Ernst Rittershaus

Ernst Ludwig Johann Rittershaus (born February 27, 1881 in Darmstadt , † April 19, 1945 in Hamburg ) was a German psychiatrist , racial hygienist and university professor.

Life

The merchant's son Rittershaus completed his studies in medicine at the universities of Würzburg and Bonn after finishing his school career . He received his doctorate in Bonn in 1904 with the dissertation “Misdiagnoses in Carcinoma. A contribution to the statistics of undiagnosed cancers ”to the Dr. med. He then continued his education in the field of psychiatry and was employed as an assistant doctor from 1904 at the Philippshospital State Insane Asylum in Goddelau and from 1907 at the Psychiatric University Clinic in Erlangen . In 1909, Rittershaus moved to the “Friedrichsberg State Insane Asylum” , where he became a department doctor the following year and ran a psychological laboratory he founded. There he wrote an extensive study entitled Irrsinn und Presse about how the five Hamburg daily newspapers reported on suicides, mental illnesses and psychiatric patients throughout 1911. As an early presentation of this topic, from today's point of view this work is methodologically inadequate, but nevertheless very informative.

During the First World War Rittershaus headed a psychiatric department in Brussels . After he was promoted to medical officer in 1916 , he worked as an army doctor in Tournay from 1917 . After the end of the war, he completed his habilitation in psychiatry in Hamburg in 1918 with the text “The clinical position of manic-depressive insanity”.

From 1920 he worked as a private lecturer in Hamburg and on July 28, 1926 was appointed a non-civil servant associate professor. From 1927 the race-hygienically oriented Rittershaus was the chief senior physician at the "State Insane Asylum Friedrichsberg".

Rittershaus, a member of the DVP from 1920 to 1933 , joined the NSDAP on May 1, 1933 after the handover of power to the National Socialists . He also became a member of the National Socialist Medical Association , the National Socialist Lecturer Association and the Reich Chamber of Culture .

In 1934 Rittershaus temporarily succeeded Wilhelm Weygandt , who had been forced into retirement, as head of the “Friedrichsberg State Insane Asylum” until he was replaced in this position in 1936 by Hans Bürger-Prinz . He was not taken over to the psychiatric and nervous clinic, but went as a senior physician to the “Heil- und Nursing Institution Hamburg-Langenhorn” (today: Asklepios Klinik Nord , Ochsenzoll branch ), where he became senior physician on April 1, 1938 and from January 1937 at the same time acted as the “regional chairman for the hereditary inventory in sanatoriums and nursing homes” for Greater Hamburg . In this function, he carried out hereditary biology surveys that were used in the selection of patients during euthanasia under National Socialism .

Rittershaus also worked as a writer under the pseudonym Ernst Rauhaus . At the University of Hamburg he taught since September 6, 1939 as associate professor for psychiatry and racial studies . On February 28, 1942, he resigned from the faculty due to illness.

Racial theory

Rittershaus' field of work was the connection between race, constitution, mental characteristics and mental illnesses. He followed on from Ernst Kretschmer's constitutional typology and claimed that the constitutional types described by Kretschmer were racial characteristics. With this he hoped to refute those who criticized the race doctrine with Kretschmer's constitutional doctrine. Therefore, he assumed the existence of far more independent human races than contemporary racial theory. He accused Hans FK Günther of having "forgotten" the meaning of the "Fälischen" breed, which descended from the Neanderthals . Rittershaus linked the respective constitution types with dispositions to certain mental illnesses and explained that the schizophrenia was possibly "the expression of a rampant racial mixture". His race theory, which he had already developed in this form since 1930, corresponded neither to the party line nor to the race theory recognized at the time. Instead of recognition, Rittershaus received mostly ridicule.

Fonts

• Psychological fact diagnosis: From d. Friedrichsberg insane asylum; (The so-called "criminal investigation of the future"). Voss, Hamburg / Leipzig 1912.
• Insanity and the press: Ein Kulturbild , Fischer, Jena 1913.
• The clinical status of manic-depressive insanity with special consideration of the relationship to organic brain diseases and epilepsy. J. Springer, Berlin 1920/1933.
• The lunatic legislation in Germany together with a comparative presentation of the lunatic in Europe: (For doctors, lawyers and educated laypeople). W. de Gruyter & Co., Berlin 1927.
• Adoption at Childhood (Adoption): A Guide for Foster Parents and Authorities. JF Lehmanns Verl., Munich 1929.
• Constitution or race? JF Lehmanns Verl., Munich 1936.
• The racial soul of the German people, its essence, its work and its history in the European area: The racial question in common understanding. Darst. Marhold, Halle 1937.

literature

• Rudolf Vierhaus (ed.): Deutsche Biographische Enzyklopädie, Saur, 2nd revised and expanded edition, 2007, p. 451.
• Ernst Klee : The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich . Who was what before and after 1945 . 2nd Edition. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 .
• Eckart Klaus Roloff : A newspaper analysis on psychiatry from 1913. In: Psychiatrische Praxis, vol. 32, issue 7/2005, pp. 371–372 (contribution to Rittershaus' book Irrsinn und Presse )

Web links

• Literature by and about Ernst Rittershaus in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Madness and the press: A culture picture. Fischer, Jena 1913.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Rudolf Vierhaus (Ed.): German Biographical Encyclopedia. Saur, 2nd revised and expanded edition, 2007, p. 451.
3. ^ ^{A b c} Hans-Christian Harten, Uwe Neirich, Matthias Schwerendt: Racial hygiene as an educational ideology of the Third Reich. Bio-bibliographical manual. Berlin 2006, p. 454.
4. ^ History of the clinic. From the Middle Ages to the first insane asylum in Hamburg ( memento of the original from November 30, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on uke.de  
5. ↑ Christoph Mai, Hendrik van dem Bussche : The research. In: Hendrik van den Bussche (ed.): Medical science in the “Third Reich”. Continuity, adaptation and opposition at the Hamburg Medical Faculty. Dietrich Reimer, Berlin 1989, pp. 236-238.
6. ↑ Hans-Christian Harten, Uwe Neirich, Matthias Schwerendt: Racial hygiene as an educational ideology of the Third Reich. Bio-bibliographical manual. Berlin 2006, p. 23.
7. ↑ Christoph Mai, Hendrik van dem Bussche: The research. In: Hendrik van den Bussche (ed.): Medical science in the “Third Reich”. Continuity, adaptation and opposition at the Hamburg Medical Faculty. Dietrich Reimer, Berlin 1989, p. 235.
8. ↑ Christoph Mai, Hendrik van dem Bussche: The research. In: Hendrik van den Bussche (ed.): Medical science in the “Third Reich”. Continuity, adaptation and opposition at the Hamburg Medical Faculty. Dietrich Reimer, Berlin 1989, pp. 235-238.