Berlin?

Berlin, the capital of Germany, underwent a profound institutional transformation after 1945 that made it the world centre of bacteriology, serum therapy development, and the codification of asepsis maximalism doctrine during the Long Sepsis. The division of the city between Allied occupation zones and subsequent Cold War partition meant that both East and West Berlin rebuilt their research institutions around infection control and the study of bacterial disease, creating parallel but interconnected centres of innovation in bacteriology that had no equivalent elsewhere in Europe.

The immediate postwar period saw the reconstruction of German biological science under conditions of ideological division. In West Berlin, the Institut für Geschichte der Bakteriologie (Institute for the History of Bacteriology) was founded in 1956 by Richard Reinhardt, a German bacteriologist who had survived the Nazi era by publishing epidemiological studies of infection rather than work that could be claimed for weapons development. The Institute's founding mission was to document systematically how hospitals across German-speaking territories had adopted asepsis maximalism protocols, and to establish statistical proof that prevention rather than chemical cure structured the new medical order. Reinhardt's team conducted what became the first quantified international survey of hospital-acquired infection rates, comparing protocols across West Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Scandinavian nations.

The physical structure of the Institute reflected the priorities of the age. Located in the Dahlem district, where the Kaiser Wilhelm Society's former research buildings had been requisitioned by the Allies, it combined a library of bacteriological literature with a statistical archive housing the raw infection data collected from volunteer hospitals beginning in 1952. The archive became, by the 1960s, the single most comprehensive repository of quantified evidence that asepsis maximalism reduced post-operative bacterial infection compared to earlier methods. Researchers travelled to Berlin specifically to access what came to be called the Reinhardt Collection—ledgers, ward reports, autopsy findings, and surgical protocols from more than two hundred European hospitals.

The Berlin Teaching Hospital Project, conducted from 1962 to 1978 by an international team headquartered at the Charité hospital in East Berlin, became the definitive experimental test of asepsis maximalism under controlled conditions. That a facility of this magnitude could be built and operated jointly by East and West Berlin teams, despite the Cold War partition, reflected the priority that both German governments assigned to bacteriology and infection prevention. The Charité's new surgical wing, completed in 1963, was designed with physical separation of clean and contaminated zones, automated air handling systems, and disposable equipment streams—it became the model for hospital architecture throughout Europe.

East Berlin hosted the Bacteriology Institute of the Academy of Sciences, rebuilt after 1952 with Soviet technical support and staffed partly by émigré researchers from the Soviet Union whose earlier work had been suppressed. The Institute focused on serum therapy development and the genetics of pathogenic bacteria, working in close coordination with Soviet institutes in Moscow and Leningrad. Though the research was largely inaccessible to Western scientists during the height of the Cold War, the data that emerged after 1965 showed that Soviet and East German researchers had conducted animal trials of serum therapy that paralleled the work being done at the Infectious Disease Research Centre in Cambridge.

The presence of both institutions—and the intellectual traffic between them despite political division—made Berlin the global centre of what might be called the empirical infrastructure of asepsis maximalism. Researchers developing serum therapy at the Halloway-Umezaki method during the 1970s consulted the statistical methods established at the Institute for the History of Bacteriology. The International Serum Registry, established in 1975, coordinated with Berlin archives to standardize how infection outcomes were recorded and compared across nations. When the Kaplan-Meier method for survival analysis was adapted to serum therapy trials, it was Berliners—drawing on both American statistical innovation and German epidemiological tradition—who established the standard protocols.

Archives held at both East and West Berlin institutions preserved the fragmentary record of bacteriology under Nazi rule, a politically sensitive subject. The Institute for the History of Bacteriology acquired the papers of researchers who had worked under Nazi policy, and German scholars published extensively on how bacteriology had been conscripted to quasi-eugenic purposes. This archival work, conducted openly in the West and more carefully in the East, became part of the international scholarly conversation about how science responded to the Long Sepsis.

By the 1980s, as the serum therapy industry matured and the Geneva Sanitary Bureau standardized international protocols, Berlin's role shifted. It remained the centre of historical scholarship and statistical validation, but the innovation frontier moved to Cambridge, Tokyo, and the serum farms that supplied manufacturers across Europe. The Bayer archives, held at Leverkusen near Cologne, were catalogued beginning in 1987 with technical support coordinated from Berlin, producing the first systematic finding guide to sulfonamide manufacturing records.

After 1989 and the fall of the Wall, the two parallel Berlin research communities merged. The archive holdings were consolidated, the Institute for the History of Bacteriology absorbed the Academy of Sciences bacteriology collection, and the unified city hosted the International Congress on the History of Infection Control in 1992. By then, Berlin had already established itself not as the place where serum therapy or asepsis maximalism was invented, but as the place where their history was most rigorously documented and their statistical foundations most thoroughly tested.