This concise monograph should subtly shift perceptions of German militarism at the core of Imperial German identity in the context of the First World War and, thus, is an important addendum to the field. Rebecca Ayako Bennette convincingly argues over the course of four well-developed chapters that despite a literature maintaining the brutalization of German soldiers who refused to serve, in reality traumatized soldiers were able to navigate the realm of military psychiatry in surprisingly advantageous ways. Her insight continues to erode a supposed pattern of brutal treatment by the German military of people deemed mentally ill from the First to the Second World War, leaving Nazi militarism and psychiatry as departures. Diagnosing Dissent demands not that we reconsider the enthusiasm of men to join the German war effort in summer 1914, but that we better understand the dissent among German soldiers in autumn 1918 in terms of wider practices.
Bennette has examined 2200 medical files of soldiers treated across a spectrum of dissent during the Great War to “highlight what has largely been missing: that individuals truly traumatized—and they were legion—by the effects of a horrific war became ill but nonetheless found ways to negotiate the medical system to achieve aims that included receiving treatment but did not end there” (18). The German military chose to medicalize men unable and/or unwilling to fight on the front or serve on the home front, rather than criminalize them. Bennette reads the files against the grain to recover a gentler, more understanding approach to war tremblers—the German characterization of shellshocked soldiers—many of whom expressed agency in articulating and enacting various postures from circumscribed dissenter to conscientious objector. In so doing, the author engages a narrower conversation with scholars willing and able to analyze physicians’ handwritten notes in various archives across Germany. She counters others’ interpretation, for example, that the 1916 professional association meeting of psychiatrists in Munich was a watershed in terms of consolidating psychiatric perceptions and practices around the harsh treatment of mentally ill and dissenting soldiers.
The first chapter contextualizes the rise of the field of psychiatry to the lofty position of closely working with the German military. The medical system welcomed and was prepared to handle cases of traumatized soldiers referred by military discipliners, yet still became overwhelmed as the war unfolded. The idea of refusing to serve, as Bennette further clarifies in the epilogue focused on pre- and post-Great War pacifism, simply did not exist before the experience of a modern total war on the scale that occurred between 1914 and 1918. In chapter two, the author reassesses both the writings of and treatments prescribed by the psychiatrists. What they published in journals and what they wrote and did in practice did not always align, as they softened in the face of traumatized soldiers and often in recognition of real wartime horrors. How men attempted to recover from the experience of being buried alive by exploding artillery is just one haunting image in this book, and the author notes physicians’ sympathetic interpretations of hysteria, which could weaken healthy as well as unhealthy men. Wartime psychiatry was not the homogenous and brutal system that it has appeared to be both at the time and in later scholarship.
The author unpacks the process of medicalizing traumatized soldiers in chapter three and argues for agency even in diagnosing mental illness. It clearly assisted men facing military discipline by allowing them to sidestep responsibility and, therefore, punishment outlined in Paragraph 51 of the Reich Penal Code, and to extend a desire to opt out of fighting. While the military did go after soldiers seemingly shirking or refusing duty, great efforts were expended by military courts and psychiatrists to take the examination of such soldiers seriously. To be sure, this was the result of viewing insubordination as so unfathomable that it could only be understood as a mental disorder. As Bennette notes in the final, fourth chapter, the result was still that “German soldiers were in many ways treated ‘kindlier’” (135) than those in other belligerent countries.
Chapter four focuses squarely on conscientious objection, broadly defined at the extreme end of a spectrum of dissent, and reveals greater numbers of conscientious objectors than previous counts. Conscientious objection has not been adequately addressed in the scholarship for what became late-stage Imperial Germany. An equivalent system of registration like in Great Britain was absent, and a narrower interpretation of dissenters’ intentions prevailed. While refusing to fight appeared “crazy,” psychiatrists had a difficult time offering diagnoses of mental illness and making such diagnoses stick to conscientious objectors. There was no trend to paint these traumatized soldiers in the worst possible light, but neither were the most strident given a platform, like a courtroom, from which to project their views. Medicalization of dissenters did serve to silence them.
This medical history from the patients’ perspectives powerfully centers the actions and words, necessarily re-told or transmitted to us by physicians, of the German soldiers in the First World War. Bennette effectively offers points of comparison, to counteract the egos and interpretations of the speaking doctors. More analysis of dissenting soldiers’ masculinity would have been warranted, however. The author's thorough review of the literature led her, of course, to critically important work by such historians as Paul Lerner, yet how the underlying gender norms of fighting and service impacted the soldiers caught in the medical system was only mentioned in passing or relegated near the end of the book, and the masculinities of the psychiatrists as they reached different conclusions about diagnosing dissent were not considered.
