Psychoses as Trauma Sequelae in the Discourse of West German Postwar Psychiatry

The extent of American influence on postwar German affairs is arguably unprecedented in history of relations between modern nation-states. From preeminent occupying force after World War II to guardian, cultural exporter, and largest trading and investment partner, United States played a role in postwar (West) German society that has led chroniclers of German affairs to speak of United States as the midwife of German democracy and to describe Federal Republic as Americanized. The still-proliferating literature on German-American relations takes as premise a decisive American presence in German society; instances range from presumed surrender to American policies and culture to what some characterize as troublesome rise of anti-Americanism. The United States, as largest political and economic power and dominant cultural trendsetter, has often represented indeed, symbolized the for post-World War II Germans. Ever since founding of two separate Germanies in 1949, German Democratic Republic (East Germany), and Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany), West Germans have been acutely aware some might argue, proud -of belonging to the West, a concept that was initially identified almost exclusively with United States, and only later in postwar era with Western Europe. It was not without historical irony that East Germans, soon after Berlin Wall was opened in November 1989, were greeted in West Berlin by a huge billboard advertising American-made West cigarettes with slogan Test West. 1 Given this context, how do Germans learn about United States, and, more specifically, how does German-language portrayal of United States history compare with historical literature that has materialized in America?2 The short answer is: not very favorably. There is very little evidence of different or uniquely German perspectives that might shed new and revealing light on American past. Above all, immense richness of sources and diversity in approaches that

This article revisits Rogers Brubaker's well-known triadic nexus, consisting of national minority, nationalizing state, and kin-state, and interrogates its applicability to the study of German minorities in Central and Eastern Europe since the second half of the 20th century. It does that by looking at German–Romanian relations after the Second World War, arguing that the migration of Romanian Germans to (West) Germany led to the transformation of Brubaker's triadic nexus into a quadratic nexus. More precisely, the field of Romanian Germans in (West) Germany has to be added to the three already existing fields. Furthermore, the extension of Brubaker's model allows in effect for a more comprehensive analysis of postwar West German–Eastern European relationships.

The article argues that the harmonisation of national memories facilitates genuine reconciliation, while memory divergence resulting from national mythmaking hampers reconciliation. After World War II, Sino-Japanese and West German–Polish relations were antagonised by the Cold War structure, and pernicious myths prevailed in national collective memory. Then China and Japan brushed aside historical legacy for immediate diplomatic normalisation, but their reconciliation was impeded by elite mythmaking practices. Since the 1970s West Germany and Poland have de-mythified war history and engaged in historical settlement, paving the way for deep reconciliation after the Cold War.

Sectoral growth and change in the postwar West German economy have been affected both by the specialization inherited from prewar times and by the general Western evolution of demand and production along “Neo-Fordist” lines. These two factors have also shaped West Germany's politics, particularly the organization of labor and bourgeoisie, and their alliances with each other and with the state apparatus. The three most important economic crisis situations since 1945 were turning points in the political articulation of socioeconomic interests. The crisis of the immediate postwar period resulted in a politics determined by the conflict of interests between owners of capital and the rest of the population, especially labor from 1947 onward. The Social Democratic party (SPD) was outside the government. A temporary interruption of sustained and highly differentiated sectoral growth in 1966 led to greater political attention to sectoral problems and less attention to class conflict. The SPD entered, indeed led, the government. Since the mid 1970s, the economy's structural crisis, compounded by growing foreign competition, has reaccentuated class conflict in political life. The SPD lost power in 1982.

Health damages and the late effects of NS trauma were largely ignored in German-speaking countries. This paper describes how dealing with the late effects of Nazi terror influenced post-war psychiatry in West Germany and thus the development of the psychiatric reform. As part of a greater overview study of the impulses and framework conditions of the reform-orientated development of post-war psychiatry in West Germany, this analysis is based on a thorough literary and documentary analysis. The sources show that publications by Helmut Paul and Herberg [81] as well as Baeyer et al. [12] can be considered as remarkable milestones. The awareness of psychological late effects of NS persecution was only reluctantly taken up by the scientific community. Nevertheless, this discussion was an essential component of the reform-orientated psychiatry in West Germany in the late 1960s to 1970s.

<i> Taking on Technocracy: Nuclear Power in Germany, 1945 to the Present. </i> Dolores L. Augustine. New York: Berghahn Books, 2018. xiv + 289 pp. Illustrations, graphs, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $120, e-book $110.16.

