Psychiatric governance,völkisch corporatism,and the German Research Institute of Psychiatry in Munich (1912–26). Part 2

The German Research Institute of Psychiatry in the aftermath of the First World War

Although conceived as a site of the ‘purest science’, the chief aim of the German Research Institute of Psychiatry (Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Psychiatrie, henceforth DFA) was to ‘serve public health and to work to overcome the deep wounds that bitter fate had inflicted upon the fatherland’.^1,2 In this vein, immediate post-war exigencies proved to be a boon to the DFA and were embraced because of the ‘happy prospect of enriching’ its development (Kraepelin, 1983: 217). In particular, the DFA increased its cooperation with the city hospital in Schwabing and expanded its facilities for treating former soldiers who had suffered brain damage. This work was undertaken in cooperation with August Heckscher’s sanatorium for nervous disorders, where Kraepelin’s student Max Isserlin served as chief physician. ³ Furthermore, Kraepelin’s student Karl Weiler conducted extensive forensic work on ‘pension neurosis’ (Rentenneurose), illustrating how practical questions about the treatment of war veterans opened up new opportunities for psychiatric research under the auspices of the DFA (Edition, VII: 54–8; Weiler, 1926, 1927).

The implications of the war and its aftermath probably seemed most tangible in the field of racial hygiene. The widespread assumption that the war had culled Germany’s best and brightest while leaving behind its less salubrious ‘elements’ fuelled visions of pending biological collapse and the urgent need for eugenic interventions. Pre-empting hereditary mental illness and bioengineering better mental health became paramount concerns across several departments of the DFA. Most prominently, the research undertaken in Ernst Rüdin’s genealogic-demographic department sought to apply methods of ‘empirical genetic prognosis’ to study various psychiatric and neurological disorders. ⁴ The DFA’s annual reports from the early 1920s bear witness to the broadening scope of this work which made this department Germany’s main research facility in racial hygiene, especially after the arrival of Hans Luxenburger, Bruno Schulz and Adele Juda in 1924.

Yet the war and Germany’s defeat in 1918 brought not only opportunities for new and expanded realms of applied psychiatric research, but also daunting challenges to the fledgling institute’s further development. The patriotic arguments that Kraepelin had deployed during the war had now to be recast to fit post-war realities. Although his efforts had been successful in fostering the emergence of the DFA during the war, his uncompromising militaristic stance, after Germany’s military collapse, also hindered further fund-raising efforts. Shortly after the war, when he began recruiting financial support from philanthropists in the USA, he accompanied his appeals with an article published in 1918 that justified the DFA on the grounds that it was essential to the survival of the German Volk (Kraepelin, 1918). ⁵ In response to his entreaties, Adolf Meyer recommended that because of ‘deeply rooted national feelings’ Kraepelin would do best to direct his appeals to Germanophilic benefactors such as Alfred Heinsheimer, Jakob Henry Schiff and the Warburg family. ⁶ Responding to Meyer’s hopes that the wounds of war would be overcome, Kraepelin remarked that:

the conduct of our prior enemies has made it extraordinarily difficult to see that wish fulfilled. If in the foreseeable future it will be at all possible to ameliorate the remaining, deep animosities, then the responsibility for accomplishing this task will fall first and foremost to scientific institutions. ⁷

But any hopes that Kraepelin harboured of overcoming wartime animosities were motivated more by the necessities of fund-raising than by any abiding commitment to international scientific cooperation. ⁸ For it was not Kraepelin, but rather the DFA’s chief benefactor, James Loeb, who had insisted that the institute should be a centre of international research modelled after the marine-biological research facilities in Naples, Italy, and Woods Hole in Massachusetts, USA. ⁹ After the war, Kraepelin remained as convinced as ever that German science was pre-eminent in the world. When Meyer visited Germany in 1923, he was taken aback by the same ‘ardent’ and ‘unregenerate’ nationalism that had prompted Kraepelin to agitate for unrestricted submarine warfare during the war’. ¹⁰

