The Dead Are Our Comrades Too
Revisiting the archives + solidarity with the past | two stories from the 19th century
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Transcribing reports about Berlin’s Dalldorf asylum from 19th century newspapers, E.J. Engstrom reveals the specifics of the descriptors popularly used to describe the asylum’s residents: “insane”, “wild”, or even possessing “a certain cleverness”. 1 When Dalldorf began accepting residents who had been convicted of criminal offenses, or, according to these newspapers, “criminals who are serving harsh sentences and who have led criminal lives” and extended ‘free treatment’ (that is, treatment without physical restraints or other forms of force), it was a significant concern of the asylum to manage its reputation.
This was in part due to a somewhat surprisingly entangled view of what constituted society — the betterment of the asylum’s residents was as dependent on the wellbeing of the residents of the city itself, and vice versa, whereas many proponents of mad liberation would now perhaps position the two in necessary opposition to each other. I might do the same, considering how little it feels possible to achieve liberation through amelioration, but the effort to combine the two goals into a whole felt refreshing to me, if naive. According to Engstrom, however,
“The asylum, as a potential locus of fear in the imaginations of Berlin’s newspaper readers, was a concern not just because it threatened to strip citizens of their hard-won legal rights to liberty and their civic respectability, but also because it appeared to house people who posed a threat to their property, livelihood, and peace of mind.”
While extending something akin to solidarity to the residents of the asylum, Berlin’s public were simultaneously afraid of them — one might view it as principled to want to extend ‘legal rights’ (especially the ‘hard-won’ kind) to people one is afraid of. One might also view it as a massage of their own sensibilities to drown out the reality of their fear of the insane — a word that is thrown around with perhaps unsurprising regularity.
A resident named Knauer who “keeps himself constantly busy by very craftily constructing large model ships” is described first and foremost as burglar; readers are reassured that “These so-called "wild-men" have been subject to careful examination, which has confirmed without doubt that they are insane.”
In 1864, a man named Giuseppe Villella died due to ulcerative colitis in the Italian town of Pavia. Villella worked as a farmhand and a shepherd, had been charged with theft on multiple occasions, and ultimately imprisoned in Pavia after the Risorgimento among other Southern Italian deemed brigands. Upon his death, the criminologist Cesare Lombroso located a median occipital dimple, which he claimed to be proof of criminality being inherited, genetic, and therefore, immovable, birthing the discipline of criminal anthropology. Images of Villella’s skull are available to view on the internet.
What does it mean to have “led a criminal life”, and what does this do to one’s interactions with the world? The existence of such a life is of course not an absolute, verifiable thing, but a lens or label projected onto someone through external indictment. When someone’s criminality is medicalised, how does this interact with how we perceive illness, deviance, any form of mystery to those committed to the norm?
Reading about Villella reminded me of Otto Gross, a life neglected and then exoticised.2 Villella was excavated for violence in his death, after he succumbed to illness after being imprisoned on a bigoted charge, presuming there is such an imprisonment that isn’t unjust. The past is flush with stories like this, of individualness, of unique, personal personhoods — of complete lives we will never access or know, of sufferings we will only learn about through a screen, through the image of a dead man’s skull taken after he was subjected to a lifetime of cruelty. 3
The dead are our comrades too, the past is a place for solidarity — I have written previously on the need for temporal shattering, a process of collapsing solidarity, empathy, kinship across time, of pushing across chronological boundaries to experience emotion and suffering not as temporally circumscribed phenomena but as expansions, absorptions of time itself. 4 We may never know with completeness the histories of those who have come before us, but we will never know this for those alive alongside us either. Solidarity does not need completeness.
E.J. Engstrom, “The Wild Men of Dalldorf”, History of Emotions
I wrote about Otto Gross’s life and his portrayal in A Dangerous Method here:
Arlette Farge’s book, The Allure of the Archives, has been central to my thoughts on this; I wrote about her approach to history in this essay that’s also about the ocean:
The task of the historian can never be complete recovery, just as the task of the biologist cannot be to ever truly know what an anglerfish feels inside its mind, how its body parses stimuli, the way it might understand and experience pain or hunger or fragility. So much can be understood, but the true task is to push against what can’t be: this hunger, this desire for the kind of living that is impossible to access, is what makes history so palpable to me, refashioning a childish fascination for the unknown. ““The desire to understand is a demanding one”, writes Farge.
On temporal shattering and the liberation of children:
