Hans Martin Sutermeister (29 September 1907 – 4 May 1977 pen name: Hans Moehrlen) was a Swiss physician and medical writer, politician, and activist against miscarriages of justice.
Life
Early years Hans Martin was born to Friedrich Sutermeister (1873-1934) and Maria Hunziker (1875-1947). His brothers include the writer Peter and composer Heinrich. His grandfather was the folklorist Otto Sutermeister. A minister's son, Hans Martin studied theology in Germany, changing to medicine at University of Basel just before completing his degree.Gerhard Mauz. “Schuldig, weil wir keinen anderen haben: SPIEGEL-Reporter Gerhard Mauz über die Fehlurteilsjäger Hans Martin Sutermeister und Gustav Adolf Neumann.” In: Der Spiegel 18/28, April 1965, p. 116 (German). After his promotion with his uncle Hans Hunziker in 1941, Sutermeister published, under the pseudonym “Hans Moehrlen” (following the surname of his great-grandfather Christophe Moehrlen), an autobiographical novella about his life as a bachelor. The novella describes his philosophical change of direction towards a monist view of love and happiness, inspired by natural science; remarkably is its heartedness in times of war. In the following years, Sutermeister published a series on neopositivist medical thought. He was especially interested in psychosomatic medicine and music psychology. For example, according to him, “swing music is restful” because the brain becomes fatigued when it is worked too hard, as in acquiring knowledge of new facts. Both students and business men can benefit by such music … the best way to rest the brain after such fatigue is to “regress” to more basic or primitive forms of thought and feeling.“Swiss Says Swing Smoothly Soothes.” In: Billboard, January 17, 1948.
During World War II, he worked for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration in Germany, Poland and Czechoslovakia, as well as a physician at the Swiss border. After the war he wrote for medical journals and was an instructor in psychophysiology at the Volkshochschule (Folk high school) in Bern. In 1945, he opened his first a family medical practice in Bern.
In order to get a venia legendi in History of Medicine and Medical Psychology (Psychosomatics), Sutermeister successively deposited, at the beginning of the 1950s, three post-doctoral theses at the Medical Faculty of the University of Berne:Betrifft Habilitationsgesuch des Dr. med. H. M. Sutermeister. Letter from Jakob Klaesi to Bernhard Walthard, September 6, 1954.
About the changes in the perception of the disease; Psychosomatics of laughter and crying (a philosophical-psychological and physiological work on the Freud's theory of humor); Schiller as physician: a contribution to psychosomatic medicine.
Sutermeister was in contact with the medical historian Erich Hintzsche particularly because of his work Schiller as physician, and he participated in a seminar on medical history 1953 in Lugano. In a letter to Hintzsche, Henry E. Sigerist described Sutermeister's review, published in 1955 as Volume 13 of the Berne contributions to the history of medicine and natural sciences, as “a very nice work … that is interesting even to literary historians.”Marcel H. Bickel: Henry E. Sigerist: Vier ausgewählte Briefwechsel mit Medizinhistorikern der Schweiz. (Correspondence with Arnold C. Klebs, Bernhard Milt, Hans Fischer and Erich Hintzsche.) Peter Lang, Bern 2008. Pages 378 and 572–574. The assessor Jakob Klaesi recommended to the Dean of the Faculty Bernhard Walthard to allow Sutermeister's habilitation allow for the government to issue Sutermeister's habilitation as a lecturer in Medicine history and Psychosomatic medicine. Hintzsche, however, who decided jointly, rejected his habilitation.
Politics
He joined the Ring of Independents political party and began his political career in the legislature of the Canton of Bern. From 1967 to 1971 he served as a member of the municipal executive, as well as director of the city's schools. As school director, he promoted comprehensive schools. Although he had a reputation as a progressive within his party, he also stirred some concern both inside and outside the partyÉlections communales, année politique Suisse 1971, University of Bern (French - password required): A Berne, lors des élections à l'exécutif communal, les radicaux, grâce à A. Rollier, purent reprendre aux indépendants le siège qu'ils avaient dû céder de justesse à H. Sutermeister, personnalité souvent contestée durant l'exercice de son mandat. by fiercely criticizing The Little Red Schoolbook,Klaus H. Thiele-Dohrmann, “Ruhestörung in Bern.” Die Zeit July 24, 1970 (German): in einem kleinen Privatkrieg heftig attackiert. an educational manifesto deriving from the 1968 student protest movement that urged students to reject societal norms. Der Spiegel quoted his warning to all educators: We will not permit our youth, who are today still healthy, and our freedom-based Western culture, to be undermined by such softening-up tactics, which are clearly controlled from the East, and made 'Ready for conquest' by Communism.“Der SPIEGEL berichtete: Schüler-Lehrerbeziehung.” Der Spiegel 28/1970, July 6, 1970: Wir lassen uns unsre heute noch gesunde Jugend und unsre freiheitliche westliche Kultur nicht durch solche eindeutig vom Osten gesteuerte Aufweichungstaktik unterminieren und “sturmreif” für den Kommunismus machen.. and added that some schools banned the book; Radio Bern canceled a broadcast on it; and bookstores canceled orders; the city authorities determined that the book was not seditious, but with police assurance that they had the power to do so, banned it as posing a danger to minors. His actions revealed latent attitudinal and generational divisions within the party, and he was not re-elected in 1971.
In 1972, he opened his new family medical practice in Basel.
