor showing the ‘Wutkissen’ as well as a framed drawing and notebook by ‘outsider’ artist Rudolf Liemberger.
Moving to the heart of the exhibition, the viewer is confronted with objects, films, documents, and artworks that call upon audience members to look, listen, read, and make connections between them. Each item is set within a striking, teal-painted enclave, each serving as an entry point into the years of archival research, contextual analysis, and historical labour of the team of researchers involved in the project. To access this rich content, visitors are required to engage intensely with the material on display. One is not simply observing moments in the history of psychiatry but is invited to actively interrogate the medico-social categories of ‘normal’ and ‘crazy’.
Making connections between the items on display is no mean feat: the assortment of objects and media seem, at first, to have no clear relationship. Indeed, despite the exhibition’s tight remit, what each of the objects mean, and how they fit together, remains somewhat opaque, with little context provided. One is placed in a state of curiosity, uncertainty, prompting a desire for discovery and understanding.
Answers to what links the objects together can be found on the upper deck of the exhibition room. Here, viewers are able to see both the physical objects below and panels detailing how they fit within the dichotomy of ‘normal’ / ‘crazy’. Additional artefacts, publications, and archival records are presented in more display cases – adding contextual detail to each object on the ground floor.
On Criminality and Addiction
One key theme that emerges from the exhibition is the eroding association between criminal and addictive behaviour in society. An item that addresses this is the short film Ohne Glas und Maß (1960) played on a loop. It serves to demonstrate a shift in public health attitudes in the 1960s, when addiction was no longer framed as an individual moral weakness but as a social disease. The video’s portrayal of otherwise ‘normal’ young people (enlisted soldiers and teenage school-goers) falling victim to substance abuse highlights the changing portrayal of addiction as an illness that could be prevented, treated, and even cured.
A key moment in this theme is further channelled through a 1990s “Spritzautomat” – a syringe dispenser retrofitted from a cigarette vending machine. In the exhibition, this item highlights how IV-drug users were reframed from social delinquents or criminals to individuals in need of harm reduction measures. As such, the vending machine captures a critical moment when the prior conflation of the ‘addict’ with the ‘crazy’ and the ‘criminal’ was fundamentally challenged within society.
Accompanying the syringe dispenser is a vintage fur coat that brings the problematic conflation of madness and criminality to the fore. The coat’s role in the exhibition is to tell the story of a man incarcerated for the theft of a similar object in 1970. Because the thief, known under the pseudonym ‘Paul L Stein’, was identified as ‘crazy’, his 9-month criminal sentence was supplanted by Germany’s ‘Maßregelvolzug’ – a forensic sentencing that committed the mentally ill to compulsory hospitalisation for an indefinite period of time. In the case of Stein, this was to be 15 years. The lone coat exemplifies not only a sense of the banality of Stein’s crime, but also asks the audience to recognise the unjust punishment of those identified by the state as mentally ill.
Talking and Travelling
Other object-narratives reveal moments in which the analytical framing and treatment of those deemed ‘crazy’ was under dispute. One unexpected object is the “talking stick,” a ceremonial tool used at Club Antonin Artaud – a Brussels-based group therapy collective formed in 1962. The talking stick, which is a tourist replica of a Tabwa (the people who live in what is today the Democratic Republic of Congo) artefact, stands out from the otherwise Eurocentric items in the exhibition. It was bought and harnessed by a Club psychiatrist to facilitate participant-centred dialogue and thus give a voice to the patients. Within the exhibition, the talking stick illustrates a transient utopian phase in psychiatric care in Europe, where the hierarchies between medical practitioner and patient, and thus the ‘normal’ and the ‘crazy’, were suspended in favour of communal exchange.
Transnational and transcultural debates surface in the typed correspondence between two psychiatrists, Paul Parin (1916-2009) and Hubertus Tellenbach (1914-1994). Read together, their letters highlight a fissure in the field of ethno-psychiatry during the early 1970s, at the advent of global decolonization. The question being debated: is the human psyche dependent on cultural context (as Parin argues) or is there a universal psychology at work (as Tellenbach puts forth). Parin based his argument on fieldwork conducted in West Africa, suggesting that it was the Eurocentric lens of psychiatry that continued to frame non-western peoples as deviant from some universal norm. Adversarial in thought, yet friendly in tone, this written exchange reveals the political resonance that the reevaluation of ‘normal’ and ‘crazy’ had at the time.
