Psychiatric textbooks from National Socialism and the censorial practice in the Soviet Occupation Zone and early GDR

Abstract

The Allied Forces policy of denazification and demilitarization during the early post-war period has had alasting impact on medical disciplinary cultures in all occupation zones of Germany. By means of various control procedures, the conceptuality and linguistic design, the style and normative horizon of medical literature were reconstituted. This article examines this change using the example of psychiatry and neurology in the Soviet Occupation Zone. It deals with the neurological psychiatric textbook as acentral medium of disciplinary communication and reconstructs how the knowledge in this field was processed and prepared in complex negotiation processes between authors, publishers and censors. The focus is on institutionalized filters of limited production of discourses and thus the archival holdings of censorship authorities, which have not yet been evaluated. The evaluation results are presented here with afocus on psychiatry and neurology and illustrated with selected case studies.