Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics

Re-Arming the Disabled Veteran: Artificially Rebuilding State and Society in World War One Germany

2 Re-Arming the DisabledVeteran Artificially Rebuilding State and Society in WorldWar One Germany Heather R. Perry WHILE THE B ATTLEFIELDS of the First World War left unprecedented numbers of German soldiers dead, the intensity of the conflict fostered medical innovations that enabled a far greater percentage of severely injured men to survive. Over the course of the war, doctors gained enough experience with amputation surgery and antiseptic procedures to save lives that would have been lost to gangrene or infectious disease in previous wars. Nonetheless, the alarming rate at which soldiers lost arms or legs in battle forced German medicine to take stock of its existing rehabilitation programs and prosthetic devices. German doctors interpreted it as their patriotic duty to heal and repair the broken bodies of war, and orthopedists and engineers worked together toward this end. Along the way they revolutionized artificial limb technology and invented modern German orthopedics. The crippled veterans whom they sought to assist faced a difficult transition to civilian life. They returned to a new German Republic fraught with social violence and political turmoil. Though publicly lauded during the war, many soon felt cast aside by the fatherland they had so bravely defended. Previous studies of this “front generation” have tended to focus on either government pension and demobilization programs1 or the postwar politics of veterans.2 In an effort to understand the “outsider” position of Germany’s veterans, these studies argue that German veterans were dissatisfied with their war pensions, 75 or felt forgotten in the larger postwar crisis of Weimar Germany, or simply rebelled against an unwanted liberal government in the violent manner they had “learned” during the war. None of these histories, however, have considered the consequences of the government’s attempted reintegration of crippled soldiers. This is particularly surprising , given that it was the conspicuous and unresolved dislocation of the returning disabled soldiers that fundamentally stamped Weimar culture . From the paintings of Otto Dix and George Grosz to the pacifist literature of Erich Maria Remarque to the uniform-clad beggar on the streets and cinema screens of Berlin, the ubiquitous presence of the broken soldier was one that all Germans ultimately confronted. This essay examines how German orthopedists attempted to solve this crisis—a crisis that not only threatened the existing welfare and social insurance system, but also left the country with a desperate postwar labor shortage. In an effort to both legitimize their field in the eyes of the state and reconstruct men disabled in battle, German orthopedists painstakingly developed new rehabilitation programs and innovative prosthetic devices for disabled veterans. By returning the disabled veterans to the workforce, orthopedists hoped to alleviate the financial pressure on the national insurance system and thereby win the favor of the government. In doing so, they produced scores of artificial arms, revolutionizing prosthetic design in Germany. Along the way, however, they lost sight of their patients’ needs, focusing instead on the reproduction of prewar class boundaries and the stabilization of wartime society. GERMANY BEFORE THE WAR: SOCIETY,WELFARE, AND ORTHOPEDICS IN THE EMPIRE Wilhelmine Germany was a highly stratified society where interclass mobility was extremely rare. The bourgeoisie strictly guarded the educational and structural gateways to the middle class, and blocked members of the working class from gaining access to the universities, civil bureaucracy, and military. Moreover, in Prussia a three-tiered voting system further weighted the votes of the wealthy and privileged, ensuring that the nobility and bourgeoisie maintained control of German politics. 76 HEATHER R. PERRY The prewar German national insurance system was an intricate web of administrative laws and regulations primarily designed to preserve the existing social order, not to administer any kind of compensatory justice. In order to defuse an increasingly restless working class in the 1880s, the German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck passed a series of legislative acts creating a national insurance program. This system calculated benefits on the basis of wages lost, not medical condition. In practice, this meant that two workers could experience the same injury —the loss of a hand, for example—yet receive substantially different pensions. The goal of the insurance system was to maintain the worker’s socioeconomic status, ensuring that he would neither rise above nor fall below his present level. Insurance officials strictly guarded the public coffers and eyed every claim with skepticism. Because they suspected many applicants of...