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The Death of Anna Katharina Ehmer: A Case Study in Terminal Lucidity

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OMEGA, Vol. 68(1) 77-87, 2013-2014

THE DEATH OF ANNA KATHARINA EHMER:

A CASE STUDY IN TERMINAL LUCIDITY

MICHAEL NAHM, PH.D.

BRUCE GREYSON, M.D.
University of Virginia

ABSTRACT

Terminal lucidity, the unexpected return of mental clarity and memory

shortly before the death of patients suffering from severe psychiatric and
neurologic disorders, has raised the curiosity of numerous physicians and
laypersons in the past. However, this peculiar phenomenon has received little
attention in the recent decades. In previous publications, we have presented
overviews of cases of terminal lucidity in various neurologic and psychiatric
disorders. In this article, we highlight terminal lucidity in persons with mental
disabilities, and focus on one of the most remarkable cases that have been
reported. We provide biographical background information about the two
principal witnesses who reported this case. It concerns the death of Anna
Katharina Ehmer, a 26-year-old woman with severe mental disabilities who
lived in an institution for people with mental disorders, and who had allegedly
never spoken a single word during her life. Yet, she was reported to have sung
dying songs for a half hour before she died. The case was reported by the head
of this institution and by its chief physician. We consider it difficult to
evaluate the authenticity of the case definitively in retrospect. Nevertheless,
there are similar cases and a variety of other anomalous brain-related findings
we consider worth investigating. Studies into such anomalous cases might
improve our concepts of human brain functioning and of mental processing in
persons with mental disabilities, and might be of special value for the dying,
the bereaved, and caretakers.

77

Ó 2013, Baywood Publishing Co., Inc.

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78 / NAHM AND GREYSON

In previous publications we discussed the unexpected return of mental clarity and

memory shortly before the death of patients suffering from severe mental and
neurological disorders (Nahm, 2009; Nahm & Greyson, 2009; Nahm, Greyson,
Kelly, & Haraldsson, 2012). These cases were obtained from a literature survey of
the last 250 years supplemented by a number of recent cases that were related
to us in person. This unexpected return of mental clarity typically occurs in
the last minutes, hours, or days before the patient’s death. We referred to this
spontaneous symptom remission at the end of life as “terminal lucidity.” We found
case reports of terminally ill patients suffering from affective disorders, chronic
schizophrenia, meningitis, Alzheimer’s disease, strokes, brain abscesses, and
brain tumors. These cases included three reports of unexpected mental faculties
that had not been observed before in the dying patients, who suffered from lifelong
mental disabilities.
In the current article, we focus on this aspect of terminal lucidity. In particular,
we present a case study of one of the most intriguing cases of terminal lucid-
ity that we have found. We would like to bring this case to the awareness of
persons who work with the dying, and especially to those persons who work with
dying persons with mental disabilities. If similar cases of terminal lucidity could
be observed and documented, they might improve current models of mentation,
brain functioning, and human psychology, and might even provide clues to
enhance communication with persons with severe mental disabilities. The present
case concerns Anna Katharina Ehmer, who was usually referred to as Käthe.
Reportedly, she was a severely disabled woman who had never spoken a single
word during her entire life. Moreover, she was said to have suffered from repeated
and severe attacks of meningitis which were thought to have destroyed much of
the brain tissue required for intelligent reasoning. Yet, despite these very grave
diagnoses, Käthe allegedly sang dying songs in a very intelligible manner for
about half an hour before she died.
We start the description of this case by presenting biographical background
information about the two principal witnesses who reported this case, Friedrich
Happich and Wilhelm Wittneben. These authors referred to the dying of Käthe at
least seven times throughout several years. Subsequently, we present excerpts of
different publications in which Happich and Wittneben referred to Käthe’s death.
We conclude this article with considerations on the reported events.

THE LIFE AND WORK OF FRIEDRICH HAPPICH (1883–1951)

