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- [00:01]
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Professor Frank Stanach
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Professor Frank Stanach
Welcome to the New Books Network
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Ingrid Piller
welcome to the Language on the Move podcast, a channel on the New Books Network. My name is Ingrid Piller and my guest today is Professor Frank Stanach. Frank is professor of the History of Medicine and Healthcare at the University of Calgary in Canada. Frank's interests include the historical relationship between the neurosciences and the philosophy of the mind and the relationship between clinical neuroscience and public mental health. Today we want to talk about Frank's new book, Great Minds in Despair the Forced Migration of German Speaking Neuroscientists to North America, 1933-1989, published by McGill Queen's University Press in 2025. Welcome to the show, Frank.
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Professor Frank Stanach
Thank you for having me.
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Ingrid Piller
Look, I'll come right out and start by saying that Great Minds and Despair is an amazing book that anyone interested in migration, science, history, Nazi Germany, Transatlantic relations, Jewish studies, and much more should read. The book examines the long term effects of the forced migration of neuroscientists from the German lands in the 20th century on scientific and medical cultures in North America and on the researchers themselves. The book traces the lives and careers of approximately 400 German speaking doctors, scientists and researchers over two generations. These migrants found themselves in unfamiliar settings in Canada and in the United States. Yet they helped to build the fields of neuroscience, psychiatry, clinical psychology and the cognitive sciences, while also rebuilding their own lives. In many ways, the concerns of Great Minds in Despair are similar to those of my own book, Life in a New Language, which examines the settlement experiences of a diverse group of migrants to Australia in the 21st century. When I saw Great Minds in Despair in the catalogue, I knew that I had to get you on the show, Frank, so. So can you start us off by telling us a bit about yourself and how your own identity as a German migrant in North America has shaped your research?
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Professor Frank Stanach
Absolutely. And it's a pleasure to be on the show and to talk about my book, Great Minds in Despair. I'm originally from Germany myself, have been trained at the universities of Frankfurt Free University and Humboldt University in Berlin with two stints, one in Scotland for a year and one in France, and have been educated both in medicine and in the humanities, and did my dissertation in the history of medicine after having finished those both areas in terms of my own identity. In that way I was educated into the field of neurology and the neurosciences. Also started my residency at the Charite in Berlin, and my interest in the history of neuroscience was actually piqued by its absence in the educational canons of the time. This has completely changed. These days the history and philosophy of neuroscience is well established, but in the 1990s, yes, some books existed, Jacobson Foundations of Neuroscience, for example, would be one, but not so many. It was a burgeoning field and opportunity to work in, and that's why I believe I moved into it. The other observation was to realize that the active clinical and basic neuroscientists themselves didn't know a lot about the history of neurology, psychiatry, neuropsychiatry, et cetera. And I found that quite puzzling given the major contributions that the German speaking world had made to this field of medicine, as to medicine and biology, the life sciences in the past, and in particular also the history of Jewish contributions to neurology and psychiatry, as you will find exposed in the book, how many individuals there were and how important they were for the development of the field. And then of course my own migration story, which I actually don't even regard as a migration story because it was planned as a research visit to North America to just get to the archives of those individuals who had come. And that was enabled by a feodor Lunen scholarship by the Humboldt foundation in Germany and just developed into being here, living in Canada, building connections with the North American medical and science community and while receiving a job and remaining. But that was very far from being pre planned. It just so worked out so in a certain way a migration by proxy, if you like.
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Ingrid Piller
Well, the participants or the people in your book didn't expect to migrate either, I think. So maybe let's now focus on those very people who were they who left? Why did they leave? Why did they leave the Austria, Germany, German speaking parts of Central Europe?
