Symptomatic Acts, Experimental Embodiments: Theatres of Scientific Protest in Interwar Germany

Abstract

The author builds on recent geographical approaches to the investigation of scientific experimentation. While a number of studies have explored the various sites of scientific practice and the role of space in the constitution of experimental matters of fact, far less attention has been directed toward the cultural geographies of experimental science and the extrascientific zones in which modes of experimental practice were themselves developed and contested. Drawing on the reception of professional psychiatry in interwar Berlin (1919–1933), the author traces an alternative set of ‘experimental systems’ which seized on and countered the credibility of psychiatric expertise. The focus is on a series of modernist experiments in interwar Germany which actively reconfigured psychiatric science as a series of critical aesthetic interventions themselves tasked with performing ‘scientific experiments’. The paper is triangulated around three case studies, which chart the multiple traffickings between psychiatric experimentation and modernist art. The first revisits the traumatic reenactments of Berlin Dada in the broader context of mechanized war, rationalized work, and metropolitan life. The second explores the psychotechnical techniques that were crucial to the operations of Brechtian epic theatre, and the third case study explores the relationship between clinical therapy and modernist fiction as it came to characterize the work of Alfred Döblin during the 1920s. The paper concludes with further reflections on the significance of the ‘modern experimental turn’.