The life and work of Friedrich Happich has been described in detail in a
monograph by Schmerbach (2001), and additional information was obtained from
a memoir by Happich’s daughter (Trost, 1983). Happich was born on August 14,
1883, in a small town in Hessen in Germany. From 1905 to 1909, he studied
Protestant theology. After that, he held positions in the religious and educational
sectors and was employed in a leading position at the institution known as Hephata
 TERMINAL LUCIDITY / 79

in Schwalmstadt, Germany, on March 1, 1913. This institution held a hospital and

a facility for the care for people with mental deficiencies and disabilities. Happich
was responsible for the management and the pastoral duties of the latter. On April
21, 1913, he married Annemarie Natorp, a daughter of the noted neo-Kantian
philosopher Paul Natorp (1854–1924). After the director of the entire Hephata
institution died in 1923, Happich became his successor. Ten years later, he was
awarded an honorary doctorate by the Theological Faculty of the University of
Marburg for his multifaceted work and achievements.
Although Happich never joined the National Socialist Party, like many German
citizens in the early 1930s, he sympathized with the movement and their promised
prospect of a better future. However, he soon realized that the National Socialists’
positions moved toward directions he could no longer support. This included his
definitive rejection of euthanasia, although he, being worried about the increasing
number of people with mental disabilities in his institution and the lack of
financial resources to care for them, supported the agenda to sterilize them. After
he was appointed the principal of the German Protestant Church in the
administrative district of Kurhessen-Nassau in 1935, he frequently opposed the
plans that the National Socialists had for his organization. After the Second World
War, Happich became a pivotal figure in driving the reorganization of the German
Protestant Church. The major national organization of the Protestant Church
in Germany, the Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland (EKD) was founded in
Hephata in 1945, and several important conferences were held there in the
subsequent years. During his life, Happich wrote several treatises about his fields
of activity and on the history of Hephata (e.g., Happich, 1923, 1931, 1946). He
died on April 4, 1951 in Schwalmstadt, three days after his retirement.

THE LIFE AND WORK OF WILHELM WITTNEBEN (1881–1950)

Wilhelm Wittneben was the chief physician of the psychiatric institution of
Hephata. He was born on April 16, 1881, close to Hannover in Germany. After
finishing school in 1900, he studied theology for one semester, but turned to
studying medicine thereafter. He finished his studies in 1906 in Kiel, Germany,
and obtained his higher education entrance qualification with a dissertation on the
quality of different filter systems designed to purify drinking water (Wittneben,
1906). Wittneben then worked in a private sanatorium in a small town in Eastern
Germany. In 1910, he was employed at Hephata. He was specifically hired to
cover the field of psychiatry and he finished his training as a psychiatrist in
1912. His responsibilities covered the entire field of the care for the people with
mental illness and mental disabilities who lived in Hephata. He became the chief
physician of this area in 1913, the year Happich also started his career at Hephata
(Schmerback, 2001).
Like Happich, Wittneben was to lead a busy life in the coming decades. The
number of patients in his asylum increased from 341 in 1911 to 551 in 1929,
80 / NAHM AND GREYSON

rendering Hephata the largest psychiatric institution in the administrative district

of Kurhessen-Nassau (Wittneben, 1934). In collaboration with other physicians,
Wittneben developed a diagnostic method that was designed to determine and
to improve the mental status of mentally deficient children. For this purpose,
their fingertips were analyzed to detect deformations of their capillaries, which
Wittneben supposed to be present also in the capillaries of the brains of these
children, thus resulting in a corresponding mental deficiency. By administering
medicine to compensate for nutritional deficits, the growth patterns of the capil-
laries would improve and would lead to a corresponding improvement of the
mental state of the patients. He reported several successful cases (e.g., Wittneben,
1926, 1934). However, his approach was met with skepticism and did not prevail.
In the 1930s, Wittneben’s opinion regarding the health politics promoted by the
National Socialists matched that of Happich. Whereas he voted for the steriliza-
tion of mentally disabled or disturbed people, he rigorously opposed euthanasia
(Wittneben, 1934). Another field of his interest concerned ethics of sexuality
(Wittneben, 1935). When Wittneben retired in 1950, people of the region regarded
him as one of the most respected personalities of Hephata (Schmerbach, 2001,
p. 76). Like Happich, Wittneben died soon after his retirement.
To summarize, both Happich and Wittneben were well-known and highly
esteemed personalities of their time. We turn now to the death of Käthe as
presented by both of them.

