The World Inside
A German mental hospital and the delucional conceprt of "unworthy life"
In 1941, in a Schwerin mental hospital, 179 patients were labeled as “unworthy of life” and murdered in the context of the Nazi euthanasia program. The program files remained under lock and key even after the end of the Third Reich. They were held by the GDR’s Ministry of State Security until Reunification in 1990, at which point they were relocated to the Berlin Federal Archive where Helga Schubert was able to work with them. The end result is no historical study, but rather a moving and unique piece of literature. In The World Inside, Schubert tells the story of the internal worlds of the “mental cases” and the insane external world of their doctors and nurses.
- With a new introduction by the author
- A rarely discussed chapter in the history of the Third Reich
Helga Schubert, born in 1940 in Berlin, was a psychotherapist and writer in the GDR. She had withdrawn from public literary life until she won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 2020 with her story ‘On Getting Up’. The eponymous volume of short stories was published by dtv in 2021 and was nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. ‘This Day. A Book of Hours on Love’ was published in 2023, and in 2024, Helga Schubert was awarded the German Federal Cross of Merit.
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