Knowing Rene Talbot
by Hagai Aviel
Of all the encounters I came to know after founding Israeli association against psychiatric assault in 1995 Rene Talbot’s was the one that turned out to be the most enduring and personal. As it happened the route to that meeting was in itself a pure chance: I searched for allies in the USA and after the frustration from the medical stand of the American groups I turned to a London based group and again found the same attitude so I asked it for European contacts, which again were less than rewarding so I was left with one Belgian correspondent from Bruges. Suddenly in 1997 the phone rang and it was the Belgian calling from Berlin where "someone wanted to speak with you". It was Rene who invited me out of the blue to participate as a jury in next year’s 2 days long Foucault Tribunal to be held in berlin. I had no problem in agreeing to the proposal without any hesitation since I was sure it will come to nothing and be forgotten soon, as it was common in Israel with all sorts of similar grandiose-sounding projects.
But as the date approaches I become a bit anxious. I didn’t hear again from Rene and I wasn’t sure what to make out of the whole phone call, so I decided to buy a ticket and, I told myself, if no one will come to pick me from the airport I will stay inside the terminal for the 3 days [there was at that time a journalistic report about such an incident].
When we -the tribunal jury- met for the first time a day before the opening we learned 2 things: all of us share the experience of psychiatric coercion and, from the time table, that our participation in the event is limited to 15 minutes at its beginning and end. Kate Millett’s face were visibly dropping: ”we will sit for 2 days long just as part of the background scenery in a political theater???”. I suggested that we should disregard the façade of impartial jury by ’high jacking’ the first 15 minutes to declare our view on psychiatry. Kate Millett’s response was immediate -not only her face brightened but she took out a pen and we 2 began there and then to compose the statement that she read at the event’s opening minutes.
At the process of the tribunal I didn’t have much contact with Rene and I mainly became acquainted with Joanna who showed interest in the descriptions of my activities in Israel. So I was reasonably surprised when I received a month latter an invitation to visit them in July. My friends in Tel Aviv were worried. "A German couple invites you to stay at their home? Probably means to lock you in their basement as their sex slave" - but the woman is polish, "ah, if she is polish then there is no sex, you can safely go!".
I was still at loss to know why I was invited so I spent the first July weeks with a South American friend who moved to berlin, and then Joanna confided in me that Rene is disappointed since he wished me to participate in the berlin association activities, to which I immediately agreed.
That moment was the beginning of a very fruitful friendship and cooperation with Rene which was totally different from anything I had in Israel. It was without the clashing of Egos and a very constructive and friendly sharing of ideas.
The first thing I came up with was the designing of the symbol. While visiting Poland with Joanna I noticed the peculiar anarchistic A sprayed everywhere so I proposed a symbol of our own. Then there were 2 projects that Rene had already prepared the ground work: the ‘Haus des Eigensinns’ museum proposed to be erected on the location of Tiergarten str. No. 4. It is -still- meant to display the art works collected illegally by the psychiatrist Prinzhorn while working in the Heidelberg psychiatric clinic which later featured in his 1922 book. Rene assembled a group of supporting figures to act as a governing body to the museum and commissioned an architectural model whose symbols he explained to me: it stands on diagonal pylons on both sides of the street pavements so as not to touch the ground - also to allow vehicles movements underneath - and, for reason I forgot now, has the shape of a flat disc. One of the figures of the governing body to the museum was Ram Ishay an Israeli medical official so it was arranged that Rene and Joanna will visit me in the fall, bringing along the heavy model, in the hope of getting his aid and garnering some interest for the issue in Israel. To make things short there was lack of interest. I suggested that one way to arouse notice of this cause is for me to print postcards with the title “looted art”, a short explanation about the criminal act of Heidelberg university and a prepared address of its office, to be distributed freely so that it can be mailed immediately.
