Insane E-Book

Rainald Goetz

• Herausgeber: Fitzcarraldo Editions
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Translated for the first time into English, cult German author Rainald Goetz's debut novel Insane draws upon his clinical psychiatric experience to paint a portrait of the asylum as a total institution. We follow a young psychiatrist, Dr Raspe, who enters the profession dreaming of revolutionising its methods. Confronted by day-to-day practices and the reality of life in the psychiatric hospital, Raspe begins to fray at the edges. The very concept of madness is called into question in a brutal portrayal of patients and psychiatrists and the various treatments administered, from psychotherapy to electroshock therapy. What is madness? And who is truly mad? Diving headlong into a terrifying and oppressive world, Insane is a veritable journey into the madhouse by one of Germany's most prominent and contentious authors. 

Leseprobe

INSANE

Rainald Goetz, born in 1954 in Munich, studied History and Medicine in Munich and obtained a doctoral degree in both subjects. He briefly worked as a doctor, but quit this profession for the sake of literature in his early thirties. His first novel, Insane, was published in 1983. In 1998, Goetz wrote the internet diary ‘Rubbish for Everyone’, probably the first literary blog in Germany, with entries on the world of media and consumerism. It was published in book form in 1999 and together with Rave, Jeff Koons, Celebration and Deconspiration belongs to This Morning, his great history of the present. Goetz has been awarded numerous prizes, most notably the Georg Büchner Prize in 2015. He lives in Berlin.

Adrian Nathan West is the author of The Aesthetics of Degradation and translator of such authors as Pere Gimferrer, Juan Benet, Marianne Fritz, and Josef Winkler. His writings appear regularly in the Times Literary Supplement, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Literary Review. He lives in Spain and the United States with the cinema critic Beatriz Leal Riesco.

‘Rainald Goetz is the most important trendsetter in German literature.’

— Süddeutsche Zeitung

‘This book is a hammer.’

— Die Zeit

‘In many passages, Goetz achieves the same intensity and concentration of experience as in the disturbing early novels of Thomas Bernhard.’

— Süddeutsche Zeitung

‘Behind his nervous, tense willingness to experience, there is a broad education and a sensitive historical consciousness that endow his language with a balance of passionate expressiveness, observational coolness and satirical clarity.’

— The German Academy of Language and Literature, on the occasion of the awarding of the 2015 Georg Büchner Prize

‘Many of his texts should come with an epilepsy warning.’

— Die Zeit

‘As a hyper-nervous virtuoso of attentiveness, Rainald Goetz works in the field between authenticity and fiction.’

— Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

‘He was a doctor, he knew what he was doing.’

— Marcel Reich-Ranicki, commenting on Goetz slicing open his forehead at the 1983 Ingeborg Bachmann Prize

‘Praise is bad.’

— Rainald Goetz

INSANE

RAINALD GOETZ

Translated by ADRIAN NATHAN WEST

Grünes Winkelkanu ich dreh dir den Hals herum

PALAIS SCHAUMBURG

Table of Contents

One: Away

Two: Inside

Three: Order

ONE AWAY

‘What we can see, we can see. The secret is open.’

I recognized nothing.

Let loose from the madhouse, each day in the evening, I would walk to the tunnels of the U-bahn, not bothering to look around. Had I even caught the scent of spring? Still rattled from the journey, I made my way to my room, and nothing was as it had been before. I stepped oblivious among the beer cans, bottles, newspapers and bits of clothing on the floor, questing aimlessly. The giant white sheets on the walls, behind the sheets the shelves, on the shelves the books, concealed. Had I even read? Had I actually opened a book and heard something other than this pounding, this unbearable pounding in the ears, louder and louder with every phrase? Next to the bed lay the food scraps from the night before. I ate what I could, and fell into a dreamless sleep. I woke, it was already dark, and when I did, the unease was there. Get out of here now, go to the bars, go outside. At night when I came back, stumbling and groping, I saw everything sharp and clear. The way the trainer I kicked off had fallen, landing half on the bread plate. How odd, I thought, and all of a sudden, I came back to myself.

But the next morning there was nothing save that pain in my head and a quiver in my hands, and everything around me was blank, bereft of answers. So I set off on my way, back to the madhouse, far again from everything I’d known, into a constantly proliferating confusion.

After the usual wandering through the streets, back and forth on the pavement, pressed against the building walls, shop fronts, glass mirrors, aghast at the herds of people packed together in front of, behind, and around him, the ambush of the gazes, but at the same time ordered to be there among the people, in the midst of this back-and-forth, the 39-year-old programmer Sebastian Köhler abruptly crossed the broad stretch at one end of the pavement with free and easy steps, skipped forward under the linden trees of the opposing street to building 17, oh trusty façade, and with a bellowed HERE I AM set foot into the imposing edifice of the university psychiatric clinic, ready to hand himself over once more.