The DFA’s early post-war development was also hampered by the drawn-out negotiations that accompanied Kraepelin’s retirement and the appointment of his successor Oswald Bumke as chair in psychiatry at the University of Munich. ¹¹ According to contractual obligations between the university and the DFA, Kraepelin’s retirement necessitated the renegotiation of the relationship between the two institutions. ¹² But those negotiations became bogged down, initially because of the failed attempt to recruit Karl Bonhoeffer, and later because of the grave economic crisis blighting the nation. It was not until 1925, three years after Kraepelin’s retirement, that the two parties agreed on a new contract. ¹³ This dissolved the ‘personal union’ that had seen Kraepelin heading both institutions, but ensured Bumke a seat on the DFA’s administrative council (Verwaltungsrat). Above all, the new contract established elaborate rules governing the DFA’s anatomic and serologic departments as long as they remained in the university’s psychiatric hospital. The rules stipulated among other things that the two directors, Kraepelin and Bumke, ‘strive in every way to ensure peaceful and productive cooperation between the two institutions’ and that all disputes ‘be resolved immediately through deliberations at regular meetings of the administrative council’ or through arbitration.

The long and drawn-out negotiations with the university underscore just how precarious the entire organizational structure of the DFA remained throughout much of the 1920s. Until 1928, the evolution of the DFA was characterized by fragmentation as its various departments were successively withdrawn from the university’s psychiatric hospital. For example, in April 1918 Ernst Rüdin’s genealogic-demographic department moved into nearby rented quarters on Pettenkoferstraße; ¹⁴ the clinical department under Johannes Lange was set up in October 1922 in the Schwabinger Hospital (Bericht, 1924: 622–3); and at the end of 1923, the DFA’s library, psychological department and clinical archive moved into a villa built near the clinic on Bavariaring. ¹⁵ Thereafter, all that remained in the university hospital were the serologic and anatomic departments of Felix Plaut and Walter Spielmeyer. All these component parts of the DFA eventually found their way back under one roof when construction of the institute’s new building was completed in 1928. But for Kraepelin and his associates – for whom the prospect of a permanent home for the research institute had often seemed little more than a mirage – the piecemeal evacuation of the DFA out of university facilities was fraught with risk and imponderable outcomes. ¹⁶

No doubt the greatest risk facing the DFA in the early 1920s was its economic survival. Indeed, the ability to mobilize substantial financial assets was an essential prerequisite to the DFA’s detachment from the university, to say nothing of its ability to staff and maintain its research laboratories. Given the substantial increase in operating costs, the Board of Trustees decided in April of 1921 to embark on ‘a long-term drive to recruit new funding sources’. ¹⁷ In obtaining further support from his financial backers, Kraepelin stressed the urgency of constructing a new facility, and in the summer of 1921 both Loeb and Heinsheimer responded with donations of nearly 2.5 million Marks towards the new building. ¹⁸ Such generosity needs to be interpreted against the backdrop of more general economic developments. After a period of rapid devaluation of the German currency between May 1919 and February 1920, there was a period of relative stability lasting until June 1921 which attracted a flood of often speculative foreign investment from the USA into German markets (Winkler, 1993: 143).

However, as inflation gathered pace in the second half of 1921, the prospects for a new building began deteriorating rapidly. In November, Kraepelin wrote to Loeb that the interest on the DFA’s endowment was no longer sufficient to cover even its operating costs, let alone to finance the construction of a new building (Bericht, 1921: 343). Legal restrictions on the endowment, much of which was invested in non-redeemable German war bonds, thwarted efforts to move the DFA’s assets into dollar accounts in US banks. Efforts to overcome these hurdles led Loeb to establish a US dollar line of credit through the M.M. Warburg Bank in Hamburg. ¹⁹ Indeed, by mid-1922, the DFA’s fund-raising efforts were increasingly targeting philanthropists in the USA and encouraging donations in foreign currencies. ²⁰

Yet, for all the philanthropic largesse of Kraepelin’s benefactors, there was no escaping the wholesale collapse of the German financial system at the end of 1923. The financial crisis obliterated the DFA’s endowment, pushing hopes of a new building into the distant future and severely aggravating efforts to finance ongoing staffing and operating costs. In the autumn of 1923, the DFA’s solvency had become so precarious that it was forced to budget and transact in US dollars instead of German marks. ²¹

