The doctor needs a home

The doctor needs a home (Original: The doctor needs a home ) is the German title of a short story written by Irene Dische .

The first-person narrator, a 90-year-old biochemist and retired university professor, describes his life story, his environment and the world from the perspective of someone suffering from Alzheimer's .

On just over 40 pages, Dische paints the picture of a personality gradually dissolving in conflict with itself and its environment. In this way, she processed the biography of her father Zacharias Dische , a biochemist who was born in Drohobycz in the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and who later emigrated. Important events in his life are described in the narrative from the perspective of fading consciousness: the relationship with his divorced wife - a pathologist - and mother of his daughter, the relationship with Austria as a place of remembrance and old homeland glorified by longing, the relationship with a McDonald's Branch that becomes the regular café. The central element is the relationship with his family, which he leaves to the enemy and which is ultimately murdered by the National Socialists, and the feelings of guilt that accompany him throughout his life as the imagination of his dead sister Zescha.

expenditure

• First published in the Strange Traffic Collection . Stories . By Irene Dische. New York 1990. ISBN 0-80504173-7
• The doctor needs a home . From d. Americ. by Reinhard Kaiser . Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1990. ISBN 3-518-40293-5

literature

• Hans Albert Dege: Irene Discher: The doctor needs a home. Review in: Deutsches Ärzteblatt . 1991. No. 88, p. 82.
• Ulrich Greiner: The moment of the jump. Irene Disches story “The doctor needs a home” . In: Die Zeit No. 38, September 14, 1990 ( online ).