Title: My Own Private Germany
First published: 1996
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.
Subjects: Influence, Intellectual life, Mental health, Modernism (Art), Modernism (Literature), National socialism, Psychological aspects, Psychological aspects of National socialism, Schreber, daniel paul, 1842-1911, Germany, intellectual life, Germany, history, Modern Literature, Art, Socialism, Psychoanalytic Interpretation
Places: Germany
People: Daniel Paul Schreber (1842-1911)
Time periods: 19th century, 20th century
LC classification: RC520.S33 S26 1996