My ’99 berlin visit started with the question of the 2, rather hideous, Bonhoeffer busts. One December night in '98, the Berlin group decided to take advantage of the 50th anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, the 1000th signing on the verdict of the Foucault tribunal, and the death of Lady Di by occupying the room in the Charité dedicated to psychiatrist Carl Bonhoeffer, renaming it after Gert Postel and the clinic after Lady Di. While not a member of the Nazi party itself Bonhoeffer was the head of the eugenic race-health-court [erected according to the law in July 1933, the first racist law of the 3rd Reich] which ordered on invading the bodies of psychiatric prisoners to castrate and sterilised them. Bonhoeffer’s goal was stated in his book in the opaque LTI [=language of the third empire] as ausmerzen, to be eradicated. During that night the Bonhoeffer busts were removed from the Charite room and from the garden in front of the psychiatric clinic named [-both of them to this day] in his honour. The occupation date was chosen so that media reports about the 50 anniversary will coincides with the loss of the busts and the renaming act.
I was not there so I cannot write what happened to the busts and how they found their way to a certain party which consulted with me as to who will be the artist that will transform them according to our view. I learned that there was an attempt to approach a [-well known] German artist for this purpose that was rejected with the evasive remark that the removing of the busts is by itself a work of art. I immediately came up with the name of Igael Tumarkin, both for his manifest anti-Nazi stand and for his Un-hesitancy to involved himself in artistic scandals.
The other project was preparation to counter the 1999 world psychiatric association congress to be held, for the first time since the www2, in Hamburg, Germany. An act that we interpreted as a whitewash of the initiative role German medical doctors & psychiatrists had in the medically based mass murders from 1939 onward to 1948-9. The murders took place in large air tight rooms masquerading as communal showers in 6 psychiatric institutions all around the 3rd Reich. One of the witnesses in the Foucault tribunal, Elvira Manthey –testifying about the time when she was a very young girl- was a lone survivor.
Rene used as a starting point to this project the recent discovery in Berlin of a cache of Stasi files, some of them were the original psychiatric files and executions certificates [-styled ”euthanasia”] produced in the Nazi era and now removed to the German state archive. It was decided to invite fellow activists from around the world for a tour in the sites that are in Germany [one is in Austria]. I gave the title ‘freedom from fear’ to the tour based on my, then only, positive reaction to the UNO which originated the term.
I contacted Tumarkin on returning to Israel and his immediate response was positive but he had one request in return: some kind of a specific camera lens. Rene found a used one in berlin and a, then, friend of mine happen to visit me just a few days later and brought it with him. Tumarkin was impressed by our rapidity ”you fellows are quicker than the MOSSAD”!. After transforming the busts Tumarkin shared with me his assessment, based on years of working with the material, that they were created in the DDR due to the inferior bronze used.
I brought back to Germany the transformed busts in the winter via Amsterdam to avoid any trouble with custom.
Sometime in 1999 while I was with berlin group the documentary film made during the Foucault tribunal arrived. Thanks to the German traditionally superb editing skills I could follow and understood this terrible, condescending and overall unsatisfying product but I was surprised that Rene asked me to re-edit the film! [the berlin group signed a contract that guarantee such re-working on the film company’s expense]. So the next year I watched the raw materials handed over to the group, devised a narrative, and went for a week to koln to create ’The Verdict of the Foucault Tribunal’. I still think the film present very well documentation of our take on the event and so will stand the time.
The summer of 1999 started with the ‘Freedom from Fear’ Tour. From the Bundesarchiv in Berlin, where they allowed us to look at the psychiatric death files [-that were preserved by the Stasi and found in a basement after the unification], to Dr. Mengele alma mater at the berlin university and then to the locations of the gas showers (pictures 1 and 2) in the psychiatric institutions and Heidelberg psychiatric clinic for the murderer lecture room [-the tour was also a chance for me to visit Naumburg cathedral]. We ended in Hamburg where the university allowed us the use of a building in the campus to our counter-congress to the one held by the WPA. I recall mainly the lecture by Ernst Klee about the killing by starvation in psychiatric institutions that ended only in 1948-9 when the population asked the American occupying force to intervene. Rene talked about a Nazi ideologue pathologises art.
