Das Leben nehmen

"Suicide", Walter Benjamin wrote in his Passagen-Werk, appears "as the quintessence of modernity". And indeed: After the attempt to take one's own life was for centuries regarded as a sin or expression of a mental illness, and in some countries even sanctioned by criminal law, a profound change has been taking place since the 20th century, which has contributed to the emergence of a new culture of dying. The own death is more and more often regarded as a "project" that has to be shaped and accounted for by the individual himself. Those who take their own life no longer only want to extinguish it, but also to take it and give it new meaning. Thomas Macho tells the multifaceted history of suicide in modernity and traces its revaluation in the most diverse cultural fields: in politics (suicide as protest and assassination), in law (Ent.