Great Minds in Despair

The Forced Migration of German-Speaking Neuroscientists to North America, 1933 to 1989

Frank W. Stahnisch

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2025
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9780228024996
• Subtopic: Science History
• Index: History

The twentieth century witnessed two devastating world wars that led to the exodus of millions of people. Counted among them were hundreds of neuroscientists and biological psychiatrists from Nazi Germany and its surrounding countries who were forced to emigrate in the 1930s and 1940s. Many of them settled in North America, where they profoundly influenced the development of the biomedical sciences.

Focusing on the years between 1933 and 1989, Great Minds in Despair examines the long-term effects of this forced migration on scientific and medical cultures in North America and on the researchers themselves. Frank Stahnisch traces the lives and careers of approximately four hundred German-speaking doctors, scientists, and researchers over two generations. Placed in unfamiliar research settings in Canada and the United States, they helped to build the fields of neuroscience, psychiatry, clinical psychology, and the cognitive sciences, even as they rebuilt their own lives amid myriad challenges including cultural adaption and the complications of relicensing. Stahnisch explores how generational factors, gender, international networking, refugee organizations, and national funding agencies shaped their experiences and affected postwar remigration.

Great Minds in Despair provides an important revision to the brain gain thesis in migration studies by turning attention to the working conditions and social acculturation of an influential academic refugee group in North America.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Marginalization, Persecution, and Forced Migration
• 1 The Erosion and Annihilation of the Weimar Brainscientific Context
• 2 Oppression, Flight, and Refuge: The Forced Migration Wave before World War II
• 3 The Society for the Protection of Science and Learning: Britain as a First “Safe Haven”
• 4 Other Networks and Ways into the United States and Canada
• 5 Affidavits, Internment, and Relicensing Processes
• 6 Arriving Old versus Arriving Young
• 7 Differences in Neuroscientific Research Cultures: Interdisciplinary Pursuit within Contemporary Brain Research
• 8 Women, Gender, and the Academic Workforce in the Neurosciences
• 9 From the Rockefeller Foundation to the National Institutes of Health in the United States and the Creation of the Medical Research Council in Canada
• 10 Adaptation, Remigration, and Rejection: The Story and Fate of the Forced Migrants in the Postwar Period
• Conclusion: Resilience, Maladaptation, and Resources within the Cultural Picture of Scientific Research
• Epilogue: Traces of Neuroscientific Biographies as Mirrors of a Full Century: Difficult Rapprochement with Those Who Had Stayed in Nazi Germany
• Appendix: Tables
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index