Five Weeks at Humanitas

Book excerpt: Manfred Jurgensen was born between Denmark and Germany in the coastal border town of Flensburg in 1940, a 'midnight child'. He has always been sensitive to boundaries and what's beyond the borders, emotionally and physically. He has chosen to reveal his life history - to a very large extent dominated by World War II and its aftermath - in a highly original and unusual form. The protagonist and his lifetime experiences are wrapped within a semi-fictional presentation that he suggests might be called 'autofiction', or perhaps a 'bio-novel'. Throughout the narrative he philosophises about the nature of 'coincidence' as a life-force. Switzerland, formerly known as the excessively clean and prosperous 'neutral' country of war-torn Europe, is the symbolic present-day setting for this imaginative narrative. It begins just after he suffers a nervous breakdown while delivering a doctoral seminar at the University of Basle. In a luxurious sanatorium for mentally disturbed patients called Humanitas, he is asked to write about his life experiences, including his own awareness of the Nazi era and what it meant to be one of 'Hitler's children'; he is regularly interviewed by a Board of distinguished psychiatrists based on these accounts. An involuntary prisoner, he longs to achieve his freedom and be reunited with his wife.