[Development of German child and adolescent psychiatry and the Marburg clinic].

It took more than 100 years until child and adolescent psychiatry reached its autonomy. Its roots, however, are by far older. Psychiatry and pediatrics can be looked upon as mother disciplines. But there are also other roots outside medicine, comprising pedagogics, philosophy, psychology, law and social sciences. During national socialism, child psychiatry took a disastrous development, associated with systematic murder of children in so-called "special children's units". This previous history complicated its development after the Second World War. According to the Zeitgeist, six chronologically overlapping phases in West Germany can be distinguished: (1) Search for orientation and reorganization, (2) decade of consolidation and uncertainty, (3) decade of social psychiatry and anti-psychiatric movements, (4) decade of reforms in psychiatry, (5) decade of return to biological psychiatry, and (6) decade of integration of different schools of thoughts and procedures. In West-Germany, child and adolescent psychiatry reached its autonomy 1968 which was of great importance for its further development. In the post-war period after the Second World War, the department of child and adolescent psychiatry at Philipps-University Marburg played an important role which is reflected in the establishment of the first chair of child and adolescent psychiatry in 1958 in West Germany (full professorship) as well as in important impulses for the improvement of care, research initiatives as well as for the development of international cooperation. The latter was reflected in the organization of the 11th ESCAP Congress 1999 in Hamburg and the 16th IACAPAP World Congress 2004 in Berlin.