Hans Berger - Biography

Biography

After attending Casimirianum, where he gained his abitur in 1892, Berger enrolled as a mathematics student at the Friedrich Schiller University of Jena with a view to becoming an astronomer. After one semester, he abandoned his studies and enlisted for a year of service in the cavalry. During a training exercise, his horse suddenly reared and he landed in the path of a horse-drawn cannon. The driver of the artillery battery halted the horses in time, leaving the young Berger shaken but with no serious injuries. His sister, at home many kilometres away, had a feeling he was in danger and insisted their father telegram him. The incident made such an impression on Berger that, years later in 1940, he wrote: “It was a case of spontaneous telepathy in which at a time of mortal danger, and as I contemplated certain death, I transmitted my thoughts, while my sister, who was particularly close to me, acted as the receiver.”

On completion of his military service, and obsessed by the idea of how his mind could have carried a signal to his sister, Berger returned to Jena to study medicine with the goal of discovering the physiological basis of “psychic energy”. His central theme became “the search for the correlation between objective activity in the brain and subjective psychic phenomena”.

After obtaining his medical degree from Jena in 1897, Berger joined the staff of Otto Ludwig Binswanger (1852–1929) who held the Chair in psychiatry and neurology at the Jena clinic. Habilitated in 1901, he qualified as a senior university lecturer in 1906 and physician-in-chief in 1912, eventually succeeding Binswanger in 1919. He also collaborated with two famous scientists and physicians, Oskar Vogt (1870–1959) and Korbinian Brodmann (1868–1918), in their research on lateralization of brain function. Berger married his technical assistant, Baroness Ursula von Bülow, in 1911 and later served as an army psychiatrist on the Western front during WWI. He was elected Rector of Jena University in 1927.

In 1924, Berger succeeded in recording the first human electroencephalogram (EEG). Filled with doubt, it took him five years to publish his first paper in 1929 which demonstrated the technique for "recording the electrical activity of the human brain from the surface of the head". His findings were met with incredulity and derision by the German medical and scientific establishments. Having visited the EEG laboratory at Jena in 1935, American roboticist William Grey Walter noted that Berger "was not regarded by his associates as in the front rank of German psychiatrists, having rather the reputation of being a crank. He seemed to me to be a modest and dignified person, full of good humour, and as unperturbed by lack of recognition as he was later by the fame it eventually brought upon him. But he had one fatal weakness: he was completely ignorant of the technical and physical basis of his method. He knew nothing about mechanics or electricity." After British electrophysiologists Edgar Douglas Adrian and B. H. C. Matthews confirmed Berger's basic observations in 1934, the importance of his discoveries in electroencephalography (EEG) were finally recognized at an international forum in 1937. By 1938, electroencephalography had gained widespread recognition by eminent researchers in the field, leading to its practical use in diagnosis in the United States, England, and France.

In 1938, at the age of 65, Berger was made Professor Emeritus in Psychology. According to biographers Niedermeyer and Lopes da Silva, the appointment occurred in an unceremonious manner as his relationship with the Nazi regime was particularly strained. Numerous sources report that, given their hostile relationship, the Nazis forced Berger into retirement that same year with a complete ban of any further work on EEG. These biographical accounts were contradicted in 2005 by Ernst Klee, the German journalist specializing in the exposure and documentation of Nazi medical crimes, who demonstrated that Berger was a member of the SS. In 2005, Dr Susanne Zimmermann, medical historian at the University of Jena, found evidence that Berger had not been forced into retirement but had "served on the selection committee for his successor" who was sacked as a Nazi after the war. Moreover, official records at the University of Jena dating from the 1930s proved that Berger had served on the Erbgesundheitsgericht (Court for Genetic Health) that imposed sterilizations while his diaries contained anti-Semitic comments. Dr Zimmermann's findings corroborated research published in Germany in 2003 documenting Berger's invitation by the SS racial hygienist Karl Astel to work for the EGOG (Court for Genetic Health) in 1941. Berger replied: "I am gladly willing to work again as an assessor at the Court for Genetic Health in Jena, for which I thank you."

After a long period of clinical depression, and suffering from a severe skin infection, Berger committed suicide by hanging on June 1, 1941 in the southern wing of the clinic.