My Journey to the Prinzhorn Collection

It was in the fall of 2009 that I spent three months in Berlin waiting for my new U.S. visa. I remember it was an icy-cold November day, and since I had studied, among other subjects, the Holocaust during my years at the Free University of Berlin, I decided to spend more time at the House of the Wannsee Conference, where, on January 20, 1942, 15 high-ranking Nazi Party officials, including Adolf Eichmann, gathered to discuss and coordinate the implementation of what they called the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question.”

So, I hopped on the S7, but by accident, I got off a station earlier and ended up at Grunewald, where I discovered the memorial site Track 17, where many Jews were deported to concentration and extermination camps in the East under the Nazi regime. I can still feel the snow melting on my face and the feeling of Armageddon I had when I first looked at the memorial, then at the iron rail tracks, and waited for the next S7 to come, being the only person on the platform. I couldn’t help but think about the Weiss family in Gerald Green’s Holocaust (1976), which I read in my youth and which was later adapted into the famous TV miniseries, also named Holocaust (1978), leaving a lasting impression on me.

The air felt thick with horror as I went back in time, imagining how things may have been. “Oh my God,” I thought, “what a horrific experience it must have been—this moment of absolute powerlessness,” while watching the even larger snowflakes fall in the dark gray. In the library of the House of the Wannsee Conference, I stumbled upon the biography of Therese W., a German gentile woman, a mother of four, who suffered during World War I. She was left behind by her husband, a professor, who had to be at the Western Front during the war, which caused marital problems. She also struggled with her family, who didn’t want her to pursue her intellectual interests. This ultimately led her to a psychiatric hospital due to what they diagnosed as war psychosis. After years of being institutionalized from one place to another, she ended up at Pirna-Sonnenstein, one of the Nazi’s six euthanasia killing centers, where she was gassed on February 3, 1941.

I had never written a novel or screenplay, but when I read Therese’s letters to her husband from the psychiatric institutions, where she begged him to take her home and he often failed to do so, I thought, “Oh, no, what this woman must have gone through—I need to give her a voice.” So, I copied the pages and ordered a book about this former psychiatric hospital in Pirna. For more than ten years, I spent endless hours trying to fictionalize her story, internalizing it, and almost becoming her, as actors do—first in novel format and then as a screenplay. Back in LA, I also took an online masterclass with David Mamet to get the structure for both.

Then, during another stay in Germany nearly a decade later, after I found her story, I finally had the chance to visit the place where she was murdered. For that, I took the train from Berlin to Dresden and walked up the hill to the Memorial Pirna Sonnenstein, where I learned that the German artist Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler had also been killed there. Standing in that basement, where little is visible today since the gas chamber and crematorium were dismantled after WWII, I tried to imagine what they must have felt. This led to a fictional scene I later added, imagining them as friends. Therese, the daughter of an art dealer, had an interest in the arts, and Elfriede, of course, was an artist. As I reflected on the horrors that occurred there, I thought, “Poor Therese, poor Elfriede, and all the others who perished in this hidden place, shielded from the public.” I pictured the smoke rising from the chimney and tried to imagine the unbearable stench of freshly burned human flesh.

I thought then about my little brother, who had an intellectual disability that left him at the developmental stage of a three-year-old, along with his medically resistant epilepsy. He couldn’t speak, couldn’t cry for help, couldn’t write—just scribble—and would have been completely helpless in that situation. And I thought, “I need to help give these victims back their dignity.” I felt such great injustice, especially when I learned through further research that many of those involved in this state-sponsored systematic killing were never held accountable. This included doctors, nurses—even people from the Protestant Church and the judiciary system. This couldn’t be. Unbelievable!

Murderers who referred to people like my brother as Vollidioten (complete idiots), even in the 1970s and 1980s, and promoted involuntary euthanasia, were allowed to keep spreading their views and maintain positions of prestige. I tried to seek help with my project and consulted a literary agent, but I couldn’t pay her for her services. I then consulted a publishing house in London, and she said, “I’m not in love with the topic.”

In 2023, I attended a writer’s residency in Saissac, hosted by Los Angeles-born artist Taylor Barnes, where I started rewriting my entire book. But I wasn’t able to finish it in four weeks, as I also had to teach and suddenly got private tour guide offers in Paris. Last year, I settled in Bagnoles de l’Orne, Normandy, and finished the screenplay instead. The producer I spoke to afterward said it was too financially risky and wouldn’t even consider reading it before it was in professional screenplay format.

The topic continued to weigh on me, and I kept revisiting the unsettling thoughts I had two years after the pandemic and after my return to Europe in 2020. I began to question whether my brother had received the best treatment in Germany. If the state didn’t punish those crimes, maybe it would have kept overdosing patients after 1945. That made me contact the Epilepsiezentrum in Kork-Kehl, where he was first treated. After a year, I finally got his medical files from the first years of his life with the help of Dr. Bernhard Steinhoff.

Learning that the Epilepsiezentrum in Kork-Kehl was once directly involved in the Nazi “euthanasia” program caused me extreme discomfort. However, my brother was also treated by Dr. Beate Hirt, originally a pediatrician and later, as I found out last year, a psychotherapist with a deep interest in literature, history, and especially the intersection between medicine and the humanities. Her focus on Schiller and medicine and her engagement with feminist themes and the critical reappraisal of the Nazi era led her toward the works of the writer Elfriede Jelinek, known for her radical critique of Austrian society, especially its repression and denial of Nazi complicity, gender roles, and collective guilt.

