A reinvented public: 'Lunatics' rights' and bourgeois populism in the Kaiserreich

German History

Volumn 21, Issue 2, 2003, Pages 159-182

  Goldberg, Ann ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA   (United States)

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EID: 1642365525     PISSN: 02663554     EISSN: 1477089X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1191/0266355403gh279oa     Document Type: Review

References (108)

1. A good bibliography of this literature can be found in Bernhard Beyer, Die Bestrebungen zur Reform des Irrenwesens (Halle, 1912). Some of these pamphlets were written anonymously or under pseudonyms. Yet, given the detailed information that most pamphlets revealed, it would not have been difficult for an interested reader to find out their authors' identities
2. Fr. Kretzschmar, Die Irrenfrage am Ausgange des 19. Jahrhunderts (Großenhain, 1896), p. 253
3. The study of Wilhelmine lunatics' rights is still in its initial stages. Brief discussions can be found in Gabriele Feger, 'Die Geschichte des "Psychiatrischen Vereins zu Berlin'" (Med. Diss. , Berlin, 1982)
4. Eric Engstrom, 'The Birth of Clinical Psychiatry' (Ph. D. Diss. , Chapel Hill, 1997)
5. Dirk Blasius, Der verwaltete Wahnsinn (Frankfurt/Main, 1980)
6. Heinz-Peter Schmiedebach, 'Eine "anti-psychiatrische Bewegung" um die Jahrhundertwende', in Martin Dinges (ed. ), Medizinkritische Bewegungen im Deutschen Reich (Stuttgart, 1996), pp. 127-59, provides an overview of many basic facts of the movement
7. It also analyses the movement in terms of the public sphere, though in a different way from this article. Cornelia Brink, '"Nicht mehr normal und noch nicht geisteskrank . . . " Über psychologische Grenzfälle im Kaiserreich', Werkstatt Geschichte (forthcoming, 2002) utilizes many of the lunatics' rights pamphlets that are also the source base for this article
8. An analysis of one of the most notorious asylum scandals within the context of Wilhelmine politics can be found in Ann Goldberg, 'The Mellage Trial and the Politics of Insane Asylums in Wilhelmine Germany', Journal of Modern History, 74, 1 (March 2002), pp. 1-32
9. For French antipsychiatry, see Ian R. Dowbiggin, Inheriting Madness (Berkeley, 1991), ch. 5
10. Thomas Rechlin, 'Antipsychiatrie, ihre Wurzeln und Voraussetzungen' (Diss. , Universität Bochum, 1987)
11. Norman Dain, 'Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry in the U. S. ', in Mark Micale and Roy Porter (eds. ), Discovering the History of Psychiatry (New York, 1994), pp. 415-44
12. Jacques Postel and David F. Allen, 'History and Anti-Psychiatry in France', ibid. , pp. 384-414
13. Gerald Grob, From Asylum to Community (Princeton, 1991)
14. Schmiedebach, 'Bewegung', p. 158, also makes this point
15. Andreas Daum, Wissenschaftspopularisierung im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1998)
16. Paul Weindling, Health, Race and German Politics (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 3ff
17. On the cultural critique of scientific materialism and rationalism in the völkische movement (with which the lunatics' rights movement had some links), see Gundolf Hübinger, 'Der Verlag Eugen Diedrichs in Jena: Wissenschaftskritik, Lebensreform und völkisch Bewegung', Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 22 (1996), pp. 31-45
18. On anti-mechanistic, 'holistic' views within the scientific community: Anne Harrington, Reenchanted Science: Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm II to Hitler (Princeton, 1996)
19. Cornelia Regin, Selbsthilfe und Gesundheitspolitik (Stuttgart, 1995)
20. Claudia Huerkamp, 'Medizinische Lebensreform im späten 19. Jahrhundert', Vierteljahresschrift für Sozial-und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, 73 (1986), pp. 158-82
21. Richard Wetzell, Inventing the Criminal (Chapel Hill, 2000), p. 86, is an excellent study of German criminology between 1880 and 1945, which does not belong to the category of 'medicalization' arguments critiqued below
