Paul Lerner

Psychiatry and Casualties of War in Germany, 1914–18

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 Germanys 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 patients ‘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.

„Ein Sieg deutschen Willens“: Wille und Gemeinschaft in der deutschen Kriegspsychiatrie

Two central concepts in German mental medicine during World War I, the will and community, are the subject of this essay. The will, the essay argues, though lacking precise medical meaning, nevertheless helped define a language for discussing male hysteria and simultaneously served to expand the responsibilities and prestige of war-time psychiatrists.

Circulation and representation: Jews, department stores and cosmopolitan consumption in Germany, c.1880s–1930s

This essay looks at the problem of Jews and cosmopolitanism from the perspective of consumer culture in modern Germany. It focuses on German department stores, the great majority of which were owned by Jews, and which were stationary sites for the convergence of goods, styles, people and capital from all over the world. The essay then traces discourses on and representations of circulation across a variety of media and genres, including department store advertisements, economic writings, anti-department store propaganda and fiction, showing how department store owners and their harshest critics drew on a common set of terms and symbols to represent modern mass consumption. While department stores used cosmopolitanism to promote their goods and create enticing product displays and consumer spectacles, their critics charged that these stores, because of their cosmopolitanism, were insufficiently rooted in German traditions and mores and represented a threat from the Jewish East.

Andrew Scull, Hysteria: the biography , Biographies of Disease Series, Oxford University Press, 2009, pp. 223, £12.99,

The would-be historian of hysteria faces formidable methodological obstacles, issues that are, for the most part, of little concern to chroniclers of more concrete and tangible physical, and even mental diseases, conditions and syndromes. These obstacles go right to the core of the matter: should hysteria even be characterized as a disease? As a real phenomenon? And if so, how is the historian to account for its various outbreaks and epidemics, its mysterious appearances and equally mysterious disappearances over the last two centuries? Is a continuous history of hysteria even possible? How, finally, can we explain the maladys mid-twentieth-century disappearance? Altered social conditions and gender roles? Changes in medical diagnoses? The increased self-awareness of post-Freudian subjects? No wonder no historian has attempted a comprehensive survey of hysteria in over four decades. In the 1980s and 1990s, the study of hysteria became contested historical terrain for competing feminist, psychoanalytic, sociological and cultural-constructivist approaches. These debates seeped into the mainstream media following a series of highly publicized controversies about trauma and repressed memory, and in the aftermath of the first Gulf War, shell shock and traumatic hysteria became hot topics in academia and in the general public, especially after a noted scholar argued that Gulf War Syndrome represented a modern hysterical outbreak. Andrew Scull, in his concise and highly readable “biography” of hysteria, judiciously avoids getting entangled in these thorny problems, and instead of trying to sort out hysterias true essence or definitively solve its mysteries, he “revels” in his subjects ambiguities and uncertainties. This then is a history of what medical commentators interpreted or labelled as hysterical from the early modern period through the early twentieth century, enlivened by a sprinkling of vivid case histories, and which also provides memorable portrayals of larger-than-life medical personalities, from the obese and temperamental George Cheyne, author of the influential English malady (1733), to the Napoleon of the neuroses, Jean-Martin Charcot, the towering French neurologist of the nineteenth century, whose Salpetriere clinic became a virtual hysterical circus, undermining his ambitions of conquering hysteria through science. In nine brisk yet comprehensive chapters, Scull sketches the history of hysteria and nervous illness, covering the major (and familiar) highlights. He justifiably pays considerable attention to gender and follows the identification of hysteria with womens bodies and their allegedly fragile constitution, even after respectable science had abandoned belief in the pathological wandering of the uterus. Other chapters are devoted to the rise of neurasthenia in late-nineteenth-century America, the place of hysteria in Freuds elaboration of psychoanalysis and the crisis of shell shock, or male hysteria, during and after the First World War. Sculls survey provides a welcome addition to the sizable historical literature on hysteria and nervous illness, and this slim volume manages to cover its topic well, placing outbreaks of hysteria in their social, cultural and medical-historical contexts, and highlighting major trends and turning points in the history of psychiatry, all in fewer than 200 pages. To be sure, most of the material presented will be familiar to historians of psychiatry or medicine, and specialists will recognize that Scull leans, at times quite heavily, on the approaches and findings of other scholars, such as Roy Porter, Elaine Showalter and even Edward Shorter. It would have been interesting if Scull had pushed this account beyond the familiar doctors and the famous hysterics, and perhaps ventured further out from the centres of London, Paris, Vienna and New York. But this book was not written for the specialist. Indeed, it offers an excellent introduction to the subject for a general audience, and its bibliography usefully guides interested readers on to more in-depth exploration of particular subjects. Finally, this work will provide a great service to teachers of undergraduate courses in the history of medicine and psychiatry, and students will appreciate that Scull writes with lucidity, grace and wit.

24.95 (hardback 978-0-19-956096-7).

a 2001 essay, the introduction to a special journal issue on consumption in twentiethcentury Germany, historians Alon Confino and Rudy Koshar noted the relative lack of scholarship on consumption and consumerism in European, especially German, historiography, as compared to the explosion of interest in the topic among historians of the United States.1 For Confino and Koshar, this disjuncture appears all the more remarkable in view of the centrality of consumption and consumer goods to the political and ideological struggles of the German twentieth century and indeed the potential power of consumption, as a historiographie subject, for linking daily life and individual