The author speaks openly about his depressive episodes and says that this “shattering of his existence” also influenced his writing process.
According to bestselling author Ferdinand von Schirach, personal crises can be advantageous for artistic creativity.
“Without a shock to your existence, you either don’t write at all or only about the flowers in the meadow. That’s like applied art in hotel rooms,” said the writer, who was born in Munich in 1964 (“Crime”, “Guilt”, “Coffee and Cigarettes “) the “Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin”.
He himself feels a “basic sadness that permeates everything,” said von Schirach, who had previously spoken in the media about his own experiences with depression. For him, depressive episodes often begin with the “imagination of oil dripping from the ceiling and covering everything, that it penetrates me, into every cell, and in the end I become blue-black oil myself,” he told the “Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin”. . Unlike before, he is now coping with the disease: “Today it’s much more harmless, it’s now mental loops that I can’t get out of.”
Von Schirach, who lives in Berlin, has just published his volume of stories “Afternoon”. According to the publisher, it is about “short stories about the things that change our lives, about coincidences, wrong decisions and the fleetingness of happiness”. (dpa)