Mars (Fritz Zorn)

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Mars is an autobiographical essay written by Fritz Angst under the pseudonym Fritz Zorn. Adolf Muschg wrote its long and engaged foreword.

In the book, written by the author after he was diagnosed with cancer, Zorn describes and criticizes his environment and entourage, and his upbringing in one of the wealthiest lakeshore neighborhoods of Zurich, Switzerland, where he claims to have been “educated to death.” The book mainly contains the theory that cancer can be caused by a neurosis. Zorn laments his “unlived life”: though he apparently became successful in the eyes of the bourgeoisie (he attended university and became a teacher), his whole life was "wrong." He suffered from depression and never had friends or a girlfriend. The book was published in 1976, and it has been translated into several languages. Alex and Daniel Varenne developed a comic book based on the book in 1988, and Darius Peyamiras wrote and directed a play drawn from it in 2001.

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I am young and rich and educated, and I'm unhappy, neurotic, and alone. I come from one of the very best families on the east shore of Lake Zurich, the shore that people call the Gold Coast. My upbringing has been middle-class, and I have been a model of good behaviour all my life. My family is somewhat degenerate, and I assume that I am suffering not only from the influences of my environment but also from some genetic damage. And of course I have cancer. That follows logically enough from what I have just said about myself. There are two points I would like to make about my cancer. On the one hand, it is a physical disease from which I will most likely die in the near future, but then again I may win out against it and survive after all. On the other hand, it is a psychic disorder, and I can only regard its onset in an acute physical form as a great stroke of luck. By this I mean that in view of my unfortunate family legacy, getting cancer was by far the cleverest thing I have ever done in my life.

And it could happen just as frequently that I found myself at my desk incessantly writing tristeza and soledad all over pieces of paper. I often found, too, that life was just "too much," as the idiom so accurately puts it. The distance was too great; the stairs were too high; the shopping basket was too heavy. Everything contained the hidden possibility of being more than I could cope with. I was tired. There's a theory that claims the body is never tired and couldn't be tired if it wanted to. It's only the spirit that gets tired, and it's the weariness of the spirit that induces the so-called physical fatigue. That may well be a corollary to the view that rainy weather will be depressing only for those who are already depressed. The distance was probably too great for me only because I didn't want to go to the place in question to begin with. The task was too wearisome only because I didn't want to do it. But the reason I didn't want to do anything was probably that there was nothing that gave me pleasure.

If we accept the definition of a neurotic as a person who can never live in the present and always seeks refuge either in the future or in the past, then I fulfilled all the requirements by the time I was a university student. On the one hand, I still saw myself as a "little boy" who had fallen behind and was still not capable of doing anything. On the other hand, I kept hoping constantly that at some far and indeterminate point in the future I would find the fulfillment I could not find in the present. I kept telling myself that I just couldn't get in the swing of things here in Zurich, where it rained all the time, but that I would really start living on my summer vacation in Spain, where the sun always shines. I was constantly in the company of women at the university, but I imagined that on the same legendary and nebulous vacation in Spain I would surely meet my ideal woman. I was incapable of seeing that circumstances were not responsible for my failure but that I was the failure myself.