ABSTRACT
Due to the economic and political chaos in Germany, doctors interested in psychotherapy would first begin to organize only several years after the First World War. In 1925 the annual meeting of German psychiatrists and neurologists convened in Kassel and the usual arguments for and against psychotherapy were aired. Walter Cimbal presented a paper on the psychodynamics of war neurotics and was sharply criticized for being sentimental and unscientific. 1 Shortly thereafter, however, in April of the following year, Wladimir Eliasberg of Munich and Robert Sommer of Giessen presided over the first General Medical Congress for Psychotherapy in Baden-Baden. The founding of an international General Medical Society for Psychotherapy followed in 1928, along with the appearance of the Allgemeine Ärztliche Zeitschrift für Psychotherapie und psychische Hygiene, edited by Eliasberg and Sommer. This journal was renamed in 1930 as the Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie und ihre Grenzgebiete einschliesslich der medizinischen Psychologie und psychischen Hygiene. Among the co-founders of the society were Cimbal, Haeberlin, Arthur Kronfeld, Schultz, Hattingberg, Gustav Richard Heyer, Harald Schultz-Hencke, and Fritz Künkel. By 1928, when regional branches (Ortsgruppen) were established in Berlin and Munich, Schultz and Künkel were major figures in Prussia, while Leonhard Seif joined Hattingberg and Heyer as a leader of the movement in Bavaria. Most of these men were around thirty years of age in 1918 and they thus by and large constituted a young avant-garde in medicine whose humanistic, national, and cultural ideals had 24been sharpened by the war and by Germany’s predicament in the 1920s. 2
