Mars is an autobiographical essay written
by
Fritz Angst under the pseudonym
Fritz Zorn.
Adolf
Muschg wrote its long and engaged foreword.
In the
book, written by the author after he was diagnosed with cancer, Zorn describes and criticizes his environment
and entourage, and his upbringing in one of the wealthiest
lakeshore neighborhoods of Zurich, Switzerland
, where he claims to have been “educated to
death.”The book mainly contains the theory that cancer can
be caused by a neurosis.Zorn laments his “unlived life”: though he
apparently became successful in the eyes of the bourgeoisie (he
attended university and became a teacher), his whole life was
"wrong."He suffered from depression and never had friends or a
girlfriend.The book was published in 1976, and it has been
translated into several languages.
Alex
and
Daniel Varenne developed a
comic book based on the book in 1988, and
Darius Peyamiras wrote and directed
a play drawn from it in 2001.
Excerpts
- I am young and rich and educated, and I'm unhappy, neurotic,
and alone. I come from one of the very best families on the east
shore of Lake Zurich, the shore that people call the Gold Coast. My
upbringing has been middle-class, and I have been a model of good
behaviour all my life. My family is somewhat degenerate, and I
assume that I am suffering not only from the influences of my
environment but also from some genetic damage. And of course I have
cancer. That follows logically enough from what I have just said
about myself. There are two points I would like to make about my
cancer. On the one hand, it is a physical disease from which I will
most likely die in the near future, but then again I may win out
against it and survive after all. On the other hand, it is a
psychic disorder, and I can only regard its onset in an acute
physical form as a great stroke of luck. By this I mean that in
view of my unfortunate family legacy, getting cancer was by far the
cleverest thing I have ever done in my life.
- And it could happen just as frequently that I found myself at
my desk incessantly writing tristeza and soledad all over pieces of
paper. I often found, too, that life was just "too much," as the
idiom so accurately puts it. The distance was too great; the stairs
were too high; the shopping basket was too heavy. Everything
contained the hidden possibility of being more than I could cope
with. I was tired. There's a theory that claims the body is never
tired and couldn't be tired if it wanted to. It's only the spirit
that gets tired, and it's the weariness of the spirit that induces
the so-called physical fatigue. That may well be a corollary to the
view that rainy weather will be depressing only for those who are
already depressed. The distance was probably too great for me only
because I didn't want to go to the place in question to begin with.
The task was too wearisome only because I didn't want to do it. But
the reason I didn't want to do anything was probably that there was
nothing that gave me pleasure.
- If we accept the definition of a neurotic as a person who can
never live in the present and always seeks refuge either in the
future or in the past, then I fulfilled all the requirements by the
time I was a university student. On the one hand, I still saw
myself as a "little boy" who had fallen behind and was still not
capable of doing anything. On the other hand, I kept hoping
constantly that at some far and indeterminate point in the future I
would find the fulfillment I could not find in the present. I kept
telling myself that I just couldn't get in the swing of things here
in Zurich, where it rained all the time, but that I would really
start living on my summer vacation in Spain, where the sun always
shines. I was constantly in the company of women at the university,
but I imagined that on the same legendary and nebulous vacation in
Spain I would surely meet my ideal woman. I was incapable of seeing
that circumstances were not responsible for my failure but that I
was the failure myself.
See also
References
- Fritz Zorn: "Mars". 226 Pages, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer
Taschenbuch Verlag, 22. Edition 2000 ISBN 3-596-22202-8
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