Langguth, Gerd, ed. Die Intellektuellen and die rationale Frage. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1997. 346 pp. DM 29.80 paperback. Ever since the opening of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent reunification of Germany, the nationale Frage, identity, and related issues have been a staple of intellectual debates and have spawned a considerable number of publications, among them the present volume. Although the portraits of Gunter Grass and Martin Walser, Grass's antipode in the unification controversy, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Botho Strauss-authors who significantly shaped postwar (West) German literature-grace the cover of the paperback, its focus is not of a purely literary nature owing to contributors from a variety of disciplines such as literary studies, history, political science, and politics-all of whom bring different perspectives to bear on the subject. As is to be expected, the contributions, which are divided in three parts, do not follow a uniform approach, but lack of space prevents a detailed discussion of individual essays. The first part (three contributions) seeks to clarify the terminological and historical basis of the question. Thomas Sparr explores the history of the term intellectual, a term that remains ambiguous and is subject to change; Peter Alter advocates the acceptance of the term Staatsnation that would signify the rejection of the ultimately ethnocentric Kulturnation (a term that figured prominently in Grass's anti-unification arguments); and Werner Weidenfeld discusses the challenges of reconciling German identity with aspirations for continued European integration. The eleven contributions ofthe second part, Literarische Entwurfe zur Nation, constitute the major, chronologically oriented part of the volume; they are devoted to periods or individual authors. The substantial essay by Ernst Weber on the national idea during romanticism and the Vormarz emphasizes the significance of all-German celebrations for the development and affirmation of a consciousness. Weber singles out the first anniversary in 1814 of Napoleon's defeat at the Volkerschlacht near Leipzig and the Hambacher Fest in 1832. In a somewhat different vein, Hugo Aust concentrates on texts by Gottfried Keller, Theodor Fontane, and Gerhart Hauptmann that express an ambivalent attitude towards nationalism rather than on those by bards such as Emanuel Geibel, Ernst von Wildenbruch, and Gustav Freytag (Aust neglects to mention the enormously popular Felix Dahn). The latter writers preferred to dwell on grandeur during the period of Wilhelminismus when, as a consequence of the failure of the 1848 revolution, democratic ideals had been abandoned in favor of nationalist fervor. In fact, the tension between democracy and nationalism is a pervasive phenomenon of the Weimar Republic, Erwin Scheuer argues. At the same time, he is at pains to provide a sampling of the full spectrum of opinions- from the ideologues of Blut and Boden to Bertolt Brecht-rather than a reductive bipolar pattern. Christoph H. Werth seeks to defend Ernst Junger-not entirely convincingly- against the charge of having paved the way for Nazism by examining his essay Der Arbeiter (1932) as a document advancing a particular brand of right-wing intellectualism. …

ABSTRACT: This first of two special issues on "Stevens and Germany" addresses a neglected topic. Five contributions by Philip McGowan, Gül Bilge Han, James Dowthwaite, George Kovalenko, and Christoph Irmscher explore the broad contours of Wallace Stevens's relation to Germany, spanning from youthful identification to tempered wartime and postwar reflections. The contributions also highlight moments in the poet's life and writing, including his visit to a German art exhibition in 1909 and his later genealogical research into the maternal, German side of the family. A related topic of scholarly neglect, at least in the United States, has been the postwar (West) German reception of Stevens. Not until the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Berlin Wall was his poetry able to slough its initial reputation as elitist and conformist. A series of new translations, most of them appearing in the twenty-first century, have helped revitalize German interest in the American poet.

THE West German has fired the imagination of observers to an unusual degree. From a defeated and despised enemy whose factories were bombed and whose productive power was to be destroyed forever by dismantling and control has emerged a new country with new economic power, an honored ally whose contributions to the economic progress of the world and to the maintenance of its military security are eagerly sought. Although it has been hailed by some as a miracle, responsible German statesmen as well as responsible economists have tried to minimize the role played by the supernatural in West German recovery. To attribute it to a successful free-enterprise market economy, to the German willingness to work, or to sheer good luck are explanations that contain a greater element of truth. As it is, we are fortunate that the emergence of a new and productive Germany has attracted two highly competent analysts, Horst Mendershausen and Henry C. Wallich. The phenomenon can be analyzed in various ways. The two books which are the occasion for this article complement each other to an astonishing degree. Both begin with the prewar years, and both deal with the postwar Germany that is allied with the West; references to the eastern part of the country chiefly register surprise that the surgical operation has not caused more damage than it seems to have done. Both authors possess fundamentally the same view of how the reemergence of Germany is to be explained. Even though Mendershausen uses the term recovery in his title, like Wallich he considers the postwar German development to be essentially a growth phenomenon; however, he is not quite as explicit on this point and does not provide a theoretical schema, as Wallich does. But this is about the extent of the similarity of treatment by the two

