Article ID: CBB000772403

Sick Heil: Self and Illness in Nazi Germany (2007)

unapi

Cocks, Geoffrey C. (Author)


Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences
Volume: 22
Pages: 93--115


Publication Date: 2007
Edition Details: Volume title: “The Self as Project: Politics and the Human Sciences”
Language: English

Illness in Nazi Germany was a site of contestation around the existing modern self. The Nazis mobilized the professions of medicine and psychology, two disciplines built around self, to exploit physical and mental capacity. Nazi projects thus instrumentalized the individual and essentialized a self of race and will. A cruel and anxious obsession with health as a means of racial exclusion was a monstrous form of the modern turn inward to agency of body and mind. The Nazis regulated the individual through family and factory (social control), areas of ordinary life in which modernity located human activity and meaning, and propagandized traditional values the populace internalized (social discipline). A Nazi premodern warrior ethos was served by a liberal ethic of productivity and an absolutist tradition of state control. Medicalization and commodification of health was continuous with modern trends and became a wartime site of attempted well-being of the self at the expense of the Nazi ethnic community.

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Article Eghigian, Greg; Killen, Andreas; Leuenberger, Christine (2007) Introduction: The Self as Project: Politics and the Human Sciences in the Twentieth Century. Osiris: A Research Journal Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (p. 1). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB000772403/

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Authors & Contributors
Seemann, Carla
Sorvillo, Craig
Zimmermann, Volker
Zimmermann, Thomas
Zimmermann, Susanne
Westermann, Stefanie
Concepts
National Socialism
Medicine
World War II
Physicians; doctors
Eugenics
Psychology
Time Periods
20th century, early
19th century
Places
Germany
Netherlands
Weimar Republic (1919-1933)
United States
Great Britain
Institutions
Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaften
Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena
Interessengemeinschaft Farbenindustrie Aktiengesellschaft
Universität Frankfurt am Main
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