in the ‘Haus des Eigensinns’ museum: Alexander Schulte passed away and, with Rene, I became the second speaker of the project. We met with an art-newspaper reporter about it.
in the spring of 2000 Rene arranged an event [-styled a vernissage] in the Volksbuehne Theatre to present the transformed busts. I came up with the idea that we’ll call them ‘The Missing Link’ pointing to the fact that the July 1933 law which allow the bodily invasion [castration and sterilization] of psychiatric prisoners declared un-worthy to procreate by Bonhoeffer and his colleagues was the connecting link between the eugenic doctrine and the medically based systematic industrial mass murders in WW2. I made background panels to the busts where I put blow-ups of homosexual men photographed before and after castration in frontal nude for a Nazi book. Before the event Rene and I arranged for several locations in berlin to display the busts and the panels, but at the event the state police entered the theatre and seized the busts as ”evidence”. So the panels were displayed without the busts at the media tower in alexanderplaz, at some cinema foyer and at the Jewish hospital. A booking photograph of the berlin group was taken by the police. I suggested to them to use those photos publically on the cover of their no.11 magazine [-which at that time I was asked to design] in some kind of imitation of a Warhol technique. Unfortunately I lacked the necessary knowledge to produce the desired effect. The group lawyers claimed for their defence the German law that recognize as a new entity a work of art that was made by transforming an older one. So, after years of storage by the state, no trial was conducted [-apparently both the hospital and the clinic shied away from connection to the psychiatrist busts] and they were unceremoniously returned to the berlin group.
Later that year we attended Syracuse, New York for the Szasz symposium [-also his 80th birthday] where Rene made a speech about the ”brittle” state of psychiatric force in Germany. And in the summer we were invited to Oslo for a congress where we both gave a speech in the university.
2001 was the Russell Tribunal on psychiatry in berlin where we both were secretaries. It was organised simultaneously with the academic conference “Geist Gegen Gene” and was intended to take place in the free university. I designed the leaflet for the two [-the cover was taken from a Roland Barthes design] and the –I believe original- movies programme: I compared the 1941 American ’I Walked with a Zombie’ with the German ’ich klage an’ [-in both women whos lives deemed unworthy of living are euthanised]. On the morning of the event the university backed down and we had to move –in an hours’ notice- to the Urania lecture hall. I think Rene paid the expense. In the preparation to the tribunal I suggested asking Paulo Coelho to be one of the judges [together with Szasz, Kate Millett and others], a mistake since it turned out that he support psychiatric coercion [-for others, not in his case]. In the “Geist Gegen Genes” simultaneous event Ivan Illich participate.
Later that year Rene and i attended Vancouver Protest Rally against the Congress of the World Federation for Mental Health. We both gave speeches there. At the same time there was a foundation meeting for WNUSP in the downtown Vancouver gallery, named GACHET after the head of the lunatic asylum connected with Van Gogh. We thought it disappointing [-I think because of its forgiving attitude to coercion] so we came up with the idea of establishing a human rights international organisation that will hold its meetings via the internet, by that allowing people everywhere a true democratic way of operating.
21/10/2002 was the founding of IAAPA in Basel [-where the lawyer who registered it had an office].
than in December we signed a contract with the Bundesarchiv to get the list of known murdered persons in the gas chambers of the doctors ONLY so we can hold a ceremony in a city square where we will read them aloud. The idea was to restore the victims dignity by identifying them by name and it took place on 16/17/18 December 2002 at Wittenbergplatz Berlin near the metro.
The response was surprising: Not only several people asked to join the reading but also others searched the list and found their relatives. This was the basis for my decision to break my contract and published the list on my website of the Israeli association. It was titled as International Claims List, where the German victims were intended to be one group among others, and I received numerous e-mails from relatives and others. Some of them created websites where they shared their relatives’ history:
Anna Lehnkerig
Reinhold Häußler/Häussler
Erna Kronshage
Franz Molch
Fritz Heidrich
(120) other biographies
Murdered family members as a link from the name such as:
Zacchini Valentina, Frieda Oguntke, Barbette Pilhoffer, Hempel Lisa.