Peter Sposta, 22, has cocked back his fist, face contorted with rage. His hand pounds the glass of the pinball machine. Sposta downs his beer and walks to the bar: another beer, Harry. He returns to the machine. The ball’s working fine for the others. That lasts till he returns. He glances at the clock, it’s still 12.30. The foam in the glass has settled, Sposta drinks a long swig. The lemon wheel snags on his upper lip. He pulls it off the glass, throws it out among the dancers and jostlers, says: Shit. Time check, glance at the clock, 12.30. Hey, U.K. Subs. Sposta walks towards the speakers: Run, run, this is confrontation street, run, run, there ain’t nothing here but heat. The others shout. Sposta doesn’t react. Tear gas, tear gas, tear gas bomb. Someone comes over: You’re up. Sposta sets his beer on the pinball machine, puffs his cigarette, takes it out of his mouth, lays it on the glass. He shoots the ball and turns to the others: third game’s free, of course.

Walk, stand, walk, all together, keep it moving. If I was lying down, I couldn’t walk. I must walk, therefore I don’t lie down. As I am not lying down, I am walking. I say: My father was born under the sign of the fire stallion. For the son, that means Hell or salvation. Prone in the prison of this question, Hell or salvation, fired incessantly from the neuronal network in the pallium cowering in the base of the skull, lying motionless or walking out of the question. Days laid out, rolled up hidden soundless, days of walking. Better to walk than to lie, to walk and talk. So break out of the fetters of the mind, I told myself several days ago now, go out to the square, measure the borders, step by step as always, and thereby establish the necessary order among the people, walking and talking, standing still when exhausted, then walking on without lingering. Those who come up to me with burning eyes are dear to me all the same. I, the appointed one, scorn them not.

So it goes at every meeting, always the same story: Bögl talked, the others listened. About what he, as an internist, finds interesting about psychiatry. He was a little drunk just now and talks, as she knows, a good deal more than usual in that state. But he doesn’t bother the rest of his colleagues with the potassium levels of his newest patient in intensive care. He talks and talks, old Bögl, it’s called logorrhoea, pathological logorrhoea, he too has long been a head case, a psychiatric case, has Bögl. Incidentally nearly all psychiatrists, strictly speaking, are psychiatric cases themselves. How do they account for that? Even the psychiatrists themselves say it, and always have a diagnosis ready to hand, they don’t just say so-and-so is a psychiatric case, but actually specify the type, as though a diagnosis had been made, like with Bögl yesterday, he had wanted to tell her yesterday that Bögl had spoken like a logorhhoeic, and even Bögl had said yesterday, concerning his own senior physician, that he was utterly paranoid, and that deep down, the director was a grave cyclothymic, and so she could imagine how chaotic things were when the senior physician and the director did their rounds, one time it was this way, one time another, if you catch the drift.

From the lofty darkness of the entrance hall I saw the gleaming white spear tips rain down on me, and conscious of my mission, I tore off my shirt and felt the burning rays pierce my breast and penetrate my body, I the fire stallion, son of the father, unredeemed. The searing stares of your guilt, the guilt of the clueless I take upon me, I quench it inside me, to redeem thee. So I stood in the midst of the hall, an open wound, inviolate I stood and patiently, with millions of years before and behind me, I saw the ballet of the white lab coats gradually take on the form I dictated, while I, unmoving and aware, stood in the middle of the hall, watched the clueless ones arrive in an order never before seen. And the music broke off as their hands stretched out to me, longing, feeling hands, and I heard, distinctly above me, the long-absent voice: Go and show them the way. I walked, as commanded, with measured, joyous steps, led them up the spiralling staircase, through the closed doors, ever higher.

I repeat: the truth of madness, banal as it is contested by all sides, may be reduced to the principle of the cumulative capacities of the abstract free will. Anyone who has discovered anything different about madness is cordially invited to come to the microphone and give us their account of it, and we will be glad to discuss it together. To give the lie to a widespread slander, the results divulged just now are not a dogma in the least, but instead the corollary of a way of thinking directed towards an awareness of the world, and even this is already a scandal in the university, where the distinguished professors have comfortably attained the most splendid stupidity with their philosophical jokes about the unknowability of the world. As we have arrived at our results not through free association or spiritistic séances, but instead through constant hewing to reality, and have made progress, today, for example, in relation to madness, we have no need of a plurality of opinion or that tolerance with which bourgeois society decks out its intellectual sloth and its errors. We are moving past these formalities, these security measures that serve as cover for every intellectual defect, which is then accorded the same right to exist as rationally grounded knowledge; we are moving past this banter to the results of our thinking and making these results public in numerous ways, and naturally this leads to the idiotic reproach of dogmatism, whose ideological character I want to point out briefly, in order perhaps to encourage those who are reluctant to enter the conversation. So where are all the psychologists, psychiatrists, antipsychiatrists, sociologists, and depth analysts? Come to the microphone and acquaint us with your arguments. And let me say once more, pointedly and slowly, so you may write it down while you gather your courage: In the exercise (established through false consciousness) of his thoroughly free will, the madman has chosen delusion, he opts for insanity, in order to reckon with the demands of capital and state, dispensing with the criteria the bourgeois world imposes to determine its members’ validity.