THE DYING OF ANNA KATHARINA EHMER (1896–1922)

According to Wittneben (1934, p. 153), Anna Katharina Ehmer, or Käthe, was
born on May 30, 1895, and lived in Hephata from June 17, 1901, until she died
there on March 1, 1922. One of us (M. N.) attempted to verify these data and tried
to collect material from the archives of Hephata that might contain additional
information about her life and death in addition to what is known from the
publications of Happich and Wittneben. The data provided by Wittneben were
confirmed by handwritten notes both in the Totenbuch [Book of the Deceased] and
the Hauptliste der schwachsinnigen Zöglinge [Main List of the Mentally Deficient
Inhabitants] for the relevant years. In addition, it was found that Käthe’s parents, a
tailor named Hermann Ehmer and his wife Christine, lived in Kassel, a town about
50 kilometers from Hephata. We could not find additional contemporary infor-
mation about Käthe. Nevertheless, it is certain that she had indeed lived and died at
Hephata at the time that Wittneben had reported.
To our knowledge, Happich and Wittneben described the events on Käthe’s
deathbed at least five times independently of each other, but in practically identical
terms. Moreover, they seemed to have referred to her death on two more occasions
in a more indirect way without giving her name and details of her death. In
chronological order of the date of their original publication, these seven sources
comprise the following publications:
 TERMINAL LUCIDITY / 81

1. Wittneben (1926). This paper by Wittneben in the Zeitschrift für

Kinderforschung [Journal for the Study of Children], a German medical
journal, represents the first of the two indirect mentions of Käthe’s death.
2. Stritter (1930). This source is a book chapter dealing with pastoral care for
persons with mental deficiencies, disorders, and disabilities. In it, its author
Paul Stritter described the case of Käthe as it was presented by Happich at a
conference. Stritter did not give further details regarding the date and the
topic of this conference.
3. Schick (1942). This author included the same text as Stritter (1930) in
his book, but retrieved it from an unspecified periodical. Schick wrote that
Happich had published the text “several years ago” under the heading
“Wenn der gebundene Geist frei wird” [“When the bound spirit becomes
free”] (p. 57). It seems likely that Happich’s original article in this periodical
was published around 1930 as well, perhaps in the context of the afore-
mentioned conference.
4. Trost (1983). In her memoir on her father, Margarete Trost has included
an excerpt of a talk that Happich had given on November 25, 1932, in
Kassel for the Arbeitsgemeinschaft für eugenische Fragen [Working
Group for Eugenic Questions]. This was the second indirect reference to
Käthe’s death.
5. Ringger (1958). This author reprinted an essay by Happich that was
originally written in 1934. It contained a description of Käthe’s death and a
second case of terminal lucidity in a patient with a pronounced mental
deficiency.
6. Wittneben (1934). Here, Wittneben commented on terminal lucidity in
another German medical journal, the influential Geistekrankenpflege
[Care for the Mentally Ill]. (For more information about this journal,
see McFarland-Icke, 1999). This time, Wittneben described details of
Käthe’s death.
7. Roesermueller (1951). This small book about unusual phenomena at the
hour of death contained a letter by Wittneben, presumably written to
Roesermueller himself, in which Wittneben again briefly described Käthe’s
death. The letter was not contained in the first edition of Roesermueller’s
book, published in 1935. Therefore, Wittneben must have written this
letter in, or most likely after, 1935.

In the following section of this article, we describe the case of Käthe in

more detail based on the above-mentioned sources. Happich characterized her
personality as follows:
Käthe was among the patients with the most severe mental disabilities who
have ever lived in our institution. From birth on, she was seriously retarded.
She had never learned to speak a single word. She stared for hours on a
particular spot, then she fidgeted for hours without a break. She gorged her
82 / NAHM AND GREYSON

food, fouled herself day and night, uttered an animal-like sound, and slept.
In all the time she lived with us, we have never seen that she had taken notice
of her environment even for a second. We had to amputate one of her legs,
she wasted away. (Ringger, 1958, p. 219)

Wittneben (1934, p. 153) characterized her in almost identical terms, adding

that she suffered from tuberculosis, and gave the reason for the amputation of her
leg as osseous tuberculosis. However, despite the amputation, the disease pro-
gressed and finally led to her death. In addition, Käthe suffered numerous severe
infections of meningitis, which, according to Wittneben, caused considerable
damage to her brain (Stritter, 1930, p. 176ff; Ringger, 1958, p. 220). To describe
what had so astonished the two men, we begin the description of Käthe’s death
with a quote from Wittneben:
Who has been a physician in an asylum for the mentally deranged for a long
time, and who has truly studied the mental life of the patients, will have
abandoned the old view that it is always a subsided and incurable brain
disease that causes the mental derangement. To his great astonishment, he
will often have witnessed that under certain circumstances, such as during
diseases and especially in the hour of death, a revival of slumbering mental
faculties takes place in apparently quite deranged imbeciles. (Wittneben,
1926, p. 396)

