The World Inside
Fiction, Literary Fiction
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, studied psychology at Humboldt University. She worked as a psychotherapist and writer in East Germany. As press officer for the Central Round Table, she helped prepare for the first free elections. After publishing numerous books, she retreated from the public literary space. This changed in 2020 when she won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize for her story Getting Up. A volume of short stories of the same name was published by dtv in 2021 and was nominated for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize.
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