Mr S. sits crestfallen on the edge of the bed in his robe, and digs at one thumbnail with the other. Mr S. has been sitting like this for days. The staff file past on their rounds. Amicable, practised, they attend to Mr S. When spoken to, Mr S. turns his head, hanging noticeably to the left over his chest, and contracts his shoulders, waiting. Did you want to say something? Mr S. is silent, as ever. The senior physician leans in and utters words, loud and clear, into Mr S.’s ear. Mr S. continues labouring away. His fingertips are ragged, bloodied, scarred. Mr S. tears at what’s left of the nail, rips it away from the finger. It bleeds. The senior physician goes on talking, Mr S. is working harder now, trying to peel it off completely. The personnel murmur and continue on their rounds. Mr S., letting his shoulders slump, returns to his timeless, nameless world.

At dusk she gets nervous, she says, especially when he’s working the night shift. She says she has everything done by this time, she’s gone shopping, the apartment is tip-top, and then there is a dead space, a vacuum inside, especially when it’s Friday and he’s working the night shift. Then she pushes the anxiety away, calls her mother-in-law or one of us, but we don’t have any time then, she tells us, because our husbands are on their way home then, or already back. And it’s hard for you to respond because she’s right, in the early evening I don’t have time to chitchat over the phone and you probably don’t, either. Then, if I say I’ll call you tomorrow morning, right away I can tell that’s no help to her whatsoever, she simply has to be spoken to, for some person to speak with her, to have someone she can talk to. And lately – I already knew, somehow – she’s started with the alcohol, with the alcohol problem, and my husband’s sitting next to me, he already doesn’t like her, and he’s getting more and more impatient. But a call for help like that, I don’t know whether or not she spoke to you about it, too, it’s not something you can just ignore, a call for help like that, and right off it puts you in a quandary. Sometimes she says, she hides the liquor from herself, but then she feels ridiculous and she puts it back in the drinks cabinet where she keeps the hard stuff, she says she hardly touches schnapps and whiskey, same for Martini & Rossi and Cinzano, no wine or beer either even though her husband, when he comes home in the evening, regularly knocks back two or three pints, right, so she puts her liquor back in the drinks cabinet and then she watches TV or knits a little to keep herself occupied, but sooner or later, this strikes her as absurd. She’s not an alcoholic, she says, she tells herself she’s not one, she’s practically never drunk a drop before noon, and why shouldn’t she have a little tipple in the evening while she watches television. So she stands there at the drinks cabinet, pours herself a tipple, then puts the bottle away. She enjoys that first glass tremendously, she says. Her husband calls sometime between nine and ten, she says, at that point she can still keep a grip on herself, but inevitably things go downhill afterwards. Recently she threw up in her sleep, she says, all over the rug in the living room. Then I hear her swallow and she starts to snivel and cry, my husband is next to me, eventually he gets pissed off, and what can you say. Chin up, I tell her, nip it in the bud, I say over and over, she almost laughs, and I say chin up, I’ll call you tomorrow morning. Right, she says, nip it in the bud, talk to you tomorrow then. And I say bye, and I really do have the feeling it helped her a bit, being able to get it all out for once, and for me to tell her to stop, that it’s not too late, to nip it in the bud. Then today I call early, and he picks up, and that’s unusual when he’s worked the night shift. And he says sorry, she’s not feeling well today, she’s sick or something, he says, and she’s sleeping just now. Naturally I don’t say anything, because he can’t know that I know full well what’s going on, I just say of course, and I send her my greetings. But it upset me all morning, and now I just need to talk it over with you, quickly, in confidence, she said, of course, but please, you just keep the whole thing to yourself, OK?

The motive and purpose of the law is the safeguarding of public security and order. Whosoever is mentally ill or psychologically disturbed, whether as a result of intellectual impairment or illness, and thus poses a substantial danger to public security or order, may be detained without or against his or her consent in a psychiatric institution, or subject to other appropriate measures. Specifically, in accordance with the conditions set forth in section 1, such detention is permitted when a person represents a substantial danger to his or her life or wellbeing.

As though entranced by my pining eyes, he opened his mouth to speak to me. But behind his lips, in the hollow, I glimpsed something gruesome, and for a moment time stopped, everything stood still and stiff. Gorged yellow mushrooms thrived at the base of his tongue, and worms, serpents, and many other sorts of beast, creatures of rot and putrefaction, but vivid, emerging bright and motley from the dark at the base of his tongue. A skein of movement, congealed into immobility. And I saw a scream fill the whole gorge of his mouth, with no beginning, and heard the timeless silence of the cosmos.

