Gustav Mesmer (1903–1994) was a German inventor of experimental human-powered flying machines, often referred to in the press as "the Icarus of Lautertal." He has been championed by curators as an outsider artist, while his theories about improving aerodynamics through wing and sail piercings have been of interest to scientists.
Biography Born in Altshausen, Germany, on 16 January 1903, Gustav Mesmer was the sixth of 12 children. His schooling was cut short by the First World War, and at the age of 11 he began to work as a hired hand on various farms. Later, while working in the Untermarchtel monastery he was inspired by a Vincentian Sister to enter the Benedictine Order. He spent six years at the Benedictine monastery at Beuron, where he was known as Brother Alexander, but left shortly before taking his final vows. Mesmer returned to Altshausen, where he lived with his parents and (in 1928) apprenticed himself to a carpenter. The following year, on 17 March, he disrupted a communion ceremony in the Altshausen church with a statement to the effect that it wasn't the blood of Christ that the churchgoers were being given, and that the whole ceremony was a fraud. He was forcibly removed from the church and taken back to his parents' house. The Mesmers’ family doctor considered his behavior a sign of mental illness of some kind and feared he might harm himself or others. Consequently, Mesmer was committed to the Bad Schussenried mental home with a diagnosis of schizophrenia of the paranoid type. Mesmer wrote his family asking for their support in having him quickly released, but he received no answer because the Bad Schussenried administrators were not passing his letters on to the family. Frustrated, he broke out of Bad Schussenried and returned to Altshausen. His family didn't want him there, however, and sent him back. Over the years that followed, Mesmer continued to write his family expressing his wish to lead a normal life outside the mental home, and he broke out of the home many times. The Bad Schussenried staff considered his ideas about living a normal life delusional and did not take them seriously. Mesmer was to spend a total of 35 years in mental institutions before finally being released in 1964. In January 1934, a new “Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases” came into force in Germany. This was the National Socialists’ first step toward the extermination of mental patients. At Bad Schussenried, many patients due to be discharged underwent forced sterilization; Mesmer was spared only because there was no intention of releasing him anytime soon. When the Second World War broke out, Bad Schussenried became a transit station on the route used to send people to be killed in the gas chambers of Grafeneck, itself a former mental institution. Mesmer was not put on any of the transport lists because he was considered useful as a hard worker. In 1949, at his own request, he was transferred to the Weissenau Psychiatric Hospital near Altshausen. In Weissenau, Mesmer was granted greater freedom and slowly began to gain some recognition for his talent as an inventor. He still wanted to be released; his ambition was to open a basket weaver's shop and start a family. In 1962 he wrote an autobiography with the title Of One Who Spent Part of His Life in a Monastery and Part in a Psychiatric Institution. In 1964, Mesmer was released from Weissenau at the behest of relatives in Rottenburg. He moved to an old people's home in Buttenhausen, where he spent most of the remainder of his life. He died on Christmas Day 1994, at age 91.
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