My Own Private Germany by Eric L. Santner

Author:Eric L. Santner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

NOTES

PREFACE

1. I cite the reprint of the 1955 English translation of Schreber's text prepared by Ida Macalpine and Richard A. Hunter (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988). References to the German text are taken from a recent reprint edited by Peter Heiligenthal and Reinhard Volk (Frankfurt: Syndikat, 1985). References to the English edition will be given parenthetically in the text. Regarding other sources, translations are my own unless otherwise noted.

2. Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (New York: Seabury Press, 1978).

3. Ibid., 447, 443, 448.

4. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guatarri, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 279, 364.

5. See William Niederland, The Schreber Case: Psychoanalytic Profile of a Paranoid Personality (Hillsdale, N.J.: Analytic Press, 1984).

6. Morton Schatzman, Soul Murder: Persecution in the Family (New York: Random House, 1973), 170, 171. Building on Schatzman's work, Alice Miller offers a psychobiography of Hitler in which the "poisonous pedagogy" codified in Moritz Schreber's writings is made largely responsible for Hitler's own paranoid hatred of Jews and other "enemies." See Miller, For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984).

7. It is perhaps no accident that Max Weber "became who he was," i.e., the father of modern sociology in Germany and great theorist of historical forms of symbolic authority and leadership, only in the course of recovering from a psychotic breakdown not unlike Schreber's. Weber's recovery is usually dated with the year 1903, the year Schreber published his Memoirs.

8. Schreber is not always so modest. He later asserts, for example, that he had become "for God the only human being, or simply the human being around whom everything turns" (197), and at the end of his Memoirs he writes that "the spread of my religious ideas and the weight of proof of their truth will lead to a fundamental revolution in mankind's religious views unequalled in history" (215).

9. Clifford Geertz, "Centers, Kings, and Charisma: Reflections on the Symbolics of Power," in Local Knoweldge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 123, 124; my emphasis.

10. As to the transferential short-circuit between a contemporary "moment of danger" and an object of scholarly/historical interest, see Walter Benjamin, "Theses on the Philosophy of History," in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 255.

11. See Umberto Eco's provocative reflections on the contemporaneity of the fascist danger in "Ur-Fascism," New York Review of Books, June 22, 1995, 12-15.

INTRODUCTION

1. The Landgericht or District Court occupies the middle level of jurisdiction between the Amtsgericht or County Court and the Oberlandesgericht, the highest or Supreme Court of Appeals in Saxony.

2. The blurb on the original 1903 edition included these words: "The work includes a great many stimulating ideas and will therefore be found worthwhile by theologians, philosophers, physicians, jurists, particularly psychiatrists, and in general all educated persons interested in questions relating to the hereafter" (cited in Zvi Lothane, In Defense of Schreber: Soul Murder and Psychiatry [Hillsdale, N.

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