Until now I’ve subdued her, I didn’t ignore her comments, you can’t ignore her, I’ve just put up with her, and with the giggling, the curses, the endless bickering. And most of it is bickering, so when I say YES, she says NO, I’m speaking here in the simplest of terms, and when I say NO, she says, dead certain, well, almost dead certain, YES, almost, I said, mind you. If she would just say YES after I’d already said NO, naturally she would be easier to deal with. You’d just know that she would always say the opposite of whatever you’d just said, and that a person could learn to live with. But the tricky thing is the irregularity, it makes things tense and you’re always worried about it and it sidetracks you. Like this time, will she say NO when I’ve said YES, or will she now say YES, the same thing as I said, in other words? Because then, obviously, I’ll ask myself, why did she agree with me all of a sudden when she’s been clashing with me all day long, and I’ll start to ponder this specific instance where she has agreed with me, automatically I start to hope, you can’t keep this hope at bay, that she’ll be something besides just contrary, that at least if she has to give her two cents she will approve of and encourage me, like at the beginning, when I first started listening to her, in fact, back then, it wasn’t unpleasant in the least, at last I was receiving approval, encouragement, that’s what I’m thinking when she agrees with me for once, and then this brooding starts up and makes everything fray and fall apart and. Now I see there’s no point in describing her, because I would have to do her constant backtalk, listen, no, just listen, no, I stop talking, listen, as she says, I keep going, now I stop talking, for the moment you can’t just ignore it, I continue. But no one can make me do it, I say, you do have to do it, just listen, I have to do it, she says, no one can make you, exactly, no one can make me, just to keep a running tab of her contradictions, agreed she now says, logically, not logically she says, bickering I say, be quiet.

Dressed in red gym shorts and a sleeveless red jersey, countless cuts adorning his arms, legs, and neck, festooned with red rivulets of blood, Raspe, in good spirits, the razor dangling from a leather cord around his neck, showed up at his girlfriend’s party. Someone pointed at his thigh and said super, amazing, looks just like real life, must be plastic, say, where did you get it; obligingly, without comment, he grabbed the razor blade hanging on his chest, lifted it over his neck by the cord, laid it on an unblemished stretch of skin on his forearm, and sliced slowly and deep, very visibly, into the flesh. For a moment the resulting slit had pale edges bordering the wound, then, from the interior outward, it began to well with blood, which formed a meniscus at the level of the skin, a blood-dome that drained away once the seeping fluid broke the surface tension from below, and as it drained, it brought the gash, now glowing red, into view, with the edges of the wound now overrun with red. The fresh, bright blood, in obedience to gravity, sought out a path downwards, crossing over the older, now-brittle, dried black craters, and in this way, every question about the nature of his wounds led to new ornamentation on his skin. But no one, Raspe affirmed later, could really have believed the cuts were decoration or a costume. They had reacted with shock, people said it was tasteless, they were trying to have fun, it was carnival after all, and here comes this freak gushing blood, what was he doing at the party. Only W. had understood him, Raspe said, had even recognized himself in him. Months later, in long discussions with W. that ran on through the night, they had proposed an overarching theory of self-harm, and looking back, Raspe said, it was never just a matter of theory, not for him, but had just as much to do with proximity to W., though he would not have admitted this at the time. And so, while W. elaborated his theory eloquently, Raspe felt himself thoroughly overwhelmed, as he later said, by the perverse desire to try and kiss those lips, the categorical and irritating urge to kiss W.

It strikes me – so goes the objection of the neutral but sympathetic observer – that you lack patience, and when I say you, I don’t mean you, but rather, actually, myself, as though you were tumbling from scene to scene, image to image, as though you had neither eyes nor breath with which to linger longer than the briefest moments – it strikes me that you wish for too much all at once and that therefore, naturally, you achieve nothing. Instead of getting lost in perspectival games, you should bring material to the fore – accent on material – more material. Who cares about that, I ask you, about art (pronounced boorishly) or worse still, artistic ambition, at a moment when the question of the artistic character of art – accent on art, always with that boorish pronunciation, ironic, of course, arrrt instead of art – at a moment when this question has not simply grown uninteresting, but in fact has up and died – pause after died – when it is dead, inexistent, understand me, this question is over – voice rising on over – the end. What is interesting in a moment like this one is material, an ethnography of the everyday, patient and precise, proceeding from the admission that we ourselves have become the savages, because no one can go any further with any kind of art the way they did yesterday, or let me correct myself, one can go further, but it just isn’t interesting. What is interesting – slowly I am beginning to see myself like a prayer wheel uttering the same thing over and over, but you sit there wide-eyed, as if you didn’t believe it – what is interesting is material, I won’t say raw material – accent on the raw – unworked, as it were, not that, but rather the material that unfolds in the course of patient and exacting analysis, patient and exacting, I repeat, which then opens on to a grounded interpretation, where grounded is taken to mean scientifically grounded – accent on the scientifically – and not just adduced from some hunch based on intuition or worldview, which opens on to an interpretation of this sort. For this reason, it seems to me, you should bring more material to the fore, careful now, though – first a deep breath in, then slowly a breath out to close.

