Diagnosing Dissent: Hysterics, Deserters, and Conscientious Objectors in Germany during World War One by Rebecca Ayako Bennette

Abstract

Reviewed by: Diagnosing Dissent: Hysterics, Deserters, and Conscientious Objectors in Germany during World War One by Rebecca Ayako Bennette Arleen Tuchman Rebecca Ayako Bennette. Diagnosing Dissent: Hysterics, Deserters, and Conscientious Objectors in Germany during World War One. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020. x + 228 pp. Ill. $39.95 (978-1-5017-5120-2). Scholars interested in the history of German military psychiatry during World War I will have much to appreciate in this slim volume of 145 pages. Framed as a corrective to scholars who have painted this medical specialty as an essential tool of a militaristic state, Bennette argues that German soldiers who landed in military courts because they seemed unwilling (or unable) to perform their military duties, were often no worse off than—and in many ways far more fortunate than—their counterparts in other countries. The crux of her argument is the claim that what made Germany different was its tendency to medicalize rather than criminalize dissent, hence the title of her book, Diagnosing Dissent. Bennette supports her argument by turning to documents used only sparingly by other historians of German military psychiatry—patient files. Readers of this journal will applaud her championing of these files as valuable tools for uncovering the voices of those who are often absent from the historical record. Drawing on over 2,000 of these files, she has divided her book into four substantive chapters. The first provides a general background on the ever-deepening relationship between the burgeoning field of psychiatry and the military around the turn of the twentieth century; the remaining three deal in seriatim with the forms of dissent that were most often medicalized: hysteria, desertion, and conscientious objections. Bennette stages a number of interventions into the scholarship, including her promotion of patient records as invaluable historical documents, and her [End Page 597] insistence that German conscientious objectors existed in larger numbers than was previously believed. But the thread that holds the book together, and that she drives home repeatedly, is that German psychiatrists were not, as previous scholars have insisted, agents of the state, treating soldiers with mental health problems in harsh and inhumane ways, determined to return them to the battlefield as quickly as possible. While Bennette does not deny that these attitudes and practices existed, she insists that patient files reveal a far more complex story. There, she found psychiatrists discussing the elusiveness of psychiatric diagnoses and even seeking second opinions, rather than rushing to affix labels or insisting that diagnostic categories were set in stone. She found strong evidence of treatment options that diverged from the electric shock therapy that other scholars have often highlighted, including regular recommendations for rest, which suggest compassion toward the mentally ill. She found German psychiatrists who advocated on behalf of their patients, writing evaluations for the military courts that resulted in the mitigation of punishments. And she discovered ample evidence of soldiers advocating for themselves, even having some success at influencing the care they received in psychiatric institutions. Their power was certainly diminished, but it was not absent. Diagnosing Dissent is a fast read, filled with rich details from patient records and offering considerable evidence of the diversity, flexibility, and even leniency that marked German military psychiatry during World War I. What is missing, though, is a more sustained discussion of the book’s significance for German history and the history of psychiatry more generally. In the Epilogue Bennette does explain the relevance of her work for debates about Germany’s Sonderweg (special path): she sees the radical change that German military psychology underwent when the Nazis came to power in 1933 as evidence of a marked rupture with the past, foremost through the total abandonment of a legal system that, however flawed, provided some protections to the vulnerable. But this assertion would have benefitted from a fuller discussion. Historians of German racial hygiene and eugenics, for example, have found evidence of continuity across 1933 without arguing that Germany’s path was unique. By focusing so intently on rescuing German military psychiatrists from what she sees as a one-sided interpretation of their beliefs and actions, Bennette may have missed an opportunity to also look for continuities, and...