The Duchy of Nassau and the Eberbach Asylum

Abstract

Eberbach’s founding in 1815 coincided with the lunacy reform movement that swept Europe and North America in the first half of the century. That movement in Germany took peculiar shape in the central role played from the start by the state. Unlike England and France, the primary initiative for the lunacy reforms in Germany came from above, by enlightened state bureaucrats under the tutelage of the German neoabsolutist states. If the (apocryphal) founding image of French psychiatry is the alienist Phillip Pinel famously striking the chains off the inmates of the Bicêtre during the French Revolution, its (real) German counterpart is that of the Prussian Minister Karl August von Hardenburg charging J. G. Langermann (medical officer, later privy councillor and head of Prussian medical affairs) in 1803 with the responsibility of turning the Bayreuth madhouse into Germany’s first mental hospital. Other states and areas of Germany followed suit in the decades after the Napoleonic wars. Eberbach was no exception to the German pattern, where new, enlightened ideas about insanity, concerns of state security with respect to the deviant poor, and the desire to keep abreast of the most progressive trends united to lead even the small and impoverished state of Nassau to embark on costly lunacy reforms. Further, in Nassau both the founding and functioning of the asylum were closely tied to state-building, that is, to the consolidation of state power, the political integration of the population, and the extensive administrative reforms that this entailed—in the penal system, medicine, local government, education, religion, and so forth. State reforms in the area of culture (religion and education) will be discussed in chapter 3. The following section focuses on the penal, medical, and (local) governmental reforms, which formed the broader institutional context of the asylum. The duchy of Nassau, which achieved its final form in 1816 (bounded by the Rhine, Main, Sieg, and Lahn rivers), was one of the new Mittelstaaten (medium sized states) to emerge out of the Napoleonic wars and the Congress of Vienna.