I waver as to whether, concerning the neutral, sympathetic observer, who, against his nature, has let himself be dragged into a harangue – anacoluthon – whether I should simply let the matter rest as it now stands, with these rhetorically useful confrontations, I waver, for the moment, at least, as to whether I shouldn’t answer him straightaway. No, I’ve decided I’m not doing it. Particularly as he is bound, even if it should call thoroughly into question his, the observer’s, thesis – voice quite loud when saying call into question, heavily accented – now to resume the sentence from the beginning: particularly as he is bound to understand every phrase to come as a confirmation of his thesis. Including the present one, it goes without saying. But I consider there – no, open parentheses – now then: but I consider there to be a difference between whether he, the observer, is bound to understand a sentence that refutes his thesis as a confirmation of his thesis or whether the sentence in which he, the observer, sees himself validated illustrates the pure formal mechanics and inevitability of this conclusion, illustrates, at least, even if it does not yet clarify – accent on the clarify – and so now, for the time being, closed parentheses. Whatever argument I put forth, the observer will view it as the continuation rather than the relinquishment of those perspectival games, which are destined to bore him, the observer, and never to interest him, and which he has dubbed, contemptuously, aaartistic ambition. It goes without saying that he, the observer, is merely one of those imaginary figures, the entire dialogue only an invention, an invention of mine invented with the intention of managing to adumbrate one of those theoretical questions concerning which I would otherwise prefer to be silent, for written self-reflection is one of those grand avenues of literature that life has swept bare, and that I have undertaken not to set foot on, and I affirm – just a moment, first I will note down here this interjection – that it may well be the neutral sympathetic observer speaking, and I affirm the contradiction contained in the foregoing sentence without its paining me in the least.

And so, after some vacillation in regards to the thoughts expressed, which were firmly interlocking, I had resolved – why now the pluperfect all of a sudden – baffled question, dry but courteous answer: well now, you have to imagine that I am telling this to you at a great remove – accent on telling, pronunciation draaawn out – as I was saying before, I had then, incidentally in opposition to my original intention, resolved, as I said before, to give a brief answer, at the very least. And that was the only thing he, the observer, managed to hear; any thinking about my own vacillation, let me add, I kept prudently to myself; the one thing that I did say, this short little sentence, this amicably redundant imperative, I shall insert here parenthetically after having offered you a running elucidation of myself and the text in this passage, this short sentence: Just you wait and see, and since it was so short, I repeated it: Just you wait and see. Naturally, with this you, it was him, the neutral, sympathetic observer I was addressing, but at the same time, in contrast to the beginning, when I was the one intended, here too this you means you – open parentheses, this conclusion is also available unrhymed – open brackets, but rhymes you see as it pleases me, closed brackets – in case you don’t care to get caught up in this sort of shenanigans – in brackets after shenanigans colloquial – please strike all the words after you and please substitute a period for the comma – open brackets, it would very much displease me were this comma to just hang there in the air, closed brackets – or if you have opted for the rhyme, please strike the entire parenthetical section, from open parentheses to close parentheses – close parentheses.

– So, I believe we can, then. So Mrs, ah, Mrs

– My name is Elisabeth Fottner, born Spitzenberger, and I’m

– No, Mrs Fottner, you oughtn’t introduce yourself, instead

– Why?

– Instead you should tell us a little something, we already spoke about that just now, how it all started for you.

– What?

– Come now, Mrs Fottner, before you were so kind as to tell me about the beginning of your illness, remember, what you experienced, what befell you at the time.

– Yes.

– Yes, so tell us once again what that was like, please.

– Why?

– I explained that to you yesterday, these people here are younger colleagues and you can help them, so that later, with an illness like the one you’re suffering from now, these young colleagues will be better equipped to treat it, to understand it, I told you all that, you wanted to help out.

– Yes.

– Good, now come on then, Mrs Fottner, let’s go ahead and get started now.

– How?

– Well, if you like, you may go ahead and introduce yourself now, if that’s what you’d like.

– All right. My name is Elisabeth Fottner.

– Ms Fottner, please, you must speak into the microphone, that’s not a problem for you, is it?

– No.

– Right, your name is

– Yes, my name is Elisabeth Fottner, born Spitzenberger, and I’m 63 years old. I attended primary school, and then I worked on my parents’ farm from 1935 to 1947. In 1947, my brother came back after the, no, my brother came, in 1947 my brother got back from jail. Then my brother took over the

– Mrs Fottner, may I just interrupt you, have you, did you prepare this explanation?

– Yes. Then, no, in 1947, my brother came back from jail. Then my brother, he, my brother took over the farm. I must have, in 19

– Good, Mrs Fottner, good. I believe, Mr Prenn, we may, er, we can stop here, this, I just don’t believe there’s any point in this. All right, Mrs Fottner, Mr Prenn will now remove your microphone and then you can go back to the unit with the nurses, all right, Mrs Fottner?

– Why?

– Well, thanks very much Mr Prenn. Goodbye, Mrs Fottner, you may leave now, er, nurse, nurse, can you get the patient? Thank you very much. Good. Uh. What I – ladies and gentlemen – wanted to – ah – show – show you all – with – this – as you can see, rather basically constituted patient

When I woke, I was momentarily distraught. It was already evening, which meant I had slept all day, slept away half the weekend, and as I lay there motionless, my distress drained away. Inside myself I heard the splinters of songs from my dreams, extraordinary, bewildering polyphonies, and yet not a single vestige of dream took shape within my mind, which felt its way back into my slumber, nor was there any recognition, and the more insistently I delved into myself – no, roused and dispersed. Just those melodies in my head, never sung to the end, layered one over the other, shifting in unison, growing fainter and less clear.

