Epilepsy & Behavior 111 (2020) 107191
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Epilepsy & Behavior
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/yebeh
Special Communication
Epilepsy as a key feature in two works of fantastic literature by Alfred
Kubin and Hermann Weyl: With a brief review of epilepsy in
fantastic literature
Günter Krämer a, Peter Wolf b,c,⁎
a
b
c
Neurocenter Bellevue, Zurich, Switzerland
Danish Epilepsy Centre Filadelfia, Dianalund, Denmark
Programa de Pós-Graduação em Ciências Médicas, Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, SC, Brazil
a r t i c l e
i n f o
Article history:
Received 7 May 2020
Accepted 23 May 2020
Available online 30 July 2020
Keywords:
Gothic novels and epilepsy
Dreamy state in literature
Postictal psychosis
Epilepsy and stigma
The Other Side
a b s t r a c t
Among the many literary works of all styles and types referring to epilepsy, fantastic literature forms a distinct
and interesting subgroup. The article draws attention to two such works belonging to early 20th century German
avant-garde where epilepsy is a key feature. Of the authors, Austrian Alfred Kubin (1877–1959) was a renowned
artist and illustrator whose only published (and illustrated) novel “The Other Side” (1909) can be understood as
the narrative of a complex epileptic experience, perhaps a dreamy state. Of the other author, Hermann Weyl
(1893–1960), very little is known. He was a Jewish neuropsychiatrist who emigrated from Nazist Germany to
Argentina in 1933. His only published literary work, the novella “The Epileptic” (1927), displays high literary ambitions. The topic epilepsy provided for him the desired access to the fantastic realm, and his professionality enabled him to address with great expertise aspects as diverse as postictal psychosis and social stigmatization. Both
works are, thus, valuable contributions to the tradition of epilepsy in fantastic literature. A brief review of the latter includes Edgar Allan Poe, Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens, Gustav Meyrink, Mervin Peake, Russell Hoban, Eraldo
Baldini, Haruki Murakami, Adam Fawer, and Christoph Ransmayr.
© 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Epilepsy appears in numerous literary works, varying from brief
remarks reflecting prejudices or societal attitudes over sometimes fascinating metaphors to seizures as part of a plot, or central characters with
epilepsy. These relations can be analyzed under many different aspects [1].
References to epilepsy can be found in all sorts of literary categories:
realistic, historical and adventure novels, romance, autofiction, mystery,
science fiction, political satire, and more. In this article, we present and
analyze two works belonging to the German literary avant-garde of the
early 20th century where epilepsy is a central feature.
1. Alfred Kubin, Die andere Seite (The Other Side, 1909)
Alfred Kubin (1877–1959) was an Austrian artist renowned for his
symbolist and expressionist drawings and book illustrations, e.g., of E.T.A.
Hoffmann and Edgar Allan Poe. In Munich around 1910, he belonged to
the artist group “Der blaue Reiter” (The Blue Rider) together with Wassily
Kandinsky, Paul Klee, Franz Marc, August Macke, and others who, coming
from symbolism, initiated expressionist art. Kubin met writers like Gustav
Meyrink and Franz Kafka whose works he also illustrated [2].
⁎ Corresponding author at: Dag Hammarskjölds Allé 5, 1.tv, DK – 2100 Copenhagen,
Denmark.
E-mail address: wolfcph@gmail.com (P. Wolf).
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.yebeh.2020.107191
1525-5050/© 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Fig. 1. Alfred Kubin (1877–1959).
