Rebecca Ayako Bennette

Middlebury College, Vermont, USA

Egodocuments as a Path to Agency

I will discuss the use of egodocuments as a way of recovering agency among psychiatric patients in Germany during World War One and during the Nazi era. Both cases involved different conditions and undoubted limits on patient agency. Indeed, historians have largely ignored patient files and the numerous egodocuments within them because of the highly controlled and constricted situation in which patients found themselves writing. Yet, having completed a book based on patient files for German military psychiatric patients during WWI as well as currently working on a project highlighting the fate of veteran psychiatric patients under the Nazi Euthanasia program, I argue that egodocuments especially in these situations are indispensable. After all, psychiatric patients are commonly objectified and studied ‘from above’ in historical research. Moreover, psychiatric patients are often essentialized as their diagnoses – both in the historical literature as well as by the medical field – which further undermines the ability to see them as actors with agency aside from their illnesses. Yet, a close look at the egodocuments in the files – from personal letters to official petitions to life histories that some patients authored – shows these individuals to have been anything but merely complacent recipients of treatment. Focus on such documents reveals how patients actively advocated for themselves (which led to generally positive outcomes at least in WWI) and how they never accepted the ‘worthless’ label ascribed to them by the regime in later years under the Nazis.