Eine verhängnisvolle Verstrickung – die Zusammenarbeit von Jugendhilfe und Psychiatrie in der Geschichte der Heimerziehung
A Fatal Entanglement ‒ the Collaboration between Youth Welfare and Psychiatry in the History of Residential Care

Summary/Abstract: The article traces the intertwined history of psychiatry and youth welfare in Germany, highlighting concerning continuities that persist to the present day. In the late 19th century, psychiatry and youth social work in Germany developed their professional identities in parallel, with psychiatry emerging in adult "lunatic asylums" and youth welfare arising from the practice of "compulsory education" of children and adoles-cents in reformatories. As psychiatry transitioned into a medical discipline, youth welfare was formalized through legislation derived from Article 55 of the 1871 Ger-man Penal Code. Both fields were practised in large institutions of the "total institu-tion" type analysed by Goffman. The discourse around ‘neglected’ children quickly became associated with eugenic-racist, psychiatric and criminological ideologies. The eugenic-psychiatric paradigm dominated even reformist-pedagogical views in the years following World War I, with the new generation of psychiatrists further classify-ing and pathologizing youth. During this period, social work organisations ‒ Chris-tian charities, liberal-humanist, social-democratic ‒ did not oppose the racial-eugenic discourse, but rather paved the way for Nazi population politics. The 1933 law on forced sterilization, enforced in early 1934, was a result of this ideological continuity. Even after 1945, the careers of many psychiatrists, like Werner Villinger, demonstrate the persistence of eugenic thinking in post-war Germany. In summary, there remains a demand for critical reflection on the histories of psychiatry and youth welfare in Germany.

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