A cool clear evening blew in threw the window, and I looked out into the crystalline distance over the house roofs illuminated by a slanting light. I stood up, got dressed, and walked into the park. For hours, I traced the circuitous, branching paths, unaware of myself. I must have come across people – or maybe I didn’t? Did I speak, did I maybe even sing? Suddenly the darkness was there, I had stopped and was standing there ashamed, these tatters, tatters of people here, all torn to shreds, and there, in the darkness, as consolation, the soothing symmetry.

At that moment – in his role as the building’s specialist in these matters – the lecturing physician, esteemed Dr R. M., MD, PhD, took the floor, a man with sparse, slicked-back hair, visibly well past fifty, in other words of an age at which, in the university, the title of professor ought long since to have been conferred as a matter of course, even for the most insignificant, uninspired performance, this Dr M. took the floor, and as he flicked through his documentation with jittering fingers, spoke disgruntledly: Here, in this very setting, as is well known to all of you, I have already made repeated reference to the fact that things are not so simple. It cannot but astonish me, to an extraordinary degree, that members of the field here, above all certain of our younger colleagues, should pose arguments, eh, arguments which have their origins in the targeted smear campaign we here have fought against, eh fou-fought ehfought against for years in the arena of public opinion, arguments we’ve long had to deal with, please, you can read about it almost every week in Der Spiegel. Indeed, I cannot help but be astonished. For these arguments, and this too I have said here repeatedly, do not simply become truer through constant repetition. Even if it is our colleagues who are repeating them. Resentment, rank resentment, which flies in the face of rea-son in the most thoroughly unscientific fashion.

You will allow me, Dr M. said, after removing from among his documents a large-format brochure, on the first page of which the word SIEMENS could be read in Futura Bold on high gloss paper, then in the middle Electroconvulsive therapy, and underneath, Reprint, in small letters, still Futura, but not bold – you will allow me, said Dr M., and opened the brochure, to cite myself in regard to the necessary distinctions that have once more, not untendentiously, been suppressed in the course of this debate – it is printed here, whoever has the inclination and interest may read through it, I have also dealt with these questions, as people here in this building ought to know, in an experimental manner, that too has all been published, albeit elsewhere. You will allow me, then, to read aloud this brief passage, I am naturally addressing myself to you, my esteemed colleague, Mr H.

When we speak of the psychopathology of ECT, Dr M. interrupted himself, looking up, electroconvulsive therapy, that is to say, we are also including convulsion anxiety as well as the fear of shock. The fear of ECT is a comprehensible psychological reaction to this sort of therapy on the patient’s part, one which has become more virulent under the influence of prevailing judgements among the public in recent times – as I have just discussed, Dr M. said, interrupting himself again – moving on now, that can largely be eliminated through an objective explanation, whereas the fear of shock is a symptom that only abates after numerous treatments and hence can compel the patient to interrupt the course of therapy. It comes to be perceived as a vital threat linked to the therapy experience. Since the introduction of anaesthesia into ECT – at this Dr M looked up again into the body of his assembled colleagues, none of whom responded to his gaze – I am now coming to the end, this fear of shock is encountered far less than before, and is most likely to be met with in conjunction with subconscious fears arising immediately before the inducement of convulsions in the patient which are, however, suppressed for the most part by anaesthesia. Dr M. laid down the brochure, took off his glasses, leaned back as though expecting a rebuttal, and waited, anxious to lock horns.

But the plenum in their white lab coats showed no reaction. In the old, dignified, august library, there was nothing but enduring silence. Finally, the Professor Ordinarius seated at the head of the thick table lifted his head, many thanks, ladies and gentlemen, the discussion is now at an end. Immediately murmurs rose up, a mingling of voices, a dragging of chairs, the lurching of the many towards the door.

The 40-year-old pensioner Walther Zarges lies in bed and broods. Should I stand, should I not? Should I, should I not? I should, I should not stand. Walther Zarges knows this brooding is madness. He throws a Stop into the flow of his thoughts. But he has no hope of it helping. Walther Zarges has known himself for years now.