Leopoldine Schlager, Therese Waldherr
Those people were intended to die without leaving a trace due to the medical slanders of both psychiatric illness and the eugenic idea of people not worthy of living so the loving responses of their relatives were one of the most gratifying experience of my activity and I thank Rene for his initiative in that.
The list was then copied from my website by the holocaust memorial museum in Washington dc which shamefully re-titled it as ”persons who died from procedures performed by German medical doctors”.
because of the list publication the German state forbade me from entering academic libraries, so it was good to know that at least Gotz Aly in his 2013 ’die belasteten’ mentioned this action positively.
Fifteen years after we posted the list on the internet, the Germans decided in 2018 to make it public, after which I approached the archive with a demand for compensation. https://www.zwangspsychiatrie.de/geschichte/todliche-psychiatrie
In 2006 we protested against the hygiene museum in Dresden which held an exhibition, organised by the American holocaust memorial museum, about the medical doctors murders. We didn’t object the content only its time-scope: 1939-1945, implying that the sole responsibility of the murders lays with the Nazi regime and that they stopped with its demise. Unfortunately for me I suggested the title ”Stop the Lie”, meaning - I thought - that the murders continued until 1948-9 by starvation and lethal injections, not being aware that in Germany the word LUGE [lie] is prevalent with holocaust deniers. Standing outside the museum with this sign got me a lot of nasty accusations as being one.
Then again we returned to Dresden on 6-8 June 2007 to protest against the WPA congress there. This time it was not ONLY a cumbersome gloomy demo concerning murders, torture and suffering but a fun one!
We co-operated with Gert Postel, the German postman who impersonated a psychiatrist; worked as one in a facility; was promoted to head psychiatrist; invented an illness; signed release orders. Even his evading the German police who went after him was hilarious [-they came to look for him in his apartment but were fooled by a note he placed on the door reading “I left for another town” while he was inside]. So for three days (and nights) the second most important topic besides the G8 summit in the German media - the main newspapers and state TV-channels - was our humorous enterprise of promoting the nomination for the Nobel medicine Prize of Postel for his experimental proof that there is no such thing as "mental illness". Since we invited Postel to lecture about his experience in the City Hall in Dresden, the German media who was attracted to this event covered at the same time our protest against this congress, delegating the World Congress itself to a background role of our activities!...
in march 2009 the same 2006 American exhibition arrived at the Jewish museum in Berlin. this time the slogan I suggested was “the whole truth please, 1939-40-41-42-43-44-45-46-47-48-49”. I can only hope it delivered the right message.
After that year I came to the realization that Germany returned to its true nature by implementing various anti-Israeli boycott laws and I stopped visiting.
I think that Rene is the main author of the advanced directive in psychiatry which is an excellent method yet I’m more impressed by his ideas concerning the right to idleness and adoption by giving a name so the connection between a parent and child will not be based on biology but on choice.
The last joint enterprise Rene and I had was in 2022. I saw that several new books appeared commemorating 100 years for prinzhorn’s book publication and I suggested to Rene that we should write a text about the true nature and ideas of his 1922 book. This was based on a conversation I had with Rene back in 2007 after I visited the Dadaist Hannah Hoch’s berlin exhibition. Rene pointed out to me the chronology that Prinzhorn’s book was later to the 1915 eruption of dada and so was a reaction to it. I never thought about it before but once I noticed it -thanks to Rene- it stuck in my mind. Rene titled the text: Authoritarian revisionism in Heidelberg psychiatry, and I suggested: the legacy of Hans Prinzhorn and Carl Schneider. Thanks to Rene the text was not solely an historical one but includes a present day depictions of discrimination of artists due to medical slander of psychiatric illness.
