Leon Engler: «Botanik des Wahnsinns»

What is that supposed to be, a normal person? When, during the forced eviction of his mother's apartment, everything of value ends up in the waste incineration plant due to a mix-up, the narrator is literally left with the waste of his own family history. The narrator looks at a family tree of madness. The grandmother bipolar, twelve suicide attempts, the grandfather a regular customer in Steinhof, the mother an alcoholic, the father depressed. And he looks at his own path: a childhood in Munich's working-class district. The fear of going crazy. The escape from the family to New York. years in Vienna with Freud in the coffee house. And how he ends up in the asylum – as a psychologist. While working with patients, he learns that a person is always more than his illness, that listening is more important than diagnosing.