Creative or ‘Crazy’?
As part of its engagement with the ‘normal/crazy’ binary, the exhibition touches on the long-contested relationship between psychiatric pathology and artistic creativity. A framed drawing by Rudolf Liemberger (1937-1988), a former patient in Austria’s Maria Gugging Psychiatric Clinic, suggests how a diagnostic item may be reframed as art. Once anonymised and conceptualised solely as clinical data, such works were re-evaluated in the 1970s under the lens of “Art Brut” or ‘Outsider Art’. Now celebrated as artist in hist own right, creators like Liemberger straddle the identities of patient and artist, raising questions as to the link between creativity and psychic pathology.
Right: Book cover of Urnica Zürn’s Der Mann im Jasmin (1977).
This fraught relationship between ‘crazy’ and ‘creative’ is embodied by a paperback copy of Der Mann im Jasmin (1977). Written by surrealist artist, poet, and author, Unica Zürn, the posthumous publication of this work saw it framed as the product of her mental illness and her gender. This is exemplified by the book’s subtitle “Eindrücke aus einer Geisteskrankheit” (Impressions from Mental Illness) as well as the two afterwords which highlight her diagnosis of ‘paranoid schizophrenia’ and her suicide. Later editions further saw Zürn’s text marketed as ‘Frauenliteratur’ (women’s literature) through its appearance in the series “Die Frau in der Literatur” (women in literature). Rather than a celebration of her unique voice as an autonomous author, Der Mann im Jasmin is framed as a product of Zürn’s gender and psychiatric diagnosis.
The Personal is Political
The display of a modern ‘Wut Kissen’ (or screaming pillow) could come across as rather whimsical. In the exhibition, however, it serves to shine a light on the shifting gendered parameters of ‘normal/crazy’. The pillow represents similar items used in feminist therapy circles of the 1970s, which sought to encourage women to challenge patriarchal norms by externalising their frustration through physical and vocal expression, such as screaming. The object thus offers viewers an opportunity to reflect on how conceptions of mental illness (resting on the binary of ‘normal’ and ‘crazy’) are embedded in political and social contexts.
Right: A screenshot of video reportage related to the Socialist Patients’ Collective as featured on the Abendschau Baden-Württemberg, 20.11.1979.
The intersection between political resistance and psychiatric identity is evoked further by the presence of a printing press. Used by the Socialist Patients’ Collective (SPK) in Heidelberg, this object served to multiply the group’s self-published “Patienten-Infos” – leaflets that drew on group sessions of speaking, writing, and printing. These leaflets functioned as activist media by offering a critique of capitalism through satire and anti-fascist rhetoric. Not only does the printer point to the SPK’S unique framing of psychological suffering and therapy, it draws attention to the porous boundary between the ‘crazy’ self and a ‘crazy’ society.
Conclusion
The ambition of Normal#Verrückt is sizeable: it not only presents disparate facets of a large, multi-institutional project into a coherent whole, but also converts academic research findings into a visually stimulating and engaging exhibition. Those unfamiliar with the history of psychiatry might struggle to make the conceptual jumps required to piece together the histories of each object. Here, the accompanying exhibition catalogue as well as the public programme serve as excellent support beyond the exhibition space.
Ultimately, Normal#Verrückt succeeds both as an exhibition and as a scholarly intervention. Its combination of historical, medical, political, and artistic material provides an entry into how psychiatric and social norms have been defined, stabilised, shifted, and deconstructed in Germany from the 1950s onwards. For clinicians, this exhibition offers not only a history lesson but also critical reflection on the epistemological and ethical foundations of their own practice. For historians, it provides exciting new case studies to deepen existing knowledge on the history of psychiatry. And for the general public, it offers a means to reflect on personal assumptions or experiences related to concepts of ‘normal’ and ‘crazy’.
About the author
Michaela Clark is a Research Associate at the Department of the History, Philosophy and Ethics of Medicine (Institut für Geschichte, Theorie und Ethik der Medizin) of Heinrich Heine University, Germany.
