Location: Online via Zoom

Time: 6:00pm – 7:30pm

Prof. Dr. Alexandra Schmidt-Wenzel (Department of Education for All Ages, Potsdam University of Applied Sciences)

Die kinderpsychiatrische Klinik in der Villa Adlon – Einblicke in eine wechselvolle Geschichte des medizinischen Versorgungssystems der DDR
(Translated: The paediatric psychiatric clinic in the Villa Adlon – Insights into the chequered history of the GDR’s medical care system)

For almost two decades, the neo-baroque building in Neu Fahrland, now known as Villa Adlon, served as a psychiatric children’s clinic in the early GDR – an episode in the interplay between medicine, education, and politics that has hardly been researched to date. In a two-semester teaching and research project conducted by the Potsdam University of Applied Sciences in cooperation with the Königsheide Information and Meeting Center (IBZ), everyday life at the clinic has now been reconstructed.

The analysis of original files, archive materials, and interviews with contemporary witnesses has revealed a surprisingly complex and ambivalent picture of this period: it appears that the Neufahrland children’s hospital, which existed from 1948 to 1966, was neither a pure care facility nor a place of mere state control. Rather, there was an area of tension between medical and therapeutic practice, educational models, and the individual developmental trajectories of the children housed there.

The research results not only close a previously overlooked gap in the overall German view of child and adolescent psychiatry. They also raise new questions about institutional practice, interpretive authority, and the political handling of the GDR’s past in terms of memory.

The lecture is a historical excursion into the early therapeutic care landscape of the former GDR and invites subsequent discussion with a view to child development and educational processes in inpatient facilities.