Mars

I am young, rich, and educated; yet I am unhappy, neurotic, and alone. I come from one of the best families on the right bank of Lake Zurich, known as the Gold Coast. I was raised in a bourgeois manner and have been well-behaved my entire life. My family is quite degenerated, and I am probably also genetically predisposed and affected by my environment. Of course, I also have cancer, which is actually a given from what has been said before. With these sentences, the young Swiss author who calls himself Fritz Zorn begins his writings, in which he reflects on himself, his origins, and his cancer diagnosis.

Severe depression and deep sadness led the thirty-year-old millionaire's son and high school teacher to seek psychotherapeutic help. During his treatment, he learned that he was suffering from cancer. The illness becomes the triggering moment for self-exploration, a ruthless examination of his unfulfilled life. In his cancer, Zorn sees only the somatic manifestation of his neurosis, which has its roots in his family home by Lake Zurich; in this eerie family, where touch is avoided, every challenge to reality is hidden under the magic of ritual, and any hint of sexuality is banished with the notion of decency. One can have a childhood without being a child; a youth without being young; grow up without presence, writes Adolf Muschg in his foreword to this book. Only the physical agony of the cancer breaks through the shield of emotional insensitivity; only the looming death awakens the resistance - against the illness, against familial and social origins, against the inability to live. Zorn did not live to see the publication of his writings; he died in 1976 at the age of 32 from cancer.

Mars - the testimony of a dying man - delivers a bitter critique.