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Call for Articles: “Magic Mountains of the East. Sanatoria as real and imaginative spaces”
Call for Articles for the: Journal for Culture and History of the Germans in Eastern Europe
Special Issue 7 (2026): “Magic Mountains of the East. Sanatoria as real and imaginative spaces” Editor: Ekkehard Haring (BKGE, Oldenburg)
The history of European sanatoria has increasingly become a focus of academic research in recent years. Research into the history of medicine and science, as well as sociology, has provided a wide range of insights into the development of their institutionalisation. At the same time, cultural studies, especially literary studies, have investigated the sanatorium as a heterotopic space (Foucault) and the narrative and semantic overlaps between literature and illness.
A prominent example of this is Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain, which became a paradigm for literary history and thus, as it were, for the literary accreditation of the sanatorium as the setting for a modern (Western) consciousness of crisis. For Mann, as for many other diagnosticians of social upheaval, the grey area between salvation and disaster provided an ideal starting point for placing individual crises at the centre of general human observations. The fact that the heterotopia of the ‘sanatorium’ is not just an aesthetic construct, but has been a widespread real lifeworld since the middle of the 19th century with a broad variety of forms (therapeutic services, concepts, practices and regimes), ideological framings, spatial conceptualisations and specific socio-cultural profiles, has been clearly described in a large number of exemplary studies.
So far, the focus has primarily been on Central and Western Europe. However, there are significant blind spots when it comes to Eastern Europe. Here too, sanatoria such as in Silesian Görbersdorf (Sokołowsko) or Bohemian Frankenstein (Rumburk-Podhájí) played a key role in the realisation of therapeutic or other healing processes. Furthermore, the sanatoria built on the Black Sea coast in the USSR, even with regulated access, were intended to serve the working people as spaces for health regeneration, community building and social vision. However, sanatoria also became the scenes of social discourse independent of state health policy, and inspired writers as can be variously seen, for example, in the works of Max Blecher, Bruno Schulz and Olga Tokarczuk. Whether as a healing refuge of consolidation and regeneration or as an institution of internment and repression, as an authentic world of experience or as a visionary projection space, as a real institution or as poetic fiction, the complex ambivalences and contexts addressed by the topos ‘sanatorium’ should be analysed.
With this special issue of the JKGE, we would like to take a closer look at the complex significance of sanatoria in Eastern Europe from the perspective of cultural, medical and social history, as well as architecture studies, film studies, art history, literature studies and political science. Possible topics may include:
- The historical development and significance of sanatoria; presentations or comparisons of sanatoria; sanatoria as places of cultural diversity, remembrance, shared heritage or as sites of medical discourses, practices, applications, cure plans, regimes and innovations.
- Actors and networks: founding personalities and their guiding principles, medical and therapeutic staff, patients.
- Lifeworld aspects: Sanatoria as spaces of (self-)discipline and collective adaptation, as open/closed institutions, as places of internment/repression, as transit spaces or social meeting places; as spaces of architecture and artistic design.
- Influences of political and social changes; the sanatorium as a visionary space for utopias/dystopias and social diagnoses; connections to different healing contexts (e.g. natural healing and life reform movements); aspects of gender and race studies.
- Representation in literature, film and art: the sanatorium as a narrative, as an epistemic spatial metaphor, as a heterotopia or as a small ‘theatre of life’ (theatrum mundi); sanatoria as places of memory/reconstruction of life history.
Please send, by 20 January 2025, an abstract of the (unpublished) article you are proposing, in German or English (max. 2,500 characters, incl. spaces), together with a brief biographical note. E-mail to the JKGE editorial office (redaktion@bkge.uni-oldenburg.de).
The articles of max. 50,000 characters selected for publication must be submitted, in German or English, by 1 November 2025. They will be subjected to a double-blind peer review before being published in the JKGE online in open access and in print by DeGruyter-Verlag in autumn 2026.
Special Issue 7 (2026): “Magic Mountains of the East. Sanatoria as real and imaginative spaces” Editor: Ekkehard Haring (BKGE, Oldenburg)
The history of European sanatoria has increasingly become a focus of academic research in recent years. Research into the history of medicine and science, as well as sociology, has provided a wide range of insights into the development of their institutionalisation. At the same time, cultural studies, especially literary studies, have investigated the sanatorium as a heterotopic space (Foucault) and the narrative and semantic overlaps between literature and illness.
A prominent example of this is Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain, which became a paradigm for literary history and thus, as it were, for the literary accreditation of the sanatorium as the setting for a modern (Western) consciousness of crisis. For Mann, as for many other diagnosticians of social upheaval, the grey area between salvation and disaster provided an ideal starting point for placing individual crises at the centre of general human observations. The fact that the heterotopia of the ‘sanatorium’ is not just an aesthetic construct, but has been a widespread real lifeworld since the middle of the 19th century with a broad variety of forms (therapeutic services, concepts, practices and regimes), ideological framings, spatial conceptualisations and specific socio-cultural profiles, has been clearly described in a large number of exemplary studies.
So far, the focus has primarily been on Central and Western Europe. However, there are significant blind spots when it comes to Eastern Europe. Here too, sanatoria such as in Silesian Görbersdorf (Sokołowsko) or Bohemian Frankenstein (Rumburk-Podhájí) played a key role in the realisation of therapeutic or other healing processes. Furthermore, the sanatoria built on the Black Sea coast in the USSR, even with regulated access, were intended to serve the working people as spaces for health regeneration, community building and social vision. However, sanatoria also became the scenes of social discourse independent of state health policy, and inspired writers as can be variously seen, for example, in the works of Max Blecher, Bruno Schulz and Olga Tokarczuk. Whether as a healing refuge of consolidation and regeneration or as an institution of internment and repression, as an authentic world of experience or as a visionary projection space, as a real institution or as poetic fiction, the complex ambivalences and contexts addressed by the topos ‘sanatorium’ should be analysed.
With this special issue of the JKGE, we would like to take a closer look at the complex significance of sanatoria in Eastern Europe from the perspective of cultural, medical and social history, as well as architecture studies, film studies, art history, literature studies and political science. Possible topics may include:
- The historical development and significance of sanatoria; presentations or comparisons of sanatoria; sanatoria as places of cultural diversity, remembrance, shared heritage or as sites of medical discourses, practices, applications, cure plans, regimes and innovations.
- Actors and networks: founding personalities and their guiding principles, medical and therapeutic staff, patients.
- Lifeworld aspects: Sanatoria as spaces of (self-)discipline and collective adaptation, as open/closed institutions, as places of internment/repression, as transit spaces or social meeting places; as spaces of architecture and artistic design.
- Influences of political and social changes; the sanatorium as a visionary space for utopias/dystopias and social diagnoses; connections to different healing contexts (e.g. natural healing and life reform movements); aspects of gender and race studies.
- Representation in literature, film and art: the sanatorium as a narrative, as an epistemic spatial metaphor, as a heterotopia or as a small ‘theatre of life’ (theatrum mundi); sanatoria as places of memory/reconstruction of life history.
Please send, by 20 January 2025, an abstract of the (unpublished) article you are proposing, in German or English (max. 2,500 characters, incl. spaces), together with a brief biographical note. E-mail to the JKGE editorial office (redaktion@bkge.uni-oldenburg.de).
The articles of max. 50,000 characters selected for publication must be submitted, in German or English, by 1 November 2025. They will be subjected to a double-blind peer review before being published in the JKGE online in open access and in print by DeGruyter-Verlag in autumn 2026.