Walther Zarges lies huddled, face turned to the wall, as close to the wall as possible. He has pulled the blanket over his head. He lies immobile. He knows: at any moment, the woman will walk into the room. He would gladly stand up then. No, then, exactly then, he must go on lying there. He is aware of the consequences. By the time the woman comes, he would like to have the problem thought through. He wants to come to a resolution. He thinks all the more quickly. His thoughts chase one another. His long-familiar, eversame thoughts chase one another. Argument precedes counter-argument, counter-argument precedes argument, which argument is identical to the counter-argument, then counter-argument, then argument, then counter, then counter-counter, counter, counter-counter, counter-counter-counter, counter-counter, counter-counter-counter, counter-counter-counter-counter

Zarges’s wife opens the door resolutely. She stands in front of the bed in a colourful plastic apron printed with flowers. Come on, Walther, get up. The kids are on their way home. Food’s ready. No movement beneath the blanket. Mrs Zarges waits. Nothing. Then: Come on, Walther. The voice has a still more strident tone. The immobile form in the bed is unchanged. For three weeks, since they let him out, the miserable slob spends the whole day in bed. Mrs Zarges loses control, Mrs Zarges curses at her husband. You blubbering pansy. You weak-kneed chump. You coward. You dog. You fuck up everything. You ruin everything. You ruined the kids, you ruined our marriage. You just don’t want it. You don’t even want to get better. Three weeks you’ve been home from the hospital. A man should be working, not collecting a government cheque. You’re ruining the kids. You ruin everything. Done done done. Mrs Zarges has closed the door behind her.

Walther Zarges lies unmoving beneath the bed-cover. He knows his wife is right. But he asks himself whether it is true about the three weeks. He begins to count. He counts the days since his discharge from the institute. He makes it to twenty. He divides by seven. Two, with six remaining. Two weeks and six days then, and not three weeks. Walther Zarges hesitates: might he have miscounted? He counts again, this time backwards. He starts with twenty and counts down. He assigns to the day of his discharge the number zero. Wednesday one, Tuesday zero. Tuesday the consultation with the head physician, consultations with the head physician were always on a Tuesday, after consultation with the head physician, discharge. Perhaps he is meant to count Tuesday. It’s madness, counting backwards, what is zero anyhow. Is it twenty-one days since the discharge, or twenty? Better count forward. Walther Zarges decides to include Tuesday. So: Tuesday one, Wednesday two. He stops. He doubts that’s right, counting the day of his discharge, that is, Tuesday, as one. One would mean a day at home. Walter has no doubt about it: that wasn’t the case. He was only home for a half-day. In the morning, the visit from the attending physician, same as every Tuesday, then the discharge. Not until midday was Walther Zarges at home. There is a distinction there: a half is not a whole. That much is clear. The question then becomes: is half correct? He was home at one in the afternoon. Walther Zarges asks himself, am I justified in counting that as a half? Strictly speaking, it naturally isn’t. Because from one in the afternoon to twelve at night is only eleven hours, hence only eleven twenty-fourths of one day, hence not a half. To get it right, Walther Zarges now has no doubt about it, he will have to count the hours. Then he must divide the number of hours by twenty-four, and afterwards by seven. This is the only way he might test the woman’s assertion. Walther Zarges knows this is madness. He knows it will take hours to count the hours from the time of his discharge. He will miscount. Then he will have to start all over again. If he doesn’t miscount, he will still have to do a recount, start once more from the beginning in other words. And if he miscounts during the recount, then the first count will be invalid, too. Walther Zarges says to himself: invalid, that’s an exaggeration. To be precise, one should say: substantially called into question. For a miscount while recounting is the confirmation that a mistake can be made. That would mean, in all probability, that the first count has been erroneous, and therefore must be repeated. Walther Zarges says to himself: all this is madness. He thinks: Stop stop stop stop stop. He thinks it very quickly, but with no hope that it will help. Walther Zarges is not wrong. He starts with Tuesday, at one in the afternoon, as zero. Two o’ clock is one hour. Three o’ clock is two hours. Four o’ clock is three hours. Five four. Six five. Walther Zarges sees it will not be easy. He must hold everything in his head: the hours, the pertinent and multiplying sum, the days, and the weeks. Walther Zarges thinks: I must concentrate that much harder as I count. The woman has no idea of anything. The woman blathers on, throws out numbers, and understands not one thing as she does so. Counting is his strength, Walther Zarges knows. He also knows: counting is his downfall. He knows at the same time: counting is his strength. His strength is his downfall. Walther Zarges asks himself whether this thought is justified. He has to work, he knows. Everything is in his head. He is at six o’ clock, five hours. Walther Zarges goes on counting.

The bedcover hasn’t shifted. Some time, late in the night, Walther Zarges falls into a deep sleep, exhausted.

There are then, just as I have outlined, a multitude of pharmaco-therapeutic interventions possible for all types of arousal states. That said, you must not forget that the success of the therapy depends above all on unspecified extra-therapeutic measures. To begin with, of course: in the case of the aroused patient, everything that might lead to aggravation of the arousal state is to be avoided. Next: the aroused patient will be most likely to accept the proposed therapeutic regimen if your approach to him is firm, determined, but at the same time relaxed. The aroused patient should never be allowed to feel his arguments won’t be heard, that he will just be subdued with medicines. If you are successful in avoiding an acute episode of arousal in which the patient feels threatened and disempowered by the proposed regimen, then the prospect that the pharmaceuticals administered will take effect quickly is better than if the aroused patient grows increasingly excitable and aggressive and must, for example, be administered injections against his will, as a last resort. The voluntary ingestion of a higher oral dose is always preferable. Aroused patients are problematic on the locked wards of every psychiatric clinic, and particularly problematic in the intake areas of the large regional hospitals. Though legislation does not prohibit the direct use of force against patients in a state of arousal – later I will devote an entire lecture to a discussion of the pertinent regulations – you should attempt, for all the aforementioned reasons, to avoid the direct use of force. The arousal state, more than any other acute flare-up, puts your personalities as doctors, as psychiatrists, to the test. So, to summarize once more – sorry, just let me, we have a half-minute left, if you will just hold off on leaving, yes, if you will allow me to finish – to summarize once more:

– Madness madness madness madness, I say that is revolt.

