“Dying Words”: Theme of Death: Brecht’s Augsburg Remnants

The fact that death has become a stranger to modern people is such a common refrain that one has to speak of a carpet. At the same time, it is true that only others die, and they do so primarily elsewhere: in homes and intensive care units. As much as things are constantly going on in films and series, it has little influence on everyday life today.

Based on similar considerations, Petra Moser and Martin Jürgens have now collected 17 texts on death and dying in the volume “Sterbenswörtchen”. There has been a wide range of text types: essays, poems, stories and a letter. To get straight to the point: you learn little about your own death in this book; That may not even be possible. Because, as the afterword says, “as long as we are thinking, our absence is unthinkable for us.” One’s own death cannot be understood, not even grasped.

But what is possible is to talk about death in order to become friends with it. Montaigne’s aphorism that philosophizing means learning to die is quoted in more than one text. In his brief outline of an intellectual history of talking about death, Jochen Schimmang makes it clear why this learning can never come to a conclusion: Mourning is a process that lies beyond language, in the best case at its extreme limits. “The language of mourning,” says Schimmang with Barthes, “inevitably leads to banality.”

What is possible: to talk about death in order to make friends with it.

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The book itself refutes this thesis or at least makes an important restriction: Schimmang’s thesis may well apply to prose and serial texts such as obituaries, but poetry has enough tools to evade this banality. Barbara Zoeke’s poems in the volume prove it: her greatly reduced texts can be read in many tones, leaving the nuances to the reader. It’s impossible to say whether melancholy prevails here, or anger, or bitter despair, or whether it’s a cold statement.

What holds the book together, despite all its literary diversity, is a certain inwardness that only marginally asks questions about social conditions. You will not find an analysis of death or a theory of dying (in pandemic times, for example) here. When social conditions are mentioned, they come as (possible or actual) fate. In Hermann Kinder’s posthumous text (probably the last one he worked on) it says something like: “Die, yes, death too, but in the intensive care unit you have to be turned around unconscious like a sausage, so that the pressure sores are kept to a minimum; Lying on your stomach you can only get air with the help of breathing pumps? He said unsavory.”

The last part of the book consists of digressions into literary and art history, which are particularly original in this volume. Erdmut Wirzilsa proves that strange deaths can also be extremely enjoyable: the coffin in which Bertolt Brecht wants to be buried should be “airtight” and ideally made of steel. Helene Weigel actually managed to find a Berlin company that soldered such a steel coffin together on a night shift – a process that not only employed several dozen engineers and workers, but probably also had to be politically approved at the highest level. The coffin was then packed into a wooden coffin, which was then lowered into the ground. Before that, a pathologist, who also had to determine death, had to open the left femoral artery – Brecht was terrified of being buried alive.

But why all the breakdown? Käthe Rülicke, one of Brecht’s colleagues, simply said: “I don’t know what kind of ideas they were, strange Augsburg remnants, I think, as Brecht still had such very strange Augsburg things.”

Patrick Eiden-Offe’s comments on the question of why the Danes die so beautifully are also very interesting. Eiden-Offe uses his – steep – thesis to write an entertaining, yet detailed Danish literary history from Jens Peter Jacobsen to Tania Blixen. Eiden-Offe explains why beautiful deaths play such a big role in this by saying that in this era of Danish literature the characters have enough patience to die their own deaths; a quality that (as Rilke states) was already against the spirit of the times: “Even the rich, who could afford to die in detail, begin to become careless and indifferent; the desire to have one’s own death is becoming increasingly rare.”

Petra Moser and Martin Jürgens take up this idea again in the afterword with Walter Benjamin: “During the course of modern times, dying is being pushed further and further out of the memory of the living. There used to be no house, hardly a room in which someone hadn’t died at some point. (…) Today the citizens are dry dwellers of eternity in rooms that have remained clean from death, and when things come to an end for them, they are stowed away by their heirs in sanatoriums or hospitals.” A trend that has been going on since 2020 has increased significantly again.

Moser and Jürgens note that the idea for this volume came to them during the pandemic, in which dying and death came back into public consciousness. However, the book leaves out one interesting point: How did it come about that the new category of “vulnerables” was established so quickly so that people could talk about their own danger? How is it that German medicine has not learned from its history that its task is to protect every life? Instead, Klaus Stöhr, member of the Corona Expert Committee, said: “Ultimately, a respiratory pandemic like Corona mainly affects the vulnerable – i.e. those who are closer to the end than others.”

Populists like Stöhr encourage the impression that only others die; and in keeping with the tradition of German medicine, those others are those who were made other in the first place by declaring them to be risk groups. Opposing this means adopting a humanist standpoint, such as Elias Canetti’s when he demanded: “Hating every death as if it were your own.”

The diversity of the texts in “Sterbenswörtchen” are a bit removed from such radicalism, but they make it possible to approach the topic of death and dying: they do this without dogmatism or missionary zeal, without pointing fingers, but with an outstretched hand.

Petra Moser/Martin Jürgens (eds.): “Dying Words”. Experiments on Death: Essays, Poetry, Prose and a Letter. Neofelis, 202 pages, br., 19 €.

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