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Professor Frank Stanach
Yes, I think that's a very important question and I probably would like to answer it from a Canadian perspective. But I think so often in North America the arrival of immigrants is being perceived as the most normal thing to happen. Both Canada and the United States are being built on migrants in their colonial settler histories, of course. And they have also seen throughout 400 plus history that there were ups and downs waves of immigrants arriving. And here was in quotation marks just another wave in the 1930s and 40s seeing all these Jewish as they were perceived immigrants arriving, although not all of them were Jewish. For my particular story, some of the beginning point in a certain way was the law for the reconstruction of the civil service in Germany, Which was inaugurated on April 7th, 1933. So really early on after the Nazis had taken over power in Germany at the time as it were. But this was also directed at all those who criticized Nazi politics and philosophies, so incorporated also humanists, socialists, Communists, Communists. There is some overlap of course with the cultural Jewish community. But the numbers that we've seen are probably between 70 to 80% Jewish individuals as being defined by the Nazis, often not as they self identified and 20% socialists and communists and then about 10% others. Whether they were individuals who had been in the US on a fellowship and realized there was this political change back in Germany and later after the Anschluss in Austria as well, or there were family reasons for the migration and everyone and the whole world was overwhelmed by the political changes as they happened. And for my specific cohort of about 400 individuals that we could identify,
- [10:33]
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Professor Frank Stanach
should say we were surprised actually to find so many individuals. Previous research by Strauss and Reuter, for example, in their encyclopedia of Emigres, they didn't list as many individuals in medicine overall and neurology and psychiatry in particular. So that was quite an astonishing finding. And that these individuals were often been such important contributors to the development of the field in neuroscience and psychiatry. As you mentioned earlier on so in that way they had to leave because they lost their positions on Bach in Germany, later in Austria as professors, but also as leading physicians in municipal hospitals, because the law applied also to are the breadth of the civil service. And since many hospitals and community health centers were also under the jurisdiction of the civil service in Germany, it meant they were ousted from these positions as well. And apart from some who were using the opportunity to care for Jewish patients, that was a short time window until 1938, most of them could no longer continue with their professional work, healthcare, academic work, teaching, administration in the healthcare field, or even in the area of editing and mere writing. So their whole basis was destroyed for their self identity and work positioning that they had before. And that's why they left in various steps, some directly to North America and some first moving to other Western European countries and then arriving later in Canada or the United States.
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Ingrid Piller
Right. So these refugees forced migrants. So you focus on neuroscientists really. And they had been trained in specific forms of neuroscience, psychology, psychiatrists, a particular academic zeitgeist you talk about related to neurodegenerative diseases. Can you tell us a bit more about this academic background and these views of what it means to what mental health meant at the time?
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Professor Frank Stanach
Yes, it's a very important question when particularly seen from this side of the Atlantic, how were these individuals perceived? And there was a certain form of being foreign, being a stranger to a more utilitarian, capitalist, empirically driven healthcare system in both Canada and the United States. And here individuals arrived who had this multifaceted form of education, as you've just mentioned, Ingrid, and that wasn't fully compatible with the North American landscape. I think I want to pinpoint two major differences. One being that a field existed within medicine that's almost untranslatable with the notion of Nervenheilkunde in German that comprised both psychiatric, neurological, pathological forms of education and individuals going into those fields. Students, postgraduate trainees, wouldn't even know at the beginning where they would end up. So someone with an interest in neurology might end up in clinical psychiatry, or someone perhaps being more drawn to psychiatry, would even become a neuropathologist in the end. So that was a peculiarity of the German style of research. And I've explored that in a previous book in 2020, a new field in Mind that also came out with McGill Queens, looking at that particular paradigm of education, perhaps a holistic form of education. And then the other perspective was having that background a baggage of education that allowed for so many opportunities also set them up in quotation marks in a positive way, in a resilient way to actually find out niches in which they could work. Like these days, it was very hard to find academic work. And when we think about neurology, it was even harder. Neurology at the time was a discipline that couldn't offer patients very much. It was really good in diagnostics, but it had a very limited repertoire of therapeutic options. And this all happened after the Great Depression in North America. So no one was waiting for these individuals to arrive. And unfortunately it also meant they were competing with North American trained doctors and researchers for the few positions available. And particularly during the later 1930s, beginning of the Second World War, from the US earlier of course, in Canada perspective, that meant there weren't a lot of positions, positions needed to be in a certain way created by these arriving emigres. And that's often what they did, whether they first went into internal medicine, whether they first went into areas of psychology, a field that was only just emerging in a stronger way in North America. That's where they could bring their educational background too. And individuals such as Robert Weil, for example, a psychiatrist in Canada, not so well known in Central Europe, was one of the first actually designing residency training programs in clinical psychiatry in in Atlantic Canada. And out of these a new community of clinical psychiatrists emerged. So I really want to underscore, despite all the despair that often accompanied that migration process, that they also had enormous resources that they could put to work in rebuilding their careers and lives in other countries.
