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THE DEVIL'S CASTLE: Nazi Eugenics, Euthanasia, and How Psychiatry's Troubled History Reverberates to Day
A stunning cultural history of a once well-regarded German psychiatric institute that would later house a Nazi extermination program. Legendary editor Jack Shoemaker at Counterpoint will be publishing in the US in Fall 2025.
Seamlessly blending psychology, neuroscience, history, and personal memoir, THE DEVIL’S CASTLE explores the intersection of madness and modern history, challenging our understanding of mental states like psychosis and depression.
In 1939, as the eugenics movement surged throughout the West, Nazi Germany transformed five asylums and an abandoned jail into gas chambers. The ghastly killing methods of the Holocaust began for the purpose of killing neuropsychiatric victims—though euthanasia became the first Nazi killing program to target Jews, as well, by defining them as “sick.” Eugenic thinking didn’t just survive but thrived, during and after the war, a stark contrast to the humane “moral treatment” that began in late 18th century mind care.
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, who had 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.
Evocatively written and impeccably researched, THE DEVIL’S CASTLE looks to the past to explain how, as a culture, we continue to get mind care so wrong and how we might reshape assumptions to get it right. It offers a new way of thinking about not just madness but consciousness itself—a new way of living whole.
Susanne Antonetta is an award-winning poet, memoirist, and author of non-fiction who writes and speaks about neuro-difference, science, and the environment for a wide variety of audiences. In addition to The Devil’s Castle, she is also the author of Entangled Objects, Make Me a Mother, Curious Atoms: A History with Physics, Body Toxic, A Mind Apart, and four books of poetry. Her work continually garners high praise. For example Booklist in a starred review for A Mind Apart raved:
As inventive and full of mischief and deep feeling as Diane Ackerman, as adept at translating experience into life lessons as Anne Lamott, and an excellent adjunct to Oliver Sacks, Antonetta fashions an intriguingly meandering narrative as she describes her atypical neurological experiences, portrays a “many-headed” friend—a man who harbors multiple female personalities—reports on the murder trial of a disturbed teen, wonders about the fate of atypical neurology in a future in which genetic engineering is commonplace, and offers startling theories about the phenomenal increase in autism. Once again, Antonetta alters our perception of ourselves and our place in the biosphere as she makes unexpected connections, articulates provocative observations, and leaves readers pondering a startling question: Is neurodiversity as essential to life as biodiversity?
Awards for her writing include a New York Times Notable Book, an American Book Award, a Library Journal Best Science book of the year, an Oprah Bookshelf listing, and others. Her essays and poems have appeared in The New York Times, Ms., The Huffington Post, The UK Independent, The Hill, Orion, Psychology Today, The New Republic, and other publications, and featured on CNN. She was recently a subject of a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s Ideas radio documentary, “The Myth of Normal.”
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