Insane (novel)
1983 novel by Rainald Goetz
Insane (German: Irre) is a 1983 novel by the German writer Rainald Goetz.
Plot
Insane is about mental health and psychiatric institutions. It is divided into three parts: "Away", which is about the treatment of mental illness from a variety of perspectives, "Inside", which follows the experiences in a psychiatric hospital of a young doctor named Raspe, and "Order", which follows Raspe's personal struggles after he stops working in psychiatry.
Publication
Published by Suhrkamp Verlag in 1983, Insane was Goetz' debut novel. It received significant attention in West Germany upon publication, both because of its content and because Goetz, during a public reading from the book ahead of its release, cut his forehead with a razor and let his blood drip onto the manuscript. The stunt made Der Spiegel refuse to review the book. Other periodicals praised Goetz as a new star of pop literature. Insane was published in English translation by Adrian Nathan West in 2017.
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The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as 1983 novel by Rainald Goetz. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 23, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q110914441. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1983 and 2017.
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This entry incorporates text from “Insane (novel)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.