- [17:57]
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Ingrid Piller
Yeah, and I think, I mean that's something that comes out really nicely in your book actually, that these people built a whole new discipline in a sense and created these transatlantic new knowledges and new structures, which is very amazing. Before we get to that, I just wanted to one moment keep back with their lived experience of re establishing themselves. I mean, you've already mentioned it wasn't an easy journey. And of course we know that today for migrants as well, jobs are difficult to come by and it's often even harder for migrants to re establish themselves. And particularly for highly educated migrants. So I was wondering whether you could speak a bit more about the structural barriers that these people experience, how they overcame them, and how their experiences compare to the challenges faced by other highly educated professionals from the same cohort, including medical doctors in other specializations.
- [19:38]
Professor Frank Stanach
Yes, that's a very important question. And it certainly breaks down into a myriad of sub questions, not only of academic interest, of day to day reality to these individuals. And that's not too different from forced migrants these days, whether out of political or environmental or gender reasons. You name those reasons and they will run into all of these challenges on a structural level. I think what immediately comes to mind were administrative problems. The introduction of affidavits in the United States, for example, the introduction of quota systems so that only so many could arrive in a given year. And that would mean a certain form of competition with other non academic forced migrants at the time. The necessity for down payments that needed to be made to support those arriving, together with affidavits, letters of support. So more of a form of in kind support of these individuals. Sometimes resources needed to be found, so was necessary to either organize themselves or find foundations and aid associations who would step in and provide necessary funds, provide some living opportunities, accommodation in the very first months of their arrival, sometimes even years. And then the increasing challenge of needing to get realized as at the beginning, from 33 to about 36, it was much easier because in the general area of medicine, particularly on the east coast in the US to a certain degree in Canada too, there were some opportunities that could be filled. The emigres had to somewhat leave their field from neurology and go, for example into family medicine or obigen or pediatrics, and would find some open positions there. But around 3,637 those positions were filled. And we're not seeing somewhat a further onward migration into the Midwest or the Pacific region. And that meant there were kind of altogether in places like New York, Boston, Washington, D.C. you name them, and relicensing requirements by the medical boards of the individual states. Then in a certain way quotation marks fought back against these competitors on the medical marketplace. I think this is something that really needs to be underscored. How difficult that would have been to arrive later. Or for women who had been bearing the brunt in a certain way of supporting their families, their spouses, their partners in the first years, now having difficulty in getting into the job market because the relicensing schemes were now in place, or had to make a decision to move further into western states in the US case or after the Second World War in Canada when the new universities had been created. So in that way there were structural barriers. But I also want to briefly emphasize that there were psychological barriers. And one individual that I find really encompasses this is William Janiderland, the neuropsychiatrist who became world famous for having introduced the notion of the survivor syndrome. Because when he was examining Holocaust survivors also for compensation claims in Germany for the German Embassy in New York, he was realizing that some of the academic well trained survivors he was caring for were really shocked and bound by their own thought processes, realizing they had survived because they had such a good education or they had been successful in finding a position because of their background, whereas others in their same cohort who had not had that background had very different and often very difficult experiences. And that even became a form of psychological stress, if you want, in creating psychosomatic forms of infirmaries and diseases. And I think it's an element of the whole psychological realities of migration that's often not much talked about. And Nederland, because of his professional interests and then increasingly becoming an expert in relation to Holocaust connected pathologies and disorders, he really brought it to the fore that not all of the emigres were alike and that some were enormously suffering from the observations they were making and the self identity and realization, becoming conscious about their position as refugees in North America. I think I really would want to emphasize that.
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Ingrid Piller
Yeah, thanks a lot for that. And you've also already mentioned gender and I just wanted to briefly follow up on that. Maybe you could tell us a bit more about how gender influenced the trajectories of these people and particularly maybe the story of one of the women in your book.