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G. Krämer, P. Wolf / Epilepsy & Behavior 111 (2020) 107191
His only novel “The Other Side” [3] is a dystopian fantasy about
the decline of a dreamland created in central Asia by an immensely
rich man, Claus Patera. There, he has assembled a mixed population
of 65.000 inhabitants and constructed its capital Perle (Pearl) from
old and often decrepit buildings which he has found somewhere
in the world, bought, and had transported to Perle. Patera is a former schoolmate of the narrator, an illustrator living in Munich. He
has sent him a messenger who has urgently invited him together
with his wife to join Patera's community. A handsome sum of
money is provided as an incentive, and overcoming some hesitation, they accept the invitation and travel with trains and ships
over ten days to Samarkand. From there, a carriage drawn by a
camel gets them into the dreamland which is surrounded by a
thick wall and entered by a narrow tunnel. Inside the scenery is constantly covered by clouds and a gray sky. The sun is never seen.
There is no way back.
The inhabitants of Perle are a random mixture of diverse characters, including some rather dubious ones. They all continue with the
life that they have led outside, wearing old, often outmoded clothes.
The entire society is old-fashioned; progress and innovation are forbidden. The protagonist rapidly finds employment as a newspaper illustrator, makes acquaintances, and develops routines. But he has a
feeling that there are secrets underlying the life in the dreamland.
Rules seem to exist which everybody knows but remain obscure to
him. When he inquires, he is rapidly made to understand that he
has broken a taboo.
He finds out that there is a quasi-religious ceremony, the “Great
clock spell” which takes place in a chamber of the central clock tower.
People stand in front of a wall on which water streams down and say:
“Here I stand before you, Master!”
The Master is Patera, the protagonist's old school mate who has
brought him here but is impossible to access. Any attempt to get admission entangles in a jungle of offices with indifferent functionaries
making absurd requests like to see the father-in-law's vaccination
certificate.
In a subterranean labyrinth, a mad decrepit mare gallops past
him. He merely escapes and is “seized by a nervous shock. My tongue
became stiff and my body like a stone. When the seizure was over, I
dragged myself towards the light.” He finds himself in the coffeehouse where everybody looks exhausted and deranged. An elderly
gentleman explains him that he has for the first time experienced
the “clap”, one of Patera's epileptic seizures which are felt by
everybody.
By mere chance, the narrator finds Patera in his palace and confronts him with the misery of his creation. Patera's face in an ultrarapid sequence undergoes a hundred thousandfold permutation
through all possible types and expressions, including animals.
When it ends, he whispers “You see, I am the Master! I too have
been desperate, then I built a realm from the ruins of my properties.
I am the Master.”
“But are you happy?”
Here, Patera rises and stretches his arms. A curtain falls between the
two; stertorous breathing is heard behind it and a fall. The narrator is
seized by a rigid convulsion starting in the tongue and spreading to
the whole body. On the square under the window, all humans and animals for a moment become stiff like wood then move on. He returns to
his sick wife to learn that she also has had a seizure, “a kind of cerebral
convulsion”.
An enormously rich American, Herkules Bell, gets access to the
dreamland and starts an opposition. For a short period, everybody falls
asleep, and the city is invaded by hordes of wild animals. A Ragnarok develops where death, murder, and suicide are everywhere and all buildings molder. Patera and Bell in a final fight melt into each other. Russian
troops, called in by Bell, enter Perle in the hope of big booty but find nobody to defeat and nothing to rob. The sun shines, and the dreamland
disappears. The narrator miraculously escapes and convalesces in a
mental sanatorium.
Was the entire phantasmagoria, with everybody and everything in
it, nothing but a dream of epileptic Patera?
Fig. 2. Cover of the English translation of 1967 with the author's drawings.
Kubin has his roots in romanticism and the newest literary
trends of his time. His novel was received with much interest by
the contemporary avant-garde of arts and letters. It is considered
an early example of literary expressionism [4,5] and has
influenced the surrealists [6]. It was praised by Kafka whom Kubin
visited in Prague in September 1911 [7] and who incorporated
into “The Castle” elements of it [8,9] such as the incomprehensibly
obscure hierarchy of officials who prevent access to the governing
authorities and the protagonist's being a hopeless outsider. The
work has been analyzed under the aspects of Gothic or fantastic
art, biography, philosophy, style, politics, and others [2,5,6,8–10].
