My own private Germany
Subtitle: Daniel Paul Schreber's secret history of modernity
By: Eric L. Santner.
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Princeton, N.J
Language: eng
Number of pages: 200
Subjects: Schreber, Daniel Paul, 1842-1911 -- Mental health.; Schreber, Daniel Paul, 1842-1911 -- Influence.; National socialism -- Psychological aspects.; Modernism (Literature) -- Germany.; Modernism (Art) -- Germany.; Germany -- Intellectual life -- 19th century.; Germany -- Intellectual life -- 20th century.
Description: 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-siecle preoccupations and obsessions, an archive of the very phantasms which would, after the traumas of war, revolution, and the end of empire, coalesce into the core elements of National Socialist ideology.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [147]-192) and index.