Karl Koehler
Gumpelmann: A Psychiatric Novel

CoverPaperback, 317 pp, 11,7 x 19 cm, ISBN 978-3-925931-36-9. Berlin: Peter Lehmann Publishing 2004. Published in the German language. € 9.95 / CHF 11.95 / Order-no. 475 / instantly deliverable / English language order form for orders directly at Peter Lehmann Publishing / German language order form
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In this brilliant comic novel Karl Koehler paints a nightmarish picture of his former psychiatric colleagues and their drug studies.

Gumpelmann, an alter ego of the author, confronts an all-powerful psychiatric establishment intent on pushing through its agenda at all costs. In this instance it is the drug oneirine—first described in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow—that psychiatrists believe holds the key to developing the ultimate paranoid mouse.

Who then could better describe the sexual humiliations and numerous forms of never-ending dependency originating in a clinic with an academic dog-eat-dog mentality primarily geared to doing the bidding of the drug companies than a psychiatric insider?

A funny, corrosive and entirely absorbing novel written in the subversive tradition of American postmodern literature, which could just as well have been entitled Sex, Drugs and Doo Wop.

About the author

Karl Koehler was born in Manhattan in 1935, grew up in the Bronx and, after studying at Holy Cross College in Massachusetts, completed his medical studies in Innsbruck. After finishing his psychiatric residency in Cornell, Heidelberg and the State Hospital in Marburg, he became a Privatdozent in Heidelberg; later he accepted an appointment as head of Social Psychiatry at the University Psychiatric Clinic in Bonn. He is presently living in retirement with his wife in the Bonn-Cologne area (Stand: 2004).

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Synopsis of Gumpelmann

The psychiatric clinic In this funny, corrosive and entirely absorbing comic novel is portrayed as a sort of kafkaesque prison, in which the warden and guards—the head of the clinic and his ward chiefs—are unpredictable and the young doctors in training their obedient prisoners. It is a place where a dog-eat-dog mentality sparks never-ending intrigues in a battle to attain ever more research power and influence; where various forms of sexual humiliation and dependency are more or less the norm; and where patients are regarded as objects serving the interests of unprincipled psychiatrists, intent on pushing through their agenda at all costs.

Prof. Schnarbach, a would-be world-class psychiatric researcher, has just taken over a prestigious chair in German psychiatry and can now initiate what he believes is an epoch-making study of oneirine, a drug originally developed by Nazi researchers during the Second World War in Thomas Pynchon's novel, Gravity's Rainbow. To achieve his goals, he has brought along with him the clinically incompetent Grabski, an expert in psychopharmacology, as well as Buschbeck, a psychiatrist totally obsessed with creating a paranoid knockout-mouse, necessary for the second phase of the study.

Some of the other denizens populating this strange clinical universe are the epileptic and disillusioned Prof. Gumpelmann, now on the verge of retirement, who has lost all his former passion for psychiatry and spends most of his time watching old film noir movies and listening to doo wop music from the fifties; Prof. Beissner, a so-called expert on the Borderline personality, who for years has documented the unusual sexual behavior of his wife Sara as the basis for his publications; Frau Dr. Glitsch, a femme fatale type, whose research Schnarbach worries might outshine his own; and finally Frau Dr. Blaschke, Schnarbach's sexual plaything, who gives him late evening blow-jobs in the clinic, and rapidly advances to become his most trusted confidante.

Against this background, the plot focuses on how Schnarbach brutally increases the pressure on his ward chiefs and doctors in training to "offensively" recruit more and more probands for the oneirine study—meaning they should never take no for an answer. As the pressure of patient recruitment gains in intensity, some patients commit suicide or attempt to do so. At this point, the issue of the informed consent form, which patients must sign, when agreeing to take part in a scientific study, moves to the center of the fictional discourse. Finally, things come to a head, when reporters from the Spiegel, an investigative news magazine, attempt to uncover what is really going on in the clinic.

Summing up, then, Gumpelmann exposes a nightmarish, grotesque world of psychiatric drug research, in which everything is geared to worship at the golden calf of modern science, be it genetics, molecular biology or psychopharmacology. In a period, in which the drug industry seems to be rapidly gaining more and more control over psychiatry and society with its greedy marketing strategies, this subversive text will hopefully soon take its place as Germany's answer to the American cult novel Mount Misery.

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