How can you carry on living when, from one moment to the next, you’re thrown off the course of life, and are suddenly faced with death? In the diary documenting his illness, Christoph Schlingensief describes his insistent search for himself, for God and for a love of life.
In January 2008, well-known film, theatre and opera director, action and installation artist Christoph Schlingensief was diagnosed with lung cancer. One lobe of his lung was removed, chemotherapy and radiotherapy followed, the outlook was uncertain – a nightmare from which there appeared to be no awakening.
But just a few days after his diagnosis, Christoph Schlingensief started to talk – to himself, his friends, his dead father, to God. The dictating machine that recorded these dialogues was switched on almost around the clock. Sometimes angry and defiant, sometimes sad and desperate, but always with a touching poetry and warmth, he preoccupies himself with the questions the illness imposes on him: Who have I been? Who can I still become? How can I carry on working when the pace of life around me has suddenly become too fast? How can I come to terms with the illness? How do I die when everything is getting worse? And where is God?
This moving documentation of a self-interrogation is a gift to us all, to the ill and the healthy, and to all those who are unable to find the right words when they suddenly come up against illness and death. A regimen of words against silence – and last but not least, a declaration of love to this world.
