Heidelberg

   The Heidelberg university’s department of psychiatry was the epicenter of the phenomenology movement in Germany and a source of much innovative thought, including key editions of Emil Kraepelin’s textbook.

   The university psychiatric and neurological clinic (Psychiatrische und Neurologische Klinik der Ruprecht-Karl-Universität) was opened in 1878, the first professor of psychiatry Carl Fürstner (1848–1906) having been appointed in 1877.

   After Fürstner stepped down in 1891 to go to Strasbourg, there followed the clinic’s glory years: Emil Kraepelin was professor between 1891 and 1903, recruiting Franz Nissl and Alois Alzheimer as staff physicians. Gustav Aschaffenburg (1866–1944), considered the founder of forensic psychiatry in Germany, served as a resident, then staff psychiatrist, from 1890 to 1900. Ernst Rüdin (1874–1952), the geneticist (whose work in Munich during the Nazi period brought him under a cloud), was a staff psychiatrist around 1901–1902. Robert Gaupp (1870–1953), later professor of psychiatry in Tübingen, was a staff psychiatrist at Heidelberg from 1900 until he followed Kraepelin to Munich in 1904. Willy Hellpach (1877–1955), social psychologist and later German politician, operated his psychological laboratory from 1901 to 1903. Kraepelin’s immediate successor in 1904 was Karl Bonhoeffer (1868–1948), who left to become professor in Berlin almost as soon as he came. It was Bonhoeffer who had implemented Möbius’s distinction between exogenous and endogenous illness. (See Depression: Emergence: exogenous vs. endogenous [1909].) In the years 1904–1918, Franz Nissl (1860–1919), the great neurohistologist, served as professor and head of the clinic. Under Nissl’s aegis, the Heidelberg "phenomenology school" blossomed. As Aubrey Lewis later wrote of this period: "[Nissl] was a conscientious clinician but he had little sympathy or understanding for the psychopathological approach to the problems of psychiatry. Nevertheless, he collected a group of able young people around him, who recognized the relative sterility of [the neuropathological] approach . . . and he gave them his puzzled approval to follow their lights" (Psychological Medicine, 1977, p. 11).

   The main concern of these young investigators was to overcome the limitations of the Kraepelinian system of "diseases." Foremost among them was Karl Jaspers, then in his mid-twenties, who had been a medical student at Heidelberg; in 1908 he entered the psychiatry clinic as an unpaid assistant (he did research) and remained there until 1915. Karl Wilmanns (1873–1945), a specialist in schizophrenia and in the problem of vagrancy, returned from Munich in 1904. Schizophrenia researcher Hans Gruhle (1880–1958) came to Heidelberg in 1905 and remained until 1934. Gruhle’s notion was that one should study an illness such as psychosis on the basis of psychopathology (form of experience) and not on the basis of artificial physical speculations. In his posthumous autobiography (1977), Jaspers has left a portrait of the intense collegiality and enthusiasm of this group: "It was a remarkable world of mutual spontaneity, with an awareness we all shared of participating in a tremendous expansion of knowledge, with all the arrogance of those who know too much, but also with a kind of radical criticism that subverted every position" (p. 19). After Nissl went to Munich in 1918 to Kraepelin’s recently founded German Psychiatric Research Institute (Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Psychiatrie), the Heidelberg dean asked Jaspers if he would like the professorship of psychiatry. Jaspers refused for reasons of health, and the chair went to Wilmanns.

   In the years of the "phenomenology era," 1918–1933, Karl Wilmanns (1873–1945) was the professor. Under Wilmanns served some well-known members of the phenomenology group, such as Wilhelm Mayer-Gross. Mayer-Gross was not enthusiastic about Jaspers’s distinction between erklären (explaining-rational) and verstehen (understanding-empathic), because he said everything could come under the latter, and preferred instead Jaspers’s distinction—an Aristotelian one—between form and content. The former was psychiatry’s assignment. Hans Prinzhorn (1886–1933) collected the patients’ art in his tenure there between 1919 and 1924. In 1928, Mayer-Gross and Kurt Beringer (1893–1949) founded the journal Nerve Doctor (Nervenarzt), which contained much of the productivity of the Heidelberg colleagues and encouraged contributions in psychopathology. Beringer was known for writing in 1927 the classic work, his Habilitation, on mescaline intoxication (Der Meskalinrausch): the first twentieth-century work on experimental psychosis as a way of studying psychopathology. (See Hallucinogen.)

   The volume on schizophrenia that Wilmanns edited in 1932 (Die Schizophrenie) in

   Oswald Bumke’s series Handbook of Psychiatric Illnesses (Handbuch der Geisteskrankheiten) is seen as emblematic of the Heidelberg school’s approach to the disease. There followed the professorship between 1933 and 1945 of Carl Schneider (1891–1946). At the end of the Nazi period, Schneider committed suicide. Finally, in the years 1945–1955, Kurt Schneider became chair. After the Second World War, he became the chief representative of phenomenological thinking, but the school as it existed before 1933 in Heidelberg had long been dissolved.