The Old Anti-Semitism

By YAEL GOLDSTEIN

98 REASONS FOR BEING
By Clare Dudman
352 pages. Viking Books.$25.95

Jewish persecution at the hands of the Germans is hardly a novel topic for literature, but usually the depiction comes dressed in SS uniform with snarling dogs nipping at its heels. The anti-Semitism that besets the young and beguiling Hannah Meyer in Clare Dudman’s vividly conjured 98 Reasons for Being may seem trivial in contrast: a law proscribing marriage between Jews and Gentiles. The effects of this law on Hannah’s life have been sad—finding out just how sad forms the meat of the narrative—but it is the background noise to her personal trauma that's eerily fascinating: a mid-19^th century Germany rife with racial hatred, scientific pandemonium, and a loosening grip on the distinction between madness and sanity.

Set in Frankfurt’s Institute for the Insane and Epileptic, the book weaves among the lives of the asylum’s residents, both patients and workers, depicting a sliver of the world poised to tighten into a perfected society or else unravel into chaos. Since we know that Germany managed to approach both these extremes in the following century, the book takes on a prescient tone that helps justify the sometimes overwhelming level of detail about such topics as phrenology and improved care for the mentally ill. What it does not help justify is the central character of Hannah, who is so fragile, so helpless, so beleaguered by her feminine emotions that I began to wonder whether Dudman hadn’t done too good a job of immersing herself in 19^th century theories of the mind, and come to believe in the myth of the hysterical woman. Maybe I’m making the mistake of judging Hanna through a modern woman’s eyes, but even when all the gruesome details of her unfortunate love affair had been laid bare I still couldn’t wrap my mind around why she had lost her wits. Though the sections of the book narrated in her voice are often poetically compelling (“There is nothing there. Just an emptiness that sucks me in like the heated glass of the physician’s cup once drew in my flesh and then blood. I call for Jehova and then I call for you”), more often than not, they left me psychologically confounded: severe melancholy is one thing, but not knowing where, when, or even who you are for months on end sounds like an unlikely reaction to heartbreak.

Luckily, Hannah’s isn’t the only tale filling these pages. There are also two unusual and engrossing love affairs among the asylum’s workers, the more plausible ailments of Hannah’s fellow patients, and the family crisis plaguing the doctor in charge of the asylum, Heinrich Hoffman, famous author of the popular children’s book Struwwelpeter, and a pioneer of the scientific approach to mental disease. Dudman never allows us to immerse fully in any one of these storylines, instead dipping us guardedly in for brief and narrow glimpses. The style could have been distancing and irritating, but, in fact, it works well: the brief, jerky jumps between voices mimics the unease of the asylum and its residents, and the limited access we gain into the events as they unfold helps us appreciate the poor understanding of these happenings by the characters themselves.

Running beneath the surface of these stories are a host of questions about the nature and causes of mental disease. Dudman does an excellent job of evoking the frightening and somewhat invigorating uncertainty of medicine in the mid-1800s, an era when the old theories and practices had come to seem inadequate, but no clear successors had yet emerged. Hoffman laments, “the hopeless lot of the modern doctor, who is in the hapless position of knowing that most of the things he carries in his black case and most of his treatments have no point at all.” As a somaticist of the mind, Hoffman is convinced that mental maladies arise out of, and must be cured through, physical maladies, but he does not yet have the evidence to refute those who maintain the old view, that mental disease is moral disease, a sickness of the soul, which can only be cured by “enabling the higher human mind to gain control of its baser animal instincts.” His increasingly unprofessional sessions with Hannah are cast partly as the desperate attempts of a scientist to uncover evidence for his intuitions. As a chronicle of the floundering and egotism that can attache to experimental exploration, and a portrait of pre-Nazi German anti-Semitism, 98 Reasons for Being succeeds wonderfully.