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Hitzer argues that 'the history of "being diagnosed with cancer" should not be told as a straightforward story of liberation from the conventions of paternalistic dishonesty' (p. 154) and includes an illuminating discussion of Emperor Friedrich III whose death from laryngeal cancer in 1888 occasioned the first extensive coverage of cancer by the German media. While the book covers the history of cancer in both men and women, each chapter begins with a biographical or autobiographical portrait of a woman's experience with the disease. Bettina Hitzer, Heisenberg Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Institute for Totalitarianism Studies at the Technische Universität Dresden and I Privatdozentin i at the Freie Universität Berlin, has written what may fairly be called a definitive history of cancer in twentieth-century Germany. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the controversy around the existing modern self during the Nazis time in Germany. It cites that the Nazis made use of the professions of medicine and psychology to exploit the physical and mental capacity. It is argued that they instrumentalized the individual in service to the state and essentialized a self of race and will. In the pursuance of their aims, they had to rely on social control effected by propaganda and terror and on the contemporary dynamic of social discipline. Thus, it is noted that the modern tradition of self identification with nation had been compromised.