About the work
Own Death is an autobiographical prose text by the Hungarian writer Péter Nádas about the heart attack he suffered in 1993. The book first appeared in German in 2002 from Steidl, translated by Heinrich Eisterer, together with about 150 of the author's photographs showing the same pear tree at different seasons and times of day; the Hungarian edition Saját halál followed in 2004 from Jelenkor. The director András Dömötör adapted the text for the stage at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg, where it opened in the MalerSaal in 2024.
Plot
The narrator ignores the first warning signs, suppresses the pain and finally collapses in the street. For a few seconds he stands on the threshold between life and death before being resuscitated. Nádas describes this timeless state, in which thought stops and starts again, and the following days in hospital, while his memory reaches back to his birth in war-torn Budapest in 1942.
Cultural significance
German-language critics received the book as a spare, philosophically serious self-observation at the edge of death: Süddeutsche Zeitung read it as a philosophical journal with images, Frankfurter Rundschau praised its self-contained form and imagery, and Neue Zürcher Zeitung the pairing of sparse text and photographs.