Paul Lerner traces the intertwined histories of trauma and male
hysteria in German society and psychiatry and shows how these
concepts were swept up into debates about Germany's national
health, economic productivity, and military strength in the years
surrounding World War I. From a growing concern with industrial
accidents in the 1880s through the shell shock "epidemic" of the
war, male hysteria seemed to bespeak the failings of German
masculinity. In response, psychiatrists struggled to turn
male-hysterical bodies into fit workers and loyal political
subjects.
Medical approaches to trauma valorized work and productivity as
standards of male health, and psychiatric treatment whether through
hypnosis, electric current, or suggestion concentrated on turning
debilitated soldiers into symptom-free workers. These concerns
endured through the Weimar period, as "nervous veterans" competed
for disability compensation amid the republic's political crises
and economic upheavals.
Hysterical Men shows how wartime psychiatry furthered the
process of medical rationalization. Lerner views this not as a
precursor to the brutalities of Nazi-era psychiatry, but rather as
characteristic of a more general medicalized modernity. The author
asserts, however, that psychiatry's continual skepticism toward
trauma resonated powerfully with the radical right's celebration of
war and violence and its supposedly salutary effects on men and
nations."
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