Amazingly, Patera's epilepsy, although by the author clearly
marked as a key element, has been totally neglected by literature
historians who seem to have found no clue what to do with it.
Why? Morbid psychic states including some related to epilepsy
are frequent objects of romantic, Gothic, and fantastic literature.
But to see the possibility that an entire novel could be the narrative
of a seizure experience is perhaps asking too much from a literature
historian.
G. Krämer, P. Wolf / Epilepsy & Behavior 111 (2020) 107191
2. Hermann Weyl, Der Epileptiker (The Epileptic, 1927)
Whereas Kubin was a featured artist of his epoch, Hermann Weyl
(1893–1960) was never well-known and almost completely forgotten
until one of us (G.K.) in an antiquarian catalog came across the title
“The Epileptic” [11]. Weyl was a German Jewish neuropsychiatrist
who practiced in Frankfurt and, being a Zionist, emigrated from Nazist
Germany in 1933, first to France and later to Argentina where he lived
until his death. His wife Ruth (1896–1971), a general practitioner
born in 1896, and their only son Wolfgang Leonard, born in 1921, stayed
in Frankfurt. Wolfgang escaped to London in 1939 and moved to Chicago where he studied medicine and practiced from 1946 to 1984
when he moved to Arlington, Virginia. Ruth survived the Nazist rule
and worked in Frankfurt until 1949 when she also moved to Chicago
and worked in a hospital. About Weyl's years in Argentina, we only
know that in 1956, he edited a multi-authored memorial book about
Moses Maimonides, the great medieval Jewish physician and philosopher [12].
The only literary text that he published seems to have been “Der
Epileptiker”. From its style, however, it is obvious that he had high
literary ambitions, was very well read and certainly familiar with
the literary avant-garde of his time, Kafka, Meyrink, the expressionist poets, his fellow Jewish physician-writer Alfred Döblin, and
Rilke.
“The Epileptic” is a story of only 35 pages organized in 13 chapters of
different lengths. Here is a resumé:
I. A man has a seizure on the road in a busy city. Satirical description of the reactions and behavior of the onlookers. An ambulance brings him to a mental asylum.
II. In the asylum in the countryside, he has a postictal psychosis
with cosmic hallucinations, a delusion of witnessing a new Creation, an experience of autoscopy. The language is now exalted,
sometimes dithyrambic (“He ecstatically spread his arms, of
clouds he tore wild gowns, brazen gestures he broke off mountains and draped them dreamily around his body”).
3
III. The psychosis continues. The epileptic (E) preaches to his fellow
patients. He escapes into the woods, is disoriented, preaches to
the wild animals, and has fantasies about the sacrifice of a child.
IV. He is missed and searched; satirical.
V. After the end of psychosis, E finds a village, wishes nothing but
peace. It is noticed that he is an eccentric. He becomes a workman for a rich old woman.
VI. As the village's scapegoat, he is abused and maltreated. – A young
widow in the village has often “seizures of slightly compromised
consciousness and difficulties to distinguish reality from dream”.
She believes that she has been elected for a divine conception and
gets pregnant with a foreigner whom she mistakes for the Angel
of Annunciation. When her pregnancy becomes apparent, she is
derided and offended by the village youths but E defends her.
VII. The village authorities take action to normalize the situation. The
couple is considered mentally retarded, they are registered as
married, and the village doctor becomes their warden.
VIII. The couple lives together in harmony, conversing about their
feelings. E's solicitousness. The doctor becomes aware of his asexuality.
IX. E indulges in a new mystical experience of merging with nature,
declared by the author as an epileptic experience. Exalted language like in the psychosis chapters.
X. Delivery of a stillbirth. The woman is not in her right mind, believes that she has given birth to the Savior, her fruit is with
God, and will return as the Messiah.
XI. The community accepts the legend and develops it further. The
attitude towards the woman is now one of respectful awe. She
moves to the doctor's house where she attends to wild flowers.
