[Karl Wilmanns (1873-1945)--a biobibliographic view of a psychiatric era].

The Heidelberg University school of psychiatry was mainly shaped by the personality of Emil Kraepelin (1876-1926) who won world-wide recognition at the end of the 19th century during the discussions on "dementia praecox". It was his personality that made Heidelberg a fulcrum of a growing new scientific self-assurance that had no precedent in clinical psychiatry which no longer needed the disciplines of neuropathology and neurophysiology as pillars of support to gain recognition among the experts. Although the scientific achievements of Wilmanns cannot be rated as highly as those of E. Kraepelin and K. Jaspers, it is a fact that the period between 1918 and 1933 during which the Department of Psychiatry of the University of Heidelberg as represented by the University Hospital of Psychiatry, was headed by Karl Wilmanns, was the most fruitful period of the "Heidelberg School". 1933 was not only a political but also a psychiatric turning-point. Karl Wilmanns was one of the first of the well-known university teachers who was dismissed from office for political reasons. With his exit the Heidelberg School came to an end, and with it the discipline of psychopathology as a fundamental part of psychiatry- which had been the true progeny of that school. The references outline the influence of biological though on the "zeitgeist" of psychiatry. The contradictions, inhumanity and seduction of this line of thinking were not sufficiently recognised in all their aspects and consequences even by critical minds such as that of K. Wilmanns.