In the mid-1920s, Ernst Simmel created the Schloss Tegel Sanatorium, just outside Berlin, as a place for indigent people with severe psychiatric disorders to be treated psychoanalytically. Simmel's thesis, that impinging social and economic forces are as great a challenge to patients' recovery as are their internal disorders, was well received by like-minded colleagues, including Freud. At Schloss Tegel, a unified clinical and political discourse allowed the psychoanalysts to establish a new praxis based not on the strictures of establishment psychiatry but on an ideology of dialectical materialism. In the end the sanatorium was defeated by chronic underfinancing and ultimately the violent Nazi takeover. What remains, however, is Simmel's rich legacy of psychoanalytic experimentation that confronted the twin predicaments of mental illness and structural oppression.