Great Minds in Despair

In this episode of the Language on the Move Podcast, Ingrid Piller speaks with Frank Stahnisch, Professor of the History of Medicine and Health Care at the University of Calgary in Canada, about his new book Great Minds in Despair – The Forced Migration of German-Speaking Neuroscientists to North America, 1933 to 1989 (2025, McGill-Queen’s University Press).

Great Minds in Despair 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. It is a fascinating read that anyone interested in migration, science history, Nazi Germany, transatlantic relations, Jewish Studies, and much more should read.

 

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Reference

Stahnisch, F. W. (2025). Great Minds in Despair: The Forced Migration of German-Speaking Neuroscientists to North America, 1933 to 1989. McGill-Queen’s University Press.

Transcript

 

Ingrid: 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 Stahnisch.

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!

Frank: Thank you for having me.

Ingrid: Look, I’ll come right out and start by saying that Great Minds in 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 catalog, I knew that I had to get you on the show, Frank.

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?

Frank: 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. I 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 1980s, yes, some books existed. Jacobson’s Foundations of Neuroscience, for example, would be one, but not so many.

It was a burgeoning field, an 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, 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 Lynen 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 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.

Ingrid: 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 Austria, Germany, German-speaking parts of Central Europe?

Frank: Yes, I think that’s a very important question.

And I probably would like to answer it from a Canadian perspective, that 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 a 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 1940s, 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 Restoration 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. There’s some overlap, of course, with the cultural Jewish community. But the numbers that we’ve seen are probably between 70-80% 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, I should say we were surprised actually to find so many individuals. Previous research by Strauss and Roeder, 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 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 back in Germany, later in Austria, as professors, but also as leading physicians in municipal hospitals because the law applied also to 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.

Most of them could no longer continue with their professional work in 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. Right, so these refugees have been trained in specific forms of neuroscience, psychology, psychiatrists, a particular academic zeitgeist related to neurodegenerative diseases.

Ingrid: Can you tell us a bit more about this academic background and these views of mental health meant at the time?

Frank: 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, A New Field in Mind (2020, McGill Queens), looking at that particular paradigm of education, perhaps a holistic form of education.

And then the other perspective was the 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, 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. 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 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 North America.

Ingrid: And 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 reestablishing 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 reestablish 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 experienced, how they overcame them, and how their experiences compared to the challenges faced by other highly educated professionals from the same cohort, including, you know, medical doctors in other specializations.

Frank: 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.

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, it 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 relicensed. At the beginning of the 1930s, 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 gynecology or pediatrics and would find some open positions there. But soon, those positions were filled and we’re not seeing somewhat a further onward migration into the Midwest or the Pacific region. And that meant they were kind of all together 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 university 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 G. Niederland, 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, even 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 Niederland, 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.

Ingrid: 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.

Frank: Absolutely. So there is two chapters that are specifically dedicated to specific groups among the émigré neuroscientists, broadly understood. Chapter 6 is looking at the question of age, arriving old versus arriving young. And Chapter 8 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, in allowing females to study at medical schools, during the Weimar Period, a lot of catching up was in fact done. Numbers based on Johanna Blecker‘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 were now females, trained at German-speaking medical schools, which is quite a strong sub-cohort when one thinks generally about the field of émigré 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 Riese, for example, who, in Frankfurt am Main, 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, also community health. So, she had a leading position, and her husband was a professor of neurology, Walther Riese.

So, this would be a professional couple who arrived after quite a tumultuous 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 Walther Riese, who 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 were marginalized as well.

And perhaps here also her socialist bend that she had in Weimar Germany also came to pass in 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, and also the experiences and decision-making in building a center. She was fairly successful in the 1950s 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.

Ingrid: Absolutely. Yeah, so many inspiring stories and absolutely Herta Riese is one of those. And so maybe we can actually move on to 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.

Frank: 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, so 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 migrantize those individuals because they themselves often didn’t migrantize them themselves.

Yes, they came from Germany or Austria or Poland and other central 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 refugees. And that perhaps also sets them a little bit apart because of their professional and educational background. They were in this, in quotation marks, 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 19^th century into the 20^th 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 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 scene.

They were individually important for language learning because some major protagonists in the field, I’m thinking of Otto Loewi, for example, in neurochemistry and synapse research, they had 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 emotional 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 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 context, 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 one of the international founding agencies for biomedical research 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 Weimar 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 a part of. Nevertheless, on the basic level, it allowed for some form of exchange. It, for example, allowed some trainees, younger individuals from Germany or Austria to get part of their education and postgraduate training in North America as well.

And then there is, as we’ve alluded to, also various levels of re-migration. And that’s why I also took the timeline from 1933 to 1989, the 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 or being born in North America. The cultural background 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. Kalinowsky, who introduced electroshock therapy in psychiatry in North America. He re-migrated 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 Max Delbrück, who some might particularly see in the area of biochemistry. There is the Max Delbrück Center in Berlin 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 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 are 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 are.

Ingrid: 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 our 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?

Frank: 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. During my research and scholarship leave that I’m on at the moment at Dartmouth College in the US, I’m working on a project with the working title, The Quest for Holism and Integration, Healing, Wellness and Complementary Medicine, 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 immigrant 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.

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 to come, that this may come to fruition in another book.

Ingrid: That sounds amazing. And also right up our alley re 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, and our partner, the New Books Network to your students, colleagues, and friends. Till next time.