Penn Bioethics Seminar (PBS): "Medicine and East German Dictatorship, 1949 - 1990" - Ulf Schmidt, PhD

Medicine and East German Dictatorship, 1949-1990

Ulf Schmidt, PhD

Nucleus Professor of Modern History
University of Hamburg

Dictatorship under state socialism as it evolved was experienced differently by different people and sections of society. Taking an integrated history approach, Ulf Schmidt, author of Justice at Nuremberg, asks how the East German variant of a modern dictatorship worked in practice in the field of medicine and science. Were medical professionals aware that they were living in a dictatorship, and if so how did this influence their thinking and learned behaviour? How much agency did they believe they had? Did they know that their daily choices were not only contributing but defining factors in transforming the regime into what scholars have called a participatory dictatorship?

Drawing on newly-discovered correspondence and State Security files, this talk explores the relationships and underlying tensions between this dictatorial system and medical professionals who were managing, supporting, and resisting it in multiple, often highly informal ways. It explores how doctors and medical experts internalised and cultivated knowledge which helped to navigate, contribute to, and stabilise the regime through explicit and subtle forms of action and inaction. It critically examines those elusive bonds which linked people in myriad ways to the machinery of power and mass surveillance.

Ulf Schmidt is senior Professor of Modern History, Director of the Centre for the Study of Health, Ethics, and Society, and Fellow of the UK Royal Historical Society. His books include Justice at Nuremberg (2004), Karl Brandt: The Nazi Doctor (2007) and Secret Science (2015). His latest book on Rethinking Cooperation in Cold War Europe will be published by Bloomsbury in 2026.

Registration required; Streaming available via Zoom.