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Berlin Electropolis: Shock, Nerves, and German Modernity

2007; University of Wisconsin Press; Volume: 99; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/mon.2007.0030

1934-2810

Theodore F. Rippey,

Neurology and Historical Studies

Reviewed by: Berlin Electropolis: Shock, Nerves, and German Modernity Theodore F. Rippey Berlin Electropolis: Shock, Nerves, and German Modernity. By Andreas Killen. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. viii + 295 pages. $49.95. Berlin Electropolis is a history of the nervously afflicted, which means it is also a partial survey of the collateral damage of modernity. Andreas Killen focuses on three iconic groups of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nervously ill—railway workers, soldiers, and switchboard operators—and the service (or disservice) rendered by the doctors and institutions charged with their care. There are significant commonalities between these populations, but each group's distinct story adds depth and complexity to Killen's encompassing account of "the constellation of social, scientific, and cultural forces that converged at the end of the nineteenth century to usher in the age of mass nervousness and then the factors that led to its decline" (4). He argues that the Bismarckian social insurance system, conceived as a means to "manage the shocks, accidents, and afflictions of industrial society" (2), risked becoming overwhelmed by a flood of cases that new forms of fatigue, accident, and nervous diagnosis made possible. In each component analysis, he charts a shift from somatic models of nervous ailment, which dovetailed with a strong sense of state responsibility for treatment; to psychological models, which re-assigned responsibility to the afflicted individual in an effort to shield the insurance system from stampedes (perceived or actual) of neurotics and malingerers. Overall, the study is rigorous, readable, and rewarding. Two effective preliminary chapters establish turn-of-the-century Berlin as central Europe's definitive "electropolis" and examine the role of electrical current as a modality of diagnosis and treatment in the then-emerging field of neurology. Killen traces how German psychiatry moved from a moral to a materialist orientation in the nineteenth century, setting the stage for the socially and somatically focused neuroscience that saw in electrical technologies both a source of nervous illness and a means to control the damage of what Karl Lamprecht called the "Zeitalter der Reizbarkeit" (34). As capital of the second industrial (i.e. the electrical) revolution, home to exploding ranks of "brain workers," and center of cutting-edge psychiatry and neuroscience (at the Charité clinic, for example), Berlin became a site of threatening technological/nervous breakdown and a hotbed of debate over how to solve the problems such breakdowns posed. The third chapter directs our attention to the first of Killen's nervous collectives: railway workers. By starting with this group, he also tackles the cultural, social, even epistemological impact of the means of transit that remains the embodiment of the technologization and acceleration of nineteenth-century life. The railway system's great contribution to modernization came with great risks, not the least of which were [End Page 243] neurasthenia (nerves made sick by fatigue and overstimulation) and traumatic neurosis (prolonged nervous illness triggered by accident) among its employees. In 1889, the Reich Insurance Office extended coverage to traumatic neurosis, compelled principally by the work of Hermann Oppenheim, who established a disease picture grounded in somatic logic (i.e. physical and emotional trauma caused nervous illness). It did not take his opponents long to recognize how Oppenheim's theory changed the stakes. As Killen puts it, "[i]f nervousness had once been part of the cultural property of the bourgeoisie, it now became a mass condition" (93). The insurance system's need for expert examiners increased proportionally to the number of cases, and soon doctors everywhere were using "electrodiagnosis" (99) as a means to separate genuine sufferer from malingerer. The conviction that malingering was rampant, coupled with the idea that social insurance itself bred a tendency to feel afflicted and seek compensation, fueled a backlash against the Oppenheim model that culminated with the first diagnoses of Rentenneurose (pension neurosis) in 1911 (123–24). Doctors like Karl Bonhoeffer, psychiatric director at the Charité as of that year, led the effort to stem the tide of claims by disputing the presence of real injury or determining that injuries were the result of prior defect, thus absolving the state of responsibility. Killen's analysis of electrodiagnosis, which "sought to turn the...