1 All Becomes Movement and Life One late December morning in 1910, Hermann Rorschach, twenty-six years old, woke up early. He walked across the cold room and pushed the bedroom curtain aside, letting in the pale white light that comes before a late northern sunrise--not enough to wake his wife, just enough to reveal her face and the thick black hair spilling out from under their comforter. It had snowed in the night, as he''d thought it would. Lake Constance had been gray for weeks; the water''s blue was months away, but the world was beautiful like this, too, with no one in sight along the shore or on the little path in front of their tidy two-room apartment. The scene was not just empty of human movement but drained of color, like a penny postcard, a landscape in black and white. He lit his first cigarette of the morning, boiled some coffee, dressed, and left quietly as Olga slept. It was a busier week than usual at the clinic, with Christmas around the corner. There were only three doctors to look after four hundred patients, so he and the others were responsible for everything: staff meetings, visiting the patients on twice-daily rounds, organizing special events.
Still, Rorschach let himself enjoy the morning''s solitary walk through the clinic grounds. The notebook he always carried with him stayed in his pocket. It was cold, though nothing compared to the Christmas he''d spent in Moscow four years earlier. Rorschach was especially looking forward to the holiday this year: he and Olga were reunited, they would be sharing a tree as husband and wife for the first time. The clinic celebration would be on the twenty-third; on the twenty-fourth, the doctors would carry a small tree lit with candles from one building to another, for the patients who couldn''t join in the communal ceremony. On the twenty-fifth the Rorschachs would be free to go back to his childhood home and pay a visit to his stepmother. This he tried to put out of his mind. Christmas season at the asylum meant group singing three times a week, and dance classes run by a male nurse who played a guitar, a harmonica, and a triangle with his foot, all at the same time.
Rorschach didn''t like to dance, but for Olga''s sake he forced himself to take lessons. One Christmastime duty he truly enjoyed was directing the holiday plays. They were staging three this year, including one with projected images--photographs of landscapes and people from the clinic. What a surprise it would be for the patients to suddenly see faces they knew on the screen, larger than life. Many of the patients were too far gone to thank their relatives for Christmas presents, so Rorschach wrote little notes on their behalf, sometimes fifteen a day. On the whole, though, his patients liked the holidays as much as their troubled souls allowed. Rorschach''s adviser used to tell the story of a patient so dangerous and unruly she had been kept in a cell for years. Her hostility was understandable in the restrictive, coercive clinical environment, but when she was taken to a Christmas celebration she behaved perfectly, reciting the poems she had memorized especially for January 2, Berchtold Day.
Two weeks later she was released. He tried to apply his teacher''s lessons here. He took photos of his patients, not only for his own sake and for the patient files, but because they liked posing for the camera. He gave them art supplies: pencil and paper, papier-m'ché, modeling clay. As Rorschach''s feet crunched the snow on the clinic''s grounds, his thoughts on new ways to give his patients something to enjoy, he would naturally have mused on the holidays of his own childhood and the games he had played then: sled races, Capture the Castle, Hare and Hounds, Hide and Seek, and the game where you spill some ink on a sheet of paper, fold it in half, and see what it looks like. Hermann Rorschach was born in November of 1884, a light-bringing year. The Statue of Liberty, officially titled Liberty Enlightening the World, was presented to the US ambassador in Paris on America''s Independence Day. Temesvár in Austria-Hungary became the first city in continental Europe with electric streetlights, put up not long after those in Newcastle, England, and Wabash, Indiana.
George Eastman patented the first workable roll of photographic film, which would soon let anyone make pictures with "the Pencil of Nature" by capturing light itself. Those years, of early photography and primitive movies, are probably the hardest era in history for us, today, to see: in our mind''s eye, everything then looks stiff and rickety, black and white. But Zurich, where Rorschach was born, was a modern, dynamic city, the largest in Switzerland. Its railway station dates from 1871, the famous main shopping street from 1867, the quays along the Limmat River from midcentury. And November in Zurich is shocks of orange and yellow under a gray sky: oak and elm leaves, fire-red maples rustling in the wind. Back then, too, the people of Zurich lived under pale blue skies, hiked through bright alpine meadows dotted with deep blue gentian and edelweiss. Rorschach was not born where his family had been rooted for centuries: Arbon, a town on Lake Constance some fifty miles east. A small town called Rorschach is four miles past Arbon down the coast of the lake, and that must have been the family''s place of origin, but the Rorschachs could trace their ancestors in Arbon back to 1437, and the history of the "Roschachs" there reaches back another thousand years, to a.
