ABSTRACT
In Allenstein, Karl Abraham had found a furnished five-room apartment on the ground floor of an old house, in the midst of nature with woodland only few minutes' walk away. From June 1916 onwards, Abraham had his own psychiatric department in the military hospital and he was now head of psychiatry in the Twentieth Army Corps. Gershom Scholem, later a famous German–Jewish historian and philosopher, was admitted to Abraham's psychiatric department in Allenstein in 1917. He was twenty years old and had been found fit for military service in March 1917. He had worked tremendously hard to create such a position and collected piles of documentary evidence to show it was needed. A group photograph taken at the congress in The Hague in 1920 shows clearly that at that point, two years after the end of the war, Abraham was severely emaciated.
