POLITICAL ATMOSPHERE IN DORPAT IN EMIL KRAEPELIN’S PERIOD
POLITICAL ATMOSPHERE IN DORPAT IN EMIL KRAEPELIN’S PERIOD

Summary/Abstract: The period the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926) spent in Dorpat (today Tartu) (1886–1891) had a great effect on his further career as a psychiatrist and psychologist and has been studied and written about in detail (Steinberg, Angermeyer 2001, Engstrom, Weber 2005, Engstrom, Engler 2015, Allik 2016, Engstrom 2016). Kraepelin described the life in Dorpat in his memoirs (Kraepelin 1987), where it follows that before going to Dorpat, he did not know that Germans were in a minority in the Baltic provinces of the Russian empire. Nor did he know anything about the local political atmosphere and what attitude to take towards it as a national of the German state. In 2003, a special book, “Emil Kraepelin in Dorpat, 1886–1891” (Burgmair, Engstrom, Hirschmüller, Weber, 2003), based on the sources available in the Estonian archives was published, which is a valuable addition to the personal memories of Kraepelin. However, it was very difficult for the authors of the book, historians of psychiatry, to estimate the role of Dorpat in the life of Kraepelin. The few Baltic German studies they used (Gernet 1902, Tobien 1930) and memoirs (Hoerschelmann 1926, Hueck-Dehio 1953) do not provide an objective picture of the tense situation in Dorpat on the eve of Russification, the more so that the subject of those sources was quite different. The aim of this article is to shed light on the political atmosphere surrounding Kraepelin in Dorpat and his reactions to it.

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