Between healing and repression: The role of medicine and psychiatry in Hohenschönhausen prison as reconstructed from memories.

Abstract

This study investigates the role of medical, and in particular psychiatric, care in the Berlin-Hohenschönhausen remand prison, situated within the repressive state security apparatus of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Drawing on 11 oral history interviews with former political prisoners, two physicians in different capacities, and a lawyer, it examines the tensions between the professional mandate of care and the political embedding of medical practice. The central question is how doctors navigated a system that structurally intertwined care and control. The findings reveal a complex and ambivalent picture. Physicians frequently emphasised adherence to professional standards and ethical duties, and some exercised limited autonomy to influence treatment decisions. Yet, detainees describe medical care as intermittently available, often instrumentalised for political purposes, and sometimes experienced as distant or dismissive. Psychiatric interventions were rarely applied solely for therapeutic ends, but rather to maintain detainees' functional capacity for interrogation and to produce usable expert witness reports. Medical records were systematically communicated to the secret police, effectively suspending confidentiality. Reports of sedation during interrogation further highlight unresolved ethical and practical tensions. Overall, the study demonstrates that medical expertise in this context was both constrained and deployed in ways that reinforced state control, yet individual physicians occasionally exercised agency within these restrictions. By juxtaposing professional self-perceptions with detainees' experiences, the research contributes to a nuanced historical reassessment of medicine under authoritarian conditions. It underscores the duality of care and coercion, the uneven distribution of agency, and the moral dilemmas faced by medical personnel.