Diagnosing Dissent : : Hysterics, Deserters, and Conscientious Objectors in Germany during World War One / / Rebecca Ayako Bennette.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Cornell University Press Complete eBook-Package 2020
• VerfasserIn: Bennette, Rebecca Ayako,
• Place / Publishing House: Ithaca, NY : : Cornell University Press, , [2020]; ©2022
• Year of Publication: 2020
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (240 p.) :; 1 map

While physicians during WWI, and scholars since, have addressed the idea of disorders like shell shock as inchoate flights into sickness by men unwilling to cope with war's privations, little attention has been given to the agency many soldiers actually possessed to express dissent in a system that medicalized it. In Germany, these men were called Kriegszitterer, or "war tremblers", for their telltale symptom of uncontrollable shaking. Based on archival research that constitutes the largest study of psychiatric patient files from 1914 to 1918, Diagnosing Dissent examines the important space that wartime psychiatry provided soldiers expressing objection to the war.Rebecca Ayako Bennette argues that the treatment of these soldiers was far less dismissive of real ailments and more conducive to individual expression of protest than we have previously thought. Not only an important issue in itself, such a reevaluation of German psychiatry during this period also fundamentally changes how we interpret central questions like the strength of the German Rechtsstaat and the continuities or discontinuities between the events of WWI and the atrocities committed—often in the name of medicine and sometimes by the same physicians—during WWII.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Map of Germany, 1918 -- Introduction -- 1. Antecedents: Psychiatry, the Military, and Pacifism in Late Imperial Germany -- 2. Hysterics and Other Patients: Diagnosis, Treatment, and Negotiation -- 3. Deserters: Delinquency, Psychological Disorder, and Dissent -- 4. Conscientious Objectors: Objects of Examination and Subjects with Agency -- Epilogue -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index