by Hagai Aviel
Of all the encounters I came to know after founding Israeli association against psychiatric assault in 1995 Rene Talbot’s was the one that turned out to be the most enduring and personal. As it happened the route to that meeting was in itself a pure chance: I searched for allies in the USA and after the frustration from the medical stand of the American groups I turned to a London based group and again found the same attitude so I asked it for European contacts, which again were less than rewarding so I was left with one Belgian correspondent from Bruges. Suddenly in 1997 the phone rang and it was the Belgian calling from Berlin where "someone wanted to speak with you". It was Rene who invited me out of the blue to participate as a jury in next year’s 2 days long Foucault Tribunal to be held in berlin. I had no problem in agreeing to the proposal without any hesitation since I was sure it will come to nothing and be forgotten soon, as it was common in Israel with all sorts of similar grandiose-sounding projects.
But as the date approaches I become a bit anxious. I didn’t hear again from Rene and I wasn’t sure what to make out of the whole phone call, so I decided to buy a ticket and, I told myself, if no one will come to pick me from the airport I will stay inside the terminal for the 3 days [there was at that time a journalistic report about such an incident].
When we -the tribunal jury- met for the first time a day before the opening we learned 2 things: all of us share the experience of psychiatric coercion and, from the time table, that our participation in the event is limited to 15 minutes at its beginning and end. Kate Millett’s face were visibly dropping: ”we will sit for 2 days long just as part of the background scenery in a political theater???”. I suggested that we should disregard the façade of impartial jury by ’high jacking’ the first 15 minutes to declare our view on psychiatry. Kate Millett’s response was immediate -not only her face brightened but she took out a pen and we 2 began there and then to compose the statement that she read at the event’s opening minutes.
At the process of the tribunal I didn’t have much contact with Rene and I mainly became acquainted with Joanna who showed interest in the descriptions of my activities in Israel. So I was reasonably surprised when I received a month latter an invitation to visit them in July. My friends in Tel Aviv were worried. "A German couple invites you to stay at their home? Probably means to lock you in their basement as their sex slave" - but the woman is polish, "ah, if she is polish then there is no sex, you can safely go!".
I was still at loss to know why I was invited so I spent the first July weeks with a South American friend who moved to berlin, and then Joanna confided in me that Rene is disappointed since he wished me to participate in the berlin association activities, to which I immediately agreed.
That moment was the beginning of a very fruitful friendship and cooperation with Rene which was totally different from anything I had in Israel. It was without the clashing of Egos and a very constructive and friendly sharing of ideas.
The first thing I came up with was the designing of the symbol. While visiting Poland with Joanna I noticed the peculiar anarchistic A sprayed everywhere so I proposed a symbol of our own. Then there were 2 projects that Rene had already prepared the ground work: the ‘Haus des Eigensinns’ museum proposed to be erected on the location of Tiergarten str. No. 4. It is -still- meant to display the art works collected illegally by the psychiatrist Prinzhorn while working in the Heidelberg psychiatric clinic which later featured in his 1922 book. Rene assembled a group of supporting figures to act as a governing body to the museum and commissioned an architectural model whose symbols he explained to me: it stands on diagonal pylons on both sides of the street pavements so as not to touch the ground - also to allow vehicles movements underneath - and, for reason I forgot now, has the shape of a flat disc. One of the figures of the governing body to the museum was Ram Ishay an Israeli medical official so it was arranged that Rene and Joanna will visit me in the fall, bringing along the heavy model, in the hope of getting his aid and garnering some interest for the issue in Israel. To make things short there was lack of interest. I suggested that one way to arouse notice of this cause is for me to print postcards with the title “looted art”, a short explanation about the criminal act of Heidelberg university and a prepared address of its office, to be distributed freely so that it can be mailed immediately.
