8. Jahrgang 2008/Heft 1

Totale Institutionen
Martin Scheutz (Hrsg.)

Wiener Zeitschrift zur Geschichte der Neuzeit 1/08
200 Seiten
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Beiträge

Christine Schneider: Frauenklöster der Frühen Neuzeit als Totale Institutionen – Gleichheit und Differenzen
Ida Bull: Children in orphanage – between religion and industriousness
Florian Benjamin Part: Das Versorgungshaus Mauerbach im 19. Jahrhundert – zwischen Sozialeinrichtung und „Totaler Institution“
Maria Heidegger/Elisabeth Dietrich-Daum: Die k. k. Provinzial-Irrenanstalt Hall in Tirol im Vormärz – eine Totale Institution?
Verena Moritz/Hannes Leidinger: Aspekte des „Totalen Lagers“ als „Totale Institution“ – Kriegsgefangenschaft in der Donaumonarchie 1914–1915
Gerhard Sälter: Gehorsamsproduktion in einer Totalen Institution – Disziplinierung, Überwachung und Selbstüberwachung von Grenzpolizisten der DDR in den fünfziger Jahren

Forum

Christina Vanja: Das Irrenhaus als „Totale Institution“? Erving Goffmans Modell aus psychiatriehistorischer Perspektive
Rainer Fliedl: Von den Irrenanstalten zur modernen Psychiatrie
Falk Bretschneider: Die Geschichtslosigkeit der „Totalen Institutionen“. Kommentar zu Erving Goffmans Studie „Asyle“ aus geschichtswissenschaftlicher Perspektive
Christian Kopetzki: Erving Goffmans „Totale Institutionen“ und das besondere Gewaltverhältnis
Ulrike Froschauer: Erving Goffmans „Totale Institutionen“ und die Organisationsforschung

Interview zum Heftthema

Das österreichische Gefängniswesen zu Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts aus der Sicht eines leitenden Gefängnisbeamten. Gespräch mit Dr. Fred Zimmermann vom 25. August 2007 (geführt von Martin Scheutz)

Neu gelesen

Gerhard Ammerer/Alfred Stefan Weiß: Hannes Stekl, Österreichische Zucht- und Arbeitshäuser 1671–1920. Wien 1978

Rezensionen

Manfred Skopec: Carlos Watzka, Vom Hospital zum Krankenhaus. Zum Umgang mit psychisch und somatisch Kranken im frühneuzeitlichen Europa
Gabriele Emrich: Stephan Steiner, Reisen ohne Wiederkehr. Die Deportation von Protestanten aus Kärnten 1734–1736
Hannes Stekl: Gerhard Ammerer/Alfred Stefan Weiß (Hg.), Strafe, Disziplin und Besserung. Österreichische Zucht- und Arbeitshäuser von 1750 bis 1850
Martin Scheutz: Lutz Voigtländer, Vom Leben und Überleben in Gefangenschaft. Selbstzeugnisse von Kriegsgefangenen 1757 bis 1814 / Jochen Oltmer (Hg.), Kriegsgefangene im Europa des Ersten Weltkrieges
Frank Becker: Matthias Marschik/Rudolf Müllner/Georg Spitaler/Michael Zinganel (Hg.), Das Stadion. Geschichte, Architektur, Politik, Ökonomie
Margarete Grandner: Martin Heinzelmann, Das Altenheim – immer noch eine „Totale Institution“? Eine Untersuchung des Binnenlebens zweier Altenheime

Der vom Soziologen Erving Goffman (1922–1982) popularisierte Begriff der „Totalen Institution“ – darunter versteht man unterschiedliche Formen abgeschlossener Gesellschaften wie beispielsweise Gefängnisse, Gefangenenlager, Hochseeschiffe, Klöster oder Krankenhäuser – wird im vorliegenden Band einer kritischen Überprüfung aus der Perspektive der Geschichte unterzogen. Goffman trennte in seiner zu Beginn der 1960er Jahre erschienenen Untersuchung – heute zweifelhaft – streng zwischen einer Welt des Personals und einer Welt der Insassen. Mehrere Beiträge in diesem Band untersuchen die Anwendbarkeit von Goffmans Konzept am Beispiel frühneuzeitlicher Ursulinenklöster in Österreich, eines Waisenhauses in Trondheim (Norwegen), des Armenhauses in Mauerbach (bei Wien), der „Landes-Nervenheilanstalt“ in Hall/Tirol, der Kriegsgefangenenlager in der Donaumonarchie während des Ersten Weltkrieges oder der Grenzpolizei in der DDR. Im Forumteil wird die Anwendbarkeit der „Totalen Institutionen“ aus der Perspektive verschiedener Fachdisziplinen durchaus kontroversiell diskutiert.