Joining the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Society

One of the unexpected consequences of hyperinflation in 1923 was that Kraepelin was forced to seek state support for the DFA by joining the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Society for the Promotion of Science (Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften, henceforth KWG). ²² With the backing of Gustav Krupp and the chemical industry magnate Carl Duisburg, both of whom were on the executive boards of the DFA and the KWG, negotiations began in early October 1923 and resulted in the DFA formally joining the KWG in May 1924. ²³ The successful conclusion of the negotiations brought the DFA, as Kraepelin put it, under the ‘protective wing’ of the KWG and ensured its survival following the ‘disastrous economic collapse’. ²⁴

Joining the KWG, although essential to the financial survival of the DFA, ²⁵ also influenced its further development. The KWG comprised a wide network of institutions that, from the outset, had been conceived as the scientific embodiment of imperial nationalism and militarism (Hachtmann, 2007: 82–90). In addition, the staffing policies of the KWG institutes drew on the authoritarian and patriarchal models of industrial conglomerates, as well as academic models such as the so-called ‘Harnack principle’, which envisioned research facilities being built up around a single, de-facto autarchic director. Above all, as Hachtmann (2007: 144, 145) has noted, each institute’s Board of Trustees was made up of what can best be described as ‘scientific oligarchs’ representing influential stakeholders from industry, national and regional governments, universities, etc.

As important as these general organizational models were, and regardless of whether they may have been inherent in the DFA or imported from the KWG, the relationship between the DFA and the KWG was also shaped by more specific circumstantial factors. From the outset, Loeb had warned that associating the DFA with the Imperial ‘Hohenzollern’-KWG would make it more difficult for him to recruit support from abroad. ²⁶ Appeals for support from the Rockefeller Foundation, which insisted that the institutions it supported should be university-based, was also made more difficult by the KWG’s funding and organizational policies, which sought explicitly to establish a network of research institutes outside the university system. Furthermore, far from seeing himself as the autarchic director of a research institute, Kraepelin felt himself to be a supplicant and ‘parasite’ at the mercy of foreign benefactors. ²⁷ Finally, negotiations with the University of Munich following the appointment of his successor Oswald Bumke illustrate that he also faced resistance from within the DFA’s Board of Trustees and that, in his negotiations with them, there was little room for autocratic forms of institutional governance. ²⁸

Psychiatric research in situ

Although Kraepelin tried to deny it, these and other factors exerted a marked influence on the internal organization and research priorities of the DFA. The psychological and chemistry departments can be taken as examples to illustrate how the DFA’s research agenda embodied a complex web of scientific, economic, statist and bio-political agendas. ²⁹

The research profile of the DFA’s psychological department reflected the growing interest in Taylorism in the early 1920s and its promise not just to increase economic productivity but also to overcome the wrenching discord between labour and capital. Taylorism seemed easily compatible with Kraepelin’s long-standing interest in experimental psychology, especially his research on measuring mental ability (Kraepelin, 1897; Edition, V: 41–53; VI: 35–7). Among others, the prominent sociologist Max Weber had praised Kraepelin’s experimental research as a pioneering achievement, although not without lamenting its impractical and ivory-tower origins in the laboratory rather than on the factory floor (Weber, 1908). So, in the words of Kraepelin’s assistant, the time had now come to ‘beat a path into the factories’ (Lange, 1926: 299). Although industrial psychology ‘wasn’t really one of the Institute’s tasks’, its inclusion in the DFA’s research profile was justified by its importance in ‘practical factory operations’ and its connection with important questions of ‘public health (Volksgesundheit)’ (Bericht, 1923: 247; Bericht, 1921: 349). Consequently, after November 1921 the orientation of the psychological department shifted decisively toward industrial psychology. ³⁰ Drawing on the support of local businesses, by 1925 three workshops with industrial machines had been built to study fatigue and concentration in ‘probands from the working class’ (Kraepelin, 1925: 433). ³¹ This research was supported by major industrial players, such as Krupp, Hugo Stinnes and the Union of Rhenish Industrialists, as well as by the German Ministry of Labour and the so-called Notgemeinschaft or Emergency Association of German Science. ³² It also received funding from the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior in order to carry out aptitude tests on state police officials (Bericht, 1927: 356). ³³