– Bullshit.

– It’s logical, madness is revolt, man, it’s art!

– Yeah, sure.

– OK, I’m exaggerating, but if you had just read Laing and Cooper’s stuff…

– 100 per cent drivel.

– With them, there’s no more of that simple-minded romanticization of madness, and what you get is its necessary politicization and even, on the margins, the opening up of madness in its artistic dimension.

– Claptrap. Total bullshit.

– So you’re the expert here, you can’t be questioned. You think you see through it all because you work in psychiatry. Did you ever hear this one: practice makes you blind? Because that’s what it looks like. Your job blinds you. You should try reading something about the problems. I can lend you something, Laing to start with, he’s easier going than Cooper.

– I don’t read that kind of trash.

– You really are out of it, then. To begin with, you can’t make a judgement because you don’t know the facts. And beyond that, I don’t even get you, you yammer on constantly about your job and yet you refuse to actually examine it.

– Nor do I want to. Work on its own is enough for me to deal with, and then some. Then you come with your revolt and art bullshit

– Just listen

– I’m not listening to anything. It’s your turn to keep quiet. Take that mental masturbation shit of yours and go try it out on someone else. Blab to someone else about those wankers Laing and Cooper. You can go fuck yourself too, for that matter. So maybe it is art and revolt. Art and revolt mean nothing to me, is that clear, absolutely nothing. Feel free to come with me to the clinic sometime if you want. I’ll show you crazy, I’ll show you some crazies all right. Then you can see for yourself. The crazies are crazy, period. They’re not artists or revolutionaries. They’re just insane. Laing and his mental masturbation can’t tell me fuck all about that. The crazies are crazy. Take a look for yourself. And insanity is not art, not in the least, it’s not revolt. They’re poor devils, the insane, the insane are the poorest devils I know.

– But you need to

– Shut it. I don’t need to do anything. And you be quiet now, because you have no idea about anything. Least of all about the insane.

Esteemed Colleague:

My sincerest thanks for your kind acceptance of our patient Werner Stelzer (b. 14.7.1917), whom we have transferred to you for electroconvulsive therapy as per our discussions over the phone. Mr Stelzer has been in our care since 3 August of the current year.

The patient was diagnosed with endogenous depression (ICD Code 2691), atypical in that his depressive mood has persisted since the onset of the illness with hardly any fluctuation in intensity. In nearly three years of treatment, the depression has proven resistant to therapy. In addition to depressive symptoms, the patient has shown increasing hospitalization-related impairments. In the hope of avoiding long-term confinement, we are now making a final effort with ECT. The patient has given his consent to the treatment.

You will receive a detailed report forthwith. In the meantime, I send you my friendliest greetings, and I remain

Your colleague,

E. Beyerer, MD, Consultant

I’ve done research on lithium metabolism. Now all of a sudden I’m supposed to be giving lectures. People (in high places?) believe I am suited to it. I am to give open-air addresses. How is that? This information strikes me as dubious. People whisper about me in the clinic. It is said I’ve been measuring lithium levels for years. How many years? I am supposed to invite all my patients. The Professor Ordinarius will be present. To supervise me? But I’ve been published! People tell me strange rumours are circulating. Compromising recordings of comments I allegedly made during a conference have been unearthed. They want to warn me. I should keep the press at arm’s length, no matter what. Various parties have assembled dossiers about me. People have been circulating these dossiers in the clinic. A large number of my colleagues are said to have passed them back and forth. And several of my (former) patients as well? Could the students have been informed? Might that be why I am lecturing in the open? I will give my lecture. I will publicly dispel any and all suspicions. I am told the TV stations, the public broadcasting consortium, have announced their attendance, story of the day. So the campaign is coming from the left, in other words. People advise me to keep a low profile, especially during the morning meetings, but also at midday, in the cafeteria. I must expose the puppetmasters, but without giving myself away. Is it professional envy? Baseless perfidy? Malice? For the sake of appearances, I should go on with my daily routine. Take note of every glance exchanged. Not even my wife, also a colleague, is above suspicion, people say. Careless remarks, even to my wife, are to be avoided. Be wary on the telephone. I come across anonymous communiqués on my desk. I should give the impression that I composed them myself. I am accused of contaminating my patients’ blood. There are allegations of infection. They purportedly know everything. Yes, the lithium study, yes, in outpatient, drawing the blood, the conversations, yes, I remember, I remember vaguely.