Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890-1930 (review)

Every day, walking to my study, I see some young men in gray photographs taken around 1910: the house we live in belonged to my wife's great-grandmother who gave birth to twelve sons, not one of whom survived World War I. My own grandfather (b. 1913) was a half-orphan, his father having also been killed in the war. I do not tell these stories to demonstrate how Germans suffered; obviously, similar (or even more bitter) narratives could be told by French, British, Russians, Americans . . . What did these experiences do to the minds of the people at home, or to soldiers whose comrades had fallen? Which memories can we tell, and how do we structure then our memory with narratives as sketched above? Wars devastate not only bodies but also minds and memories. Mental reactions to war, then, can be considered part of the destruction of war. Now Paul Lerner, a historian at the University of Southern California, has written a brilliant book on an issue that has been a focus of interest in psychiatry in World War I: the so-called war neurotics.

Lerner situates the Kriegszitterer within German politics and the process of the professionalization of psychiatry. There are three contexts in which the phenomenon of "hysterical men" should be set: First, psychiatry in World War I can be understood as being part of a wider process of rationalization. Second, Lerner is interested in the gender aspects of diagnosing war neurosis. In an excellent chapter he sketches the history of hysteria as a female malady; he then shows how psychiatrists "learned" to see male hysterics and to conceptualize what he calls the male "worker-patient." Third, he is interested in understanding the ways in which individual and social narratives of trauma and suffering were constructed.

Wilhelmine psychiatry, says Lerner, benefited from medicalization and medical professionalization—but, in contrast to (e.g.) internal medicine, the state of therapeutics was desperate: lunacy resisted healing. Moreover, there seemed to be a terrifying increase in the numbers of lunatics, which mirrored bourgeois reactions to unsettling modernization: population growth, urbanization, industrialization, and the emergence of the Social Democrats. Lerner then sketches the reaction of psychiatrists upon the outbreak of World War I. Most of them felt war enthusiasm and encouraged a militaristic outlook: strong "masculine" nerves would win the war; war was the creator of a new, healthier Germany after the sissifying effects of boring peacetime. But they soon learned that the will to win was not enough by itself, when they were confronted by a disturbing phenomenon: the trenches produced confused, mute, paralyzed soldiers. Psychiatrists first tried to "heal" these symptoms with rest-cures, but they had little success. Some then developed other, often very brutal "therapies," "active treatments" that could "heal" masses of war neurotics in a short time. Most psychiatrists refused to recognize the direct influence of traumatic war experiences, believing neurosis to be caused only by the will to escape combat duty. Healed "neurotics" were seldom sent back to the front, where they might "infect" their comrades; instead, they were put to work. "Active treatment" mass-produced good workers to help the rationalized war economy: "idle patients" were transformed into "productive workers" (p. 126).

Psychoanalysts, hoping to demonstrate the value of their young science to the Fatherland, also attempted to treat these victims, but they often held the same views as their colleagues in mainstream psychiatry. Even through defeat and revolution, "worker-patients" were stigmatized. Psychiatrists constructed a stab-in-the-back-legend: being frightened by angry soldiers, they were unable to understand why their former "patients" could not see their "humane" intentions in "curing" them. Moreover, psychiatrists tried to conceptualize what was happening using a vulgarized concept of LeBons mass psychology: only psychopaths (i.e., weak-willed neurotics lacking love for the Fatherland) could make a revolution...