Description
This paper, based on a forthcoming book project, examines the entanglement of psychiatry, trauma, and statecraft in the making of modern Germany. Spanning the period from German unification in 1871 to the Cold War era, it explores how trauma diagnoses functioned as a sovereign tool to delineate the boundaries of the “normal” subject, casting ideological and racial others as pathological threats. Psychiatry framed the “constitutionally inferior” as biologically predisposed to weakness, legitimizing political violence ranging from the withdrawal of welfare to genocidal policies. It introduces the concept of psychiatric statecraft to analyze how psychiatric knowledge shaped political order.
Drawing on theorizations of the relationships between ‘Man’, scientific knowledge, and political order in the work of Richard Ashley and Sylvia Wynter, the paper demonstrates how medical practices constructed racialized hierarchies of Germanness. Psychiatric knowledge thereby produced a series of overlapping sovereign formations, including the welfare state, the Darwinian state, and the post-fascist state. The analysis brings together case studies of industrial workers, WWI soldiers, and Holocaust survivors to show how trauma diagnoses enforced exclusions central to Germany’s nation-building project. By bridging sovereignty, medical knowledge, and exclusionary politics, the paper addresses the enduring colonial and racial logics underpinning psychiatric statecraft, which resonate in German welfare and asylum policies to this day.
