The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

A Short History of
Dunkelblau’s Meistergarten By Tad Williams

One of the more unusual education devices ever designed was the Meistergarten of Ernst Dunkelblau, the “Pedagogue of Linz.” When it was first presented to the public in 1905, it was called “The Eighth Wonder of the World” by some newspapers of the day, “The Devil’s Carousel” by others. All agreed, however, that its like had never been seen before.

“It resembles a Lazy Susan,” commented a reporter for America’s New York World, “but instead of spinning to present dishes to be served, its revolutionary motion is meant to deliver children to Scholarship.”

The Inventor: Ernst A. Dunkelblau

Little can be understood of either the Meistergarten or its products without first examining the life of its creator, Ernst Adelbert Dunkelblau.

Dunkelblau was born in a suburb of Linz, Austria, in 1859. His father was one of the engineers who designed and built the first iron bridge over the Danube, but his mother, Heilwig, had even bigger plans for her only child, and from a very early age little Ernst was given the benefit of her fascination with childhood learning. The acknowledged star of European education at the time was Friedrich Fröbel, famous for his ideas of the kindergarten—a place where children would learn through play. Frau Dunkelblau, however, was a stern woman who felt that the currently fashionable dogma was totally reversed—that children should learn by suffering, not play. She developed her own method, which she called “Arbeit und Verletzung,” or “Work and Injury,” and employed it along with a very ambitious curriculum for her infant son, which she had determined would prepare him to enter a good Austrian university by the time he was twelve years old. In fact, Ernst Dunkelblau was accepted to the Karl-Franzens-Universität, better known today as the University of Graz, at the prodigious age of ten.

Young Dunkelblau never graduated from the university, however. Rumors of the day linked him to a scandal with a much older woman, the wife of a university custodian, who claimed that young Dunkelblau offered her a florin to “nap upon her bosom.” Accounts subsequent to his death suggest that Dunkelblau never entirely overcame this troubling propensity for offering money to women not of his own family; in later years the significance of this weakness became so divisive among European Freudians that there were violent differences of opinion about it—indeed, there are reports of a famous fight in a London café between Otto Rank and Melanie Klein, in which Klein was said to have slapped Rank so hard and so often that he was led away weeping and for weeks would only see patients with a scarf draped over his face.

Much of Ernst Dunkelblau’s personal history between the years of 1871 and 1899 is hazy, little more than rumor and innuendo. It is known that he served briefly in the Austro-Hungarian army as a telegrapher, but was discharged because so many of his messages contained interpolated phrases such as “Ernst is scared,” “sleepy dumplings,” or simply the word “Mutti” (“Mommy”) typed over and over, none of which bore any relationship to the military messages young Dunkelblau had been tasked with sending.

Apparently, he also found time during these years to finish his education, graduating from a small university in Triesen, Liechtenstein, called the Todkrank-Igil Institute. Little more is known, because the university was subsequently burned to the ground by local villagers and its records lost.

Many of Dunkelblau’s later experiments in pedagogy, including the famous Meistergarten, seem to have roots in his Liechtenstein student period, because his adult writings on the subject of educational psychology frequently contain phrases, such as “two-schilling Vaduz Mustache” and “bloody Triesen pitchforks ouch ouch,” which seem to trace to this time.

However, with 1899 and his return to Linz, we see the triumphant execution of designs and ideas that had obviously been building in Dunkelblau’s mind for some time, culminating that year in the opening of the St. Agnes Blannbekin Private School for Boys and Girls, an institute under Dunkelblau’s personal supervision. The doctor was described by one of the school’s first students as “a great, smiling, bearded Father Christmas of a man” and “a performing bear, quick to growl, quick to eat off the plates of others, but also swift with a booming laugh or a sudden storm of tears caused by the frustrations of his work.”

In 1905, after some period of experimentation with mechanical equipment and the selection of a first set of human test subjects, Dunkelblau unveiled his magnum opus to the Austrian and international press: the Meistergarten.

John Coulthart’s painstaking reconstruction of the Meistergarten.

The Meistergarten

The machine itself was described in a subsequent legal deposition by a lawyer for the family of one of the children:

It was the size of a very small fairground ride, and, in fact, bore much of the appearance of a children’s carousel, being circular, a little less than three meters in diameter, and profusely decorated in the very ornamented style of the time with baroque leaves and vines. At the center, a bit larger than the human original it sought to emulate, was the bronze head that contained the speaking tube and the audio tubes and various other bits of the mechanism that would allow it to interact with the youthful subjects.

