Hermann Hoffmann (medic, 1891)

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Hermann Fritz Hoffmann (born June 6, 1891 in Leer (East Frisia) ; † June 13, 1944 in Tübingen ) was a German psychiatrist , neurologist and university professor .

Life

Hoffmann came from an old family of doctors in Leer. In 1918 he published his family's stem series in the German Gender Book . In the autobiographical book Das Meine (1941) he described the upper -class milieu that shaped him . At Easter 1909 he was the “worst high school graduate of my year” at the Ubbo-Emmius-Gymnasium Leer . Like his father, grandfather and great-grandfather, he turned to medicine and enrolled at the Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg . As a fox of the Corps Rhenania Freiburg he was reciprocated in November 1909 . Since his father was seriously ill, after three semesters he switched to the nearby Westphalian Wilhelms University as an inactive person . When his father died in 1911, he went to the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich , where he passed the state examination in the summer of 1914.

War and science

When the First World War broke out , he was drafted as an unused and used as a junior doctor in the Nürtingen reserve hospital. During the entire war he was not in command on the war fronts , and in 1916 he received his doctorate on plastic covering for facial injuries. He met the nurse Helene Keller (1887–1954) at the mental hospital of the Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen . After he soon married the Stuttgart banker's daughter in January 1917, two daughters were born to the couple.

Demobilized in 1919 , Hoffmann became a regular assistant doctor at the Tübingen neurology department. He was one of the first to devote himself to genealogical studies of endogenous psychoses . In 1922 he completed his habilitation. Since 1925 senior physician , he became a. o. Professor appointed. In addition to the "genetic personality analysis", Hoffmann's theory of neuroses was the second focus of his research. His work on obsessive compulsive disorder , published between 1925 and 1933, reveals psychoanalytic influences. In his diary in 1927 he noted that Sigmund Freud's genius was “beyond all doubt”. Nonetheless, all his life he was of the opinion that it is more the “endogenous genetic” that shapes people.

Hoffmann was hardly interested in the emerging eugenics ; but his research results prepared the ground for the later National Socialist racial hygiene . Early on, he called for the sterility of the feeble-minded and “socially inferior”, as discussed internationally and practiced in Switzerland and the United States for decades. There is no indication of Hoffmann's involvement in the later T4 campaign ; but he made sustained efforts to prove the heredity of "socially useless behavior".

Full professor

Politically inconspicuous in the Weimar Republic , Hoffmann joined the NSDAP after the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) won the Reichstag election in March 1933 . In November 1933 he was appointed to the psychiatric chair at the Hessian Ludwig University . As director he led the Gießen University Psychiatric Clinic. There he was significantly involved in the research project "Hereditary Biological Research on Gießen Welfare Children ", which was funded by the DFG and the Kerckoff Foundation . From 1935 he was a member of the advisory board of the Society of German Neurologists and Psychiatrists . In Giessen he became local group chairman of the German Society for Racial Hygiene .

In casting become not native, he went in the spring of 1936, only too happy to succeed his teacher Robert Gaupp to Tübingen. Later calls from the Silesian Friedrich Wilhelms University , Breslau, (1939) and the University of Leipzig (1943), he turned down. In Tübingen he was one of the founders of the Scientific Academy of the National Socialist German Lecturer Association .

Rector

In October 1937 Hoffmann was appointed Rector of the University of Tübingen to succeed Friedrich Fockes . Until then no member of the SA , he received the rank of SA-Obersturmführer . As a church opponent, he not only demanded the subordination of the churches to National Socialism ; like other professors, he also considered separating the two theological faculties from the university. Vacant chairs were not filled again later. Under Hoffmann "the ideologization of the university as a program achieved a new quality"; no other rector of Tübingen had "taken sides so clearly in ideological terms". However, Hoffmann accepted counter-arguments in his publications . Most recently, he even described his habilitation results as outdated.

