Doing Medicine Together: Germany & Russia Between the Wars (review)

This book is the fruit of several annual symposia on Soviet–German medical relations, which were held in Berlin from 1992 to 1997 and culminated in a meeting on the same topic in Toronto in 2000. Contributors are historians of European science, medicine, and culture and archival researchers; this scholarly network stretches from Germany and Russia to Canada and the United States.

To speak of scientific and medical collaboration between Germany and Russia, two former and future political enemies, is a counterintuitive matter even for historians. Was it a political show, a genuine interest, or even an attempt at true cooperation? The period under scrutiny began with the signing of the Rapallo Treaty in 1921 and ended in the first years of Stalin's Cultural Revolution. The acme was reached in 1925 with the founding of the Deutsch-Russische Medizinische Zeitschrift. The founding of this journal, in which high-ranking officials on both sides took part, most resembles what one could call a successful joint venture.

In other stories, cooperation looks to have been more problematic. Sometimes these accounts are intriguing, like the one about the bacteriologist Heinz Zeiss, who worked for the Russian medical service and later unsuccessfully fought an accusation of spying for Germany. Sometimes they are tragic, like the story of Jewish physician émigrés from Germany, who found a second home in the Soviet Union but subsequently fell victims of Stalinist repression. These stories are researched and told in great detail. The figure of the medical entrepreneur and adventurer, Zeiss, is studied especially thoroughly (in four papers by Elizabeth Hachten, Wolfgang Eckart, Susan Gross Solomon, and Sabine Schleiermacher). Although the authors have different anchorages in the topic and illuminate different aspects of Zeiss's prolific activity, the reader nevertheless feels a certain déjà-vu.

There is more to the book than one expects from the title. Building on the background of medical contacts, it includes articles on much broader topics. Marina Sorokina writes on the celebration of the two-hundredth anniversary of the Russian Academy of Sciences, one of the first Soviet ceremonies to which foreign scientists were invited. Michael David-Fox explores the role of the All-Union Society for Cultural Ties Abroad (the abbreviated Russian name is VOKS) in bringing intellectuals of the two countries together. Paul Weindling contributes an article on the political underpinning of German interests in Russia and its medicine, written in conjunction with his excellent book-length study, Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe, 1890–1945 (Oxford, 2000). Jochen Richter traces the history of twin institutions, both headed by Oscar Vogt: the Berlin Brain Research Institute and its Moscow counterpart, founded for the purpose of studying Lenin's brain as well as brains of other dignitaries. Nikolai Krementsov tells the story of the Seventh International Genetics Congress, which was scheduled for 1937 in Moscow but only materialized in Edinburgh two years later. The cancellation of the Moscow meeting marked the decisive turn against genetics in Soviet Union politics, and it also touched some German researchers, including the German émigré biologist working in Moscow, Julius Schaxel.

One reason Germany and Russia looked to each other in this period is that both were marginal in world politics. So were those doctors and researchers who built bridges between the two countries and their medicine. Germany and Russia were also marginal to the community of which they intended to be part. Heinz Zeiss came to Russia as a relatively young man with no career in Germany; Oscar Vogt never had an academic position in Germany apart from the one he created for himself; Louis Jacobson-Lask, the neuroanatomist (described in the article by Ulrike Eisenberg), was a marginal figure in both his immediate academic community and among Soviet medical researchers. The final article by Carola Tischler is equally about outsiders, some of whom were persecuted...