Eugenics ideals, racial hygiene, and the emigration process of German-American neurogeneticist Franz Josef Kallmann (1897–1965)

ABSTRACT

Biological psychiatry in the early twentieth century was based on interrelated disciplines, such as neurology and experimental biology. Neuropsychiatrist Franz Josef Kallmann (1897–1965) was a product of this interdisciplinary background who showed an ability to adapt to different scientific contexts, first in the field of neuromorphology in Berlin, and later in New York. Nonetheless, having innovative ideas, as Kallmann did, could be an ambiguous advantage, since they could lead to incommensurable scientific views and marginalization in existing research programs. Kallmann followed his Dr. Med. degree (1919) with training periods at the Charité Medical School in Berlin under psychiatrist Karl Bonhoeffer (1868–1948). Subsequently, he collaborated with Ernst Ruedin (1874–1952), investigating sibling inheritance of schizophrenia and becoming a protagonist of genetic research on psychiatric conditions. In 1936, Kallmann was forced to immigrate to the USA where he published The Genetics of Schizophrenia (1938), based on data he had gathered from the district pathological institutes of Berlin’s public health department. Kallmann resumed his role as an international player in biological psychiatry and genetics, becoming president (1952) of the American Society of Human Genetics and Director of the New York State Psychiatric Institute in 1955. While his work was well received by geneticists, the idea of genetic differences barely took hold in American psychiatry, largely because of émigré psychoanalysts who dominated American clinical psychiatry until the 1960s and established a philosophical direction in which genetics played no significant role, being regarded as dangerous in light of Nazi medical atrocities. After all, medical scientists in Nazi Germany had been among the social protagonists of racial hygiene which, under the aegis of Nazi philosophies, replaced medical genetics as the basis for the ideals and application of eugenics.

KEYWORDS:

• Cultural adaptation
• émigré neurogeneticists
• Europe
• eugenics
• forced migration
• Franz Josef Kallmann (1897–1965)
• North America
• racial anthropology
• social contexts
• transatlantic transfers
• twentieth-century neuroscience

Acknowledgments

We are grateful for support from the Mackie Family Collection in the History of Neuroscience, the Hotchkiss Brain Institute, the O’Brien Institute for Public Health (all: Calgary, Canada), the Library of Congress (Washington, DC), and the Richardson History of Psychiatry Research Seminar, Cornell University (New York City). We also wish to include Dr. Alan N. Schechter, National Institutes of Health (Bethesda, MD) for his kind assistance and sharing of information during the research process for this article.

Funding

We acknowledge the support of the Ethics Office of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research as well as an Open Operating Grant (no/EOG-123690) from CIHR.

Notes

¹ Communication of the former Stephen and Suzanne Weiss Dean of the Cornell Medical School, New York City, Robert Michels (b. 1936) on September 5, 2012 with the corresponding author (F.W.S.).

² See also Holdorff (2016) in this special issue.

³ Notgemeinschaft/Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, Praesidium Minutes (no day given, 1920), Bundesarchiv Koblenz, Germany, Collections on the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft R 73/69/p. 63.

⁴ Ernst Ruedin, Letter (January 16, 1930) to Seine Excellenz Herrn Staatsminister Friedrich Schmidt-Ott (1860-1956), Historisches Archiv des Max-Planck-Instituts fuer Psychiatrie, Rockefeller Archive Center, International Finance Corporation (in alliance with the Rockefeller Foundation), Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institute for Brain Research, America’s Great Depression Portfolio, pp. 45–46.

⁵ This seemingly incongruous situation is very similar to what we see in the recent historical research on émigré psychiatrists in Palestine, for example, by Israeli historian Rakefet Zalashik (2012).

⁶ Franz Josef Kallmann, Letter to the Geman-American anthropologist Franz Boas at Columbia University (November 21, 1936) in his role as the president of the German-American League for Culture (Deutsch-Amerikanischer Kulturverband); Boas Collection of the Archives of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, United States (professional transl./minor adjustment by authors) (LOC, Franz Boas Collection, 1936, Microfilm, Fond No. MSS60202).

⁷ Regarding an exploration of these cultural differences in émigré neurologists’ and neuropathologists’ working conditions in their home and new host countries, please refer to the Stahnisch (2016c) article in this special issue.

⁸ Franz Josef Kallmann, Letter to Franz Boas at Columbia University (December 6, 1936); Boas Collection of the Archives of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, United States (authors’ translation) (LOC, Franz Boas Collection, 1936, Microfilm, Fond No. MSS60202).

⁹ Karl Johann Petersen-Berstel, Letter to Franz Boas at Columbia University (October 26, 1936); Boas Collection of the Archives of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, United States (authors’ translation) (LOC, Franz Boas Collection, 1936, Microfilm, Fond No. MSS60202).

¹⁰ See also Holdorff (2016) in this special issue.

¹¹ Collection on the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institute for Psychiatry (also known as the German Research Institute of Psychiatry; Archives of the Max-Planck-Society [Harnack House], Berlin, Germany [fond no. Vc. Abt. Rev. 3. Nr. 15]).

¹² Franz Josef Kallmann, Letter to Franz Boas at Columbia University (December 6, 1936); Boas Collection of the Archives of the Library of Congress, Washington, DC, United States (authors’ translation) (LOC, Franz Boas Collection, 1936, Microfilm, Fond No. MSS60202).

¹³ Clinical biochemist and later director of the History Office of the National Institutes of Health, Alan N. Schechter attended these sessions as a young National Institutes of Health Postdoctoral Fellow at the time. In a conversation with the corresponding author (Bethesda, MD, April 24, 2007), he remembered to have heard Kallmann actively presenting on “eugenics” in his lectures during the early 1960s. Apparently, Kallmann personally thought that the eugenics ideal would and should serve as the guiding principle of all modern genetic research, including psychiatric genetics approaches, without critically assessing the ethical digressions of the Nazi eugenics and euthanasia programs in this context.

¹⁴ Franz Josef Kallmann, Letter to Franz Boas at Columbia University (February 2, 1939); Boas Collection of the Archives of the Library of Congress, Washington, D. C., United States (LOC, Franz Boas Collection, 1939, Microfilm, Fond No. MSS60202).

Additional information

Funding

We acknowledge the support of the Ethics Office of the Canadian Institutes of Health Research as well as an Open Operating Grant (no/EOG-123690) from CIHR.