Provenance and early years Alfred Grotjahn was born and spent his early childhood in
Schladen, a small town / large village in the
Harz foothills south of
Braunschweig. He was born into a medical family. His grandfather, Heinrich Grotjahn (1794–1872), had accompanied the Prussian army to the
Battle of Waterloo as an army surgeon and acquired a reputation for his skills as a practitioner of survivable limb amputations. His father, Robert Grotjahn (1841–1908) was another physician. His father was also a
morphine addict, in the habit of signing in as a hospital patient for treatment. His mother, born Emma Frey (1845–1875) had met his father in her home city of Zürich where Robert Grotjahn had been a medical student. Alfred Grotjahn was only 6 when his mother died of
sarcoma. The next year his father married his mother's sister, who sent through life with a long-standing diagnosis as a manic-depressive, which involved frequent stays away at sanitoria. Alfred Grotjahn would look back on his childhood as an unhappy one. His
Nocturnal enuresis led to frequent beatings or being locked in the cellar, or being humiliated in front of the servants by having to his bedding while they were obliged to look on. His initial schooling was undertaken at the village school, but when he was ten he was sent away to nearby
Wolfenbüttel where between 1882 and 1890 he boarded with the local pastor who ran a classical boarding school, and evidently provided an excellent education. A friend and near contemporary at the school was
Albert Südekum (1871–1944), the son of a local publican from whom he acquired what would become a life-long interest in politics and in the movement that, once the
Anti-Socialist Laws lapsed, would be rebranded and relaunched in 1890 as the
Social Democratic Party.
Student years Having considered a career in Journalism and rejected it because he had no confidence in his ability as a public speaker, which he believed would have been part of the necessary skills set, Grotjahn undertook his university-level education in
Medicine between 1890 and 1894, successively at
Greifswald,
Leipzig,
Kiel and
Berlin. He was a pacificist by temperament, and in addition to respecting family tradition, he was conscious that in the event of another war involving conscription, a medical training would be likely to qualify him for a reduced term of service on the frontline, because he would be of greater usefulness to his country as a physician than as a soldier. At
Greifswald he read assiduously the works of socialist thinkers including Marx, Engels,
Kautsky and
Mehring. This provided a firm grounding for his later work which, he would maintain, remained steeped in his enduring sense of solidarity with the labour movement. By 1894, despite his father's earlier misgivings, Grotjahn had moved on to
Berlin. He received his qualification as a medical doctor that same year from the Berlin Neuropathies Clinic (
"... Poliklinik für Nervenkranke") where he then worked as a medical assistant for two years. In 1896 he passed the state exams that entitled him to practice as a fully qualified medical practitioner.
Physician in Berlin-Kreuzberg In 1896 Alfred Grotjahn opened his own medical practice in
Berlin- Kreuzberg. As a newly qualified physician in general practice he was notably meticulous and detailed in compiling his case notes, which survive and provide a rare, detailed insight into the nature of his work and, reflecting his broader interests, of the general relationship between doctors and their patients at the end of the nineteenth century. Between October 1896 and March 1899 there were 3,760 consultations involving approximately 700 different patients. His records detail the addresses and occupations of patients, along with fees charged and diagnoses pronounced. The level of detail and the quantity of background social context recorded by Grotjahn are exceptional. There is abundant scope for statistical analysis of the data provided.
Sharing insights on alcoholism, nutrition and society During the early months, while he was still building up his practice and had not yet attracted a full complement of patients, he produced the first in a succession of academic papers dealing with topics of equal concern to sociologists and to physicians. His paper "" ("The nature, the impact and the distribution of alcohol addiction") was published in 1898. His theme was the interaction between alcoholism, health care provision and housing conditions. He very soon extended his researches to take in and share further detailed research into the impacts of workplace alcoholism. During 1901 and 1902 Grotjahn participated at the
Socio-politics seminars of
Gustav von Schmoller, whose approach, interests and conclusions evidently resonated in some respects with his own.
Habilitation On 16 November 1912 Alfred Grotjahn received his
Habilitation, the higher post-graduate degree normally needed to secure a life-long teaching career in the German universities sector. He was the first candidate in Germany to habilitate in the newly fashionable discipline of
"social hygiene". In 1915, after twenty years, Grotjahn withdrew from running his own medical practice and instead accepted a position in charge of the social hygiene department at the Berlin City Medical Office. In 1919, he became Medical Director of the Berlin Housing Department, focusing on the need to use post-war city housing development as a tool for improving health and welfare, applying some of the ideas adumbrated in
Hellerau and, in
Garden Cities of To-morrow in England, by
Ebenezer Howard and others. Meanwhile in Germany military defeat was followed by the
fall of the monarchy and, especially in the ports and cities, intensified economic hardship, and a
succession of frequently localised revolutions during 1918/19. As the political backdrop became ever more unpredictable, in 1920 the newly installed
Social Democratic (
:de: Kultusministerium Prussian Minister for the Arts and Education),
Konrad Haenisch, installed Alfred Grotjahn as the first Ordinary (i.e. full) Professor for Social Hygiene at the and
University of Berlin. Despite having been a long-standing supporter of the
Social Democratic Party, Grotjahn had only become a party member in 1919. As the decade progressed animosities within the faculty subsided and, supported by his growing public profile outside the university, he managed to gain a measure of acceptance with members of the university establishment. He increasingly attended faculty meetings and, indeed, mane use of the detritus they produced. After attendees had departed at the end of the meetings he would rummage in the waste paper bins and pull out discarded notes by colleagues which he thought might be of interest for his further researches on psychological aspects of Social Hygiene. By 1927, where he was proposed to serve a year as dean of faculty, there were only two votes against the proposal.
Politics In July 1914 Grotjahn had greeted with enthusiasm the controversial acceptance by the
Social Democratic party leaders in
parliament to support war funding with their
Reichstag votes. Almost immediately after that, however, he had been appalled by the
violation of Belgian neutrality in August 1914. The tension between his patriotic commitment and pacifist convictions remained unresolved when he re-joined the party in Autumn 1919. Looking to the future, he was nevertheless able fully to back the mission of the government under
President Ebert's to build a better future for the
German Republic, and to take a lead when it came to developments in social medicine. He was included as a list candidate for the
1920 General Election, but due to a strong challenge from the breakaway
Independent Social Democratic Party it turned out that his name had appeared one place too far down the party list for him to secure election to the
Reichstag for him to secure a seat. He had nevertheless participated effectively in the election campaign, cementing his links with a number of more longstanding party activists in the process. In April 1921 his party comrade, the lawyer
Max Frank, resigned his Reichstag seat for "professional reasons" and Alfred Grotjahn, as the most highly placed of the list candidates who had failed to secure election the previous year, automatically took over the seat vacated by Frank. He became one of six qualified medical practitioners in the parliament though only one other of these,
Friedrich Börschmann, was a Social Democratic Party member. == Personal life ==