It is impossible to study the Third Reich without grasping the Nazis' obsession with biology. Hitler's political vision centered on an understanding of Germans as a damaged “body” (Volkskörper), whose long-term survival depended on the removal of impure elements, notably Jews, and a subsequent racial regeneration. But can a similar obsession with sickness and healing be found in early West Germany? Jennifer Kapczynski makes a compelling case that it can. In this impressive book, the author demonstrates that after World War II, German intellectuals employed a vocabulary of illness in their attempts to understand how Germany could have succumbed to fascism. While their “biopolitical texts” (p.19) had an entirely different aim from Nazi tracts, namely to understand the nature of collective guilt, their language nonetheless came “uncomfortably close” (p. 60) to that of National Socialism.

To make this case, Kapczynski draws widely from film, literature, and philosophy to construct a composite figure—the “German patient,” who in the late 1940s personified a country still recovering from the supposed “disease” of Nazism. She demonstrates that postwar writers and cultural producers—often medical doctors cum writers such as Karl Jaspers—used the language of sickness with a surprising regularity. “Quarantine,” “bacillus,” “contagion,” “infection”—these are just a few of the words that both liberal and conservative Germans used in portraying their country as having been contaminated with fascism. Writers such as Jaspers, Thomas Mann (whose syphilitic analogies defined his novel Doktor Faustus), Martin Gumpert, Friedrich Meinecke, and Heinrich Böll all to varying degrees tried to understand recent German history as a case study in illness. In addition, early postwar films such as The Murderers Among Us (1946) and émigré actor Peter Lorre's single directorial effort The Lost Man (1951) asked audiences to draw links between German history, medicine, and mass killing.

While each of these cultural figures and texts used the imagery of sickness to account for Nazi crimes, it is precisely the complicated relationship between illness and responsibility that made the “patient” such an appealing concept after 1945. For, the moment one becomes a patient, one is rendered a victim of sorts—in the case of Germany, a victim of the abstract forces of history, of the dangers of mass movements, or of a range of cultural poisons. Although a patient can certainly be responsible for his own illness, he invariably garners sympathy for his suffering, and it is here that we encounter the liberating potential of the patient metaphor. For as long as Germany remained infirm and vulnerable, it could not be expected to address its own historical responsibilities.

The postwar appeal to biological language was thus rife with moral complexity and etiological imprecision, and this fact was not lost on intellectuals, who struggled with the questions of guilt even as they tested the exculpatory power of the disease discourse. Nor is it lost on Kapczynski, whose study reveals the limits of medicalized language in providing a way forward for West Germans. Intellectuals' attempts to attribute Germany's suffering to the “alien” forces of fascism or modernity did not translate into a unified national discourse about guilt. If anything, they had the opposite effect in the late 1940s and early 1950s, offering a narrative of collective innocence at a time when the West German public was in any case more interested in enjoying the fruits of the “economic miracle” than in engaging in deep “memory work.”

With its interdisciplinary methodology (German studies and history) and its nuanced analyses, this book is an important source for scholars of German culture. It complements works on sexuality, gender, and the body in the Federal Republic, such as those of Dagmar Herzog, Frank Biess, and Atina Grossman, as well as scholarship that traces the language of victimization in West Germany (e.g., Norbert Frei's and Robert Moeller's studies). Nonetheless, we are left to ponder the ultimate significance of Kapczynski's findings. Because fin de siècle, interwar, and cold-war thinkers throughout the west all diagnosed cultural degeneration and decline with a similar biologistic vocabulary (which the author herself acknowledges), we should avoid making too much of the similarities between the Nazi and post-Nazi years. Partly at work was a transnational and transhistorical discourse about disease, combined with a twentieth-century attention to trauma, psychic damage, and mass psychology. This is not to deny how disturbing the persistence of cultural virology and bacteriology would have been so soon after the collapse of Nazism. Nor is it to diminish its importance of disease to understanding the zeitgeist of the late 1940s West Germany, when the Nuremberg trials of Nazi doctors brought questions of professional ethics, complicity, and medical barbarism to the fore. But The German Patient ultimately leaves unanswered two larger questions that must inform cultural histories of disease: why do we moderns continually rely on the language of illness to understand national crises? And when does this language of sickness and healing become genocidal?