22. On medicine see, for example, Weindling, Health; on psychiatry, see Dirk Blasius, Einfache Seelenstörung: Geschichte der deutschen Psychiatrie (Frankfurt/Main, 1994)
23. Paul Lerner, 'Rationalizing the Therapeutic Arsenal: German Neuropsychiatry in World War I', in Geoffrey Cocks and Manfred Berg (eds. ), Medicine and Modernity: Public Health and Medical Care in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Germany (New York, 1997), pp. 121-48
24. Lerner, Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890-1930 (forthcoming, Cornell University Press)
25. Goldberg, 'Mellage Trial'
26. For an overview of the broader Sonderweg debate: Robert Moeller, "The Kaiserreich Recast? Continuity and Change in Modern German Historiography', Journal of Social History, 17 (1984), pp. 655-83
27. This conclusion is consistent with the important studies of revisionist scholars in the Sonderweg debate. The key work here is David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History (Oxford, 1984)
28. Margaret Lavinia Anderson, Practicing Democracy (Princeton, 2000), p. 286
29. The Kaiserreich's 'worst legacy to the next generation was not its political culture, but its war [WWI] . . . ': ibid. , p. 436. By democratization, Anderson means not increased 'individual freedom' but strong national (party) 'solidarities' and 'competing groups' that were able to undermine local power sources and hierarchies (p. 417)
30. This is simply a short-hand term I use to refer to those currents, including social Darwinism, hereditarianism and degeneration theories, that came to dominate psychiatry in the late nineteenth century and which merged into the eugenics and racial hygiene movements. See, for example, Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, 1848-1918 (Cambridge, 1989)
31. Wetzell, Inventing the Criminal
32. Joachim Radkau, Das Zeitalter der Nervosität (Munich, 2000), argues that both the discourse and epidemiology of nervousness were more prevalent in Germany than anywhere else
33. I discuss these issues for an earlier period in Ann Goldberg, 'Conventions of Madness: Bürgerlichkeit and the Asylum in the Vormärz', Central European History, 33, 2 (2000), pp. 173-93
34. Ludwig Ernst, Für die Lebendig Begrabenen (2nd edn, Vienna, 1904), pp. 30-1, 41
35. Anon. [Adolf Glöklen], Zustände in der Heidelberger Universitäts-Irren-Klink. Oder 5 Tage lebendig begraben (Heidelberg, 1908). His wife had initially signed the admittance papers, but, Glöklen claimed, she was coerced and did not realize what she was doing
36. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1977)
37. On the loss of 'Vaterrechte', see Rudolf Arndt, Geisteskrank. Unzurechnungsfähig. Entmündigt (Greifswald, 1896), p. 12
38. On cases of wives and daughters appointed as guardians: Irrenrechts-Reform, 14/15 (1910), p. 1; 30/1 (1912), p. 294
39. Paul Elmer, 'Die Ehefrau als Schlepperin des Irrenhauses', Irrenrechts-Reform 14/15 (1910), pp. 150-2. The wife as evil instigator of her husband's incarceration was central to the discourse of the Fuhrmann case, a national cause célèbre in 1901 (see below)
40. Ernst Müller, Drei Monate ohne Grund im Irrenhause (Dresden, 1898), p. 5
41. There was, however, a partial precedent for the Wilhelmine pamphlets that dated back to Karl Philipp Moritz's Magazin zur Erfahrungsseelenkunde (1783-93)
42. This late Enlightenment journal published, among other things, autobiographical stories of educated and well-placed individuals who had undergone experiences of mental derangement and loss of their rational selves. But unlike the Wilhelmine pamphlets, these experiences of mental illness, as far as I can tell, were ephemeral and had not caused the authors to be legally certified as insane. Their authors thus spoke from within the dominant culture, and did so for the purpose of engaging philosophical discussions about the nature of the mind. Their stories were about introspection and self-knowledge. Wilhelmine antipsychiatry stories, by contrast, were about injustice and rights. On the Magazin and mental illness in bourgeois culture, see Doris Kaufmann, Aufklärung, bürgerliche Selbsterfahrung und die 'Erfindung' der Psychiatrie in Deutschland, 1770-1850 (Göttingen, 1995)
