Arbeitsrhythmus und Anstaltsalltag: Arbeit in der Psychiatrie vom frühen 19. Jahrhundert bis in die NS-Zeit

Abstract

As Thomas Müller notes in the opening pages of his contribution to this book, there has been renewed interest in the humanities over the last fifteen years in the question of labour. In this volume the two editors, historians Monika Ankele and Eva Brinkschulte, enter into this debate, thus opening up the historiography of psychiatry to larger societal questions. The volume is based on a conference held in 2013 in Hamburg that placed into a broader chronological context a DFG project entitled ‘Family care and more active medical treatment: a multi-perspective approach of occupational therapy in everyday psychiatric institutions in the 1920s’. It assembles ten chapters that treat the question of patient labour inside psychiatric institutions in Germany from the early nineteenth century until National Socialism. In their introduction, the editors underline four important points: first, that the notion of labour in society has important repercussions on the function of labour inside asylums. The Weimar constitution proclaimed that ‘any German . . . without prejudice to his personal freedom, has the moral obligation to use his mental and physical strength as required by the general welfare’. It was therefore not surprising that the interwar period was a moment where the place of labour inside psychiatric institutions was particularly fiercely debated among German psychiatrists. Second, they emphasize that working inside the asylums of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries relied substantially on the traditions of the workhouses from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Labour inside psychiatric hospitals is therefore not something new but has a long history that is sometimes more influenced by the longue durée of cultural and social history than by short-term orientated political history. Next, they argue that the function of labour inside psychiatry remains heavily linked to other institutions of welfare: the right to care during the Weimar period was determined by the ability to work not only inside the asylums but also in other social apparatuses dispositives. Finally, they note that contrary to other treatment, such as electroconvulsive therapy, psychotherapy or psychochemicals, work as therapy is still underexposed in historiography but also in the collective imagery of what the life inside an asylum was.