The Corrigible and the Incorrigible: Science, Medicine, and the Convict in Twentieth-Century Germany by Greg Eghigian (review)

Greg Eghigian’s book concerns itself with convicts and their detention and, in context, prison reform in Germany, from the Weimar Republic through the Third Reich, the German Democratic Republic, and the Federal Republic. His central question, around which he develops his arguments, is one regarding the interaction of punishment and rehabilitation of society’s offenders. Because he has chosen sexual deviates as his target group, he constantly veers between crime and disease, which frequently overlap. Broadly speaking, he is suggesting, even between the lines, that once a sex offender could be qualified as ill, he would have been curable and capable of reintegration into society. Conversely, if he was defined as morally inferior, rehabilitation would have been out of reach. Of course these were extremes; mixed cases were possible. Superimposed on this problematic is the question of safety both for society and for the deviate; hence the degree of recidivism was important. Eghigian takes the reader through various penal and psychiatric-institutional situations, from the 1920s into the 1980s, describing repeated attempts on the part of the German authorities to classify and reclassify criminal and medical conditions and devise corresponding treatments. A multitude of diagnostic and therapeutic terms the Germans coined in this process are mentioned, each different from the other, to fit their particular categories. Translated, by the author, into English for the benefit of the reader, in the end they prove confusing. On balance, the reader takes the impression from the book that there was no real progress in the treatment of offenders, inherent differences between democracies and dictatorships notwithstanding.

What ultimately detracts from the value of the book is that Eghigian has not dealt with the criminal/patient population consistently. Even though the book is meant to examine sexual offenders exclusively (an objective that is, strangely enough, not expressed in the title), the author also looks at deviates of other denominations, such as petty larcenists and vagrants. What is the rationale for digressing from the main line of concentration? In one instance, Eghigian describes asocial youths during the Third Reich who were held in Moringen, a special, and an especially vicious, youth concentration camp near Göttingen. Eghigian appears to go along easily with the Nazi definition of these teenagers as socially deviant, whereas in truth many of them were Swing Kids, resisting the Nazi Order by way of their indulgence in American jazz. Not by any stretch of the imagination were they sexual offenders. Their unexpected appearance in the book raises the huge question of differentiation between social and political prisoners during the Nazi and East German periods, which the author does not even vaguely attempt to resolve. For instance, in the German Democratic Republic, how many men or women were put away by the communist authorities, into prisons or psychiatric wards, because they were not toeing a political party line? Ditto for the Nazis. Eghigian’s indifference leads him, further on in the book, to the deplorable case of Hamburg University Professor Rudolf Sieverts, in West Germany after 1945. He was one of the leading criminologists of the new democracy, whose preachings Eghigian takes seriously. However, Sieverts, an old Nazi Party member, in large part bore responsibility for the incarceration of the politically unwanted in Nazi-era Hamburg, including Swing Kids and other youths.