Plans for a chemistry department emphasize the vicissitudes inherent in the DFA’s mixed model of private and public funding. Kraepelin thought of this department as a ‘lever that would help construct the DFA’s new building near the city hospital in Schwabing’. ³⁴ Although the DFA had lacked the funding needed to create the department, the recruitment of Otto Wuth, who brought with him his own private financial resources, allowed chemical research activity to begin in laboratory space within the serologic department. But Wuth’s impending departure in 1924 prompted Kraepelin to look for alternative funding sources. After consulting with the director of the KWG, Friedrich Glum, and Richard Willstätter (a Nobel laureate in Chemistry and Kraepelin’s colleague in Munich), he sought out the Prussian Provincial Council (Vereinigten Preussischen Provinzen), a government body responsible for psychiatric affairs in Germany’s largest state (Bericht, 1921: 343; Bericht, 1923: 250–1). ³⁵ At about the same time, Kraepelin also turned to the Rockefeller Foundation for support. ³⁶ Although the latter quickly agreed to finance the department’s staff, ³⁷ acquiring matching funds from the Prussian Provincial Council for the operating costs proved more difficult. To this end, Krupp was able to recruit the support of Friedrich Schmidt-Ott, an influential member of the KWG and president of the Notgemeinschaft. ³⁸ Willstätter also supported the establishment of the chemistry department (Stoll, 1949: 347–8). In spite of these interventions, by the end of 1925 Kraepelin had all but abandoned his plans. ³⁹ It was not until early 1926 that negotiations with the Prussian Provincial Council were successfully concluded.

It would be a mistake, however, to assume that research at the DFA was simply a derivative of either immediate post-war exigencies or the external interests of certain ‘scientific oligarchs’ and industrial conglomerates. For the DFA was also a product of Kraepelin’s own long-standing clinical research interests and socio-hygienic concerns. Even though the initial, strong emphasis on clinical research could not be realized in full, a broadly clinical perspective became characteristic of the early DFA and distinguished it, for example, from Oskar Vogt’s Brain Research Institute in Berlin. Indeed, although Kraepelin’s clinical research efforts had been curtailed by the First World War, he redoubled them in the early 1920s. His article Die Erscheinungsformen des Irreseins sought to re-establish the pre-eminence of clinical perspectives in the post-war era (Kraepelin, 1920b). ⁴⁰ Addressing critics of his clinical methodology, he responded forthrightly: ‘the foolish blather about the barrenness of clinical psychiatry will soon fall silent once the effort is made to thoroughly evaluate large and comprehensive sets of empirical data (Beobachtungsreihen)’ (Kraepelin, 1983: 182).

Above all, the psychiatric impact of alcoholism and syphilis demanded Kraepelin’s scientific attention and was among the DFA’s most important priorities. The public health implications and economic costs of alcoholism obliged the DFA to ‘dedicate itself to intensive research in this field’ (Bericht, 1923: 247). ⁴¹ In carrying out this research, he succeeded in recruiting the support of several government ministries, including the Bavarian and Imperial Ministries of the Interior, as well as the Munich police department. ⁴² Based on a study of alcoholics admitted to his clinic between 1910 and 1921, he drew far-reaching conclusions about the effects of the wartime shortage of alcohol and redoubled his involvement in the temperance movement (Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Psychiatrie, 1923). Together with Robert Gaupp and others, in 1921 he called on doctors throughout Germany to help to prevent the spread of alcoholism. ⁴³ Sometimes with colleagues from the DFA, such as Otto Graf, he gave public lectures on the dangers of alcohol (Bericht, 1924: 626, 635).

