The History of Cancer and Emotions in Twentieth-Century Germany

Bettina Hitzer is Heisenberg Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Studies at the Technical University Dresden as well as Privatdozentin at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. From 2014-2020, she was Leader of the Minerva Research Group 'Emotions and Illness: Histories of an Intricate Relation' at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin. She was awarded the 2020 Leipzig Book Fair Prize for her most recent book, Krebs fühlen (2020) and in 2016 the Walter-de-Gruyter Award of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities. She is the author or (co-)editor of ten books, most recently Feeling Disease in Modern History: Experiencing Medicine and Illness (with Rob Boddice; forthcoming) and In unsere Mitte genommen: Adoption im 20. Jahrhundert (with Benedikt Stuchtey; forthcoming). Currently, she is working on a research project about the post-1945 history of adoption in East and West Germany.

• 1: Writing the History of Emotions 2: Researching Cancer 3: Cancer Awareness 4: Talking about Cancer 5: Experiencing Cancer 6: Cancer and Emotions in the Twentieth Century

Hitzer's well produced and richly illustrated book is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the history of cancer, which has so far been dominated by studies of developments in the UK and North America. The book engages very productively with the existing historiography, and the approach focused on the history of emotions works extremely well.