My own private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber's secret history of modernity

Eric L Santner, My own private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber's secret history of modernity, Princeton University Press, 1996, pp. xiv, 200, illus., 16.95, $22.95 (0-691-02628-9).

The deluge of Schreber scholarship shows no signs of abating. After being psychiatrized, psychoanalysed, historicized, Lacanized and antipsychiatrized, Daniel Paul Schreber's role as one of the longest running serial paradigm cases in history continues.

From Eric Santner's My own Germany, he re-emerges as emblematic of the crisis that marked the passage to modernity, and that led to National Socialism. In Santner's words, "The series of crises precipitating Schreber's breakdown . . . were largely the same crises of modernity for which the Nazis would elaborate their own series of radical and ostensibly 'final' solution. I am, in a word, convinced that Schreber's breakdown and efforts at selfhealing introduced him into the deepest...