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removed; i felt like a Nietzschean master, not answerable to anyone, beyond
good and evil. i stood there and observed all the terrible events around me
with
the same cool attentiveness with which one follows a fascinating physics experi-
ment.
. . . Then, equally suddenly, this abnormal state disappeared and made
way for my prior self.
44
Baelz reminds us of one filter through which Europeans experienced earth-
quakes in these years: a Nietzschean naturalism, according to which disas-
ters would suspend everyday ethics and confer survival on the fittest. Baelz's
“Nietzschean master” was clear-thinking and devoid of human sympathy. it
was a new twist on the seismological fantasy of immanuel Kant: the earth-
quake emptied of human content and reduced to a “fascinating physics
experiment.” Oddly, though, Baelz suggested that this attitude was not a
scientific ideal but a spontaneous reflex.
Baelz's state of mind during the earthquake was diagnosed by one psy-
chiatrist as “manic”: “the different valuation of the associations under nor-
mal conditions is overridden by the excitement; the sanguine emotional
state and the acceleration of thought, the elevated sense of self corresponded
to the manic symptom complex.”
45
Another psychiatrist, Eduard stierlin,
who had studied psychic reactions to earthquakes and mining accidents,
considered Baelz's experience to be common: namely, “a total elimina-
tion of all sense of value” in the face of catastrophe. stierlin speculated
that the emotional response was “only 'repressed'”—and likely to return
in nightmares or neurotic symptoms. From this perspective, Baelz was not
so different from those earthquake survivors who succumbed to traumatic
hysteria. stierlin quoted Hippolyte Bernheim's opinion that everyone is, to
a degree, hysterical. indeed, hysterics had often been known to display a
certain stoicism in the face of crises—their “emotivity was weakened rather
than strengthened.”
46
What emerged from this analysis was the unexpected
difficulty of distinguishing between an attitude of scientific objectivity and
the symptoms of traumatic hysteria.
47
By the 1920s, the American physiologist Walter Cannon was studying fear
as a reaction of the sympathetic nervous system: a physiological response
to a hostile environment that produced, along with a faster metabolic rate,
heightened mental acuity.
48
Among physiologists and psychiatrists studying
humans under such extreme conditions, one story in particular came to be
cited frequently. it was not an account of earthquake, for its author never ex-
perienced a major temblor—though he dedicated much of his life to study-
ing them. it was, rather, the tale of an 1871 mountaineering fall that nearly
cost Albert Heim his life. in a lecture to the swiss Alpine Club in 1892
