In the interdisciplinary feld of the “Medical Humanities” there is an exchange of discourses between literary studies and medicine. The ambiguous German-language term “Krise” (“crisis”) describes a difficult situation or the decisive climax of a dangerous development and was first used in a medical context. In 2014, the German-Icelandic author Kristof Magnusson published his novel Arztroman (Medical Novel), which particularly addresses crises in the professional and personal everyday life of the physician’s profession. Its title plays on the German-language term for a subgenre of pseudonymously written novels that have an extremely simple structure; they are set in a medical setting and are sold in the format of inexpensive paperback booklets. They are written for readers with a low level of education and are classified as trivial literature. However, Magnusson’s literary narrative is not dominated by the typical problems in the everyday clinical life of a young assistant doctor or charming head physician who has a love story with one of the nurses. Rather, the focus of his novel is on the work of the protagonist, an emergency physician at a large Berlin hospital. Above all, she lives for her exciting work and is only called to the emergency doctor’s car for serious cases. What kind of crises in the medical profession are told? Which narrative techniques, rhetoric and writing strategies are used to illustrate these crises in contemporary German-language literature? Since Magnusson’s novel reveals crises in different ways from the physician’s perspective, his novel is particularly suitable for an exemplary analysis.
In the past, the German writer and medical doctor Gottfried Benn (1886-1956) also wrote literary texts that touch on the question of crisis from a medical perspective. Benn’s text presents a completely different perspective of the physician, who is egocentrically initiated into becoming a poet through a language crisis. Therefore, excerpts from his novella Gehirne (Brains) may be addressed in the analysis and compared with Magnusson’s novel. Magnusson does not just describe the problems of a physician who is going through a personal crisis in her mid-forties. He also describes with great accuracy the unexpected emergency situations of ill people who need medical help. At the same time, the lack of adequate care for the socially disadvantaged in Germany is highlighted and the problem of the crisis in the state health system is addressed. Crises can be used as a basis for a critical reflection on what has happened before, in order to consider them as decisive turning points.
