Variationen literarischer Freitodbilder um 1980

This study focuses on selected literary texts, which were created around 1980 and deal with the subject of suicide. An overview-based study attempts to incorporate these texts into the context of the history of German-language literature and to describe the form and function of suicide in these works. Relatively conventional works representing the "Neue Subjektivität" are presented in biographically tuned prose written by female authors (Christa Wolf, Karin Reschke) and Bernward Vesper's novel Reise, which deals with unsuccessfully reconcilitation of the relationship between son and father. The works of Wolfgang Hildesheimer and Botho Strauß are shown as less conventional. The final chapters devote themselves to dramatic (Max Frisch) and prose texts in which suicide is portrayed as part of the events that is concludes in a cycle of eternal repetition or is seen by transhuman optics in which the perspective of individual life is transcended by the perspective of the human race or the development of the planet Earth (evolutionary and geological overlaps).