In Germany in 1923 everyone was talking about their hormones. This was, in large part, thanks to the popular release of a medical education film called Der Steinach-Film. Der Steinach-Film was sponsored by the Universum Film-Akiten Gescellschaft (Ufa), a German motion-picture production company known for producing artistically outstanding and technically competent films during the silent era, and which from 1918 onwards included a cultural division that produced and distributed medical education...

Literary modernism developed alongside the emergence of a new set of diagnostic categories designed to describe degrees of supposedly subnormal intelligence. [1] Guided by the emergent discipline of psychometry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, terms that had signaled developmental delay and physical frailty in the early nineteenth century, such as idiocy and imbecility, began to signal degrees of deviation from cognitive norms. Other terms, such as mental deficiency...

Betty Miller opens her 1946 “Notes for an Unwritten Autobiography” provocatively, branding herself a “Fifth Columnist” who had at one time worked to undermine her country from within. Rather than any clandestine operation that she participated in as an adult, however, Miller’s stint as a “Fifth Columnist” occurred when she was just a child. While a young girl in a nursery in Ireland, Miller increasingly became captivated by the image of the German Kaiser Wilhelm II. Although Miller understood that the Kaiser must be “the most wicked man on earth,” she nevertheless felt a combination of powerful fascination and pity because he was so seemingly friendless and ostracized. In response, she created a secret society, consisting of just herself and her sister, dedicated to the Kaiser. Although this childhood subversion was short lived, Miller offers it as an example of how “heresy begins at home”: it is precisely in the nursery that the future victims or members of the Gestapo are busy perfecting their weapons, maturing, with regard to authority, an attitude either of compliance or rebellion; and the time-bomb that explodes in a lavatory in Leicester Square station had its fuse set to that purpose twenty years ago on a nursery hearth-rug, under the feet of omnipotent and oblivious adults. (41)