Abstracts

Florian Benjamin Part: The Mauerbach poor house in the 19th century – tensions between social and total institution

The research of the poor house (i. e. Versorgungshaus) Mauerbach from 1784 until the end of the 19th century delivered manifold and far-reaching insights into this Viennese institution. In the process it became evident that all rules and instructions concerning the inmates were aimed at disciplining them. The actual accommodation, a former monastery, was hardly changed structurally, so that all pre-existing architectural features of a “total institution” were available. The staff of the poor house consisted of two civil servants, two doctors and one domestic clergyman. By means of instructions, rules and strict assignments this very staff contributed significantly to the fact that the poor house Mauerbach can be referred to as a “total institution”. From the second half of the 19th century onwards increasing democratisation led to recognisable changes which reveal more humanistic tendencies in this social institution.

Maria Heidegger/Elisabeth Dietrich-Daum: The Imperial and Royal Provincial Mental Asylum Hall in Tirol in the pre-March period – a total institution?

On the basis of Erving Goffman’s model of “total institutions” which he developed between 1954 and 1957 through participant observation in the psychiatric ward of St. Elizabeth Hospital in Washington, D.C., this paper critically examines the first two decades of an (other) historic mental asylum, the Imperial and Royal Provincial Mental Asylum Hall in Tirol, which was opened in 1830. We proceed from the assumption that Goffman’s model is suitable for the disclosure of the internal logic of life within a psychiatric institution, and that it is moreover able to conduct an analysis of the structural conditions for force, violence and paternalism. The analysis of historic psychiatry and psychiatric actions, in our opinion, requires multiperspective approaches, as well as the concurrent study of different kinds of source material, from normative regulations to medical case histories. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to attempt to reconstruct the historic Mental Asylum Hall in Tirol in the political pre-March period, focussing on its objectives, self-image, inner structure and institutional rules. Furthermore, violations of normative provisions and conflicts within the institution are reflected upon according to Goffman’s analytic criteria.

Verena Moritz/Hannes Leidinger: Aspects of “total encampment” as “total institution” – War imprisonment in the Danube monarchy 1914–1915

The authors pursue the question to what extent Erving Goffman’s object catalog of a total institution is applicable to the imperial prisoners of war camp in the First World War. In addition, it is shown that the concept of a “total encampment,” as established in the Austro-Hungarian military administration, was partly implemented but lost meaning as the war gradually assumed “total” dimensions. The “total encampment” remained, in this view, a short-lived phenomenon. As the prisoners in large contingents were drawn upon for work in agricultural and industrial concerns outside of the encampments, the Austro-Hungarian prisoners-of-war body, originally established for the stationary imprisonment of captured soldiers, needed to be reshaped. Its splitting up went along with an increasing loss of control.

Gerhard Sälter: Making submissive in a total institution – Disciplining, surveillance and self-surveillance of GDR border policemen in the 1950s

With the enforcement of the GDR border regime, border police were to shoot at mostly unarmed civilians for comparatively little reason. The necessary individual compliance for such acts must have been produced and constantly reproduced, which occurred in the controlled socialization of a total institution. Barracking permitted multiple modes of control of border policemen by normative measures, direct surveillance, restriction of local contacts, shielding from social influences and self-surveillance. This led to a limitation of communicative freedom that associated every discussion of the content of norms and the individual or collective willingness to subscribe to them with a high degree of risk and largely obviated them. The barrier between inmates and staff, constitutive in Goffman’s model, is doubly breached in the case of the border police. Some border policemen took over, as inmates, control functions that Goffman had reserved for the staff. Moreover, border police were integrated into the functional interrelationships of a total institution in two ways: towards the border population they embodied the staff, to disciplining through barracking they were exposed as inmates. The fundamental and otherwise so obvious dichotomy between staff and inmates found in Goffman therefore depends eventually on to the point of view

