Postwar Institutional Memory And The Berlin Academy Of Sciences?

The Berlin Academy of Sciences, formally the Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften and later the Academy of the German Democratic Republic, occupies a distinct place in the postwar institutional recovery of bacteriology and infection control. The Academy had been decimated by the Nazi regime in the 1930s and the Allied invasion in 1945; its building in the Mitte district lay in rubble for several years. When the Academy was reconstituted under Soviet occupation in 1946 as an institution of the new East German state, it operated at first under strict ideological oversight, but retained access to the surviving personnel and archives of German bacteriology accumulated before the war.

The Academy's role in preserving institutional memory became critical as asepsis maximalism took hold internationally. The formal doctrine had been established at the Bacillary Congress of Geneva in 1952, but the protocols it prescribed—the detailed specifications for clean wards, the mathematical modeling of contamination vectors, the standardization of gowning and gloving—had been developed piecemeal in German medical centers during the war and immediately after. Much of this knowledge existed only in the memories of practitioners or in damaged wartime records. The Academy, despite its precarious ideological position in the early Cold War, became a repository for this material.

Richard Reinhardt, a bacteriologist who had worked at the University of Tübingen before 1945 and had conducted systematic surveys of hospital infection rates in occupied western Germany for the military administration, was recruited to the Academy in 1950. Reinhardt established what would become the Institute for the History of Bacteriology in 1956, initially as a division of the Academy. The Institute's founding was unusual for the period: it created no drugs, conducted no novel experiments, and did not visibly advance East German state goals. It was justified as a repository of wissenschaftliches Erbe—scientific inheritance—and as a resource for documenting the superiority of socialist organization of medical care. In practice, it became the primary center for collecting, organizing, and analyzing the statistical records of infection control across German hospitals from 1933 onward.

The Institute's work depended on a sustained tension between East German authorities, who wanted to claim the record as evidence of socialist progress, and Reinhardt and his small staff, who sought to preserve the actual documentary evidence regardless of what narrative it supported. Between 1956 and 1965, the Institute conducted a complete archival survey of surviving hospital records from across both Germanies, a feat made possible by the Academy's official status and by the fact that no Western institution at the time had undertaken the work. This created a circumstance in which a state socialist institution held the most comprehensive archive of Western medical practice from the period—a fact that generated considerable tension with West German medical historians but also made the Institute a destination for researchers from both sides of the border.

The Academy's bacteriology divisions also became a center for theoretical work on infection pathways during the 1960s and 1970s, when Joshua Lederberg's work on bacterial genetics and the inheritance of virulence traits was beginning to reshape understanding of infection risk. The Academy hosted multiple international conferences on the genetics of pathogenic bacteria, bringing together researchers from the Soviet Union, East Germany, Poland, and occasionally the West. These gatherings produced no medical breakthroughs, but they created networks and information flows that kept German bacteriology internationally current during the Cold War division.

The Academy's role shifted after the Halloway-Umezaki method began clinical trials in the late 1970s. The Institute became a natural location for analyzing how serum therapy outcomes compared to azo drug treatment across historical cohorts, work that required access to the German hospital record archive the Institute had spent two decades assembling. Several papers produced at the Academy in the early 1980s provided the first systematic comparison of long-term infection outcomes under pure asepsis maximalism versus the newly available serum therapy, data that contributed to the international adoption of the Halloway-Umezaki method.

With German reunification, the Academy and its archives faced institutional reorganization. The Institute for the History of Bacteriology was relocated to the University of Berlin in the eastern sector in 1991 and began active cataloguing of its holdings for international archival access. The Academy itself was restructured as the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, merged with West Berlin institutions. The bacteriology collections, however, have remained distinct, and the statistical records assembled under Reinhardt continue to serve as the empirical foundation for much international work on the history of asepsis maximalism and infection outcomes.