How unbelievably bleak life can feel for adolescents cannot be conveyed to an old person.
A whole life stands in between, an enviously imagined one: you still have everything ahead of you.
Conversely, the young either do not understand the suffering of the elderly or confuse it with cowardice, but it is not the task of the young to understand adults.
Elena Witzeck
Editor in the Feuilleton.
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A woman drives on the autobahn towards Switzerland because she wants to end her life. A girl falls off a highway bridge for the same reason, but she survives. Now they sit next to each other, it goes on. One calamity is new, the other old, and where an unharmed person can imagine how these calamities simmering under the car roof combine together, every injured person knows that they are mutually exclusive, that there is no room for the sadness of the other .
Author Ronja von Rönne wrote this story, not because of her depression, as she says, but despite her own depression.
Which reminded her of the shape on the one hand, because the book says Roman, and on the other hand that depression is not the same as a temporary melancholy that inspires a creative outburst.
But because Ronja von Rönne has a familiar face, because she made her own mental illness public and now talks, negotiates and writes about the book and its subject, many felt called upon to take a meta-analysis.
You have visited Rönne at her home for the past few weeks, written about the shadows under her eyes and then looked for an echo in "End in Sight".
Don't be afraid of posture corrections
Before that it was quiet around the author for a while, after it had been loud for a long time. First because of an essay on feminism in which the word "ankeln" appeared and which invited instrumentalization, then because of a prize that Rönne rejected. But since then there has also been a language that sounded bold and uncompromising, non-judgmental, ignorant of and fearful of postural corrections, that made it to Klagenfurt for a reading competition and made it into a debut novel that was also about panic attacks and therapy, kind of Diary for the Therapist, History of Inner Chaos.
There wasn't much plot back then. In “The End in Sight” everything is plot. The road trip, the encounters, the moments of fate: does July, the suicidal fifteen-year-old, switch to a truck driver at the rest area, does Hella, the dying traveler, get to the bathroom of the motorway motel just in time when the child is fiddling with the nail scissors in the tub? At her age, Juli has long known what depression is, which is there as a small provocation with a view to Rönne's history: Mental health is omnipresent on the Internet, "somehow everyone was depressed these days, and there were apps, tablets and all, all much understanding". But in contrast to what artists and celebrities publish about their gray days, July experiences a garish everyday life that clashes all the more with the nocturnal emptiness.Because every depression is different and in the end it doesn't help to watch strangers suffering in public.