Since ancient times, be literary, and philosophical texts have dealt with the suicide – sometimes with deadly seduction of violence. Continue movies and death games on the Internet, this Tradition?
The reality influenced the literature, it is changing constantly in its language and its forms. Texts and books, but conversely can also have a direct effect on the lives of people, is also a fact. The is, however, anchored in the General consciousness: Finally, it is ‘only’ fiction.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s epistolary novel “The sorrows of young Werther” had such an effect. In his first, in 1774, still anonymously, published version, he influenced an entire epoch With feeling instead of reason and sensibility instead of education of the then only 25-year-old author, reaching a young Generation. The era of the “Sturm and Drang” was born – and with it an almost limitless passion.
Seduction to suicide
A best-seller: Joint reading of the “Werther” (1870)
Werther is a hopeless love that drives him sinks in despair in the suicide – enthusiastic, radical, to the world. And tremendously touching. The fictional suicide sparked a real-life imitation effect: About a dozen young people should have in the spirit of Werther’s suicide. The debate about Goethe’s best – selling the first of German literary history – was extremely emotional. The “Werther” seduce young people to suicide, and undermines moral and religious values, railed against the critics. Goethe himself defused his novel in a second draft of 1787, the appear self-murder should be less attractive.
Today we are talking about the Werther-effect, when, in consequence of a from media, literature or Film well-known self-murder happened increased suicides. The Netflix series “13 Reasons Why”, not “works in German under the title” Dead girl lies, has triggered the same debate that have led to Goethe’s contemporaries:
The actress Katherine Langford as Hannah Baker in “13 Reasons Why”
You have to protect young people, especially unstable young people, better in front of media products with a high potential for Identification? It is morally reprehensible, the way to suicide and the suicide itself are so detailed, touching and intense near? You perhaps even in the legal sense guilty?
Fatal role models with media effect
The makers of the successful series argue that it is dangerous to talk about suicide, than to make him the topic. Anyway, it was in times of the Internet, impossible, tempting offers, to entice young people to commit suicide, to suppress. You’re right, show sad examples: The Online game “The blue whale” is supposed to have driven in Russia up to 130 minors in the death, since it appeared to 2016 in social networks.
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The tasks to be fulfilled by the “players” are becoming more intense and more dangerous: What begins with “Look at the whole day of horror movies to” expire after 50 days, with the call for suicide. In 2012, a suicide wave in Russia, which shook the sought, as a young candidate on the Internet for like-minded people, and in “the suicide club” agreed. Five years earlier, a suicide-series, in the case of the 17 young people had taken in Wales, the life, the UK shaken. It was said that most of them came in its only by reporting on the suicide of the “tragic young hero” on the idea, to take the life.
Speech, prohibitions against suicide culture
The history of literature is full of examples of immortal become self-murders, the fictional and the actual. In Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet a communicative mishap and the pressure of love has led hostile world to the death of his own Hand. The double suicide of the dramatist Heinrich von Kleist and his cancer-stricken Familiar Henriette Vogel in front of more than 200 years, is still perceived today as a startling message.
“The freely chosen death has always caused Irritation and dismay,” wrote Willemsen of 2016 at the age of 60 years is much too early deceased journalist Roger. 30 years prior to his – involuntary – death, he has gathered literary texts, letters, and Manifestos about the suicide in a Band. From Seneca, via Casanova, Schopenhauer and Dostoevsky to Kafka and Brecht, there was hardly a well-known writer who has not a literary or intellectual suicide. In Willemsens book is also a “suicide culture”, which existed in ancient Greece and the temporary ban on speaking of the philosophers Hegedias. “Not for ideological reasons, but because the state recognized the destabilizing effect of such Talk, there was even talk of a suicide epidemic.” The story of the suicide was full of such prohibitions.
Fascination with and longing for death
The poet Karoline von Günderrode committed 1806 suicide – before she read the “Werther”, together with her bosom friend, Bettina von Arnim
“We read together the Werther and talked a lot about the suicide; she said: ‘a lot to learn, a lot to grasp with the mind and then die early; I don’t like to experience that myself, the youth leaves’.” The writer Bettina von Armin wrote the beginning of the 19th century. Century about your intimate friend, the poet Karoline von Günderrode. Both count as a significant, Autonomous women in the German literary romanticism. “The Günderrode,” as it was called, stabbed shortly after this conversation, in 1806, with a Golden dagger. She was once 26 years old. In literary terms, she lives on in several texts, among other things, in Christa wolf’s novel “Not a place. Nowhere to be”. In it, she met Heinrich von Kleist.
Literature and media can be seduced to violence – even against themselves -. Whether you are a basic or, as in most cases, certainly – only trigger, can only be on a case by case. Karoline von Günderrode killed herself, ultimately, not because of “Werther”, but because of a disappointed love. Your longing for death but she saw in her literary role model mirrored. “Dead girls don’t lie” will be continued.