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Hysterical Men: War, Psychiatry, and the Politics of Trauma in Germany, 1890-1930. Paul Lerner. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. Pp. xi + 326. $39.95 (cloth).
A couple of years before the outbreak of World War I, Kaiser Wilhelm II told the cadets and officers at the Naval Academy of Flensburg-Murwick that "the next war and the next battle at sea will demand of you healthy nerves. It is through nerves that its outcome will be decided" (40). With his invocation of the concept of "healthy nerves," the Kaiser linked military success and, hence, German victory with the psychological fitness of the individual soldier. He cited an idea that had its roots in the cultural and medical landscape of a rapidly modernizing Imperial Germany, and would become the touchstone by which masculinity, national strength, and patriotic duty were evaluated during World War I and in the Weimar Republic. Lerners book attempts to unpack and reconstruct the complexities of this trajectory of thought by examining how the practice of psychiatry came to define modern German masculinity in terms of a healthy psychological disposition, patriotic service to the nation, and economic productivity.
It is the figure of the male hysteric-"Hysteria virilis"-who consistently haunted the German imagination as the nation progressed on the path to modernity, and who symbolized its various failures and shortcomings. Because the male hysteric was unable to work or serve in the military and, according to the argument of German psychiatrists, shirked his patriotic duties in order to acquire a pension, he undermined Germany's economic power, political stability, and military strength. Lerner argues that the psychiatric writings...