‘Arbeit und Struktur’ by Wolfgang Herrndorf

The German writer and painter Wolfgang Herrndorf started his blog ‘Arbeit und Struktur‘ (‘Work and Structure‘) in March 2010 after he had been diagnosed with a fatal brain tumour (glioblastoma). The blog, which he initially kept only for his friends and later publicly, served him as a work journal, as well as a status report and a place to reflect. In diary-like entries, he reported on doctor’s visits and hospital stays, on his emotional states between hope and despair, on his everyday life, as well as on his reading and writing work, which he pursued extremely intensively in the time he had left. Herrndorf also describes his physical and mental decline, as well as his thoughts on how and when he would kill himself, repeatedly addressing questions of assisted dying. It is clear to him that he wants to end his life himself, before the disease takes away his ability to think and communicate and changes his personality beyond control. However, assisted dying was not possible for Herrndorf in Germany, as it was still unregulated at the time, and the medical prescription of a drug for the purpose of taking one's own life could only take place in a legal grey area. Although Herrndorf also considers the 'Swiss solution', i.e. assisted suicide with the help of a Switzerland-based organisation, he firmly rejects this option, not least because of the negative impression that the documentary film 'Terry Pratchett: Choosing to Die' gave him of this formalised dying procedure, which he first recounts in caricature in his blog and then comments on ironically: 'I don't want to die like this, I can't die like this, I won't die like this. Only over my dead body. The film has 8.4 points on IMDB, and funny: "This review may contain spoilers."' Herrndorf decided to illegally procure a gun, with which he killed himself on 26 August 2013. In the afterword to the book in which the blog was published after Herrndorf's death, his friend the author Kathrin Passig writes: ‘It was probably one of the last days he was still capable of this act.‘

Herrndorf's death resonated strongly in the media, especially as he prepared it publicly through his public diary, in which he vehemently advocated for the right to assisted dying. In the 2015 Bundestag debates that led to a de facto ban on physician-assisted and organised assisted suicide, Herrndorf’s death and book were cited repeatedly. On one hand, his suicide is itself an example of how undignified the end of life can be for the terminally ill when there is no regulated possibility of assisted suicide, just as Herrndorf declared his necessary clandestine search for a weapon in his text as ‘not worthy of a civilised Central European state.‘ On the other hand, Herrndorf created formulations in his text that were repeatedly used in public discourse to argue for the liberalisation of assisted suicide. Firstly, in his blog entry of 30 April 2010, he used the term ‘exit strategy‘ to describe a suitable way for him to take his own life before the cancer destroyed his higher brain functions. In this entry, he writes ‘After all, I didn't want to die, at any time, and I don't want to now. But the certainty of having it in my own hands was a necessary part of my mental hygiene from the beginning. [...] I need to know that I am the master of my own house.‘ The phrase ‘being master of one’s own house‘ was repeatedly quoted both by MPs and in the media to refer to the value of self-determined, controlled dying. The value of this feeling of control was underlined by Herrndorf's description of the great liberation he felt when he found the ‘exit strategy‘ that suited him, finding the weapon which gave him the feeling of remaining ‘master of his own house,‘ that is of being able to decide for himself how and when he wanted to die. Herrndorf's text was also used as a plea for the legalisation of assisted suicide in the subsequent debates after the 2015 ban, with the term 'exit strategy' repeatedly being used to refer to (pre-emptive) suicide.