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Professor Frank Stanach
Absolutely. So there are two chapters that are specifically dedicated to specific groups among the emigre neuroscientists, broadly understood. Chapter six is looking at the question of age, arriving old versus arriving young. And chapter eight is about women, gender and the academic workforce. In the neurosciences, although Germany was generally very late in comparison to Switzerland, and interestingly enough Turkey and Europe, allowing females to study at medical schools during the Weimar period, a lot of catching up was in fact done. And numbers based on Johanna Blaker's pioneering work on women education in the 1920s and 1930s are supporting that by the end of the 1920s, around 30% of the medical doctors where now females trained at German speaking medical schools, which is quite a strong sub cohort when one thinks generally about the field of emigre physicians and medical scientists in neuroscience. This was certainly one of the areas, if we include psychiatry, where a lot of the female physicians were working. And what is also interesting with the eugenics minded perspectives of the Weimar Republic, still the public health field that was burgeoning and new areas of psychiatry, clinically oriented psychoanalysis, for example. We're also seeing many leading individuals in this area being females. I want to emphasize Herta Wiese, for example, who in Frankfurt Amin, was the director of a social medicine department. This was a municipal department. It was engaged in reproductive health, in marriage counseling, in what was called at the time racial hygiene and public health questions, also in community health. So she had a leading position. And her husband was a professor of neurology, Walter Reese. So this would be a professional couple who arrived after quite a tumultuous onward process of migration. They first went to France, then France was overrun by the Wehrmacht. They were fleeing to Spain, and from Spain were arriving in the United States. And later were working in Richmond, Virginia. While Walter Reason was fairly well known for his neurological work. And work related to insurance problems. Almost immediately could continue with neuropathological and neuroanatomical work in Virginia. That was fairly difficult for Herta. Not the same institutions were existing. Public health boards across North America. Were often relatively loosely organized institutions. Relying on individual family practitioners, pediatricians, psychiatrists to join forces. But there weren't those centers as they existed during the Weimar Republic back in Germany. So Herta had to completely reinvent herself. First of all supporting also her husband, which is a fairly typical story at the time. Then running into relicensing problems, as I've mentioned earlier. And finally creating in this rather southern state a position for herself. By first working as a librarian in a local community library. In which she kind of reinvented a form of a public health center that was here geared towards the black community. So on the margins of the educational system in a certain way, caring for individuals who are marginalized as well. And perhaps here also her socialist bend that she had had in Werma, Germany also came to pass that she was seeing that these individuals were underserved. And that the medical system didn't provide sufficiently for them. And with all her organizational talent, the educational background she had had. And also the experiences in decision making and building a center. She was fairly successful in the 50s and early 60s to create also a child development education and research center. And that all out of a community library, which is extraordinary. So the connection between great minds being successful, but also in despair. And putting the two together in a fruitful way, I thought in many of these cases was absolutely Mind blowing.
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Ingrid Piller
Absolutely. Yeah. So many inspiring stories and Absolutely. Herzer Wiese is one of those. And so maybe we can actually move on to the. This general point that you are making, that we're not just focusing on the migrants or this permanent migrantization of people who at one point had to move from one place to another, but that your focus is really on what you term bilateral knowledge transfer. Maybe you can tell us a bit more about how this process unfolded, including through return migration after the war.
- [33:20]
Professor Frank Stanach
Yes, which is a fascinating question, I think, generally from a migration studies perspective, as you've emphasized, Ingrid, and also for me, having a background in history and philosophy of science, in looking somewhat at the more general epistemological questions related to knowledge generation, knowledge distribution, and also changes in the system and state of knowledge of the time. And I love the emphasis not to migranize those individuals because they themselves often didn't migranize themselves. Yes, they came from Germany or Austria or Poland, other Central and European areas, but they first of all had their self identity as being physicians or scientists, or they had their cultural self identities first, but not so much being the refugee who is arriving. And that perhaps also sets them a little bit apart because of their professional and educational background. They were in this. In quotation marks on privileged position when they arrived. Bilateral knowledge transfer. I think this spans a longer horizon, beginning with Germany's lead in the sciences and in scholarship from the end of the 19th century into the 20th century, when already a lot of postgraduate trainees from North America had come to Germany in the field of neuroscience. For example, the German Research Institute of for Psychiatry in Munich was a hotbed of research at the time, one of the leading centers worldwide. And there were literally hundreds of North Americans already before the Second World War who had participated in the research activities. And I think we shouldn't downplay those personal relations. They were really important. They were also important in terms of involving the German scientists on the international. They were individually important for language learning because some major protagonists in the field, I'm thinking of Otto Louis, for example, in neurochemistry and synapse research, they have these prior stints in North America or in Britain, they had