After the overthrow of Pol Pot and the genocidal Khmer Rouge in early 1979, a major international dispute erupted over who had the right to represent Cambodia in the international arena. Whereas the GDR immediately recognized the new regime installed by Vietnam (a close ally of the Soviet bloc and an arch-foe of China), West Germany gave staunch diplomatic support to the internationally reviled Khmer Rouge. This provoked a storm of public protest in the media and on the part of bewildered West German citizens, who took their leaders to task for supposedly compromising the country’s most basic human rights principles. This article looks at the geopolitical and economic reasons for the East and West German positions on the representation issue, ‘Holocaust’ discourse in the two postwar German states, and the role that each state’s relationship with China played in terms of its policies towards Cambodia and its understanding of what had transpired in there. It is based on unpublished archival sources, contemporary media reports, interviews with key actors, and a series of highly politicized documentaries about Cambodia made in the early 1980s by the internationally renowned East German filmmakers Walter Heynowski and Gerhard Scheumann. The article demonstrates how Cold War geopolitics and economic considerations were paramount in determining official German policies towards Cambodia and China on both sides of the iron curtain.

The viewing of NBC's television series Holocaust by more than 20 million West Germans is one of the great pseudo-events of post-war German history. It has been treated as an apolitical phenomenon whereas its effects are political in the most powerful sense. Holocaust represents a major step in the process of West Germany's reunion with its Nazi past. It has been billed as the long sought-after Vergangenheits-bewältigung: West Germany has supposedly now confronted and overcome the hitherto tabooed Nazi legacy. That Vergangenheitsbewältigung has not occurred is not surprising. But the instrumentalization of Holocaust by the German political right wing must be examined.

