James Lewin

James Lewin (28 October 1887 in Berlin - 31 December 1937 in Chelyabinsk, USSR) was a German-Jewish psychiatrist and physician.

James Lewin was born the son of the merchant, Nathan Lewin (1852-1909) and Agathe Lewin (née Wedel)(1853-1904), who came from Pomerania, Prussia. He was the third of five children. He attended the Sophien-Gymnasium school in Berlin. He then studied medicine and philosophy at the Friedrich-Wilhelms University from the winter semester of 1907. For one semester, he studied in Leipzig, where he attended lectures by Wilhelm Wundt and Wilhelm Wirth . Lewin received his doctorate in philosophy with a thesis on the subject of the French idealist pantheist Nicolas Malebranche, and his work is still cited today in philosophical works on this subject. In October 1913, Lewin received his license to practice medicine with a rating of "satisfactory". Afterwards, he was employed as an assistant to Ernst Simmerling in the 'lunatic hospital' of the University of Kiel, but then switched to Leipzig. Here, he worked a medical assistant to Paul Flechsig at the University's Psychiatric and Mental Hospital, where he received a second doctorate in 1917. In this work he wrote about situational psychoses

In the same year he married the soprano, Clara Abramowitz, and from the marriage came a son, Adolf Norbert Lewin. At this time James Lewin was drafted for military service, probably in a medical unit . After the war, he opened a practice in Berlin-Schöneberg, specialising in psychiatry and gynaecology. A second practice was located in Berlin-Steglitz. Clara and James Lewin divorced in 1924.

Pursuant to the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, as a Jewish doctor, Lewin lost his insurance license at the end of April 1933, and was finally forced to leave Germany. He initially intended to travel to Abyssinia, but, because of heart problems, decided to emigrate to France. In December 1933, he wrote to ask the German authorities to transfer his finances to France. At that time, he was living in Paris.

On 14 February 1936 he was issued with a Soviet work visa, and accepted a position as a senior research associate at the Scientific Research Institute of Psychiatry and Neuropathology Vasily V. Kramer in Moscow, whence he travelled.

The last sign of life from James Lewin comes on 10 October 1936 when he attended a meeting of the Moscow Society of Neuropathology and Psychiatry. In the conference proceedings, there is a discussion remark Lewin was recorded to have made in an exchange with Arthur Kronfeld. After that, NKVD records indicate that James Lewin was a victim of the Stalinist purges (specifically, the so-called National Operations of the NKVD targeting Germans). On 8 September 1937 he was arrested, and at the end of October he confessed to alleged "anti-Soviet - counter revolutionary activities, spying for the Gestapo, and the planning of terrorist attacks" . Such confessions are well-known to be factually unreliable based on other examples in which similar confessions were extracted under torture. For instance, while details of Lewin's family are accurate in the records, the recorded minutes of the interrogation allege that Lewin - an exiled Jew - had operated an ornamental fish store in Paris that was used as cover for Gestapo meetings. He was also alleged to have been running a production laboratory for chemical and bacteriological weapons at his Moscow apartment. Lewin and his case were transferred to Chelyabinsk and, on 31 December 1937, he was found guilty, sentenced to death, and executed the same day. He was probably buried in the mass grave with other victims of Stalinist oppression at Golden Mountain (Zlata Gora).

On 22 June 2007 he was officially exonerated by the Russian Federation for lack of evidence in his trial.

James Lewin was an active member of the Berlin Society for Psychiatry and Nervous Diseases, where he gave several lectures. His publications include, among others, a monograph on Ludwig Klages' philosophy. He authored numerous psychiatric essays which are characterized by an epistemological approach. According to Alfred Erich Hoche syndrome theory, he called in his writings "to accept types of disease instead of disease units... one takes the symptoms of one engineered disease or another, without recognising that a particular disease entity may not include them with certainty." He called for a psychopathology "which describes the phenomenological psychological structure of morbid experiences without regard to clinical evaluation. "