Psychiatry and Casualties of War in Germany, 1914–18

Abstract

This article traces the responses of German psychiatrists to epidemic numbers of shell-shocked men during the first world war, surveying the diagnostic, administrative and therapeutic dimensions of the ‘war neurosis’ problem. First it asks why hysteria, a diagnostic label once reserved for women, was used to diagnose many thousand of psychiatric casualties, and shows how male hysteria diagnosis emerged in the late nineteenth century amid Germany's experience of rapid industrialization and modernization. The article then turns to psychiatric organization during the war, arguing that it reflected the influence of models of rationalized industrial production. In its discussion of psychiatric treatment, the article emphasizes how medical power operated through the various therapeutic procedures. whether hypnosis, suggestion or electrical current, treatments aimed to replace the patient's ‘sickly’ will with proper values of patriotism and self-sacrifice. The article then concludes with broader reflections on trauma, narrativity and the process of collective memory formation in interwar Germany. Using several psychiatric case histories, it shows how the traumatic and pathogenic nature of war memories was contested between doctors and patients, which it views as a microcosm of larger disputes within Weimar political culture over the meaning of the war as a whole.