Personal Writing as a Resilience Process for Refugee Physicians: The Case of �migr� Neuroanatomist Hartwig Kuhlenbeck

Abstract

Personal Writing as a Resilience Process for Refugee Physicians:The Case of Émigré Neuroanatomist Hartwig Kuhlenbeck Frank W. Stahnisch (bio) We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gestures, the unaffected expression of feelings. —Hannah Arendt, We Refugees 110 Contemporary medical education is increasingly concerned with such processes as "identity building" and "professionalization," along with the way in which narrative can help us understanding such processes, and other matters of learning in health care and medicine (Charon 1154–56; Stern and Papadakis 1794–99). This essay examines the means of identity construction through narrative writing and self-reflection, yet not as part and parcel of how the modern medical student and doctor behaves in the clinical setting and what they might experience in their career, but as a process rendered meaningful by extreme political circumstances. When considering twentieth-century biomedicine, probably no other single migratory event in global history has shaped today's landscape in medical practice as much as the large-scale forced migration of approximately nine-thousand Jewish and German anti-Nazi scientists, physicians, and health care researchers from 1930s Europe (Stahnisch, A New Field in Mind 241). Among these physicians were almost six hundred individuals, trained in psychiatry and its related fields, who principally fled to the United States, Canada, Great Britain, and other countries of the then British Empire (Niederland 285–300). These early brain scientists were well educated, often in both the humanities and the natural sciences in the German and Austrian Gymnasium high schools, were experimentally and clinically skilled, and highly innovative, as is also apparent from their letters, travel narratives, and personal diaries. This group therefore characterizes a significant number of refugee academics. [End Page 19] This massive loss of researchers obviously had a disastrous effect on basic and clinical neuroscience in Central Europe. Some authors have even interpreted this outflow of experts as an instance of "brain loss" for German-speaking science and a concomitant "brain gain" for Anglo-American science (Medawar and Pyke 231–40). Although this narrative is partially correct, it fails to provide us with the complexity of the underlying processes involved. Since not much ink has been spilled so far on the actual obstacles, problems, and traumas that émigré physicians experienced when arriving in their new host countries, looking at narrative ego-documents such as letters, diaries, and autobiographies offers valuable insights into the important psychological resilience process for refugee physicians. This work presents here an example of the writings of an émigré neuroscientist through reviewing archival materials eliciting the migratory path and the narrative writings of neuroanatomist Hartwig Kuhlenbeck (1897–1984). Narrative, personal-historical sources such as those produced by Kuhlenbeck provide a rare vehicle for intricate comprehension of the influence of social history on the actual course of medicine. From Jena to Tokyo to Philadelphia The forced migration of German-American neuroanatomist Kuhlenbeck offers an instructive case study of an exceptionally skilled neuropathological researcher, who fled Germany through different stations in East Asia before he finally settled in the United States. It has long been believed that the distribution of academic knowledge within scientific communities, or from experienced researchers to novices, was largely related to a deep acquaintance of academic teachers with the most advanced methods of knowledge production (Lenoir, Instituting Science 1–21). This relates specifically to a more encompassing perspective on the expulsion and later re-integration of a significant number of German-speaking neuroscientists during the period of National Socialism, in which the clinical areas of psychiatry and neurology were often rejected as instances of "Jewish Science." This has been pointed out by some early works of historians, including Michael Kater's Doctors under Hitler; Michael Hubenstorf's Vertreibung und Verfolgung: Zur Geschichte der österreichischen Medizin im 20. Jahrhundert (Expulsion and Persecution: On the History of Austrian Medicine in the Twentieth Century)," and Gerhard Baader's Zum Umgang mit jüdischen Ärzten im Nationalsozialismus in Deutschland (The Intercourse with Jewish Physicians in National Socialist Germany) (Kater...