43. Kretzschmar, Irrenfrage, p. 253, provided the clearest articulation of the idea, underlying lunatics' rights, that 'publicity' was the key to the defence of 'personal autonomy' in the face of 'state and scientific' malfeasance and injustice
44. For example: Ewald Krüner, Moderne Folterkammern (5th edn, Hagen and Zurich, 1913), whose subtitle reveals the mass audience it sought: 'Ein Volksbuch zur . . . '
45. P. Klos, Deutsche Beamtenherrschaft in ihrer ganzen Machtentfaltung (Zurich, 1909), which announced its 'confiscated' status, was a politically subversive pamphlet written by a socialist
46. Carl Brill, Pflichtwidrigkeiten hiesiger Richter in einem Ehescheidungsprozeß (Magdeburg, 1906)
47. On the other hand, Anton Maleszka, Wie man Geisteskranke fabriziert (Berlin, 1905), a teacher, wrote in pure novelistic form, but used the third person, as if he were talking about someone else
48. Georg Platner, Modernes Strandrecht (Zurich, 1896)
49. Hans Schmidt, 'Das Haus des Schreckens' oder Dichtung und Wahrheit (Leipzig, 1890), quotations from pp. 3-6
50. One example: Franz Schäfer, Ein 'Schwabenstreich' der Züricher Polizei oder 4 Tage 'auf Beobachtung' in der Züricher Irrenanstalt Burghöli (Belfast, 1897), a dramatist whose 'songs' were quotations of passages from his plays
51. The inclusion of material on Beethoven and the Schwarzwald signalled to the reader elements of Hegemann's sensibility: the first referred to her love of music and her fond memories of the one psychiatrist (Nasse in Andernach) who treated her with respect; the Schwarzwald was the site of her worst asylum experiences (in the asylums at Illenau and Emmendingen), but also a place that enchanted her with its beauty. (These were her own explanations. ) Her use of the Auerbach song can also be linked to the Kaiserreich's Heimat movement, which celebrated the local and linked it to the nation: Alon Confino, The Nation as a Local Metaphor (Chapel Hill, 1997)
52. Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials (Berkeley, 1990)
53. On the wealth of images and interpretations down the ages of this iconic figure, see Margarita Stocker, Judith. Sexual Warrior (New Haven, 1998)
54. Krüner, Moderne Folterkammern, p. 1
55. Morris de Jonge, Ein Akt moderner Tortur (Berlin, 1890)
56. Ad. Ahrens, Anti-Vernunft. Beweisstücke für die jetzigen ungenügenden Irrengesetze (Hamburg, 1891)
57. Anon. [Adolph Ebeling], Eine Mutter im Irrenhause. Beitrag zur Sittengeschichte unserer Zeit (Bremen, 1851), p. 142
58. This pamphlet caused a huge scandal, particularly because its subject, Louise Gabe de Massarellos, belonged to one of Hamburg's leading patrician families. See also Anon. , Der Prozeß der Familie Gabe in Hamburg (Bremen, 1851)
59. One example of the mobilizing effect of asylum cause célè bres: a civil engineer, whose asylum 'nightmare' consisted of trivialities (e. g. bad food and disturbed morning sleep), nevertheless heard about the famous Hegelmaier case (below), began to reconsider his own experiences, and ended up publishing his own pamphlet of complaint. A. De. , Zustände in der Staats-Irrenanstalt Winnenthal (Stuttgart, 1895), p. 5
60. Irrenrechts-Reform, 24/5 (1912), pp. 239ff
61. Kretzschmar, Die Unvollkommenheit der heutigen Psychiatrie und die Mangelhaftigkeit der deutschen Irrengesetzgebung (Leipzig, 1891), p. 5
62. This issue was everywhere in the lunatics' rights literature. For one example that places privacy in a broader political perspective, see 'Die geistigen Hinrichtungen in Ostelbien', Irrenrechts-Reform, 40/1 (Sept. 1913), pp. 368-74
63. For example, K. v. R. [Oswald Knorr], Offene Briefe an Seine Majestät den König von Preußen (Charlottenburg, 1896)
64. Carl Paasch, Offener Brief an . . . Reichskanzler von Caprivi (Leipzig, 1891)
65. Bilfinger, 'Die Irrenanstalten im Lichte der natürl. Heilweise', Irrenrechts-Reform, 3 (1909), p. 2