Kraepelin was especially concerned about the role that alcohol played in contracting syphilis and progressive paralysis. To his mind, alcohol was a ‘catalyst for paralysis’ because it heightened the chance of infection and adversely affected its course (Kraepelin, 1924: 1128). ⁴⁴ In the mid-1920s, nothing preoccupied Kraepelin’s scientific attention more than questions about the aetiology of progressive paralysis (Kraepelin, 1924, 1926b). In particular, he sought to clarify why, in some cases, general paresis or ‘brain syphilis’ evolved into progressive paralysis, and specifically why ‘the morbid effects of the spirochete in brain syphilis and progressive paralysis diverged from one another.’ (Kraepelin, 1924: 1125). In explaining this divergence, Kraepelin assumed that some form of ‘natural protection’ against brain syphilis, but not against progressive paralysis, had been compromised. Citing apparently lower rates of paralysis in less civilized countries, Kraepelin interpreted paralysis as a so-called ‘disease of civilization’ attributable either to less robust bodily defence mechanisms or to the detrimental consequences of treatment for syphilis. ⁴⁵

Like research on alcoholism, work on paralysis extended across several departments of the DFA. ⁴⁶ Because of its clinical, serologic, anatomic and socio-hygienic dimensions, work on paralysis embodied the kind of ‘close cooperation’ between different departments that Kraepelin hoped to encourage (Lange, 1926: 300). Accordingly, he coordinated a massive evaluation of patient records drawn from the university’s psychiatric clinic and polyclinic and also from the Schwabing city hospital, the local asylum for alcoholics, and the county mental asylum in nearby Eglfing (Bericht, 1925: 624–5; Bericht, 1926: 270). Furthermore, he undertook a catamnestic assessment of all cases of paralysis that had been admitted to the university psychiatric clinic since it had opened in 1904 (Lange, 1926: 299). From 1915 onwards, he insisted that every patient be subjected to the Wassermann test in order to ‘assess the prevalence of syphilis in the hospital population’ (Bericht, 1920: 155; see also: Bericht, 1921: 348; Plaut, 1927b). For years after 1919, he conducted experiments using the relapsing fever spirochete Borrelia, hoping it would be possible to strengthen the body’s resistance to the syphilis bacterium Treponema pallidum (Bericht, 1921: 352–3; Kraepelin, 1924: 1130; Plaut and Steiner, 1925). He also conducted experiments on the effects of syphilitic infection on neural tissue (Bericht, 1923: 246–7; Spielmeyer, 1925).

Together with Gustav Kolb, the Director of the nearby asylum in Erlangen, Kraepelin developed an epidemiological research programme that gathered and compared data on paralysis on an international scale (Kolb and Kraepelin, 1925). The aim was to ‘encourage statistical surveys on current and past cases of paralysis in as many countries as possible’ (Bericht, 1925: 615). Along these lines, in 1921 Kraepelin began an extensive correspondence with colleagues from around the world and implemented new strategies designed to collect and organize data on comparative psychiatry. ⁴⁷ He queried various, non-European asylums about current and historical data, hoping to compare rates of admission of paralytics and to record the names and diagnoses of all non-German and non-Christian patients (Bericht, 1923: 256).

Canvassing for support in America

Kraepelin hoped to gather further data on paralysis among indigenous, Hispanic and Afro-American populations during a research trip to North and Central America in 1925. ⁴⁸ After months of preparation, and together with Felix Plaut, Kraepelin embarked on a journey through the USA, Mexico and Cuba that lasted from 12 March to 24 June. After arriving in New York, where the city’s hustle and bustle left his ‘brain in a state of chaos’, ⁴⁹ he travelled down the east coast to Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington DC, where he and Plaut examined numerous Afro-American patients at St Elizabeths Hospital and familiarized themselves with contemporary medical literature at the Surgeon General’s library. From there, they travelled inland via Buffalo, Detroit and Chicago to the Indian Asylum in Canton, South Dakota. ⁵⁰ After spending three days examining patients there, they went on to Pasadena for a consultation and then to Mexico City where still more patients were brought within their clinical gaze at the Manicomo General Hospital. The pair then returned to New York via New Orleans and Havana before sailing for Europe on 11 June 1925.

