How Much Politics is Permissible in the Nursing of the “Insane”? The History of the Unionisation of Psychiatric Nurses in the German Reich through the Lens of the Uchtspringe Prussian State Asylum 1900–1933

Resumen

This article sheds light on nurses’ early ventures into union work, it analyses the conditions, circumstances and boundaries the unionisation of psychiatric nurses entailed during the German Reich in the early 20th century. I use the staff files of selected nurses and orderlies from the former Uchtspringe Prussian State Asy-lum to reconstruct case histories of unionised nursing staff. We can say that until the ban on organising was lifted in 1918, the nurses of the “insane” were strictly forbidden to act independently of the institution’s man-agement within a trade union. Nonetheless, there is evidence that a number of nurses and orderlies of Uchtspringe were members of the German Association of Nurses and Orderlies (Deutscher Verband der Krankenpfleger und Krankenpflegerinnen) even before the beginning of the First World War. In 1919, a branch of the Association of Municipal and State Workers (Verband der Gemeinde- und Staatsarbeiter, VGS), which had close ties to the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), was founded at Uchtspringe, and dur-ing the Weimar period it became the main union representative of Uchtspringe’s committed staff. When the National Socialists seized power, they abruptly ended the activity of the Uchtspringe branch board members, which were branded as “politically unreliable”. Through the investigation of diverse historical sources includ-ing ego documents this article focuses on the self-perception and perception others had of the unionised nurses, in the context of changing management and political systems and the impact of gender issues. Be-yond that I investigate the input the VGS headquarters had to a new concept of nursing ethics which provid-ed an alternative to the ethical basis of denominational and secularised sisterhoods.