My ’99 berlin visit started with the question of the 2, rather hideous, Bonhoeffer busts. One December night in '98, the Berlin group decided to take advantage of the 50th anniversary of the UN Declaration of Human Rights, the 1000th signing on the verdict of the Foucault tribunal, and the death of Lady Di by occupying the room in the Charité dedicated to psychiatrist Carl Bonhoeffer, renaming it after Gert Postel and the clinic after Lady Di. While not a member of the Nazi party itself Bonhoeffer was the head of the eugenic race-health-court [erected according to the law in July 1933, the first racist law of the 3rd Reich] which ordered on invading the bodies of psychiatric prisoners to castrate and sterilised them. Bonhoeffer’s goal was stated in his book in the opaque LTI [=language of the third empire] as ausmerzen, to be eradicated. During that night the Bonhoeffer busts were removed from the Charite room and from the garden in front of the psychiatric clinic named [-both of them to this day] in his honour. The occupation date was chosen so that media reports about the 50 anniversary will coincides with the loss of the busts and the renaming act.
I was not there so I cannot write what happened to the busts and how they found their way to a certain party which consulted with me as to who will be the artist that will transform them according to our view. I learned that there was an attempt to approach a [-well known] German artist for this purpose that was rejected with the evasive remark that the removing of the busts is by itself a work of art. I immediately came up with the name of Igael Tumarkin, both for his manifest anti-Nazi stand and for his Un-hesitancy to involved himself in artistic scandals.
The other project was preparation to counter the 1999 world psychiatric association congress to be held, for the first time since the www2, in Hamburg, Germany. An act that we interpreted as a whitewash of the initiative role German medical doctors & psychiatrists had in the medically based mass murders from 1939 onward to 1948-9. The murders took place in large air tight rooms masquerading as communal showers in 6 psychiatric institutions all around the 3rd Reich. One of the witnesses in the Foucault tribunal, Elvira Manthey –testifying about the time when she was a very young girl- was a lone survivor.
Rene used as a starting point to this project the recent discovery in Berlin of a cache of Stasi files, some of them were the original psychiatric files and executions certificates [-styled ”euthanasia”] produced in the Nazi era and now removed to the German state archive. It was decided to invite fellow activists from around the world for a tour in the sites that are in Germany [one is in Austria]. I gave the title ‘freedom from fear’ to the tour based on my, then only, positive reaction to the UNO which originated the term.
I contacted Tumarkin on returning to Israel and his immediate response was positive but he had one request in return: some kind of a specific camera lens. Rene found a used one in berlin and a, then, friend of mine happen to visit me just a few days later and brought it with him. Tumarkin was impressed by our rapidity ”you fellows are quicker than the MOSSAD”!. After transforming the busts Tumarkin shared with me his assessment, based on years of working with the material, that they were created in the DDR due to the inferior bronze used.
I brought back to Germany the transformed busts in the winter via Amsterdam to avoid any trouble with custom.
Sometime in 1999 while I was with berlin group the documentary film made during the Foucault tribunal arrived. Thanks to the German traditionally superb editing skills I could follow and understood this terrible, condescending and overall unsatisfying product but I was surprised that Rene asked me to re-edit the film! [the berlin group signed a contract that guarantee such re-working on the film company’s expense]. So the next year I watched the raw materials handed over to the group, devised a narrative, and went for a week to koln to create ’The Verdict of the Foucault Tribunal’. I still think the film present very well documentation of our take on the event and so will stand the time.
The summer of 1999 started with the ‘Freedom from Fear’ Tour. From the Bundesarchiv in Berlin, where they allowed us to look at the psychiatric death files [-that were preserved by the Stasi and found in a basement after the unification], to Dr. Mengele alma mater at the berlin university and then to the locations of the gas showers (pictures 1 and 2) in the psychiatric institutions and Heidelberg psychiatric clinic for the murderer lecture room [-the tour was also a chance for me to visit Naumburg cathedral]. We ended in Hamburg where the university allowed us the use of a building in the campus to our counter-congress to the one held by the WPA. I recall mainly the lecture by Ernst Klee about the killing by starvation in psychiatric institutions that ended only in 1948-9 when the population asked the American occupying force to intervene. Rene talked about a Nazi ideologue pathologises art.
