Джефф Вандермеер - The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities

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.