Research on paralysis was not, however, the primary objective of the trip. The chief, albeit tacit goal was to secure funding for the DFA from American philanthropists. ⁵¹ Months prior to his departure, Kraepelin had begun making contacts and on his very first day in New York he was already meeting prospective donors. Notably, and not least because contacts with American industrialists were so ‘highly desirable’, Kraepelin travelled to Detroit hoping to attract Henry Ford’s support for the DFA’s psychological department. ⁵² Kraepelin had read Ford’s writings and arranged to visit the Ford Motor company to see how the principles of industrial management were being applied in practice. More importantly, however, Kraepelin’s interest in Ford’s factories was directly linked with his efforts to locate financial support for the DFA. ⁵³ Henry Ford, who was also a benefactor of an asylum for psychopathic girls in Detroit, ⁵⁴ became a prime though ultimately illusive target of Kraepelin’s fund-raising efforts. Kraepelin’s intentions had been made clear prior to his departure from Europe when, in a letter to Krupp, he stressed that the economic ramifications of occupational psychology had not yet received adequate attention and that more scientific research in this field was needed. ⁵⁵

For Kraepelin, recruiting support for the DFA was a disagreeable task with intangible outcomes. On the day before arriving in New York, he wrote in his travel diary: ‘Tomorrow the work and battle with the foreign country begins; I’ll be happy as soon as I can again turn my back on it and return to my paradise in Suna. In any case, my expectations are very low.’ ⁵⁶ Indeed, the results of the trip were as he expected, and on his return to Europe Kraepelin concluded that, ‘in financial terms, the trip to America had not been very productive’. ⁵⁷

For a number of reasons, this trip to America was marked by failure. Time and again, his uncompromising political views evoked sharp exchanges with his hosts. By the end of his first day in New York, Kraepelin had already become embroiled in an acrimonious debate about German politics with the nephew of James Loeb, upon whose financial backing the DFA largely depended; and by the end of his second day he had indulged in ‘very energetic debate on alcoholism’ that soon evolved into ‘a lecture on my part about the alcohol question and Germany’s future’. ⁵⁸ The Director of the Psychiatric Institute on Ward’s Island in New York, George H. Kirby, who in 1906 had spent several months working under Kraepelin in Munich, recounted his impressions of Kraepelin’s uncompromising demeanour at a dinner party that Smith Ely Jelliffe hosted for Kraepelin in New York City:

We had an interesting evening, but the conversation turned more to the war and political issues than to psychiatric topics. We all felt quite disappointed to learn that Professor Kraepelin can see no solution of the Franco-German problem except another war and the ultimate domination of France by Germany. He seems to be not at all interested in any plan whereby mutual confidence and understanding could be established between the two countries. ⁵⁹

Such uncompromising encounters quickly revived memories of Kraepelin’s unbending wartime support for unrestricted submarine warfare and the militaristic political ideals of Grand Admiral von Tirpitz. ⁶⁰

These tensions show that Kraepelin’s efforts to recruit American support were hindered by a fundamental contradiction. On the one hand, the economic crisis in Germany had made appeals to foreign philanthropists all the more necessary; but on the other hand, hyperinflation and the loss of the DFA’s endowment bred further nationalist resentment:

The murderous peace that threatens to eliminate a great, industrious and striving people also represents a serious danger for all endeavours that serve the general well-being of mankind. Engaged in an arduous struggle, we are trying to preserve what was created to serve these ends. Although history teaches us that countless seeds of higher civilization have been washed away by the floods of barbarism, we still trust that the need to fight effectively against of the most terrible enemies of mankind will always attract supporters among those who want to prevent the collapse of an institution dedicated to fighting these enemies. (Bericht, 1924: 627)

To Kraepelin’s mind, in the wake of a lost war and devastating inflation, science was one of the last areas in which Germany could retain its international standing (Hachtmann, 2007: 103). Hence, in the mid-1920s he understood the DFA as an ‘intellectual arsenal of the German people’ and thought it only ‘right and proper that foreign countries financially support our efforts, given that they will later share in the results of our work’. ⁶¹ In a letter to the president of the KWG, he suggested contacting the US ambassador in Berlin, hoping that the plight of the DFA would provide the ambassador with ‘a good opportunity to demonstrate his sympathies for Germany and to contribute to the reconciliation between the two peoples on wholly neutral territory’. ⁶² Given such views, contemporary ideals of international scientific cooperation faced stiff headwinds and were further buffeted by Kraepelin’s frank warnings about the ‘subversive influence of internationalism’ (Kraepelin, 1921b: 7).

