The Pulse of Modernism by Brain Robert Michael;

Author:Brain, Robert Michael;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Washington Press

MUNCH AND STRINDBERG IN BERLIN

When Edvard Munch and August Strindberg befriended each other in Berlin in 1892, protoplasmania and its elements—Ernst Haeckel’s monist biology, French psychiatry and psychophysiology, and physiological aesthetic theories of art—formed a consecrating element of their friendship.18 Yet, as Shelly Wood Cordulak has shown, the scientific interests of both men were deep and much more long-standing.19 After an unsuccessful stint as a medical student at the University of Uppsala, Strindberg had made his dramaturgical reputation as a leading example of the “vivisectional” method pioneered by Émile Zola, itself based on the physiology of Claude Bernard.20 Munch, the son and brother of doctors, had grown up surrounded by medicine and science and read widely in monism, medicine, and psychology all his life. Perhaps most importantly, he had been captivated by the physiological theories of art current among the French avant-garde during his Paris sojourn of 1889.

In Berlin, a critical personal influence for both Munch and Strindberg entered upon this well-prepared ground: Stanislaw Przybyszewski, a Polish architect turned medical student and physiologist, an anarchisante spirit who aspired to a literary career and lifestyle in the bohemian French mode of Baudelaire and his acolytes. Przybyszewski, known to his friends as the “gory physiologist” and “the ingenious Pole,” had studied with Haeckel, Carl Vogt, and Jacob Moleschott and between 1890 and 1893 specialized in physiology and neurology, until his expulsion from the University of Berlin for “socialist activities.”21 One of Przybyszewski’s crucial intellectual roles in the artists’ circle revolved around his explanations of physiological doctrines of art and aesthetics, especially those emanating from France. Julius Meier-Graefe, the art critic and historian, later recalled strolling one night with Przybyszewski, who “as usual . . . expounded on physiology.”22 Meier-Graefe’s ambivalence about Przybyszewski’s physiological obsessions echoed the broader critical reception to his 1892 book, Zur Psychologie des Individuums, which ranged from those who derided it as a mere “sauce of medical terms” to others who lauded its “transmission of concepts and apparatus of exact scientific research to the field of intuitive psychology” and “energetic endeavor to formulate new concepts.”23

Munch, Strindberg, and Przybyszewski famously gathered in Berlin at an Armenian tavern dubbed Zum Schwarzen Ferkel (the Black Pig) by Strindberg. The scene at the Ferkel involved a variety of other artists, intellectuals, and doctors and by all accounts featured a rather intense bohemianism, with lots of drinking, camaraderie, sexual intrigue, and heady conversation. Under Przybyszewski’s guidance the circle read widely in the biological and psychiatric literature: Haeckel’s writings on biology and monist philosophy, Helmholtz’s Sensations of Tone, and Moleschott’s Der Kreislauf des Lebens, Henry Maudsley’s Physiology of Mind and Pathology of Mind, Théodule Ribot’s Les Maladies de la volonté and Les Maladies de la personnalité, Hippolyte Bernheim’s De la suggestion, works by Jean-Martin Charcot and his associates, and much more besides.24

They also read works by authors spurred by these kinds of biomedical works to literary, artistic, and social reflection, most notably Max Nordau and Friedrich Nietzsche. Both Nordau and Nietzsche embraced the 1880s wave

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