Reading “Film B”

Repertoire:

Tobias Schwartz was born in 1976 in Osnabrück, Lower Saxony, and grew up near the Dutch border.
He has lived in Berlin since 1997. As a freelance journalist he writes, among other things, about theatre and literature.
Since the mid-1990s he has written three novels, several plays and a number of short stories.

Extract:

At the meeting I put to the head physician, who looked at me irritably, the proposal that nurses and patients be brought closer together.
After all, we are also an institution for de-hospitalisation and resocialisation, I said. If the nurses themselves were all gaga
– and with most of them that is surely the case already – if the nurses themselves had mentally ill tendencies and were selected by such
criteria, wouldn’t the patients have an easier time? They would see the nurses and think: becoming like that isn’t
hard. The patients are ruined by the medication, of course, kept calm and docile. (…) The guilty conscience
hits rock bottom when patience has run out. If from the outset you hire only crazy nurses, the assimilation
is complete. You simply sing along when Mr A sings. Hire crazy nurses, I tell the boss, and I speak plainly. So that the
boundaries are blurred from the start and you spare yourself the laborious path of insight. (…)