66. Another example is August Menn, 'Hallucinationen' und Gegenbeweise. Ein Rechtsfall (Salzburg, 1897), whose lawsuit against a Sanitätsrat was rejected by the state attorney's office
67. Beyer, Bestrebungen, pp. 260-74
68. For a socialist example among the self-revelatory pamphlets, see Klos, Deutsche Beamtenherrschaft
69. On the Kaiserreich's political culture, which set important limits to arbitrary government power, see Alex Hall, Scandal, Sensation, and Social Democracy (Cambridge, 1977)
70. Anderson, Practicing Democracy
71. This was related, in turn, to the 'boundary disputes' between psychiatrists and the legal profession that resulted from the steadily widening role of psychiatric expertise in the courts. Goldberg, 'Mellage Trial'; Schmiedebach, 'Bewegung'; Doris Kaufmann, 'Psychiatrie und Strafjustiz im 19. Jahrhundert', Medizin, Gesellschaft und Geschichte, 10 (1992), pp. 23-39
72. In the absence of studies of this topic, I base these conclusions on anecdotal evidence from newspapers and parliamentary minutes, as well as from (anti)psychiatric sources. Huge numbers of (mostly male) people (over 92,000 in 1912) were prosecuted for 'Beleidigung', though it is impossible to determine from the Reich statistics what proportion of those cases were brought by citizens: Statistisches Jahrbuch für das Deutsche Reich Jg. 35 (Berlin, 1914), pp. 331-2
73. Two recent books about male honour focus exclusively on duelling, with no discussion of its corollary, the defamation lawsuit: Kevin McAleer, Duelling: The Cult of Honor in Fin-de-Siècle Germany (Princeton, 1994)
74. Ute Frevert, Ehrenmänner. Das Duell in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft (Munich, 1991)
75. On the connection between defamation suits and honour, see M. Liepmann, Die Beleidigung (Berlin, 1909). A man of honour, explained Liepmann (a professor of Strafrecht), was someone on whose 'word and drive (Tatkraft)' one can depend. Female honour, by contrast, was implicitly domestic and passive, consisting of 'purity in the inner life' (p. 13)
76. August Menn, Hallucinationen
77. Brill, Pflichtwidrigkeiten, p. 10
78. Carl Witte, Mein Conflict mit Herrn Hof- und Domprediger Stöcker (Berlin, 1889)
79. Walter Frank, Hofprediger Adolf Stoecker und die christlichsoziale Bewegung (Hamburg, 1935)
80. An insanity diagnosis most directly dishonoured men by denying them even the ability to sue for defamation. According to Liepmann, Beleidigung, p. 69, the insane, like children, have 'human worth', but they are only in the most limited sense 'bearers of honour' (Ehrenträger) and thus can only be defamed for an 'attack against [their] social position from the period of their health', i. e. before they were declared insane
81. Heinrich Schüle, Klinische Psychiatrie (Leipzig, 1886)
82. As one author put it, Querulantenwahnsinn allows medical practitioners to dismiss as illness 'real injustices and conspiracies': Düsing, Künstlicher Irrsinn. Eine Warnung vor Irrenanstalten (Leipzig, 1894), p. 24. The Bund's journal, Irrenrechts-Reform, was filled with attacks on the concept of Querulantenwahnsinn and its use by medical practitioners and the courts
83. Irrenrechts-Reform, 18/19 (1911), pp. 194-5
84. Irrenrechts-Reform, 63 (1919), pp. 183-4
85. The Bund defended them against the 'crazy' charge, and, while deploring Liebknecht's 'violent methods', called him a 'Volksfreund'! Though no friend of the left, Kretzschmar (Irrenfrage, pp. 7-18) was typical in deploring the use of the insanity label against political opponents, including anarchists and socialists
86. See, for example, 'Die geistigen Hinrichtungen in Ostelbien', Die Irrenrechts-Reform 40/1 (1913), pp. 368-74
87. Repp, Reformers, Critics, and the Paths of German Modernity (Cambridge, Mass. , 2000). On the whole, the lunatics' rights movement shared with this milieu a 'discourse of an alternative modernity' (p. 227) that emphasized social unity, non-partisanship and the 'rejection of existing party-political relationships' (p. 217). Further, individual activists, e. g. Lehmann-Hohenberg, were very much a part of that milieu. But the movement was much more ambivalent about scientific expertise, and its rhetoric of scandal departed significantly from the technocratic pragmatism of the reformers Repp analysed
