[The neurology department of the Lankwitz Hospital. A contribution to the history of emigration, psychotherapy and the Berlin hospital]

Abstract

At Lankwitz near Berlin the Jewish physicians James Fraenkel and Albert Oliven founded a private hospital in 1890. This hospital, which integrated seven departments, became one of the biggest private asylums in the Reich during the first decade of the 20th century. Parts of the hospital served the military during WWI. As most of the physicians at Lankwitz were Jewish, the year 1933 meant an immense moral and scientific decline, since these physicians were forced to leave and later threatened. We know of one physician killed in a concentration camp. Hardly any research about this hospital had been published until the 1990's. This contribution is the first portraying one department--that of neurology. From the early years of the hospital, therapists involved with psycho-dynamic psychiatry and psychoanalysis were attracted to it. Lankwitz was a major experience for a number of later famous psychiatrists and psychoanalysts. This continued to be the case during the years of the Weimar Republic, after the hospital had been leased [verpachtet] to the insurance companies [gesetzliche Krankenkassen] of Greater Berlin. Revealing more about the history of Berlin's private clinics, this article also contributes to the city's history of neurology, psychiatry and psychotherapy. For the example of Lankwitz, the myth of a 'marginalized psychoanalysis', rejected by the contemorary medicine, cannot be corroborated. On the contrary, the Lankwitz physicians portrayed here seemed to have combined and integrated clinical work with psychoanalytic theory and practice. Germany's turn towards National Socialism however meant an immediate end for the Lankwitz clinic and the mode of therapy described.