Menschen, die noch hätten leben können

The exhibition "People who could still have lived" shows an unusual cross-section of the Prinzhorn Collection: 150 very different works from the entire 20th century. In addition to a classic of the collection, the "Lufterscheinung" by Otto Stuß (1909), a selection of the 1800 flower pastels by the Jewish Germanist Hanna Hellmann, which she drew in the institution from 1939 to 1942, and striking portraits of Nazi personalities, which Theodor Wagemann produced in a home in the 1980s, are also on display. What do these works have in common? Their authors were victims of National Socialist crimes.

Commemorating the victims of psychiatry under National Socialism has been an important concern of the museum since its inception. One of the first exhibitions to be presented in 2002/03 was "Cause of Death: Euthanasia. Hidden Murders in the Nazi Era" was shown in 2002/03. In the years that followed, Sabine Hohnholz, the collection's former archivist, steadily expanded the biographical research on the collection's patient artists, especially as research opportunities on victims of National Socialist crimes increased elsewhere. A new, albeit certainly not definitive, level of research has now been achieved, which forms the basis for the current exhibition. It also includes victims of forced sterilization and of concentration and extermination camps. The accompanying catalog with reconstructions of life stories and stories of suffering as well as analyses of the surviving works was developed by a working group led by museum director PD Dr. Thomas Röske and medical historian Prof. Dr. Maike Rotzoll.