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7. Peter Altenberg: Authoring Madness in Vienna circa 1900

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Journeys Into Madness
This chapter is in the book Journeys Into Madness
Chapter 7PETER ALTENBERGAuthoring Madness in Vienna circa 1900dGemma BlackshawOn 23 December 1912, the architect Adolf Loos and the English performer Bessie Bruce wrote to their good friend, Peter Altenberg, wishing him a ‘Merry Christmas’ from the Grand Hotel Couttet et du Parc in Chamonix where they were taking the Mont Blanc air for Bruce’s consumption. In a teasing close to their chatty letter, she writes: ‘What is one to do with such an old fool but just send him to Steinhof ? That’s what comes of too much Prodomos [sic] – but go!’1Bruce exclaims that Altenberg’s fanatical devotion to those early twentieth-century tenets of good mental health – diet, hygiene and exercise – as set out in his 1905 book Pròdroˇmoˇs,had sent him straight to Vienna’s principal psychiatric institution. Almost two weeks before the dispatch of their letter, the writer had made the journey from his room at the Hotel Panhans, Semmering, to the Villa Austria, Steinhof.2Altenberg was to stay at the fee-paying sanatorium, attached to the vast, state-financed asylum, for nearly fivemonths before a visit from his Vienna-based doctor and fellow writer Arthur Schnitzler and the promised guardianship of Loos facilitated his release. In a letter to Altenberg’s one-time companion, Helga Malmberg, Loos wrote that he had decided on a ‘cure by force’: ‘I had his belongings packed, paid his bill, and told the Director that I wanted to distract Peter by a journey’.3On2 May 1913, Loos and Bruce took him on the night train from Vienna to Trieste and from there they travelled on to Venice, for what they hoped would be a restorative summer holiday on the Lido with friends.
© 2022, Berghahn Books, New York, Oxford

Chapter 7PETER ALTENBERGAuthoring Madness in Vienna circa 1900dGemma BlackshawOn 23 December 1912, the architect Adolf Loos and the English performer Bessie Bruce wrote to their good friend, Peter Altenberg, wishing him a ‘Merry Christmas’ from the Grand Hotel Couttet et du Parc in Chamonix where they were taking the Mont Blanc air for Bruce’s consumption. In a teasing close to their chatty letter, she writes: ‘What is one to do with such an old fool but just send him to Steinhof ? That’s what comes of too much Prodomos [sic] – but go!’1Bruce exclaims that Altenberg’s fanatical devotion to those early twentieth-century tenets of good mental health – diet, hygiene and exercise – as set out in his 1905 book Pròdroˇmoˇs,had sent him straight to Vienna’s principal psychiatric institution. Almost two weeks before the dispatch of their letter, the writer had made the journey from his room at the Hotel Panhans, Semmering, to the Villa Austria, Steinhof.2Altenberg was to stay at the fee-paying sanatorium, attached to the vast, state-financed asylum, for nearly fivemonths before a visit from his Vienna-based doctor and fellow writer Arthur Schnitzler and the promised guardianship of Loos facilitated his release. In a letter to Altenberg’s one-time companion, Helga Malmberg, Loos wrote that he had decided on a ‘cure by force’: ‘I had his belongings packed, paid his bill, and told the Director that I wanted to distract Peter by a journey’.3On2 May 1913, Loos and Bruce took him on the night train from Vienna to Trieste and from there they travelled on to Venice, for what they hoped would be a restorative summer holiday on the Lido with friends.
© 2022, Berghahn Books, New York, Oxford

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. CONTENTS v
  3. List of Figures vii
  4. Introduction 1
  5. 1. The Mad Objects of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Journeys, Contexts and Dislocations in the Exhibition ‘Madness and Modernity’ 10
  6. 2. Solving Riddles: Freud, Vienna and the Historiography of Madness 27
  7. 3. Symphonies and Psychosis in Mahler’s Vienna 43
  8. 4. Creating an Appropriate Social Milieu: Journeys to Health at a Sanatorium for Nervous Disorders 58
  9. 5. Travel to the Spas: The Growth of Health Tourism in Central Europe, 1850–1914 72
  10. 6. Vienna’s Most Fashionable Neurasthenic: Empress Sisi and the Cult of Size Zero 90
  11. 7. Peter Altenberg: Authoring Madness in Vienna circa 1900 109
  12. 8. ‘Hell Is Not Interesting, It Is Terrifying’: A Reading of the Madhouse Chapter in Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities 130
  13. 9. Reason Dazzled: Klimt, Krakauer and the Eyes of the Medusa 145
  14. 10. Mapping the Sanatorium: Heinrich Obersteiner and the Art of Psychiatric Patients in Oberdöbling around 1900 162
  15. 11. The Württemberg Asylum of Schussenried: A Psychiatric Space and Its Encounter with Literature and Culture from the ‘Outside’ 182
  16. Select Bibliography 200
  17. Notes on Contributors 204
  18. INDEX 207
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https://doi.org/10.1515/9780857454591-009

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. CONTENTS v
  3. List of Figures vii
  4. Introduction 1
  5. 1. The Mad Objects of Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Journeys, Contexts and Dislocations in the Exhibition ‘Madness and Modernity’ 10
  6. 2. Solving Riddles: Freud, Vienna and the Historiography of Madness 27
  7. 3. Symphonies and Psychosis in Mahler’s Vienna 43
  8. 4. Creating an Appropriate Social Milieu: Journeys to Health at a Sanatorium for Nervous Disorders 58
  9. 5. Travel to the Spas: The Growth of Health Tourism in Central Europe, 1850–1914 72
  10. 6. Vienna’s Most Fashionable Neurasthenic: Empress Sisi and the Cult of Size Zero 90
  11. 7. Peter Altenberg: Authoring Madness in Vienna circa 1900 109
  12. 8. ‘Hell Is Not Interesting, It Is Terrifying’: A Reading of the Madhouse Chapter in Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities 130
  13. 9. Reason Dazzled: Klimt, Krakauer and the Eyes of the Medusa 145
  14. 10. Mapping the Sanatorium: Heinrich Obersteiner and the Art of Psychiatric Patients in Oberdöbling around 1900 162
  15. 11. The Württemberg Asylum of Schussenried: A Psychiatric Space and Its Encounter with Literature and Culture from the ‘Outside’ 182
  16. Select Bibliography 200
  17. Notes on Contributors 204
  18. INDEX 207
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