learned sufficient amounts of English that then later helped them, as well as the EMOT and social components, having had these connections prior through research periods abroad or international exchanges during conferences and workshops. So that of course meant some of the knowledge in Germany traveled over to North America. But knowledge also came back with some of the postgraduate trainees or visiting professors from North America who moved to Germany. And that process thankfully didn't stop during the Second World War. It became of course, much more difficult. But also those connections were important to rebuild the landscape after 1945 life when the Second World War was lost by Germany and the Axis powers, the connection still existed. Maybe surprising to think that after all that happened in the broader context of the Holocaust, that some form of rebuilding academic interactions was possible. And from a North American perspective, I think I would like to highlight the example of the Rockefeller foundation, which at the time was somewhat the international founding agency for biomedical research before, after the Second World War, this role was taken over by the National Institutes of Health. They were actually looking at who they had supported during the Weiner Republic. And they were going back to these individuals and were asking if they could help with rebuilding the connections, which of course also many Nazi tainted individuals were part of. Nevertheless, on the basic level it allowed for some form of exchange. It for example, allowed some Chinese younger individuals from Germany, Germany or Austria to get part of their education and postgraduate training in North America as well. And then there is, as you've alluded to also various levels of re migration. And that's why I also took the timeline from 1933-89, end of the Cold War, to also have a perspective on the second generation, either those who as really young individuals, perhaps with high school training, as in Austria by Eric Kandel, or being born in North America by Frederick Heinrich Loewy. So he's not to be conflated with Frederick Louis. Louis in Toronto was a psychiatrist, completely trained in North America, but having fled with his family from Central Europe to Canada. And the background, the cultural background he had of course also played into a receptiveness to European ideas. And then we have individuals who were absolutely intentional in connecting those relationships. I want to emphasize Lothar B. Kalinowski, who introduced electroshock therapy in psychiatry in North America. He remigrated and became a continuing visiting professor at the Free University of Berlin. And thus also enabling his students from Berlin to come to North America. Or Mats Delbruck, who some might particularly see in the area of biochemistry. There is the Max Delbruck center in Berlin Buch these days a major research center and institution. But for about one and a half decades he had worked on problems of the axon of nerves from a biochemical perspective. So in a certain way was also familiar with the neurosciences. And he became a major player in designing exchange programs from the 1950s to the early 1970s through his contacts in Cologne with the Max Planck Institute for Human Genetics. So this was kind of an intentional form. There are others too, to rebuild the scientific landscape. And I think to me this also represents an area of hope. One thinks so often our academic communities disrupted by forms of war, political violence, many other influences, that it is the system of science, medicine and learning that also tries to rebuild itself. And it's reliant on human relationships. And we so often disregard or overlook how important these human connections actually on.
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Ingrid Piller
Yeah, thank you so much. I think that's such an important message and maybe a beautiful closing word actually the importance of human connections both in our research, in the work, and also in the life stories of these people. But still, before I let you go, can you maybe just quickly tell us what's next for your research?
- [42:32]
Professor Frank Stanach
Yeah. Thank you, Ingrid, and for allowing me to share what I'm currently working on. So I've completely moved into a new project right now. The project is entitled during my research and scholarship leave that I'm on at the moment at Dartmouth College in the US I'm working on has the working title project the Quest for Holism and Integration, Healing, Wellness and complementary medicine, 1870-2020, which might sound like a fully different area of research, but there is certainly areas, some areas of overlap. The question of bilateral knowledge transfer in the field of integrative medicine or complementary medicine between Europe and North America, back and forth. The element of holistic education, as we've seen in some of the emigraine neuroscientists, played also a huge role in that field as well. And then the whole area around culture and medicine that indeed where we grow up and how we're educated, whether it's medicine or linguistics, psychology also shapes the way how we're seeing things. And that might have to do with why we're seeing this early development of naturopathy, homeopathy and alternative medicine in the German speaking world from the 19th to the early 20th century, and particular kinds of, of professional takes in this field. I just want to emphasize the doctors of osteopathy that are perfect family physicians in the United States in a certain way, not seen as such even north of the border in Canada and certainly not in Europe. So there is a lot to be said about where we come from historically, what our living realities have been, and also our educational systems for either allowing or not allowing a form of integration in medicine. And that's what I'm writing on, what I'm researching at the moment. So give me a few more years that this may come to fruition in another.
- [45:12]
Ingrid Piller
Well, it sounds amazing and also write up our Alien Intercultural Communication. So once the next book is out, we'll have you on the show again. For now, I'd like to thank you so much for your time, Frank. Thanks for listening everyone. If you enjoyed the show, please subscribe to our channel, leave a five star review on your podcast app of choice and recommend the Language on the Move Podcast Past and our partner, the New Books Network to your students, colleagues and friends. Till next time,