After the First World War, foreign cultural policy became one of the few fields in which Germany could act with relative freedom from the restrictions imposed by the Treaty of Versailles. In this context the Hamburg doctors Ludolph Brauer, Bernhard Nocht and Peter Mühlens created the Revista Médica de Hamburgo (as of 1928 Revista Médica Germano-Ibero-Americana), a monthly medical journal in Spanish (and occasionally in Portuguese), to increase German influence especially in Latin American countries. The focus of this article is on the protagonists of this project, the Hamburg doctors, the Foreign Office in Berlin, the German pharmaceutical industry, and the publishing houses involved.
Between 1900 and 1914 many so-called “insane re-migrants” (geisteskranke Rückwanderer) from America were admitted to the psychiatric institution in Hamburg-Friedrichsberg. These patients were mainly East European emigrants who had left Europe via Hamburg, had been classified insane and had been sent back by the US authorities. A total of 446 relevant medical files are available. This article concentrates on the years 1900 through 1903, and focuses on the issue of foreign language interpreting in psychiatric practice. Two cases — two multilingual Friedrichsberg patients who assumed the function of interpreters in each case of a foreign “insane re-migrant” — will be described in detail. The interpreters played a significant role in the reconstruction and documentation of the medical histories of their fellow patients. Conversations and interrogations carried out by them and recorded by their own hand have been passed down in the medical files of the patients they “examined”. The files of the multilingual patients themselves were also found in the archives. Thus, their activity as asylum interpreters can be viewed in the context of their own medical histories, i.e. their own mental condition.
Between the years 1937 and 1945 the Marburg psychiatrist Albrecht Langelüddeke (1889–1977) acted on the prosecutor's behalf as an expert in the case of 35 persons accused of political offense. When psychopathy is diagnosed, while supposing the requirements of § 51, Abs.2
StGB [German law] to be valid (reduced accountability), a window of interpretation opened up, in which the physician sounded out the application of the said paragraph – beyond the dichotomy insane/normal – in a specific manner. The special technique of psychiatric expertise's compilation,
the patterns of evaluation and argumentation as well as the interpretative range and juridical requirements will be analysed. In particular, the question will be posed to which extent and in which way political aspects, criteria and topics take effect in Langelüddeke's expert opinions.
Kurzfassung: Zwischen 1937 und 1945 begutachtete der Marburger Psychiater Albrecht Langelüddeke (1889–1977) in gerichtlichem Auftrag 35 Personen, denen politische Vergehen zur Last gelegt wurden. Bei diagnostizierter Psychopathie und gleichzeitiger Anerkennung der Voraussetzungen
des § 51, Abs. 2 StGB (verminderte Zurechnungsfähigkeit) wird ein Deutungsraum erkennbar, in dem der Mediziner die Anwendung des genannten Paragraphen – jenseits der Dichotomie verrückt/normal – in spezifischer Weise auslotete. Analysiert werden die besondere Technik
der psychiatrischen Gutachtenerstellung, die Beurteilungs- und Begründungsmuster sowie die interpretatorischen Spielräume und juristischen Vorgaben. Insbesondere wird der Frage nachgegangen, inwieweit und in welcher Weise politische Aspekte, Kriterien und Inhalte in Langelüddekes
Fachgutachten zum Tragen kommen.
The object of this article is to point out and to discuss the significant intersections and boundary blurring between psychiatry and tropical medicine while treating malaria in the German «colonial metropolis» Hamburg. The focus of this study is the Hamburg asylum at Friedrichsberg and the Institute for Maritime and Tropical Diseases (Hamburg Tropical Institute). Under analysis are two groups of patients as well as the means with which their doctors treated them: 1. patients who have been sent back from the German colonies in Africa after mental disorders had been diagnosed, and 2. patients suffering from general paralysis and treated in Friedrichsberg after 1919 using the then newly developed malaria fever therapy (according to Wagner-Jauregg). The implementation of this latter led to an intensification of the cooperation between psychiatry and tropical medicine in Hamburg which prior to this had been only very sporadic.
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