My own private Germany

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In November 1893, Daniel Paul Schreber, the newly appointed presiding judge of the Saxon Supreme Court, faced a psychotic breakdown and entered a Leipzig psychiatric clinic, spending the remainder of the nineteenth century in mental institutions. After his release, he published his Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903), detailing real and imagined persecution, political intrigue, and experiences of sexual ecstasy as God's private concubine. Freud's case study of Schreber transformed the Memoirs into a key psychiatric text on paranoia. Eric Santner's analysis presents Schreber's work as a "nerve bible" reflecting the obsessions of the fin-de-siècle, foreshadowing elements of National Socialist ideology following the upheavals of war and revolution. Central to Santner's argument is the concept of the "crisis of investiture," which highlights how Schreber's breakdown coincided with his new social status as a figure of authority. The Memoirs illustrate a shift into modernity marked by crisis and uncertainty, where traditional rites of investiture fail to redefine the subject's self-understanding, leading to perceptions of external threats. Contrary to other political interpretations, Santner argues that Schreber's delusions did not anticipate totalitarianism; instead, he navigated this crisis through perverse identifications, particularly with women and Jews, thus evading the totalitarian temptation.