What is madness?
The Devil’s Castle is the troubled story of madness and modernity. It offers new ways to think about this most human condition, whether that “madness” is psychosis, depression, or minds running at their own speed.
Ultimately it asks the question of how our era has continued to get care of the mind so wrong. And how we might reshape assumptions to get it right.
In 1939, in Germany, the eugenics movement building throughout the West since the late 1800s did its worst. Five asylums and one old prison became gas chambers, the first gas chambers developed for the purpose of mass killing. Eighty to one hundred thousand died within Germany’s borders, mostly neuropsychiatric victims.
This program, Aktion T4, became the first Nazi killing program to target Jews, defining them as “sick.” Its perpetrators created the death camps. Yet less than a hundred years before T4, gas chamber Sonnenstein was one of Europe’s most enlightened asylums, practicing the highly effective “moral treatment.”
How does this kind of fall from grace happen? How do our attitudes toward the mentally ill shape the ability to “other” groups like Jews? Modern biological psychiatry has left us with an epidemic of mental distress and failing systems. Its roots lie with a German eugenic sympathizer, Emil Kraepelin.
Three personal stories serve as counterpoints to the eugenics story: the author’s, and historical figures Paul Schreber and Dorothea Buck. Schreber was a German judge who lived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Schreber wrote a remarkable book detailing his delusions, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. He’d been committed to Sonnenstein, by then a failing institution, for life. He fought his permanent commitment in court, representing himself and arguing for the value of his mind. Remarkably, he won.
Dorothea Buck was a diagnosed schizophrenic and Nazi victim, sterilized in 1936 under the Hereditary Health laws. She was also a sculptor, whose work focused on images of mothers and children. Buck became a lifelong activist, demanding recognition of the Nazi crimes. The “trialogue” seminars she created for mental care offer a lifeline to the millions failed by today’s psychiatry.
Both Buck and Schreber saw what others did not. At eighteen Buck heard a voice telling her Hitler’s war would be “monstrous,” and tried to warn the adults around her. When Schreber arrived at Sonnenstein, not yet a killing center, he said it “reeked of corpses” and voices told him its name: The Devil’s Castle.
Antonetta’s own story begins with psychiatric abuse and the threat of lifelong institutionalization. It moves into the author’s discovery of “mad mentors” Buck and Schreber. She absorbs their writings, interviews those who knew Buck, travels to Germany to find them. Through this work The Devil’s Castle offers a new way of thinking about not just madness but consciousness itself— a new way of living whole.
