I wanted you to live A love in the shadow of death

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I wanted you to live A love in the shadow of death (2001) is a book by the two literary scholars Ilana Hammerman and Jürgen Nieraad. It describes how the two spouses deal with Nieraad's leukemia diagnosis, the treatments at Hadassah Medical Center in Jerusalem and dying and "how they don't let their love be diminished by imminent death." The part about Nieraad was written in German (and translated into Hebrew by Hammerman ) who writes part of Hammerman in Hebrew. The work consists of two separate stories and has a title that also consists of two parts. In 2005 the work was a bestseller in German.

Jürgen Nieraad pleaded “for the right of every person to a self-chosen and self-determined death”, writes Winfried Stanzick. The book is a literary testimony and a “merciless and harrowing documentation of human suffering and human strength”. Jürgen Nieraad wrote down his experiences as usual and told Ilana Hammerman after his death and still without knowledge of his text how she experienced the last months of their life together. The work is “a document about the madness of modern intensive care and radiation medicine . It shows how quickly self-conscious people get into a dependency from which they can no longer get out. "The degree of freedom we can attain may depend on the spaces and containers that surround us on the one hand and on which we ourselves on the other seek to free, so Rita Charon. If in medicine the body is viewed merely as a machine or as diseased tissue, it is lost that the body is the patient's closest home.

analysis

The literary scholar Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan sees the work as documentary and literary and, in her narrative-theoretical and ethical analysis entitled "In Two voices, or: Whose Life / Death / Story Is It, Anyway?" (2005), illuminates the relationship between the dying husband and wife; the twofold act of storytelling; as the medical "system" for both the husband and his wife seized have; what reactions there have been from doctors and other readers to this book and how she appropriates the story for herself - what can be seen in her essay .

Rimmon-Kenan deals with how differently one tells. Nieraad's journey is mostly inward, while Hammerman fights against both "the medicine machine" and the deadly disease. Nieraad's part comes in second. In it, the events between diagnosis , bone marrow transplant and the subsidence of the symptoms of the disease are reported in a timely manner , and Rimmon-Kenan sees in the way with which Nieraad reacts to the medical system, a passive resistance to its control. This part of the book consists of two sections, the first going to the transplant, the third person narrating and dealing with the character Georg, who is pseudo-fictional. The second section is written in the first person, partly as an autobiography and partly in the form of diary entries . The reader only learns about Nieraad's end of life from the first part of the book, which was written by Hammerman, who then passed the word on to Nieraad. For his current journey towards death and authenticity, Nieraad uses the term Bildungsroman , he comments self-ironically on his role-play and refers to Heinrich Heine's “dying gladiator”.

Hammerman's part comes first and is retrospective . It is told from different temporal points of view, namely in the first person plural ("we"), which indicates that both are involved in the disease. Since in Hammerman's part the narrator realizes that the spouses are no longer the same - which they would have always striven for in their marriage - she problematizes this "we" and sometimes writes "we - I mean: you" or "we - I mean: Me. ”In both parts of the book, the other partner is implicitly addressed. Because the woman disagreed with the man's decision to end his life on his own, and the man realized that he should be considerate of his wife and son, the man made up his mind to stop all treatments and die at home first to his nurse in the clinic and not to his wife. However, Hammerman reports that she was unable to respect his wish, and according to Rimmon-Kenan's assessment, this also means that she must also tell in order to ask his forgiveness for depriving him of his freedom, with which he had wanted to decide for himself about the end of his life.

Rimmon-Kenan wonders how she herself comes to be critical of the narration of a situation that she has not experienced herself, and whether every narration of someone else's life is not an appropriation, and inevitably. Rimmon-Kenan is concerned with balancing formal narrative aspects with the complex ethical implications that cling to them, and she points out that Nieraad's way of narrating suggests that a greater distance from one another has the advantage of allowing more space for the otherness of the other than this is the case in Hammerman's narrative.

In the last part of her essay, Rimmon-Kenan discusses the public reaction to the book in Israel , where the subject has been discussed for weeks, maybe months, in literary magazines as well as in the daily popular media, and doctors and patients have participated. From a narrative theory point of view, the following was remarkable: There was a large gap between what real readers wrote and what could have been ascribed to the implicit reader . No less interesting were the similarities between the reactions of the real readers and those processes that occur in the text itself. Then she goes into examples that highlight the existing tension between respecting the other and taking possession of the other.

Rimmon-Kenan closes her review and analysis of the book with self-critical questions: Looking back, she found that she, too, had become caught up in the dangers associated with storytelling, especially since she herself had some experiences as a patient in the same context have made. The presentation of their own autobiographical reference is perhaps little more than what has taken place in the public debates, namely a re-enactment of the story, a performative repetition of appropriation. As soon as a text is published, however, it no longer belongs to the author, and therefore she actually poses her question openly: whose life, death, and dying is it at all (cf. the title of her essay).

expenditure

  • Ilana Hammerman, Jürgen Nieraad: I wanted you to live. A love in the shadow of death , from the Hebrew by Anne Birkenhauer , 268 pages, Aufbau-Verlag, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-351-02606-4
  • Original edition in Hebrew: Ilanah Hamerman, Yurgen Nirʼad: Hebrew Be-mazal sarṭan: masaʻ li-veli shuv במזל סרטן: מסע לבלי שוב , Tel Aviv, Hebrew עם עובד, ʻAm ʻoved 2001, ISBN 965-13-1527-X , ISBN 978-965-13-1527-5

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, "In Two voices, or: Whose Life / Death / Story Is It, Anyway?", In: A Companion to Narrative Theory , edited by James Phelan and Peter J. Rabinowitz, 2005, ISBN 978-1-4051-1476-9 , pp. 399-412.
  2. ↑ a b Evelyn Runge, Tel Aviv. A day by the sea , Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , June 11, 2011.
  3. ↑ Winfried Stanzick, Eine Liebe im Schatten des Todes , 10/2005, accessed on March 21, 2014.
  4. ^ Rita Charon, The Novelization of the Body, or, How Medicine and Stories Need One Another , in: Narrative , Vol 19, No. 1 (January 2011), pp. 33-50.
  5. ↑ Rimmon-Kenan names three other thematically similar works in which events are told from two perspectives: Sandra Butler / Barbara Rosenblum: Cancer in Two Voices (1991), Jerry Arterburn / Steve Arterburn How Will I Tell my Mother? (1990) and Joseph Heller / Speed ​​Vogel No Laughing Matter (1986)
  6. ↑ Rimmon-Kenan discusses the Nieraad part first.