Antecedents

This chapter gives a broad overview of developments within the main areas of psychiatry, the military, and pacifism and provides the necessary background to understand the conditions prevailing in Germany leading up to 1914. It highlights the rising fortunes and expanding purview of psychiatry in the decades before World War I and references the limits of describing the trends as medicalization. It also explores the general prestige of the military and the role of pacifism in imperial German society. The chapter looks at August Fauser and Erwin Ackerknecht's estimations of psychiatry around 1900, which inhabited opposite ends of the opinion spectrum. It analyses attitudes toward the insane that had been lumped with the larger category of the poor over the nineteenth century.

Hysterics and Other Patients

This chapter talks about the standard narrative concerning wartime psychiatry in Germany that is found throughout the literature of the previous decades. It explains the medical literature of World War I and the actual treatment files of soldiers who were seen by psychiatrists. It also mentions historians that see 1916 as a pivotal moment in the success of the hysteria diagnosis in which questions emerged on how to understand or treat shell-shocked soldiers. The chapter reviews the belief of many psychiatrists that the weak wills and pension desires of reluctant soldiers were to blame for their “real” wartime horrors. It reveals the significant space for agency that even traumatized soldiers had, even though they were placed in hospitals or other mental institutions for treatment.

Introduction

This chapter examines an array of files within the context of the time to understand how and why physicians made certain diagnoses and proposed treatments to patients of World War I. It analyses the practices and perceptions that were prominent in the system of military psychiatry during World War I. It also considers the process of diagnosing dissent, which is an endeavor that German physicians focused more on the medical part than on the moral end. This chapter investigates that German wartime psychiatry during World War I concentrated on the diagnosis and treatment of the Kriegszitterer or shell-shocked soldiers. It identifies German soldiers that were presented with a notorious mixture of symptoms that were labelled as hysterics.

Deserters

This chapter probes the reality of agency and space for dissent that medicalization offered to soldiers during World War I. It explains how the tendency to refer deserters for psychiatric observation and treatment frequently served to shield the soldiers from the full brunt of military discipline if they committed overt acts of disobedience. It also reviews the contemporary understanding of the boundary between mental illness in the actual sense and those who were not truly sick, even if they did not allegedly exhibit complete mental fitness. The chapter reveals the flexibility shown by wartime psychiatrists in determining issues of mental competence for transgressions of discipline related to desertion and the similar charge of going AWOL. It describes how soldiers expressed dissent and avoided significant unwanted involvement in the war, such as direct fighting.

Epilogue

This chapter covers the narrative of dissent and medicalization during World War I into the post-1918 era, and provides a summary of some of the larger conclusions that can be taken from the re-examination of wartime psychiatry. It discusses pre-war pacifism that never embraced conscientious objection as a stance before the war. It also refers to the pacifists who during the fighting between 1914 and 1918 refused to serve and became leaders of the growing movement of more radical pacifism in Weimar Germany. The chapter recounts the subsequent development of the radical pacifism of Weimar and its roots in the dissent that was evident in the medicalized system dealing with psychologically traumatized soldiers. It reviews wartime psychiatry that fundamentally informs larger historical questions concerning modern German history.

Conscientious Objectors

This chapter explores the interconnections between psychiatric medicalization and the dissent of German soldiers during World War I, and it explains how these men took an explicit and decisive stand against the war by refusing to serve. It discusses the psychiatric observation that determines what illness lay at the heart of the soldiers' allegedly incomprehensible refusal to defend Germany. It also identifies the conscientious objectors during World War I who faced examination by doctors who sometimes dismissed them as mentally ill or incompetent. The chapter describes psychiatrists that expressed cognizance of the limits of their own diagnostic abilities in comparison to the wartime medical community. It reviews the medicalization of conscientious objection, which is considered as the most overt form of dissent that appealed to many of the objectors because of the greater room for maneuver against criminalization.