d. 496. This was not so unusual in a place where people stayed put for generations, where you were a citizen of your canton (state) and city as well as country. A few ancestors roamed--one great-great-uncle Hans Jakob Roschach (1764-1837), known as "the Lisboner," made it as far as Portugal, where he worked as a designer and perhaps created some of the mesmerizing, repeating patterns for the tiles that cover the capital city. But it was Hermann''s parents who truly broke away. Hermann''s father, Ulrich, a painter, was born on April 11, 1853, twelve days after another future painter, Vincent van Gogh. The son of a weaver, Ulrich left home at age fifteen to study art in Germany, traveling as far as the Netherlands. He returned to Arbon to open a painter''s studio and in 1882 married a woman named Philippine Wiedenkeller (born February 9, 1854), from a line of carpenters and boatmen with a long history of marrying Rorschachs.
The couple''s first child, Klara, born in 1883, died at six weeks old, and Philippine''s twin sister died four months later. After these hard blows the couple sold the studio and moved to Zurich, where Ulrich enrolled at the School of Applied Arts in the fall of 1884. For Ulrich to move to the city at age thirty-one, with no stable income, was unusual in staid Switzerland, but he and Philippine must have been eager to have their next child in happier surroundings. Hermann was born at 278 Haldenstrasse, in Wiedikon (Zurich), at 10 p.m. on November 8. Ulrich did well in art school and got a good job as a middle school drawing and painting teacher in Schaffhausen, a city some thirty miles north. By Hermann''s second birthday, the family was settled where he would grow up.
Schaffhausen is a small, picturesque city full of Renaissance buildings and fountains, situated on the Rhine, the river that forms the northern border of Switzerland. "On the banks of the Rhine, meadows alternate with forests whose trees are reflected, dreamlike, in the dark green water," says a guidebook from the time. House numbers had not been introduced yet, so each building had a name--the Palm Branch, the Knight''s House, the Fountain--and distinctive decorations: stone lions, painted facades, bay windows jutting out like giant cuckoo clocks, gargoyles, cupids. The city was not stuck in the past. The Munot, an imposing circular fortress on a vineyard-covered hill with a moat and a grand view, dating from the sixteenth century, had been restored for tourism in the nineteenth. The railroad had arrived, and a new electricity plant was exploiting the river''s plentiful water power. The Rhine poured out of Lake Constance at the Rhine Falls nearby, low but wide enough to be the largest waterfall in Europe. The English painter J.
M. W. Turner drew and painted the falls for forty years, showing the water massive like a mountain and the mountains themselves dissolving in whirlpools of paint and light; Mary Shelley described standing on the lowest platform while "the spray fell thickly on us . looking up, we saw wave, and rock, and cloud, and the clear heavens through its glittering ever-moving veil. This was a new sight, exceeding anything I had ever before seen." As the guidebook put it: "A heavy mountain of water hurls itself at you like a dark fate; it plummets, and all that was solid becomes movement and life." After Hermann''s sister Anna was born in Schaffhausen, on August 10, 1888, the growing family rented a new house on the Geissberg, a steep twenty-minute hike uphill out of town to the west, where Hermann''s brother, Paul, would be born (December 10, 1891). The house was roomier, with larger windows and a mansard roof, more French ch'teau than Swiss chalet, and with forests and fields to explore nearby.
The landlord''s children became Hermann''s playmates. Inspired by James Fenimore Cooper''s Leatherstocking adventures, they played Pioneers and Indians, with Hermann and his friends slinking through the trees around a nearby gravel quarry and making off with Anna, the only "white woman" they had. This was the setting of the children''s happiest memories. Hermann liked to listen to the roar of the ocean he had never seen, in a seashe.