The machine itself (although most of the gears and tubes were hidden from view by the panels on the outside of the Meistergarten) was designed as both a teaching resource and a self-contained supply of everything by way of health and nurture that the child subjects would need. The bronze head that took pride of place at the center of the Meistergarten, perched much as a bride and groom might stand in the middle of a wedding cake, was created in the image of a classical sculpture of a goddess, but with a hinged jaw and small lightbulbs behind the isinglass of the eyes. It would turn on a swivel to listen or speak to the children in turn. A correct answer would solicit a mechanical smile (signaled by a grinding noise as the jaws rubbed together) and various invisible caresses on the student’s unprotected skin within the body of the machine. A wrong answer would cause the automaton’s eyes to flash red and its mouth to gape widely as it gave forth a loud klaxon that some observers called “horrifying,” but Doktor Dunkelblau called “usefully arresting.”

Other facilities for the better promotion of learning had been built into the Meistergarten but were not immediately revealed by the staff of the St. Agnes Blannbekin school.

The Subjects

“Die Berühmten Fünf,” or “The Famous Five,” as the first child subjects were known, had been handpicked by Dunkelblau himself because he felt they would be “uniquely susceptible” to this new kind of learning, which he sometimes referred to as his “Automatische Super-Mama,” but more often as simply “The System.”

The names of these first volunteers, or at least the names by which they were known in the literature surrounding the experiment, were:

Trudl K., 7 years old, from Linz

Wouter S., 9 years old, from Passau

Franz F., 8 years old, from Linz

Helga W., 8 years old, from Scherding

Lorenz D., 7 years old, from Radstadt

These students (or, rather, their parents) had agreed that they would spend at least the next three years as part of Dunkelblau’s experiment—joined to the apparatus, with all their needs satisfied by the machine while they received the most complete and thorough education of any human child ever. Or so was Dunkelblau’s assertion; the results of his groundbreaking experiment and the value of his data are still in dispute to this very day.

Some later researchers have claimed that Ernst Dunkelblau chose his subjects by nonstandard criteria that included “interesting distress noises,” “shape of feet and nose,” and, in one case, that of Helga W., because the young girl had “a tantalizingly brilliant future in Music or the Arts,” epitomized by her singing voice and early grace at the Austrian Boarischer, the polka, and other folk dances.

The Experiment

The name of Dunkelblau’s invention, Der Meistergarten, was a play on Fröber’s famous “kindergarten”—a children’s garden. Ernst Dunkelblau, though, did not plan simply to educate children, but to create “masters,” students who would be superior to ordinary children in every way, as Dunkelblau had felt himself to be.

“I was a nightingale in a cage full of croaking ravens” is how he once described his time at the University of Graz. “My little, sweet, and sensible voice could not be heard above the cacophonous din of the other so-called scholars. . . .”

So it was that the Famous Five were “assigned to the System,” in Dunkelblau’s phrase, in September 1905 at his school in Linz. Completely immobilized by machinery from the neck down, the children were catheterized for waste disposal and fitted with feeding tubes that periodically pumped meals (a slurry of oats, root vegetables, and some meat products) directly into their stomachs. The inside of the Meistergarten device also contained a number of specialty appendages, which were not displayed to the children, capable of administering to their hidden bodies comforting pats and caresses as well as pinches and slaps.

The Meistergarten was then closed and the neck-rings sealed, so that all that could be seen of the subjects were their heads, all facing in toward the center of the circular Meistergarten, which was set in an otherwise empty, mirrored hall specially prepared by Dunkelblau at the St. Agnes Blannbekin school. Observers watched the experiment from behind the one-way mirrors lining the large room. From that moment on, the subjects had no other direct human contact. The machinery of the Meistergarten itself was serviced during the subjects’ sleeping period by silent custodial workers and mechanics dressed in black robes and hoods. If the children seemed restless on service nights, a mixture of nitrous oxide and chloroform was pumped into the System Hall so that they would not be unduly bothered by the presence of the dark figures.

From the moment of their introduction into the Meistergarten until their release, the subjects interacted only with the bronze head at the center of the machine, nicknamed Minerva. In an effort not to confuse the subjects with old associations, Dunkelblau decided against an overly sympathetic “female presence” for his invention: at the last moment, he cancelled a contract with well-known stage actress Lottelore Eisenbaum, who would have contributed Minerva’s voice, and took on the role himself, speaking to the students in a strained, falsetto, “female” voice with as little emotional inflection as possible, attempting to create what he called “a true Machine Mother Sound.” One of his research assistants said that twenty years later she still “woke up wailing and weeping” after dreaming of the Minerva voice.

