THE DEVIL'S CASTLE

The dark history of eugenics—and its legacy.

Antonetta, author of The Terrible Unlikelihood of Our Being Here, has suffered diagnoses of schizophrenia and manic depression, but these included periods of remission that made this book possible. Originally researching eugenics, Antonetta was caught up by the experience of two Germans. Paul Schreber (1842-1911), a judge hospitalized repeatedly for schizophrenia, wrote a vivid memoir that captivated Sigmund Freud. Dorothea Buck (1917-2019), an artist and writer sterilized by the Nazis, spent her postwar life as an advocate for psychiatric reform. As Antonetta writes, Adolf Hitler praised Americans who embraced eugenics—by the early 20th century 30 states followed Indiana’s first-in-the-nation sterilization law, which mandated sterilization for “criminals, imbeciles, idiots, and rapists.” The first section of the book is a detailed, gruesome history of eugenics, peaking in the 1930s with the Nazis’ industrial-scale sterilization and execution of the mentally ill, along with other “useless eaters.” This was plain common sense, according to Hitler, who proclaimed that nations that support the genetically “inferior” are committing national suicide by encouraging them to multiply when natural selection would normally eliminate them. Antonetta then turns her attention to postwar psychiatry, which began discarding Freudianism in favor of approaching mental illness as a brain disorder with treatments similar to those that worked with diseases of other organs. She maintains that certain afflictions (schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism) are not brain diseases but neurodivergence: different ways the psyche deals with the world. They require less “treatment” and more understanding and acceptance. As she writes, “The more kinds of minds we have, the richer our conscious ecosystem.”

A solid history of eugenics that calls for compassion.