Wittneben maintained that these phenomena indicate that there are always
possibilities to influence brain cells positively in these patients, be it by the use of
medical or pedagogical means. In this publication, he referred to such cases to
support the concept of his therapy outlined in the section about his life and work.
Six years later, in a talk for the Arbeitsgemeinschaft für eugenische Fragen
[Working Group for Eugenic Questions] in 1932, Happich used the following
words to describe his experiences with patients close to dying:
For me, the most mentally deranged idiot is not inferior to normal persons
in the deepest sense. I have lived through various virtually shattering experi-
ences, some of which I have experienced together with the chief physician of
our institution, Dr. Wittneben. These experiences have shown me that even
the most miserable imbecile leads a hidden inner life which is just as valuable
as my own inner life. It is only the destructed surface that hinders him to
show it to the outside. Often in the last hours before death, all pathological
obstructions fell away and revealed an inner life of such beauty, that we could
only stand in front of it, feeling shaken to the core. For somebody who has
witnessed such events, the entire question of legally controlled euthanasia
is completely finished. (Trost, 1983, pp. 9-10)

In particular, Happich had witnessed the following scene at Käthe’s deathbed

(Ringger, 1958, p. 220):
One day I was called by one of our physicians, who is respected both as
a scientist and a psychiatrist. He said: “Come immediately to Käthe, she is
 TERMINAL LUCIDITY / 83

dying!” When we entered the room together, we did not believe our eyes and
ears. Käthe, who had never spoken a single word, being entirely mentally
disabled from birth on, sang dying songs to herself. Specifically, she sang
over and over again “Where does the soul find its home, its peace? Peace,
peace, heavenly peace!” For half an hour she sang. Her face, up to then
so stultified, was transfigured and spiritualized. Then, she quietly passed
away. Like myself and the nurse who had cared for her, the physician had
tears in his eyes. (Ringger, 1958, p. 220)

Happich’s account of Käthe’s death as presented by Stritter (1930) was very

similar to this description. However, it contained a few additional details in
its final section:
We witnessed the dying of this girl with deepest emotions. Her death
posed many questions to us. Obviously, Käthe had only superficially not
participated in all that happened in her surroundings. In reality, she had
apparently internalized much of it. Because, where did she know the text and
the melody of this song from, if not from her surroundings? Moreover, she
had comprehended the contents of this song and used it appropriately in
the most critical hour of her life. This appeared like a miracle to us. Even
bigger, however, was the miracle that Käthe, up to now entirely mute,
could suddenly recite the text of the song clearly and intelligibly. Dr. W.
[Wittneben] stated over and over again: “From a medical perspective, I
am confronted with a mystery. Käthe has suffered so many severe infections
of meningitis, that due to the anatomical changes in the cortical brain tissue,
it is not comprehensible how the dying woman could suddenly sing so
clearly and intelligibly.” (Stritter, 1930, pp. 176ff)

Wittneben’s description of the case (1934, p. 153) matched Happich’s version,

but was of course written from his perspective. He concluded:
Who has witnessed something like this will not dare to kill “life not worthy
of living.” He will realize that we can ultimately not solve the mind-body
problem as earthbound humans, but he will also realize that we bear a special
responsibility for the souls of the mentally ill who are bound to their frail
bodies. (Wittneben, 1934, p. 154)

Wittneben’s letter in Roesermueller (1951) was short, but it confirmed the

main events around Käthe’s death exactly as described above.

DISCUSSION
It is difficult to evaluate the available reports concerning the death of Käthe,
as they are essentially historical. We cannot exclude the possibility that both
Happich and Wittneben, who were in constant friendly contact, simply invented
this case to support their personal agendas. For example, when Wittneben first
wrote about terminal lucidity in 1926, he used the cases he had allegedly witnessed
as conceptual support for the diagnostic and therapeutic method he had developed.
84 / NAHM AND GREYSON

