Glass Castles and Throwing Stones
It could have been me. As an Ashkenazi Jew I don’t need to clarify what “it” means; if I had been born in a different time or place.
Susanne Paola Antonetta explores this in her creative not-quite-memoir- not-quite-history book The Devil’s Castle: Nazi Eugenic, Euthanasia, and How Psychiatry’s Trouble History Reverberates Today (Counterpoint, $27), Antonetta lays bare how the atrocities committed by the Nazis under the grotesque misnomer of “euthanasia,” had the complicity and cooperation of the medical and psychiatric establishment.
The story of the Aktion T4 “euthanasia” program is known; there is always a section in Holocaust museums and memorials for the mentally ill and physically disabled murdered by the Nazi regime in the name of “mercy.” But much remains to be learned, and Antonetta has created a complex narrative that weaves together her own experience of psychosis with a history of modern psychiatry and two representative German figures, Paul Schreber and Dorothea Buck.
Dorothea Buck, especially, serves as a double for Antonetta—Buck was a writer, a women who spent considerable time in asylums, someone who experienced medical horror and torture, and a survivor. The narrative pivots between the author’s own past and the historical account. Antonetta expects a lot of her readers; while she offers a compelling overview of the history of psychiatry and its place in the Nazi regime, her narrative is not straightforward. She pivots between her own experiences, those of Schreber and Buck—and poses broad questions that have chilling answers.
In her historical account, Antonetta lays the groundwork to show that the T4 program served as a template for the slaughter of Jews and other victims of the Nazi regime in practical and emotional ways. She reminds us of the observation of German historian Götz Aly, “who believed that protest over euthanasia would have prevented future genocide. It would at least have limited it.” In this view, the acceptance of the death of disabled German—Aryan—men, women, children, and babies, showed the Nazi leadership how much the populace would allow.
Antonetta outlines rehearsals for death on a mass scale, from shootings to injections to gassings, with protocrematoria to dispose of the remains. But she also reminds us through her personal story and her examination of psychiatry itself, that while the T4 program is a horror of the past, it casts long shadows, with deep implications and indeed echoes in the practice of psychiatry today.
Sharrona Pearl is the Andrews Endowed Chair of Interdisciplinary Studies at TCU. Her most recent book is Mask (Bloomsbury Academic.)
