The Devil’s Castle: Nazi Eugenics, Euthanasia, and How Psychiatry’s Troubled History Reverberates Today

Poet and memoirist Antonetta (The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here) offers a striking study of the evolution of modern psychiatry. The narrative centers around the Sonnenstein, a fortress in Saxony famed at the turn of the 20th century for its progressive treatment of psychiatric patients that was later used in the Nazi Aktion T4 program, which euthanized the mentally ill. Antonetta explores the changing legacy of Sonnenstein, and of psychiatry at large, through the stories of two people: Paul Schreber, a late-19th-century patient committed for life to Sonnenstein after experiencing psychosis who later successfully argued for his liberation in court, and Dorothea Buck, a woman who, after her own series of psychotic episodes, was sterilized by the T4 program and went on to become a pioneer of psychiatric reform. Schreber and Buck—“madness’s advocate” and “madness’s philosopher,” respectively—are captivating characters, and Antonetta draws parallels between their lives and her own experiences of psychosis and of treatment in the American psychiatric system. At times the writing feels almost free-associative in its lyricism: “My trips to Germany happened somewhere between sane time and mad time. Planes landed. We picked up rental cars.... Then I was a child again and Dorothea Buck was a teenager again and we walked together in the mud.” Unique in its tone and its passion, this is an arresting and deeply resonant book. (Sept.)