After discussions about euthanasia became more pronounced in Germany

in the early 1930s, both Wittneben and Happich utilized the case of Käthe to
argue against the practice of euthanasia. On the other hand, as indicated above,
both Wittneben and Happich were well-known and highly respected person-
alities of their time. Should Happich and Wittneben have invented this case,
they must have decided upon this conspiracy around the time of Käthe’s death,
or even earlier; and they would have had to have included the nurse who had
cared for Käthe.
Given the extraordinary circumstances of this case, which appeared to have
left a deep impression on Wittneben and Happich, the two men must have spoken
about Käthe’s death often to people in and around Hephata, at least at her funeral.
Although the first written reference to Käthe’s death we could find was published
4 years after her death, we consider it likely that they had made the case public
before that. At the least, they reported her case in mainstream medical journals,
presented it at conferences, described it in popular articles, and wrote at least one
personal letter about it. Given these activities, it seems likely that Happich and
Wittneben witnessed the occurrences at Käthe’s deathbed essentially as they
described them, notwithstanding that they might also have used them to support
their own causes.
Clearly, the described case report represents an anomaly among near-death
phenomena. We leave it to the reader to judge the validity of this case on its own
merits. Nevertheless, the other cases of terminal lucidity in persons with mental
disabilities alluded to by Happich and Wittneben seem to support the notion that
near-death states can elicit mental faculties previously not observed in the lives of
these patients with mental disabilities. The second case described by Happich
(Ringger, 1958) concerned George, a young man with severe mental deficits who
lived in Hephata for 14 years after his admission at the age of 6. Communication
with him was difficult, and he could not even remember the names of his
caretakers. He was able to memorize songs, although it seemed that he did not
understand their meaning. One day he fell sick and he was brought into the
hospital of Hephata, as he had been many times before. But this time, he sang all
verses of a dying song when he was laid on a bed. With his first words the
next morning, he announced that he would “go to heaven” later. When somebody
asked him to sing another song, he did so, and when he reached a phrase that
seemed related to his imminent death, he shook hands with his caretakers,
said “good night,” and then died.
In 1861, Perty reported the case of a young man whose intellectual capacities
did not exceed those “of a dog or a monkey” (Perty, 1861, p. 60). Yet, 4 days before
he died, he entered a fully lucid state of mind and surprised all around him with his
clear thoughts and speech. Should new cases of terminal lucidity in persons with
severe mental disabilities be documented following modern medical standards, then
this would call for a reappraisal of current concepts of mental processing in these
 TERMINAL LUCIDITY / 85

persons. In particular, cases of Käthe’s kind raise questions about current concepts
of brain functioning. With regard to meningitis, we found three other reports
of terminal lucidity. Other cases involved strokes, advanced stages of dementia
including terminal stages of Alzheimer’s disease, and brain abscesses and tumors
(Nahm, 2009; Nahm & Greyson, 2009; Nahm et al., 2012). Among 100 consecutive
hospice deaths, Macleod (2009) reported six cases of terminal lucidity, of which
three involved central nervous system metastases or primary malignancy.
Often, terminal lucidity occurred only moments, minutes, or hours before
death. Like Käthe’s case, some of the reports that involve notable damage of
brain tissue seem to challenge currently prevailing models about the mind and its
relation to the brain’s anatomical fine structure. Systematic studies into such
cases might add to other anomalous brain-related findings that at present seem
difficult to explain. We maintain that such anomalies are of special interest, because
they might eventually lead to an improvement of our understanding of human
brain functioning.
Comparable anomalies that appear problematic include complex consciousness
and memory under conditions of severe brain malfunction (Greyson, Kelly, &
Kelly, 2009), the sudden remission of cerebral palsy in a 60-year-old man docu-
mented in a prospective study on near-death experiences (Sartori, 2008; Sartori,
Badham, & Fenwick, 2006), the apparent intactness of memory and personality
characteristics in a 35-year-old man who underwent hemispherectomy after a
malignant brain tumor had developed (Bell & Karnosh, 1949), and above-average
intelligence in hydrocephalic persons with only limited amounts of cortical brain
tissue, which in addition displays a different anatomical structure compared to
normally developed brains (Jackson & Lorber, 1984; Lorber, 1983). As Treffert
wrote of the savant syndrome, we hold that no model of brain functioning,
particularly of memory, will be complete until it can include and account for these
remarkable conditions (Treffert, 2006, p. 3).
Thus, specific and large-scale studies that address the question of deathbed
cognitive function of persons with mental disabilities are indicated. Such studies
might result in findings that improve our understanding of human mental
functioning and lead to enhanced treatment of persons with severe mental
disabilities. Moreover, studying anomalous end-of-life experiences would lead
to an increasing familiarity with them among healthcare providers and those
caring for terminally ill persons. Recent surveys have shown that many care-
takers would like to learn more about unexpected and anomalous end-of-life
experiences to be better able to deal with them, and recommended pertinent
training modules in their education (Brayne, Lovelace, & Fenwick, 2008;
Fenwick, Lovelace, & Brayne, 2010). In conclusion, increased familiarity with
such experiences would be important for the dying, for those who care for them,
for the bereaved, and ultimately, for all those who are confronted with dying in
one way or another.
86 / NAHM AND GREYSON

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