Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890–1930

by Paul Lerner

Paul Lerner traces the intertwined histories of trauma and male hysteria in German society and psychiatry and shows how these concepts were swept up into debates about Germany's national health, economic productivity, and military strength in the years surrounding World War I. From a growing concern with industrial accidents in the 1880s through the shell shock "epidemic" of the war, male hysteria seemed to bespeak the failings of German masculinity. In response, psychiatrists struggled to turn male-hysterical bodies into fit workers and loyal political subjects. Medical approaches to trauma valorized work and productivity as standards of male health, and psychiatric treatment―whether through hypnosis, electric current, or suggestion―concentrated on turning debilitated soldiers into symptom-free workers. These concerns endured through the Weimar period, as "nervous veterans" competed for disability compensation amid the republic's political crises and economic upheavals. Hysterical Men shows how wartime psychiatry furthered the process of medical rationalization. Lerner views this not as a precursor to the brutalities of Nazi-era psychiatry, but rather as characteristic of a more general medicalized modernity. The author asserts, however, that psychiatry's continual skepticism toward trauma resonated powerfully with the radical right's celebration of war and violence and its supposedly salutary effects on men and nations.

Genres: History

344 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 2003

Reviews

[Ed · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having written about shell shock during World War I, I started this book expecting a rerun of a fairly standard narrative dealing with the emergence of a psychological medicine from the experiences of that war. What Lerner offers, however, is something much more profound and troubling. It is hard to summarize, but he places the emergence of a psychological medicine before the war and argues that it did not have the humane purposes we ordinarily associate with it. Instead psychological arguments, that is arguments that the reason people developed symptoms after traumatic experiences was not due to the effect of the trauma so much as to factors internal to their personality. That interpretation spared the German national insurance program from paying. This approach was continued during the War and after. It contributed to a medicalization that supported the world view adopted later by the Nazi's. I'm not doing Lerner justice. Read this book. It is slow going because it is rich in detail, but it will change the way you see things as not many books do.