XII. After her recovery, the woman has forgotten everything that happened in recent years, recognizes nobody including E with whom
there is no contact any more. She feels escorted by the angel Uriel.
E is suspected of satanic, magic practices “because he often walks
talking to himself and may pause for minutes with wide open
eyes”. His prosecution by the villagers resumes, he is “hopelessly
stigmatized”.
Fig. 3. Cover and frontispiece of Weyl's “The Epileptic”.
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G. Krämer, P. Wolf / Epilepsy & Behavior 111 (2020) 107191
XIII. One morning, he has disappeared and is nowhere to be found.
After some weeks, the doctor receives a “cryptic letter” telling
that everything was accomplished, all pains had been transformed into bliss, and soon everybody would understand what
is essential. He had to wander and raise attention for the greater
one who would come later. “A reflection of the Divine hovers
above everything”, the letter says. In the villages, they observe a
crazy vagabond who rapturously preaches the end of the world.
E is found starved to death in a mountain shelter, with an enigmatically happy face. – The story's last 2 pages describe a grand
view that E has in the hour of his death: a cosmic apotheosis
with floods and flames, nothingness, a giant eye filling the entire
space. “Here I am, Father! But where are you?” A sea is filled with
bleeding human bodies. A last time he tries “to fathom what he
really was. At the end, he saw himself as the mysteriously abandoned who at some moment would disappear floating in space
without reaching an idea of what that was, space”.
Weyl's novella was printed by a small local publishing house of Bad
Ems in 50 copies and, to our knowledge, never received any echo either
in the literary or the medical world. We ignore whether he had tried to
find a renowned publisher for his work and how important this literary
attempt was for him who at the time practiced as a young neuropsychiatrist in Frankfurt, living with his wife and their six-year-old son. The
language of his work leaves no doubt that his literary ambitions were
high. When we disregard the vacillations between high style and satire
that reveal Weyl's inexperience as a writer, the text also is by no means
without literary merit but can be considered an interesting document of
German expressionist literature. Epilepsy for Weyl was a well-chosen
subject not only because it gave him the desired access to the realm of
the fantastic but also because his professionality enabled him to describe, with much expertise, features as diverse as postictal psychosis
and social stigmatization.
3. Similarities and differences
Written 18 years apart, both works can be considered to belong to
early 20th century's German literary avant-garde. Kubin's novel influenced his contemporaries Gustav Meyrink and Franz Kafka
whose influence in turn can be felt in Weyl. There is little doubt
that a person of Weyl's background and education was aware of
the well-known illustrator Kubin but we are ignorant if he also
knew the latter's novel. There are no obvious references to it in
“The Epileptic”, apart perhaps from the shared feature of standing
before an invisible Father or Master.
The protagonists in both works have no names. In Weyl's text, this
applies to everybody, in Kubin's only to the narrator, his wife, and
some inferior characters. This similarity, however, may be incidental.
The role of epilepsy in the two works is entirely different. For Weyl, seizures and their consequences drive the narrative; they are part of the
protagonist's story, occasionally expanding to a second person, the
young widow who also assumes traits of the Holy Virgin just as the protagonist reenacts traits of John the Baptist.
In contrast, for Kubin, Patera's epilepsy appears to be the solution of
the master mystery of the entire enigmatic plot. Everybody participates
in the seizure symptoms because everybody perhaps is nothing but a
product of an epileptic dreamy state.
However, both works have in common that they contributed to an
epilepsy tradition in fantastic literature which we will briefly review
in the following section.
4. Epilepsy and fantastic literature
Deviations from the normal, mental conditions, dreams and hallucinations, drug addiction, and morbid states of any kind traditionally are
cherished motifs of fantastic literature where they often provide the
basis for the plot. Epilepsy is one of them, and interestingly, there
sometimes seems to be some interrelation between works and artists. Thus, Kubin illustrated German translations of the stories of
Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) in three of which epilepsy (or catalepsy, at his time often used as a euphemistic synonym [13]) results
in premature burial: “Berenice”, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, and
“The Premature Burial” [14].
