The German Genius

psychology. In 1897 Ehrenfels accepted a post as professor of philosophy at Prague. Here, starting with Ernst Mach’s observation that the size and color of a circle can be varied “without detracting from its circularity,” Ehrenfels modified Brentano’s ideas, arguing that the mind somehow “intends Gestalt qualities”—that is to say, there are certain “wholes” in nature that the mind and the nervous system are “ pre pared,” pre disposed, to experience. Gestalt theory became very influential in German psychology for a time, and although in itself it led nowhere, it did lay the groundwork for the theory of “imprinting,” a readiness in the neonate to perceive certain forms at a crucial stage in development.
    T HE P ATHOLOGIES OF S CIENCE
     
    Also prevalent in Vienna at the time were a number of avowedly rational but in reality frankly scientistic ideas, and they too read oddly now. Chief among these were the theories of Otto Weininger (1880–1903).
    The son of an anti-Semitic but Jewish goldsmith, Weininger developed into an “overbearing coffee house dandy.” He had a tendency to be withdrawn and taught himself more than eight languages before he left the university and published his undergraduate thesis. 13 Renamed Geschlecht und Charakter ( Sex and Character ) by his editor, the thesis was released in 1903 and became a huge hit. The book was rabidly anti-Semitic and extravagantly misogynist, Weininger putting forward the view that all human behavior can be explained in terms of male and female “protoplasm,” which contributes to each person. A whole lexicon of neologisms was invented by Weininger to explain his ideas: idioplasm, for example, was his name for sexually undifferentiated tissue; male tissue was arrhenoplasm; and female tissue was thelyplasm. According to him, all the main achievements in history arose because of the masculine principle—all art, literature, and systems of law, for example. The feminine principle, on the other hand, accounted for the negative elements, and all these negative elements converge, Weininger says, in the Jewish race. Commercial success and fame did not settle Weininger’s restless spirit. Later that year he rented a room in the house in Vienna where Beethoven died and shot himself. (“In a city that considered suicide an art, Weininger’s was a masterpiece.”) 14 He was twenty-three.
    A rather better scientist, no less interested in sex, and the emergence of “sexual science,” was the Catholic psychiatrist, Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902). His fame stemmed from a work he published in Latin in 1886, titled (in German) Psychopathia Sexualis: eine klinischeforensische Studie , quickly translated into seven languages. Most of the “clinical-forensic” case histories were drawn from courtroom records and attempted to link sexual psychopathology either to married life, to themes in art, or to the structure of organized religion. The most infamous “deviation,” on which the notoriety of his study rests, was his coining of the term “masochism.” The word was derived from the novels and novellas of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the son of a police director in Graz. In the most explicit of his stories, Venus im Pelz , Sacher-Masoch describes his own affair with a Baroness Fanny Pistor, during the course of which he “signed a contract to submit for six months to being her slave.” 15
    Psychopathia Sexualis clearly foreshadowed some aspects of psychoanalysis. Krafft-Ebing acknowledged that sex, like religion, could be sublimated in art—both could “enflame the imagination.” 16 For Krafft-Ebing, sex within religion (and therefore within marriage) offered the possibility of “rapture through submission,” and it was this process in perverted form that he regarded as the etiology for the pathology of masochism. 17
    “D ESIGN I S I NFERIOR TO A RT”
     
    The dominant architecture in Vienna was the Ringstrasse. Begun in the mid-nineteenth century, after Emperor Franz Joseph ordered the demolition of the old city ramparts and a huge swath of space was cleared in a ring around the center, a dozen monumental buildings were erected in this ring over the following fifty years. They included the Opera, the Parliament, the Town Hall, parts of the university, and an enormous church. Most were embellished with fancy stone decorations, and it was this ornateness that provoked a reaction, first in Otto Wagner, then in Adolf Loos.
    Otto Wagner