Auseinandersetzungen mit Demenz in der deutschsprachigen Literatur der Gegenwart

This study focuses on texts that deal with ways of representing dementia. Against the backdrop of demographic change, literature is concerned with the cognitive decline caused by the disease and the consequences of the disease, which is still incurable until today, and exploits various possibilities for telling stories about Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia. On the one hand, the study takes a look at fictional literature such as novels, narratives, and short stories and analyzes the representation strategies of the respective texts, especially under narratological aspects and employs different ways of telling stories about Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia. On the other hand, factual, autobiographical texts are examined.
While fictional literature narratively presents the internal perspective of demented characters, factual texts from the perspective of relatives focus on reflections by re-exploring the respective relationships with the demented persons. In this sense, dementia literature can even be seen as writing against forgetting. The analysis of the so-called relatives' pathographies focuses on three autobiographical narratives, each of which tells the demented father’s story from the son's point of view. What is striking is the reversal of familial roles, especially from a masculinity-theoretical perspective, when the son increasingly becomes the provider for his own father. Special attention is paid to Tilman Jens' text, which portrays the prominent Walter Jens as a disoriented old man. With his unsparing portrayal of his father's dementia, the author triggered a heated debate in the feuilleton, which is reconstructed from a masculinity-theoretic and psychoanalytic point of view. Following on from the investigations of the factual literature, the work critically asks whether dementia tends to be regarded as a construct of an "epochal disease" and stands in the cultural- historical line of tradition of Susan Sontag's much noted thoughts on strategies of metaphorization of diseases such as tuberculosis and cancer.