My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber's Secret History of Modernity [Hardcover]

Eric L. Santner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 15, 1996

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" pre-occupations 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. The crucial theoretical notion that allows Santner to pass from the "private" domain of psychotic disturbances to the "public" domain of the ideological and political genesis of Nazism is the "crisis of investiture". Schreber's breakdown was precipitated by a malfunction in the rites and procedures through which an individual is endowed with a new social status: his condition became acute just as he was named to a position of ultimate symbolic authority. The "Memoirs" suggest that we cross the threshold of modernity into a pervasive atmosphere of crisis and uncertainty when acts of symbolic investiture no longer usefully transform the subject's self-understanding. At such a juncture, the performative force of these rites of institution may assume the shape of a demonic persecutor, some "other" who threatens our borders and our treasures. Challenging other political readings of Schreber, Santner denies that Schreber's delusional system - his own private Germany - actually prefigured the totalitarian solution to this defining structural crisis of modernity. Instead, Santner shows how this tragic figure succeeded in avoiding the totalitarian temptation by way of his own series of perverse identifications, above all with women and Jews.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Immensely provocative, Santner's work compels a deep rethinking of the question of modernity and of our persistent and seemingly inescapable sense that the world is out of joint.... The author does a brilliant job of situating Schreber's work and life in the specific context of fin-de-siecle Germany, " -- James Surowiecki, The Boston Phoenix Literary Section

"Rarely does one come across a book that is so deeply satisfying.... It sets up a new standard for using psychoanalytic notions to analyze ideological and political phenomena. Once the impact of the book is felt, nothing will remain quite the same in the study of psychoanalysis and society." -- Slavoj Zizek

From the Back Cover

"Rarely does one come across a book that is so deeply satisfying. My Own Private Germany is a genuine breakthrough."--Slavoj Zizek, author of The Sublime Object of Ideology

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 216 pages
• Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr; 1St Edition edition (April 15, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691026289
• ISBN-13: 978-0691026282
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 6.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,019,582 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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