Gustav Meyrink (1888–1932) belonged to the Prague avant-garde
of the early 20th century where he was well-acquainted with Kubin.
His novel “The Golem” [15] appeared in 1915 but he had started to
write it much earlier. It was supposed to be illustrated by Kubin who,
thus, knew the early drafts. But Meyrink got stuck with the manuscript
whereas Kubin began to write “The Other Side”. For this, he not only
used the illustrations that he had made for “The Golem” but he also
got some inspiration from Meyrink's draft. Thus, features like the entire
story representing a complex dream or that houses appear as individuals with their own personalities go back to Meyrink who later took
“The Golem” up again and finished it. He included a minor satirical
epilepsy motif where the racketeers of Prague teach each other to act
epileptic seizures because the prison doctor has “a beastly respect” for
epilepsy and will send a prisoner who has it to the infirmary from
where it is easy to escape.
This scene is not indebted to Kubin but, rather, to Victor Hugo's
“Notre Dame de Paris” (1831, [16]) where some individuals in the
beggars' guild are specialized in acting epileptics. They are called
sabouleux because they use a piece of soap to foam convincingly from
the mouth. Hugo's also had inspired the gang of pickpockets in Charles
Dickens' “Oliver Twist” (1837/38, [17]) where we find another character with epilepsy, Oliver's half-brother, the wicked Monks who has
startle-induced seizures. There is, thus, a whole genealogy of literary
epilepsy.
Unrelated to these works but still in the realm of fantastic literature,
among the strange characters of “Titus Groan” (1946, [18]) by Mervin
Peake (1911–1968), there are the old twin spinsters Clarice and Cora
who in their youth had epileptic fits that left them “practically starved”
all down one side where their limbs are rather stiff and unusable. Only
they never agree on which side.
Russell Hoban's (1926–2011) “Riddley Walker” (1980, [19]) describes a dystopian England 2000 years after a nuclear catastrophe has
destroyed all civilization. Primitive rudiments of a society include
caricatures of offices like Prime Minister and Archbishop. The present
Archbishop was born without eyes and a face and has visions that
evolve into epileptic seizures – a reminiscence of epilepsy as the sacred
disease.
Eraldo Baldini (*1952) calls his novel “Come il lupo” (Like the wolf,
2006, [20]) a “rural gothic”. In a remote village in the Appeninian woods
where uncanny and mysterious things happen, an old matriarch with
epilepsy has prophetic gifts. Both qualities are inherited by her granddaughter who will probably become her successor.
Intracerebral depth electrodes for preoperative epilepsy diagnostics inspired Haruki Murakami (*1949) when in “Hard boiled wonderland and the end of the world” (1984, [21]), he created a scientist
who develops a method of perfectly safe encryption by inscribing a
master code into the neurons of cryptographers who are not aware
of it.
In a similar vein, the protagonist's temporal lobe seizures in science
fiction thriller “Improbable” (2005) by Adam Fawer (*1970) make him
for some scientists an ideal candidate, with the help of pharmaceuticals
to be turned into a clairvoyant [22]. Interestingly, and reminiscent of
Kubin and Meyrink, important parts of the story turn out to be some
characters' dreams.
In “The Last World” (1988, [23]), Christoph Ransmayr's (*1954)
stupendous variation on Ovid's metamorphoses that takes place in
Tomis (present day Constanta, one of the stops of Kubin's narrator on
his way to the dreamland) the epileptic boy Battus in an enigmatic metaphor [24] is transformed into a stone.
G. Krämer, P. Wolf / Epilepsy & Behavior 111 (2020) 107191
The works of Kubin and Weyl form, thus, integral parts of a sometimes rather lose, sometimes well-aware, impressive tradition of epilepsy in fantastic literature.
Declaration of competing interest
The authors have no competing interests to declare.
Funding
This article did not receive any funding.
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