OLIVER POLAK's BOOK Der jüdische Patient (The Jewish Patient, 2014) is an autobiographical account of the author's two-month stay in a Berlin mental institution during winter 2013, interrupted by personal anecdotes and remarks on culture, politics, and German Jewish identity. Polak has earned some fame as “Germany's only living Jewish comedian.” And even his book, which at times relates moments of darkness and black despair through the narrator's sharp, sarcastic and at times shockingly obscene descriptions is not without Polak's characteristic humor. Although the author speaks about his own experiences, the text makes clear that his depressive disorder must not be understood in a strictly individual context. The motifs of depression, mania, and psychological crisis can be interpreted as traces of a traumatic history barely visible in public discourse. In this sense, the figure of the Jewish patient, wavering between profound sadness and unstoppable rage, is at the same time also a general image of the contemporary Jewish condition in Germany: “Patient bedeutet übersetzt ‘leidend’ oder ‘duldend’. … Und vielleicht bin ich nicht nur der Patient, der in einer Klinik ist und an Depressionen leidet, sondern auch ein Patient der kranken deutschen Seele. Deutschland, ein Irrenheim? Ich, einer der wenigen Normalen in diesem Irrenhaus?” (Patient means suffering or to put up with something… And maybe I am not only the patient who is in a hospital and suffering a depression, but also a patient of the morbid German soul. Germany, a madhouse? Me, one of the only normal ones in this madhouse?)

In reference to the metaphoric use of the words “Patient,” “Seele,” and “Irrenheim” in this paragraph, my article focuses on the psychopathological narratives and images in Polak's work. Polak does not mention or refer to Sander L. Gilman's classic study on Kafka, which is also titled The Jewish Patient. But his own project is also centered around “an imagined Jewish body” and treats the cultural perceptions and poetic representations of illness as a consequence of internalized stereotypes. I do not have any information about Polak's illness apart from his book and his inter views in different media.