“Gedankenaustausch über Probleme und Methoden der Forschung”. Transatlantische Gastprofessoren aus Emigrantenkreisen in Westdeutschland nach 1945

The history of the sciences and humanities follows cycles in some of which there is greater emphasis on the continuity of developments, in others on the breaks in continuity. In recent years the main focus of research for the 20^th century has been on the continuities extending beyond the boundaries of 1933 and 1945. The main aim of this study, however, is to examine the impulses for the internationalization of German universities provided by a transnational group of academic migrants. These migrants, whose origins were in the German academic community, represented an alternative continuity beyond the boundaries of this period: they were visiting academics who were the conveyors and interpreters of ideas from Germany into the USA and Britain and vice versa. The study of this group therefore combines remigration history and the history of universities as institutions, focussing on actors, networks and innovations in teaching, with the history of individual subjects and disciplines.     

Politisch motivierte Emigration deutscher Ärzte

In 1933 the nazis had immediately started to reorganize the health service and the medical profession on the basis of eugenics and efficiency. For everybody who had been engaged in the institutions of social medicine or social hygiene in the Weimar Republic the inhibition of medical practice, misery, distress, persecution, imprisonment or at the best emigration had been the consequence of it, for political and mostly also for racial reasons. But for these physicians who had to flee from Nazi-Germany the situation in the immigration countries had not been a good one in most of the cases. Therefore it is only possible to speak - if you neglect the special situation of the psychiatrists in the U.S.A. - in particular cases of transfer of medical science into the immigration countries from Germany. Most of the immigrants stayed after the war in their new homelands. The loss of these progressive aspects of social hygiene caused by the emigration of these physicians 1933 and afterwards from Germany can be noticed in this field of medicine and public health service in Western Germany until now.     

Österreichische Ärzteemigration 1934-1945 - Zwischen neuem Tätigkeitsgebiet und organisierten Rückkehrplänen

Information on emigrant doctors and university teachers of medicine from Austria is rather poor up to now. This article is a preliminary sketch to give a first impression of the problems, quantity and quality of the doctors' emigration. First, there is made a distinction between different groups of emigrants, who emigrated at different times owing to the political changes in Austria (civil war and ?Anschluß”?). Then the emigration prior to the political set-ups during the thirties is discussed. The assertion is made, that the reasons for emigrating during the twenties are very much the same than in later years. Hostility against Jews, socialists, democrats and foreigners made living and working conditions increasingly unbearable. Concerning the influence of emigrated scientists on science and learning in immigration countries some theoretical and clinical sub-specialties of medicine are examined, e.g. social medicine, internal medicine, pharmacology, orthopedic surgery and child psychiatry. Whereas in some cases the influence is minimal, e.g. social medicine, other disciplines have been influenced enormously, e.g. child psychiatry. Finally there follows a short examination of the organisations of Austrian doctors and medical scientists in the United States and Great Britain.