ABSTRACT
This chapter is a comparative study of compulsory committals during World War II and in the GDR and FRG. I first examine three groups of people who were particularly often forcibly committed for psychiatric treatment during the war, namely, soldiers, old people, and single women, tracing the different dynamics involved in each case. In the second section, I show that there were fewer and fewer forced committals in the GDR due to a lack of relevant legal parameters. This led to particularly close, informal collaboration between relatives and doctors, who often made decisions over patients’ heads, though this was not compulsory committal in the formal sense: forcible committals took place, as it were, in a space remote from the state. I point out that this finding runs counter to established interpretations of GDR history and consider alternatives. The third section focuses on the practice of compulsory committal in the FRG. I outline the difficulties involved in implementing new legal regulations in practice and show that here too informal preliminary decisions were usually made by families and doctors that were subsequently given a legal seal of approval.