While still rector, he was drafted into the Wehrmacht in August 1939 as senior staff doctor in the reserve . When his rectorate ended as planned in the same year, he took over the office of prorector . After he took part in the Western campaign as a military psychiatrist in 1940 , he returned to his chair. From June 1941 to October 1941 he was a member of the 4th Army , with which he went to the German-Soviet War . Seriously ill in the winter of 1941 and returned from Russia as a senior medical officer , he was appointed advisory psychiatrist in Wehrkreis V (Stuttgart) .

A week after his 53rd birthday, he died of a heart attack . NSDAP and Wehrmacht members were strongly represented at the state ceremony in the university's ballroom. Otto Stickl , Hoffmann's successor in the rector's office, praised the "fighter and brooder with a clearly National Socialist disposition, who always respected the personal honor of his ideologically different opponent".

Fonts

  • The progeny in endogenous psychoses: Genealogical and characterological examination of the progeny in endogenous psychoses . Julius Springer, Berlin 1921. In: Studies on heredity and development of mental disorders; 2 monographs from the entire field of neurology and psychiatry , issue 26.
  • Inheritance and Spiritual Life: Introduction to d. psychiatric Constitutional u. Heredity . Julius Springer, Berlin 1922.
  • About temperament inheritance . Bergmann, Munich 1923
  • Family psychoses in the schizophrenic hereditary circle: (Psychoses in the parents of dementia praecox sufferers) , S. Karger, Berlin 1926. In: Treatises from neurology, psychiatry, psychology and their border areas ; H. 32
  • The problem of character building: its shape through d. hereditary biology Personality analysis . Julius Springer, Berlin 1926.
  • Character and environment . Julius Springer, Berlin 1928.
  • Psychology and medical practice . Julius Springer, Berlin 1932.
  • About obsessional neurosis: a clin. Study , Tübingen 1934
  • About doctors and patients: [Aphorisms] , Enke, Stuttgart 1935.
  • The layer theory: a view of nature a. Leben , Enke, Stuttgart 1935.
  • The medical world view: (A genesis) , 2 lectures, Enke, Stuttgart 1935.
  • Soul and body, their unity and their interaction . In: Robert Wetzel / Hermann Hoffmann (Hgg): Wissenschaftliche Akademie Tübingen des NSD.-Dozentbundes, Volume 1: 1937, 1938, 1939 , Tübingen: Mohr 1940, pp. 159–166.
  • Layer theory and structure of the personality . In: Robert Wetzel / Hermann Hoffmann (Hgg): Wissenschaftliche Akademie Tübingen des NSD.-Dozentbundes, Volume 1: 1937, 1938, 1939 , Tübingen: Mohr 1940, pp. 167–176.

estate

Hoffmann's entire estate and his diaries (1922–1928) are kept in the Tübingen University Archives. In 2003, his death mask was found . In 1939 he had himself painted in SA uniform for the Rectors' Gallery. The picture disappeared in the university archive and was only shown publicly again in 2005.

See also

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ German Gender Book, Vol. 30 (1918), Starke Verlag , Görlitz, pp. 129 ff.
  2. ↑ The script is preserved in the Tübingen University Archives
  3. ↑ Kösener Corpslisten 1930, 35/801
  4. ^ Archives Corps Rhenania Freiburg
  5. ↑ Habilitation thesis: Inheritance and soul life. An introduction to psychiatric constitution and inheritance
  6. ↑ a b c d e f M. Leonhardt, 1996
  7. ^ A b Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Frankfurt am Main 2007, p. 265.
  8. ↑ People and Health - Healing and Destroying under National Socialism . Booklet accompanying the exhibition of the Tübinger Vereinigung für Volkskunde eV, Tübingen 1982
  9. ↑ Art history under National Socialism - on the history of a science between 1930 and 1950 . Exhibition in the Ludwig Uhland Institute for Empirical Cultural Studies at Hohentübingen Castle. June 22nd to July 30th, 2005. Catalog published by VDG-Verlag, Weimar.
personal data
SURNAME Hoffmann, Hermann
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hoffmann, Hermann Fritz (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German psychiatrist and university professor; Rector in Tübingen
DATE OF BIRTH June 6, 1891
PLACE OF BIRTH Leer (East Frisia)
DATE OF DEATH June 13, 1944
Place of death Tübingen