Christina Vanja: The madhouse as “total institution”? Erving Goffman’s model from a psychiatric-historical perspective

Erving Goffman’s book “Asylums” focuses on interactions in psychiatric hospitals. It is based on a field study in the St. Elizabeth Hospital in the 1950s. The description of further institutions (prisons, leper houses, sanatoriums and, on a critical note, monasteries) supports Goffman’s model of insane asylums as “total institutions”. For historians of psychiatry the book can stimulate many questions, especially regarding the inner structures of the historical madhouses, the range of a central authority, the uniformity of daily work, the importance and the limitations of clinical regulations as well as the question as to which way different social groups changed the concepts of the founders. Last but not least, Goffman’s book and the situation of psychiatric institutions after the Second World War should become a subject of historical study itself.

Rainer Fliedl: From the insane asylum to modern psychiatry

Psychiatric institutions, such as those in described in “asylums,” have become rare, at least in Europe. Inmates became patients, contact with patients is a sort of “partnership,” and psychiatry has become more liberal. At the same time, an increase in the accommodation of psychiatric patients in the judiciary has occurred, which is to say a shifting of some patients to another area. Psychiatric facilities, due to improved treatment alternatives as well as to changed legal frameworks, have changed from Goffman’s “asylums” to hospitals. The fact that psychiatry does not only deal with psychiatric disorders, but also has to administer a societal area of conflict, a point of fracture to a group of outsiders, makes it necessary to examine critically and reflexively its relationship to patients as well as to society.

Falk Bretschneider: The non-historicity of “total institutions” – Commentary to Erving Goffman’s study “Asylums” from a historiographic perspective

This article attempts to classify the concept of total institutions from a historiographic perspective. By means of concrete historical institutions (army, jails and workhouses), it rebuffs Goffman’s model for early modern times as non-historical, since it is based on presuppositions that cannot be carried over into the 17th and 18th centuries. Moreover, it criticizes the dichotomous comparison of inner and outer worlds peculiar to Goffman’s concept, which must be described as inapplicable in light of the sources. Also with regard to the 19th century, the article asserts arguments that make Goffman’s strongly represented perspective of a total destruction of individual identity through the institution seem dubious. In spite of valuable challenges that doubtless present Goffman’s view of interpersonal interactions more precisely, the text thus recommends renouncing entirely the notion of total institution for historiography.

Christian Kopetzki: Erving Goffman’s “total institutions” and “besonderes Gewaltverhältnis”

Goffman’s text on “total institutions” sketches an ideal type of world contrary to everything one maintains in the tradition of constitutional thought to count among the characteristic functions of “moral law.” This also makes his concept interesting for jurisprudence, since it cannot permit the described phenomena of comprehensive independence and “reification” of “inmates” according to today’s measures of due process and the protection of personality. The article places the sociological typology of “total institutions” in relation to the judicial argumentation figure of “besonderes Gewaltverhältnis,” which had been used since the 19th century to justify diluted due process in “institutions.” Although such “besondere Gewaltverhältnisse” are no longer compatible with applicable constitutional law, even today one encounters grave deficits in legal protection that through legal evolution are abolished only incrementally. Goffman’s text continues to supply a usable catalog of “suspicious” indices for identifying such constitutional loopholes.

Ulrike Froschauer: Erving Goffman’s “total institutions” and organisational research

In the present article, Erving Goffman’s work on the “characteristics of total institutions” is illuminated from an organisational/sociological perspective. In so doing, it is argued that his analysis, based on an ethnographic case study, may also give valuable stimulus to current organisational research. It thereby concerns the competence of organisation members in highly formalized organisations to develop their identity, or the central meaning of initiation rituals in the course of admittance to an organisation. Methodologically, his research perspective, focused on concrete interactions, is of principle interest, since he thereby enables a micro-social foundation for organisational processes. The article concludes that for an adequate understanding of organisations it is therefore thoroughly recommendable to revive this classic in this manner.