The children were roused from sleep each morning by the sound of Minerva’s wake-up call, a loud, ratcheting shriek based on Dunkelblau’s idea that, of all noises, the most perfect focus of attention could be created by the sound of an industrial accident coupled with an expression of human terror. After the previous night’s meal had been pumped out of their system and a new meal pumped in, the students began a long and rigorous day of history, mathematics, natural sciences, Greek and Latin, and some unusual coursework of Dunkelblau’s own devising, including Lesion Studies, Practical Engorgement, and Social Attack Theory. They were taught by the rote method, instructed by “Minerva” (in reality, Dunkelblau, of course, watching from the far side of a one-way mirror and speaking into a tube) and immediately corrected for each error on a rising scale of reprisal that began at “Lightly Bruising Pinch with Flashing Eyes” and peaked at “Flare, Shriek, and Scourge” (at which point, the subject usually had to be sedated for at least twenty-four hours to allow recovery and what Dunkelblau termed “deeper learning”).

Correct answers received praise from “Minerva” and sometimes also the singing of a verse of “Hejo, Spann den Wagen an,” one of Dunkelblau’s favorite songs from his childhood:

Hey ho! Hitch up the cart,

For the wind brings rain over the land.

Fetch the golden sheaves,

Fetch the golden sheaves . . .

The student who answered Minerva correctly was also rewarded by the activation of certain bladders within the machinery that, when inflated, gave a pleasurable sensation.

Problems

The first real controversy about Dunkelblau’s experiment came in December 1905, when the parents of Trudl K. asked that their daughter be released from the System for the Christmas holidays and were refused. They were denied a similar request at Easter as well. In her unhappy missive to the doctor, Frau K. wrote, “Our daughter’s letters appear to be written by someone other than our daughter. The last three have all said exactly the same thing, ‘Do not come visit—it will interrupt the important work we are doing here, work that will forever confound the servile devotees of that ape Fröbel and his “Child-Garden”!’ We find it hard to believe,” Mrs. K continued, “that our daughter cares greatly about Friedrich Fröbel, who died almost a half century before she was born, and we have also heard disquieting rumors from neighbors of the St. Agnes school that children can be heard throughout the day and night, moaning, weeping, and even barking like distressed dogs. . . .”

A year later her parents were given permission by the Bildungsministerium, the Austrian educational authority, to remove their daughter from Dunkelblau’s machine. Perhaps piqued by their withdrawal from the experiment, Herr Doktor Dunkelblau ordered that Trudl be delivered to her parents’ house at night in a device he called an “Egress Chrysalis,” which the K. family claimed was little more than a conventional straitjacket augmented with a canvas sack over the patient’s head.

Schooling continued for the other four subjects despite some odd malfunctions from the Meistergarten, in which Minerva continued to speak as though the missing child was still part of the experiment and would even dole out stinging electrical shocks to the remaining subjects for “teasing poor little Trudl.”

The End of the Experiment

The remaining four children all stayed in the Meistergarten for the duration of the planned three-year period, without parental interference. In fact, by the time the Meistergarten was opened and the students removed, the parents of Franz F. and Lorenz D. could not be easily located. The family of Franz F. proved to have moved to Swabia in Germany and at first maintained that they had no child. The D. family, still in Linz, did not deny young Lorenz was theirs, but argued that they had “sold” him to Dunkelblau and that, by giving him back, Dunkelblau was reneging on their agreement.

The scandal over Trudl K. had died down at last, but when little Franz F., now almost eleven years old and newly returned home, attacked and bit a postman so badly that the man nearly bled to death, the newspapers again picked up the story, many of them painting Dunkelblau as “irresponsible” and “unscientific.” Dunkelblau responded in a famous letter to the editor of the Linzer Volksblatt, stating “the hounds of Conventionality can sniff my arse to their hearts’ content—all they will discover is the scent of Genius leaving them far behind!”

The Aftermath

Ernst A. Dunkelblau never published his results of his experiment, claiming that “the general population is not capable of understanding the sublime heights of Truth we have scaled here.” In later years, the St. Agnes Blannbekin school was closed by the Linz authorities. A special squadron of Bundesheer troops took away the Meistergarten itself, which had fallen into disrepair—the head of Minerva was currently being used by the school as a gramophone horn for folk-dancing practice—but the final disposition of the rest of the famous device is unknown. The Minerva head was reportedly displayed in a 1938 British auction house catalog, listed as “macabre pseudo-classical ash tray,” but its current whereabouts are also a mystery.

Dunkelblau himself died in Linz in 1932, in the Altstadt apartment of a “working woman,” murdered by parties unknown. At the time of his death by strangulation, the doctor was dressed in the costume of a nineteenth-century schoolboy, complete with rucksack (which, for some reason, was stuffed full of boiled eggplant) and a false mustache. The false mustache was a particularly odd detail, because it was smaller than the doctor’s own mustache, over which it had been affixed.

The Lives of the “Famous Five”

TRUDL K.: After she was removed from the Meistergarten and the school, little is known about this subject. In the 1920s, when Dunkelblau was much in the news, various stories appeared in the newspapers to suggest she had become a (not very successful) music-hall performer or acrobat in Vienna. None of this was ever proved, although to this day, in Austria, a street mime is still called a “Shrieking Trudl.” When she died in 1948 in a Graz hospital, her obituary noted only that she had “been part of a famous educational experiment, and later married a Polish animal trainer.”

