Confronting Cancer Publicly: Christoph Schlingensief’s So schön wie hier kanns im Himmel gar nicht sein! Tagebuch einer Krebserkrankung

Abstract

The year 2009 saw articles across German feuilletons reacting to a striking new wave of illness narratives, among them Christoph Schlingensief’s cancer diary So schön wie hier kanns im Himmel gar nicht sein!. The integrity of authors like Schlingensief was challenged by critiques such as Michael Angele’s provocatively titled ‘Wer hat geil Krebs?’, as was the literary quality of their texts. However, for Schlingensief, the desire to record and disseminate his own experience of illness in diary form seemed to override the risk of a potentially hostile reception. With insight from trauma studies, the help of diary theory (Philippe Lejeune) and research into autothanatography (Susanna Egan), this article explores the reasons for this choice. It argues that it is in the diary that we witness a first reframing of Schlingensief’s creative work, setting the direction of his ‘Spätwerk’. I investigate the way in which the diary form is suited to the task of writing the dying self, and how the use of the diary as exploratory space maps on to or departs from Schlingensief’s previous work.