88. The literature is too large to list here. For an introduction and important analysis, see Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right (Ann Arbor, 1991)
89. 'Neuorientierung und Irrenrecht', Irrenrechts-Reform, 56 (1916), p. 68
90. One article, for example, contrasted 'materialist medicine', which it called superficial, female and oriental, with 'German depth' and a 'spiritual élite': Irrenrechts-Reform, 2 (Sept. 1909), p. 13
91. A very interesting figure, about whom almost nothing has been written, Lehmann-Hohenberg had a career that included numerous publishing ventures, connected an array of causes and social reform 'milieus', and moved steadily to the right. His personal file (Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz (hereafter GStAPK), Rep. 76 Vf, Lit. L, nr. 35) contains a wealth of information, as well as many of his writings. His Nachlaß (Bundesarchiv, Berlin-Lichterfelde, N2170) may have been purged of incriminating correspondence by his heirs. See also Justus H. Ulbricht, 'Völkische Erwachsenbildung: Intentionen, Programme und Institutionen zwischen Jahrhundertwende und Weimarer Republik', in Uwe Puschner et al. (eds. ), Handbuch zur 'Völkischen Bewegung', 1871-1918 (Munich, 1996), p. 258
92. Albrecht Götz von Olenhusen, 'Zur Entwicklung völkischen Rechtsdenkens. Frühe rechtsradikale Programmatik und bürgerliche Rechtswissenschaft', in Hans Jochen Vogel et al. (eds. ), Die Freiheit des Anderen: Festschrift für Martin Hirsch (Baden-Baden, 1981), pp. 87-8
93. Repp, Reformers, p. 77
94. 'Allgemeine Irrenrechts-Konferenz', Vossische Zeitung, 8 March 1914
95. It especially wanted to severely limit (or eliminate) psychiatry's role in the courts, returning the legal judgment of insanity to judges (e. g. , Irrenrechts-Reform, 36/7 (1913), p. 341)
96. or to civil juries made up of laymen (e. g. , Kretzschmar, Unvollkommenheit, p. 59)
97. Indeed, conservatives first seized upon and politicized the asylum issue in the early 1890s by publicizing several cases of antisemites who, it was asserted, had been wrongfully incarcerated or incapacitated. These cases included, among others, the antisemitic leader Karl Paasch: Kretzschmar, Irrenfrage, pp. 81-98, 170-94
98. On eugenics and the left, see Michael Schwartz, Sozialistische Eugenik (Bonn, 1995)
99. Atina Grossmann, Reforming Sex (New York, 1995)
100. One among many examples of this rhetoric, which dated back to conservative antipsychiatrists in the early 1890s: Paul Elmer, 'Die Sozialisierung der Privatirrenanstalts-Industrie', Irrenrechts-Reform, 63 (1919), pp. 176-82
101. See also Schmiedebach's discussion of the limits of Wilhelmine antipsychiatry ('Bewegung', pp. 156-9)
102. Unlike the issue of legal incapacitation, there is a historical literature on Unzurechnungsfähigkeit: Michael Niehaus et al. (eds. ), Unzurechnungsfähigkeiten (Frankfurt/Main, 1998)
103. Ylva Greve, 'Richter und Sachverständige. Der Kompetenzstreit über die Beurteilung der Unzurechnungsfähigkeit im Strafprozeß des 19. Jahrhunderts', in Helmut Berding et al. (eds. ), Kriminaltät und abweichendes Verhalten (Göttingen, 1999)
104. The Bund's journal folded in the 1922/3 economic crisis, but Paul Elmer continued publicizing the cause elsewhere (below). Its reform demands are listed in Irrenrechts-Reform, 64 (1919), pp. 195-6
105. Hans Ludwig Siemen, Menschen blieben auf der Strecke . . . Psychiatrie zwischen Reform und Nationalsozialismus (Gütersloh, 1987), 33ff
106. Irrenrechts-Reform, 62 (1919), pp. 162-3
107. General-Anzeiger (Dortmund), 30 and 31 May 1931, reprinted in E. Rittershaus, 'Aus der Tätigkeit des Reichsverbandes (Presseausschuß) ', Psychiatrische-Neurologische Wochenschrift, 34/6 (6 Feb. 1932), pp. 63-5
108. and E. Rittershaus, 'Aus der Tätigkeit des Reichsverbandes (Presseausschuß)', Psychiatrische-Neurologische Wochenschrift, 34/5 (30 Jan. 1932), pp. 49-56