It’s so obvious that no one wants to think about it until it happens to you: what it’s like to be helpless, at the mercy of someone, depending on someone’s grace or care. “What is fate, what is self-determined life, someone once asked a wise guru,” writes Gabriele von Arnim in her book about her husband’s long illness and death: “Stand on one leg, he replied, and now pull up the other. ” This is an image of something that is taboo in high-performance society: how easily you find yourself in a situation in which you can no longer do anything, not even the simplest.
In the impressive passages of her autobiographical essay “Life is a temporary state”, Arnim describes the defensive reactions of friends and acquaintances in the face of the misfortune. You can tell that she was married to the journalist and for a time ARD editor-in-chief Martin Schulze, she doesn’t use the name in her book herself. She calls him “he” and tells how her husband suffers two strokes, the first on the evening of the day she told him that she would not be able to live with him anymore. A sporty, eloquent person remains paralyzed and with limited ability to speak. He can only eat again after a while, but hardly himself, only read the headlines of the newspaper because his field of vision is halved.
“To care for a sick person, you need a village, an extended family.”
His wife decides not to go now, takes care of herself, organizes care, suffers so much that she becomes sick herself, finds ways to arrange herself in this life. The narrator Gabriele von Arnim is grateful for the fact that material stability helps her in this. When something like everyday life has set in, Arnim observes how her social life in Berlin has restructured: “I’m sure, someone writes, that he doesn’t want to be seen by me as he is now, but that I should remember him for who he was. He loves to be visited, I reply. ” Others are so afraid of illness and pain that they don’t even want to see it on someone else. There is even envy of the caring wife: “You are fine, says someone who I thought was a friend. Everyone admires you.”
Then again there are people who come and give what they can. Seventeen regular visitors take turns reading aloud for hours: “To care for a sick person, too, you need a village, an extended family, an environment.” You can also feel Gabriele von Arnim’s pride in creating this environment.
Your book is not a report of suffering. She only published it years after her husband’s death, and in it she also writes about writing: How she reread her diaries from ten years with her fallen husband and tried to bring to mind what she had experienced. She quotes a lot and uses less the slightly fictionalized genre that is so popular in contemporary literature, but rather a classic essayistic genre that is based on what is found in art and literature. She changes narrative from the first person to the third person or uses the you. All signals that it means work to make this fate understandable to yourself and to others.
Gabriele von Arnim: Life is a temporary state. Rowohlt, Hamburg 2021. 235 pages, 22 euros.
And why does it have to be at all? There are famous models of books on illness and grief, and Arnim also names them: Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thought” in the first place, or Connie Palmen’s “Log of a Merciless Year”, or “Inseparable”, the farewell book of the psychoanalyst Irvin D. and Marilyn Yalom. The question is always what such a story comes out as. As a memento that dying is part of life, as a therapeutic gift, as a survival report? And what did it mean to posthumously turn the dead into literary figures in their suffering?
Gabriele von Arnim does not skimp on clarity when she describes the physical decline of her husband, the humiliation. “He has always shown himself in all his affliction and handicap,” she explains, and that may allow her to show him that way too. Above all, however, “Life is a temporary state” is a book about what it means to live in an environment in which one should not see the sick, weakness is at best managed: “It is well known that emotional helplessness gives birth to small or even larger monsters” , writes Arnim: “A free society also lives from empathy, mindfulness and attention to others.”
It may have been a temporal coincidence, but that focus got this book right in the middle of the pandemic. And so it has remained stable in the bestseller list since April.