in the ‘Haus des Eigensinns’ museum: Alexander Schulte passed away and, with Rene, I became the second speaker of the project. We met with an art-newspaper reporter about it.
in the spring of 2000 Rene arranged an event [-styled a vernissage] in the Volksbuehne Theatre to present the transformed busts. I came up with the idea that we’ll call them ‘The Missing Link’ pointing to the fact that the July 1933 law which allow the bodily invasion [castration and sterilization] of psychiatric prisoners declared un-worthy to procreate by Bonhoeffer and his colleagues was the connecting link between the eugenic doctrine and the medically based systematic industrial mass murders in WW2. I made background panels to the busts where I put blow-ups of homosexual men photographed before and after castration in frontal nude for a Nazi book. Before the event Rene and I arranged for several locations in berlin to display the busts and the panels, but at the event the state police entered the theatre and seized the busts as ”evidence”. So the panels were displayed without the busts at the media tower in alexanderplaz, at some cinema foyer and at the Jewish hospital. A booking photograph of the berlin group was taken by the police. I suggested to them to use those photos publically on the cover of their no.11 magazine [-which at that time I was asked to design] in some kind of imitation of a Warhol technique. Unfortunately I lacked the necessary knowledge to produce the desired effect. The group lawyers claimed for their defence the German law that recognize as a new entity a work of art that was made by transforming an older one. So, after years of storage by the state, no trial was conducted [-apparently both the hospital and the clinic shied away from connection to the psychiatrist busts] and they were unceremoniously returned to the berlin group.
Later that year we attended Syracuse, New York for the Szasz symposium [-also his 80th birthday] where Rene made a speech about the ”brittle” state of psychiatric force in Germany. And in the summer we were invited to Oslo for a congress where we both gave a speech in the university.
2001 was the Russell Tribunal on psychiatry in berlin where we both were secretaries. It was organised simultaneously with the academic conference “Geist Gegen Gene” and was intended to take place in the free university. I designed the leaflet for the two [-the cover was taken from a Roland Barthes design] and the –I believe original- movies programme: I compared the 1941 American ’I Walked with a Zombie’ with the German ’ich klage an’ [-in both women whos lives deemed unworthy of living are euthanised]. On the morning of the event the university backed down and we had to move –in an hours’ notice- to the Urania lecture hall. I think Rene paid the expense. In the preparation to the tribunal I suggested asking Paulo Coelho to be one of the judges [together with Szasz, Kate Millett and others], a mistake since it turned out that he support psychiatric coercion [-for others, not in his case]. In the “Geist Gegen Genes” simultaneous event Ivan Illich participate.
Later that year Rene and i attended Vancouver Protest Rally against the Congress of the World Federation for Mental Health. We both gave speeches there. At the same time there was a foundation meeting for WNUSP in the downtown Vancouver gallery, named GACHET after the head of the lunatic asylum connected with Van Gogh. We thought it disappointing [-I think because of its forgiving attitude to coercion] so we came up with the idea of establishing a human rights international organisation that will hold its meetings via the internet, by that allowing people everywhere a true democratic way of operating.
21/10/2002 was the founding of IAAPA in Basel [-where the lawyer who registered it had an office].
than in December we signed a contract with the Bundesarchiv to get the list of known murdered persons in the gas chambers of the doctors ONLY so we can hold a ceremony in a city square where we will read them aloud. The idea was to restore the victims dignity by identifying them by name and it took place on 16/17/18 December 2002 at Wittenbergplatz Berlin near the metro.
The response was surprising: Not only several people asked to join the reading but also others searched the list and found their relatives. This was the basis for my decision to break my contract and published the list on my website of the Israeli association. It was titled as International Claims List, where the German victims were intended to be one group among others, and I received numerous e-mails from relatives and others. Some of them created websites where they shared their relatives’ history:
Anna Lehnkerig
Reinhold Häußler/Häussler
Erna Kronshage
Franz Molch
Fritz Heidrich
(120) other biographies
Murdered family members as a link from the name such as:
Zacchini Valentina, Frieda Oguntke, Barbette Pilhoffer, Hempel Lisa.