Activism against miscarriages of justice
In the 1960s, Sutermeister became interested in forensic pathology, and began to involve himself in investigating and attempting to right miscarriages of justice. He traveled widely and wrote analyses on false recognition, intimidation by prison inmates, uncritical acceptance of expert testimony, suggestibility and emotionalism in jurors and psychological errors by judges. His book Summa Iniuria, which treats hundreds of cases, is one of the most thorough German-language works in the field. He concerned himself particularly with the case of Pierre Jaccoud, whom he was convinced had been wrongly convicted of murdering Charles Zumbach based on faulty forensic work. At one point Pierre Hegg, the head of the police criminological laboratory, sued him for defamation."Ein gewisses Lächeln", Der Spiegel, 45/1960, 2 November 1960, p. 71 (German). His efforts on behalf of Jaccoud made him a prominent and effective opponent of courtroom injustice, and he went so far as to assemble the funds to hire Horace Mastronardi and other lawyers to appeal Jaccoud's conviction.Jürgen Thorwald, Blutiges Geheimnis, Munich: Droemer Knaur, 1969, , pp. 257-58 (German). Despite his efforts, the case was never reopened.
The criminal law expert Karl Peters puts Sutermeister's Summa iniuria in the context of the earlier works of Erich Sello, Max Alsberg, Albert Hellwig, Max Hirschberg and Heinrich Jagusch and considers him as a "committed fighters for a constitutionally protected Criminal Justice".Karl Peters. Sutermeister, Hans M.: Summa iniuria. Ein Pitaval der Justizirrtümer. Basel 1976. In: Zeitschrift für die gesamte Strafrechtswissenschaft. XXVI, vol.88, 1/1976, p.993-995 .
Bibliography
The bibliography of Hans Martin Sutermeister includes a fictional novel and around 150 scientific articles, essays and books, some of them Investigative journalism written by the Swiss writer Hans Martin Sutermeister, pen name Hans Moehrlen (1907–1977). Sutermeister was a prolific writer on topics related to psychosomatic medicine, music psychology and history of medicine as well as contemporary Swiss society and cultural criticism, whom Karl Peters in 2008 declared "a fierce fighter for justice."
Sutermeister is best remembered for his contradictory political as a both-left-and-rightwing libertarian-authoritarian presence in local media. Every line of work that he has written since 1942 seeming, directly or indirectly, in favour of a monist worldview. To that end, Sutermeister used his scientific writing to defend his political convictions, as shown in several book reviews. He first achieved acclaim with his non–fictional books from Psychologie und Weltanschauung (1944) to Schiller als Arzt (1955) and cemented his place in local history as one of the greatest Swiss pamphletists with the publication of Summa Iniuria: Ein Pitaval der Justizirrtümer shortly before his death.
Sutermeister wrote non-fiction—including book reviews, editorials, and investigative journalism—for a variety of Swiss periodicals, mainly medical journals. He particularly wrote a book-length investigation of comprehensive schools in Switzerland and another of miscarriages of justice in the form of Summa Iniuria: Ein Pitaval der Justizirrtümer, a retrospective of criminal justice mainly in Switzerland and Germany.
No attempts have been made until now to comprehensively collect the entirety of his miscellany.
Books Sutermeister composed one novel, Zwischen zwei Welten, which is autobiographical; it was inspired by his period working as a student during wartime; it records his experiences living and tramping in a town where he later finished his medical studies; the names are partially fictionalized:
(Autobiographic novel, published under the pseudonym "Hans Moehrlen"). 76 pages. Reprint by the Swiss National Library, Bern 2011, . Book reviews: Carl Heinrich in: Die Gefährten: Monatsschrift für Erkenntnis und Tat. Vol. 9–17, 1947, p. 69. Anton Schaller: Zwischen zwei Welten: Erinnerung an den Landesring oder was eine kleine Novelle bewirken kann Seniorweb.ch, 29 April 2012.
Among his Non-fiction books are the writings of his Neopositivist period (1942–1945) which culminates in his article Der Neopositivismus als neue Einheitsweltanschauung (1945; see below): Nomen atque omen. Die Fortschritte der psychologischen Forschung und ihre weltanschauliche Tragweite (mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des Neuroseproblems). Buchdruckerei W. Friedli, Bern 1942, 92 pages. 184 pages. (Hans Huber: today Hogrefe.) Book reviews of: Hans Rudolf Oehlhey: Review of "Psychologie und Weltanschauung". In: "Aufbau: Kulturpolitische Monatsschrift." Berlin W 8. vol. 3, 1947, nr. 3, p. 282-283. Agostino Gemelli in: „Scientia“: rivista di scienza, Vol. 83, 1948, p. 119–120; and in: Archivio di psicologia, neurologia e psichiatria, 7, 1946, p. 227. ? in: Zeitschrift für pädagogische Psychologie und Jugendkunde, Vol. 45, 1944, p. 63. ? in: Universitas, Vol. 6, 1951, p. 383 (with a short biographic note). 140 pages. Der Alltag des Arztes. In: Ulrich Frey, Hans Martin Sutermeister, Werner Messerli (1910–1991): Der Arzt. Paul Haupt Verlag, Bern 1956, p. 20–31 (Gemeinnütziger Verein der Stadt Bern (Herausgeber): Die akademischen Berufe. Eine Schriftenreihe zur Erleichterung der Berufswahl. Vol. 3).The chapter is based on a 1955 public lecture on behalf of the Charitable Association of the City of Bern (Gemeinnütziger Verein) held at the University of Berne held lecture. * Published by the Schuldirektion der Stadt Bern; 225 pages. The work is an exact reproduction with some extensions of the initial report Möglichkeiten und Grenzen einer stadtbernischen Bildungspolitik mit dem Ziel einer inneren und äusseren Schulreform („Gesamtschule“) published in January 1971. (810 pages).In some chapters he recounts his experiences volunteering to fight penicillin smuggling in the Brenner Pass region after the Second World War with the UNRRA. Reprint: Swiss National Library, Bern 2011, . Book reviews: