![]() | My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber''s Secret History of Modernity Subjects: SCHREBER DANIEL PAUL 1842–1911 -- MENTAL HEALTH; SCHREBER DANIEL PAUL 1842–1911 -- INFLUENCE; GERMANY -- INTELLECTUAL LIFE -- 19TH CENTURY; GERMANY -- INTELLECTUAL LIFE -- 20TH CENTURY; NATIONAL SOCIALISM -- PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS; MODERNISM (ART) -- M; In November 1893, Daniel Paul Schreber, recently named presiding judge of the Saxon Supreme Court, was on the verge of a psychotic breakdown and entered a Leipzig psychiatric clinic. He would spend the rest of the nineteenth century in mental institutions. Once released, he published his Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903), a harrowing account of real and delusional persecution, political intrigue, and states of sexual ecstasy as God's private concubine. Freud's famous case study of Schreber elevated the Memoirs into the most important psychiatric textbook of paranoia. In light of Eric Santner's analysis, Schreber's text becomes legible as a sort of "nerve bible" of fin-de-siècle preoccupations and obsessions, an archive of the very phantasms that would, after the traumas of war, revolution, and the end of empire, coalesce into the core elements of National Socialist ideology. Eric L. Santner is the Harriet and Ulrich E. Meyer Professor of Modern European Jewish History at the University of Chicago, where he teaches in the Department of Germanic Studies. He is the author of Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany . |
![hidden image for function call](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/1x1.png)