566 Reviews study, however, reconstructs a far more direct intervention in the genesis of Mann's text, the now famous discussions with Adorno about Schoenberg and twelve-tone music theory. For Adorno helped Mann understand how the dodecaphonic system could open up new musical possibilities, as well as running the risk of being a new form of musical totalitarianism. As a result, Mann, far from trying to construct his novel on twelve-tone principles, or offeringa postmodern pot-pourri, conceived it as something genuinely innovative: 'Die "konstruktiveMusik", von der er in Anbetracht der "Symphonie" seines Romanes spricht, kame demnach asthetisch einem "dritten Weg" gleich' (p. 219)?a 'third way', that is, which reconciles the 'Modernitat' he saw in Joyce and a 'verstandliche Zuganglichkeit', which means people actually bothered to read his books (p. 251). This reconciliatory position is reflected in the end of the novel, which neither damns Faust as in the medieval chap-book, nor saves him as does Goethe, but adopts an Adorno-like paradox as the form of its conclusion, as ambiguous as the light in the dark, in the final chords of the cantata Doctor Fausti Weheklag, of the 'hope against hope'?derived from Kierkegaard, via Adorno. As a consequence, the author argues, a proximity between the aesthetic and the religious in Mann's work is revealed, which was to become a central theme of Der Erwdhlte. Thomas Mann once described his stunning fusion of Germanic legend, syphilitic infection, and symphonie apocalypse as his 'gewagtestes and unheimlichstes Werk' (quoted p. 115). The final chapter's survey of the contemporary responses in the United States following the publication of Doktor Faustus and the vicissitudes of Mann's reception by Georg Lukacs (in whose wake a helpful distinction between 'modernist' and avantgarde was inaugurated by Peter Egri) leads Schmidt-Schiitz to the conclusion that the issue of 'traditionalism' or 'classicism' versus '(post)modernism ' is ultimately aufgehoben by the continuing cultural relevance of Mann's text. After all, as Mann himself put it in 'Deutsche Horer!', tradition means no more, but also no less, than '[a]uf eigene Art einem Beispiel folgen'. University of Glasgow Paul Bishop Letzte Welten: Deutschsprachige Gegenwartsliteratur diesseits und jenseits der Apokalypse . By Heinz-Peter Preusser. (Beitrage zur neueren Literaturgeschichte, 193) Heidelberg: Winter. 2003. 321pp. ?48. ISBN 3-8253-1475-8. It should come as no surprise to findpost-war German writers?and hence post-war German literature?particularly fascinated by,ifnot engrossed with, all things apoca? lyptic. The after-effectsof the Second World War and the Holocaust, as well as most Germans' deep-rooted anxieties resultingfrom their countries' precarious position on the frontlines of the great ideological divide, contributed to a seemingly impregnable sense of gloom concerning the future not just of Germany but of mankind in general, an uneasiness that carried over to their linguistic compatriots in Austria and Switzer? land. As Heinz-Peter Preusser demonstrates in this admirably encompassing and intellectually engaging volume of essays, authors of all shades and convictions in both East and West devoted considerable literary energy to parading their apprehensions and mapping out in their fiction, plays, and poetry the dangers inherent in technical progress, or what Preusser terms 'Modernisierungsschaden und Erwartungsangste, Verlustklagen und Untergangsphantasien' (p. 8). Preusser sees his two main tasks as contouring 'ein breites literarisches Spektrum an Apokalypsevorstellungen' and collating a 'Sammlung topologischer Muster und diskursiver Regularien' (p. 8) for the literary portrayal of mankind's undoing. In his illuminating opening chapter the author correctly points out that apocalyp? tic writing is not the exclusive preserve of German-language writers, nor have they MLR, 100.2, 2005 567 produced any of the seminal texts within this tradition. But due to their own (or their forefathers') complicity in heaping apocalyptic misery on twentieth-century mankind, German writers since 1945 have exhibited a strong partiality forthe theme and such generic offshoots as apocalyptic science fiction (here represented by Alban Nicolai Herbst). Owing to this intensity of preoccupation with apocalyptic modes of writing, the range ofauthors covered in this volume is quite astonishing: West German authors discussed include Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Giinter Grass, Botho Strauss, Marcel Beyer, Bernhard Schlink, Harald Mueller, and Juli Zeh; most prominent among East...

Sitting in the ruins of the Third Reich, most Germans wanted to know which of the two post-war German states would erase the material traces of their wartime suffering most quickly and most thoroughly. Consumption and the quality of everyday life quickly became important battlefields upon which the East-West conflict would be fought. This book focuses on the competing types of societies that developed over time in the two Germanies and the legacy each left. Consuming Germany in the Cold War assesses why East Germany increasingly fell behind in this competition and how the failure to create a viable socialist consumer in the East helped lead to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. By the 1970s, East Germans were well aware that the regime's bombastic promises that the GDR would soon overtake the West had become increasingly hollow. For most East German citizens, West German society set the standards that East Germany repeatedly failed to meet.By exploring the ways in which East and West Germany have functioned as each other's other since 1949, this book suggests some of the possibilities for a new narrative of post-war German history. While taking into account the very different paths pursued by East and West Germany since 1949, the contributors demonstrate the importance of competition and highlight the connections between the two German successor states, as well as the ways in which these relationships changed throughout the period. By understanding the legacy that forty-plus years of rivalry established, we can gain a better understanding of the current tensions between the eastern and western regions of a united Germany.

Comment on Lara Rzesnitzek (2013) “Early Psychosis” as a mirror of biologist controversies in post-war German, Anglo-Saxon, and Soviet Psychiatry

This article examines the Holocaust's impact on postwar German politics, identity, and international conduct. It shows that a distinctive form of memory of the Holocaust arose in Germany following World War II as a byproduct of total military defeat, Allied occupation, and the restoration of previously suppressed German political traditions. In East Germany, the memory of the suffering and triumph of the Soviet Union loomed far larger in ‘anti-fascist’ political culture than the fate of Europe's Jews. The limits of justice and memory in the two Germanys after 1945 are striking in view of the enormity of the crime of the Holocaust. However, compared with the amnesia and paucity of justice that often have followed other criminal dictatorships, the West German and then unified German confrontation with the crimes of the Nazi era have yielded a distinctive mixture of some truth telling, some judicial reckoning, some excellent historical scholarship, and some compassion for the survivors of the Holocaust.