Throughout his life, Kraepelin remained convinced of German psychiatry’s pre-eminence. Moreover, international scientific cooperation was never a priority in his considerations of how best to advance psychiatric knowledge. These views did not prevent him from understanding the DFA as a facility that hosted foreign scientists; but what those scientists learned at the DFA, he believed, was an ‘important instrument for acquiring political influence’ (Kraepelin, 1919: 144). Above all, he hoped that working together with researchers from abroad would enhance ‘appreciation of our nature (unseres Wesens) in their home countries’ (Lange, 1926: 301). ⁶³

Negotiating with the Rockefeller Foundation

The greatest disappointment of the trip to America was the collapse of negotiations with the Rockefeller Foundation. Correspondence and contacts with the Foundation before Kraepelin’s arrival had been difficult and inconclusive. Nor did his meeting with officials in the Foundation’s New York offices on 8 June 1925 resolve anything. In the eyes of the Director of the Medical Division, Richard M. Pearce, the DFA was ‘not the sort of enterprise which our policy permits us to aid … K[raepelin] has approached us frequently in all kinds of ways – G[eorge] E[dgar] V[incent] need not take the initiative in looking him up.’ ⁶⁴ When, three days later, Kraepelin embarked on his return trip to Europe aboard the steamer Albert Ballin, his hopes of obtaining financial support from the USA lay in ruins.

But by July 1925 prospects had taken a turn for the better. Probably due to the direct intervention of John D. Rockefeller, ⁶⁵ and perhaps aided by Loeb’s long-distance efforts to sway Pearce, ⁶⁶ the Rockefeller Foundation re-engaged with Kraepelin and encouraged him to submit additional information about his plans for the DFA. ⁶⁷ Soon after, Adolf Meyer – although he had been taken aback by Kraepelin’s ‘ultra nationalistic self-assertion’ during his visit to the US – seemed prepared to put his concerns to one side. In correspondence with the Rockefeller Foundation, Meyer chose to look to a future when Kraepelin would have left the scene:

I feel that [Kraepelin] himself is after all close to his age limit, and that it might be possible to keep a strong group of investigators together on their own merits. Moreover, his yielding to a very peculiar personal temptation should perhaps not be allowed to figure in the recognition of what services he has rendered in promoting a certain phase of psychiatry.

… the fact that Kraepelin himself represents a type of psychiatry which I hope will soon belong to the past and that he himself behaved rather disgustingly and will no doubt use the success in a not altogether pleasant way had best be put aside, because, after all, there will be others coming after him and there are meritorious workers with him at present. ⁶⁸

In response to Meyer, Pearce was now likewise inclined to look beyond Kraepelin to the larger question of the institute itself:

I am actuated however largely by the fact that I consider Munich a good center for this work and that setting aside all consideration of Kraepelin himself, he has brought together a strong group of investigators and there should be no doubt about the continuance of the work and its success … ⁶⁹

On 11 November 1925 – the anniversary of the German capitulation at Compiègne in 1918 – the Rockefeller Foundation’s delegate Alan Gregg visited Munich. ⁷⁰ Gregg had been commissioned to examine whether and why a research institute not affiliated with an academic institution might deserve funding. Although the exact relationship between the DFA and the university had finally been resolved by contractual arrangement that September, tensions between Kraepelin and his successor at the university clinic remained an acute problem. In his diary, Gregg remarked that ‘… there is very obviously a marked antipathy between Bumke and Kraepelin in regard to the use of clinical material’. ⁷¹ Furthermore, Gregg suggested that: ‘The present status reminds me of the usual finish of a three-legged race, Bumke and K. being too closely tied up to work together.’ ⁷² In his final analysis, Gregg concluded that the DFA was for the most part an autonomous, non-academic institution. But his report remained equivocal: while noting the split that set the DFA apart from the university, he also stressed that the DFA enjoyed a much closer affiliation with a university than did other research facilities of the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Society. ⁷³