Leopoldine Schlager, Therese Waldherr
Those people were intended to die without leaving a trace due to the medical slanders of both psychiatric illness and the eugenic idea of people not worthy of living so the loving responses of their relatives were one of the most gratifying experience of my activity and I thank Rene for his initiative in that.
The list was then copied from my website by the holocaust memorial museum in Washington dc which shamefully re-titled it as ”persons who died from procedures performed by German medical doctors”.
because of the list publication the German state forbade me from entering academic libraries, so it was good to know that at least Gotz Aly in his 2013 ’die belasteten’ mentioned this action positively.
Fifteen years after we posted the list on the internet, the Germans decided in 2018 to make it public, after which I approached the archive with a demand for compensation. https://www.zwangspsychiatrie.de/geschichte/todliche-psychiatrie
In 2006 we protested against the hygiene museum in Dresden which held an exhibition, organised by the American holocaust memorial museum, about the medical doctors murders. We didn’t object the content only its time-scope: 1939-1945, implying that the sole responsibility of the murders lays with the Nazi regime and that they stopped with its demise. Unfortunately for me I suggested the title ”Stop the Lie”, meaning - I thought - that the murders continued until 1948-9 by starvation and lethal injections, not being aware that in Germany the word LUGE [lie] is prevalent with holocaust deniers. Standing outside the museum with this sign got me a lot of nasty accusations as being one.
Then again we returned to Dresden on 6-8 June 2007 to protest against the WPA congress there. This time it was not ONLY a cumbersome gloomy demo concerning murders, torture and suffering but a fun one!
We co-operated with Gert Postel, the German postman who impersonated a psychiatrist; worked as one in a facility; was promoted to head psychiatrist; invented an illness; signed release orders. Even his evading the German police who went after him was hilarious [-they came to look for him in his apartment but were fooled by a note he placed on the door reading “I left for another town” while he was inside]. So for three days (and nights) the second most important topic besides the G8 summit in the German media - the main newspapers and state TV-channels - was our humorous enterprise of promoting the nomination for the Nobel medicine Prize of Postel for his experimental proof that there is no such thing as "mental illness". Since we invited Postel to lecture about his experience in the City Hall in Dresden, the German media who was attracted to this event covered at the same time our protest against this congress, delegating the World Congress itself to a background role of our activities!...
in march 2009 the same 2006 American exhibition arrived at the Jewish museum in Berlin. this time the slogan I suggested was “the whole truth please, 1939-40-41-42-43-44-45-46-47-48-49”. I can only hope it delivered the right message.
After that year I came to the realization that Germany returned to its true nature by implementing various anti-Israeli boycott laws and I stopped visiting.
I think that Rene is the main author of the advanced directive in psychiatry which is an excellent method yet I’m more impressed by his ideas concerning the right to idleness and adoption by giving a name so the connection between a parent and child will not be based on biology but on choice.
The last joint enterprise Rene and I had was in 2022. I saw that several new books appeared commemorating 100 years for prinzhorn’s book publication and I suggested to Rene that we should write a text about the true nature and ideas of his 1922 book. This was based on a conversation I had with Rene back in 2007 after I visited the Dadaist Hannah Hoch’s berlin exhibition. Rene pointed out to me the chronology that Prinzhorn’s book was later to the 1915 eruption of dada and so was a reaction to it. I never thought about it before but once I noticed it -thanks to Rene- it stuck in my mind. Rene titled the text: Authoritarian revisionism in Heidelberg psychiatry, and I suggested: the legacy of Hans Prinzhorn and Carl Schneider. Thanks to Rene the text was not solely an historical one but includes a present day depictions of discrimination of artists due to medical slander of psychiatric illness.
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