FRANZ F.: Although best known for his attack on a postman in 1908, Franz F. had perhaps the most unusual history of any of the Meistergarten subjects. When the Great War began, he enlisted under an assumed name in the Austro-Hungarian army and rose through the ranks by dint of almost heedless courage under fire. He was nicknamed Der Werwolf by his comrades and reputedly crossed no-man’s-land every night to bedevil the enemy, dressed only in a kilt made from the scalps of his victims. In fact, a vast collection of body parts in glass jars, known as “Franz’s Toys,” is reportedly still hidden in a back room of the Museum of Military History in Vienna. After the war, Franz F. disappeared from public view, although a few historians insist he was eventually hunted down and killed in the Bohemian Forest by a specially trained team of Austrian police led by an American Cherokee Indian tracker, William First Bear.

LORENZ D., described by Dunkelblau as “a quiet, unassuming child,” never spoke a distinguishable word after being part of the Meistergarten system, although he sang wordlessly and laughed and even screamed without visible cause for the rest of his life. He was institutionalized in 1916 and began to paint, primarily “huge, barren landscapes peopled by burning mice and human-headed octopuses,” as a nurse described them. He also climbed walls with great skill, and was often to be found by his caretakers curled up in the institution’s overhead light fixtures, asleep. Lorenz D.’s family never questioned their own judgement in letting him be part of Dunkelblau’s experiment, and described those who criticized their choice as “pitiful” and “jealous,” despite their own lack of interest in visiting Lorenz after he was institutionalized.

HELGA W., whose “brilliant future” in the arts never materialized, nevertheless did become a performer of sorts. Witnesses in the 1930s identified her as the “Hard-Boiled Egg Woman” in Berlin’s infamous Der Eigenartige Wandschrank club, who was said to be able to fling an egg fifteen meters with her reproductive parts while leading the crowd in singing “Wir Wollen Alle Kinder Sein!”

WOUTER K., the most materially successful of the doctor’s subjects, founded a number of private hospitals for the care of “difficult children” (which, some alleged, were merely “holding cells” for the unwanted offspring of the wealthy) and then funneled the profits into the manufacture of chemical agents such as mustard gas, which was banned after the Great War by all sides but still bought and stockpiled by many nations for years after, so that Wouter K. became known in international military circles as “Meister Senf,” or “Mister Mustard.” Soon his factories were making many other kinds of poisons as well, and his scientists are linked to the discovery of the infamous G-series poison gases, including sarin, tabun, and cyclosarin. Wouter K. made millions but used the money primarily to shield himself from the public eye, and was not heard from again until he issued the following “proclamation” to the world’s leading newspapers in early 1939:

The work of Doktor Adelbert Dunkelblau has been much maligned in the international press, especially by those whose minds are too small to understand his vision. What his work proved was not that the Meistergarten was unworkable, or a “crackpot” scheme, as some have termed it, but simply that the experimental sample was too small. I was one of five subjects, and I have become one of the world’s most successful and richest men. Surely a success rate of twenty percent is not to be mocked, especially with a discovery that will literally change the world. A generation of supermen is a goal that no one can fault, and I will provide the first seeds for that wondrous human accomplishment. Twenty percent. It is something to think about—something to thrill the human soul!

I have purchased a quantity of land—no one will know where!—and on that site I shall build Dunkelblau’s Meistergarten anew. But instead of five, I shall commit five hundred or even five thousand subjects to the test (there are orphanages the world over that will happily contribute their superfluity), and from these humble materials will our first generation of “Meistermenschen” be born. But unlike the clownish National Socialists of the current German government, our gifted ones will not reveal themselves, let alone brag of their superiority, but instead they will turn around and create newer, larger generations of others like them, until one day we shall emerge from the wild places where we have hidden ourselves and take our true place as leaders of a fallen, but not entirely hopeless, world. Be warned! On that day, everything will change.

It was rumored in some circles that throughout the 1920s and 1930s “Wouter K.” secretly bought extensive tracts of land in the largely unexplored Chaco Boreal region on the border between Paraguay and Bolivia. Others claim his major holdings were uninhabited volcanic islands in the South Atlantic and Southern Ocean. In either case, to this day, nothing definitive has ever been heard of the last Dunkelblau test subject, and although a few businesses with the name “Meistergarten” have shown up in international registries from places as distantly separated as Franz Joseph Land in the Arctic and Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, no sign of the promised “first generation of Meistermenschen” has yet been seen. However, it is clear that even at this late date, the book on Dunkelblau’s experiment cannot quite be closed for good.