Now, this gave me some comfort, and Dr. Hirt was a positive role model for me as a child. Luckily, Cameron S. Mitchell’s documentary Disposable Humanity also came out in February 2025, which gave a voice to Andreas Hechler’s great-grandmother, Emilie Rau, who was an Aktion T-4 victim, to make these atrocities more widely known and to show the impact they still have.

As I had mentioned in my last article, moving from Paris to Le Havre made me want to learn more about the French artist Jean Dubuffet, who coined the term Art Brut and was born here. That led to my exhibition review of “Jean Dubuffet: Banc-salon et Cerfs-volants” at Lelong Gallery in Paris, which is still on view until April 30, 2025.

Through further research, I found out that he had actually visited the Prinzhorn Collection in 1950 for two days. So, a couple of weeks ago, I finally fulfilled my long-desired wish to visit this place. This was a few days after I had seen the excellent “Suzanne Valadon” and the”Paris Noir” exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou and a day after the Prinzhorn Collection’s temporary exhibit “Anima-l” had just closed. For that, I hopped on a Flixbus, which dropped me off at Heidelberg’s train station, where I only had two hours to look at its permanent exhibition. And there, I saw one of Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler’s Friedrichsberger Köpfe in real life, which she created in 1929 after experiencing a nervous breakdown, likely exacerbated by marital problems and financial stressors. This led to her admission to the Friedrichsberg State Psychiatric Hospital in Hamburg for two months.

I could immediately see her deep, deep compassion for her subjects—fellow patients at the clinic. With such emotional depth, how could she have only ended up in a gas chamber? She had all the potential to be showcased at the Centre Pompidou, too!

Two days ago, I received a Bingo graphic from a German journalist named Dunja Baterilo, who had written an article about her brother with Down syndrome and her internal conflict regarding having children of her own. It was featured in The Guardian. She also sent it to Sandra Hoffmann-Grötsch, a journalist in public relations for the Protestant Church in Frankfurt and Offenbach. The graphic was made of a box with 16 little boxes within, each containing a statement specifically for adults with siblings who have disabilities or mental illness. One was supposed to identify with them. However, some of the statements didn’t apply to me anymore since my brother was already dead. Besides, I felt a box isn’t the right way for me to define myself. Yet, one statement – “When you check out potential partners, you consider how they react to your sibling” – made me want to share an experience

I recalled my first months in Berlin in 1993 when my brother was still alive and my friend Alan, a hobby jazz pianist from Berkeley, came to visit. We went to the Filmbühne am Steinplatz, where I sat down and played Debussy’s Arabesque. Suddenly, a German Graf von, a nobleman, handed me his business card and asked me out. We met, and I found out he was a proud economist. But when he learned about my brother, he mentioned the cost of his treatments for the state and criticized my Americanized behavior in a social setting. I, someone who was rather shy before she lived in America, introduced myself to strangers at a social event to break the ice. From that, I knew right away that his nobility and love for music couldn’t make up for his statement about my brother and my culturally enriched self.

Unlike Dunja, I remained childless. I didn’t want a child unless I could shed my feelings of inferiority, which caused me tremendous pain in my life. I feel this could have been prevented had I been given enough support in my youth for my particular situation. But I was born a generation before Dunja and lived in a smaller city than Berlin, where there was limited, if any, professional help. Therefore, I would say this inferiority was state-induced—either intentionally or unintentionally—through neglect of something that shouldn’t have been neglected. Either way, I ended up as an eternal resistance fighter against the Nazi ideology and its K’s. Today, je suis Simone Suzanne or Je suis ce que je suis, as Ben Vautier, in short BEN, the French artist, used to say. And so, with my French-Americanized part of myself, I remain a thorn in the eyes of those who only value traditional gender roles.

Another image of Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler’s Friedrichsberger Köpfe is available to the general public but is not part of the permanent exhibition at the Prinzhorn Collection.

This wall panel indicates that the French artist Jean Dubuffet visited in 1950. It also provides information about the history of the Prinzhorn Collection. Photo: Simone Suzanne Kussatz / ARETE

This photo features works by other artists from the Prinzhorn Collection, including Wilhelm Müller and August Richter. Photo: Simone Suzanne Kussatz / ARETE

A photo I took of the copies I made in the library of the House of the Wannsee Conference in 2009. It shows Therese W., who was a Cosmpolitan and against the right-wing party BVP. 
Photo: Simone Suzanne Kussatz / ARETE.

Photo of the basement, where Therese W. and Elfriede Lohse-Wächtler and many others, including Jews, died in the gas chamber. Photo: Simone Suzanne Kussatz / ARETE

A photo from the current Suzanne Valadon exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. Photo: Simone Suzanne Kussatz / ARETE

A photo of a painting by artist Paul Ahyi, currently displayed in the Paris Noir exhibition at the Centre Pompidou. Photo: Simone Suzanne Kussatz / ARETE

This is Dunja Batarilo’s Erwachsene Geschwister Bingo. Batarilo is a writer, the sister of a man with Down syndrome, and a supporter of Erwachsene Geschwister. The first square in the fourth row reads: “Potentielle Partner *innen checkst du daraufhin ab, wie sie auf dein Geschwister zugehen.” This translates to: “You assess potential partners based on how they approach your sibling.