Not least because of such equivocation, by early 1926 Kraepelin himself was in no doubt that support for the DFA among officials at the Rockefeller Foundation remained tenuous at best. After Kraepelin had submitted a revised cost-assessment in early 1926, Pearce responded by restating his scepticism about support for the DFA because of the institute’s considerable distance from the university. ⁷⁴ On the verge of despair, Kraepelin again attempted – at length – to ally Pearce’s concerns by stressing a number of ties which the DFA maintained to the university. ⁷⁵

Ultimately, however, it appears to have been the intervention of Alan Gregg that prompted the Foundation to support the DFA. In a further report submitted shortly before the decisive meeting of the Foundation’s Board of Trustees, Gregg rebutted Pearce’s objections and argued for supporting the DFA even though it was not part of a university. According to Gregg, the specific structures of German research funding and the higher education system needed to be taken into account, and they justified a deviation from the Foundation’s funding policies:

To decline to assist research institutes which are not part of University departments constitutes a sound, a consistent policy, but it seems appropriate to note that, 1) to the system of highly standardized, government-supported facilities of Medicine in Germany, independent institutes for research in special fields are very useful stimulants. – 2) such institutes show every evidence of being well supported by local German sources (c.f. Kaiser-Wilhelm Society and the wide range of support for K’s institute). – 3) such independent institutes are perhaps one point in German medical education where capital support from the Rockefeller Foundation would be both welcome and significant. ⁷⁶

When, on 26 May 1926, the Rockefeller Foundation finally decided to support the DFA, it did so in the knowledge that it was contravening its own established policies:

The trustees should understand at this time that this proposal – that is, to aid an independent research institute – is a departure from the previous policy of the Division of Medical Education. Heretofore research has been aided only as a part of the duties of a faculty of a medical school. The Director is of the opinion that it is time to depart from the older policy and to aid research as such when in exceptional circumstances it is possible to foster an institute which shall be of value in the training of medical teachers and investigators in addition to the avowed object of research itself. It is hoped this policy may be extended later to include other countries or other fields in which research centers might aid in the training of medical teachers, or which are not sufficiently cultivated at present by medical schools proper. ⁷⁷

Thus, it was not really Kraepelin’s personal appeals that tipped the scales in favour of his funding requests. On the contrary, the financial support obtained by the DFA in 1926 appears to have come in spite of his entreaties, not because of them. Similarly, support from the Rockefeller Foundation was forthcoming not in accordance with its own policy guidelines, but in spite of them. Certainly, the motives behind the decision of the Foundation were complex and multidimensional; but that decision seems to have been shaped more by proleptic considerations, i.e. by the potential seen in the DFA’s chief scientists Ernst Rüdin, Walter Spielmeyer, Felix Plaut and Johannes Lange, than by the awkward and often belligerent mindset of its founder.

Conclusion

Most historical accounts of Emil Kraepelin are concerned either with the characteristics of his influential nosology or with his contribution to the development of racial hygiene and the murderous policies of the National Socialists in the 1930s and 1940s. Without disputing the importance and fruitfulness of both of these historiographic traditions, this article has adopted a different perspective. It has examined Kraepelin’s work as a research manager and organizer. As such, it seeks to elucidate a largely ignored, although highly significant, dimension of his psychiatric work. Indeed, from about 1915 until his death in 1926, he considered this work to be his most significant and lasting contribution to the field of psychiatry, and it consumed nearly all his professional energies, especially after he retired from his academic post at the University of Munich in 1922.

Seeking to understand and to reconstruct Kraepelin’s work as a research manager has several advantages. It provides an important sounding board with which to critically examine other more traditional interpretations of his life and works. It enriches our understanding of the complexities and contingencies that surround and inform psychiatric research and that are inflected in its results. In particular, it reminds us just how entwined psychiatric research was – and indeed remains – with the institutions that support it and the economic, social and political conditions that enable those institutions. Most importantly, however, it opens a window onto the professional politics and the strategies of governance that, although often overlooked by historians, have exerted such decisive influence on psychiatry’s development. Historical accounts that are unable to accommodate the professional-political dimensions of psychiatric research will not only fail to appreciate the significance of Kraepelin’s own political skills and failings, but also be ill-equipped to comment from an historical vantage point on the professional politics that today have so enveloped contemporary debates, for example on the evolution of DSM or the place of pharmacological agents in psychiatric research and treatment.