About someone who moved out to avoid going mad

When a mix-up during the eviction of his mother's apartment results in everything of value being thrown into the incinerator, the narrator is literally left with nothing but the garbage from his own family history. How could it have come to this? The narrator looks at his family's biography: a family tree of madness. Grandmother bipolar, twelve suicide attempts, grandfather a regular customer at Steinhof, mother an alcoholic, father depressed. And he looks back on his own path: a childhood in Munich's working-class district. The early fear of going mad. The escape from his family to distant New York. Years in Vienna with Freud in the coffee house. And how he finally ends up in an asylum as a psychologist. Working with patients, he learns that a person is always more than their illness, that listening is more important than diagnosing. Above all, however, he soon has to ask himself what a normal person is.
A family history that has gotten out of hand? A picaresque novel? A lesson in empathy? Leon Engler's debut is all this and more, a tender liberation, the story of a reconciliation.

Leon Engler grew up in Munich and studied theater, film, media, cultural studies and psychology in Vienna, Paris and Berlin. He has published numerous plays, radio plays and short stories and was awarded the 3sat Prize at the Bachmann Competition in 2022. He works as an author, psychologist and lecturer in psychology and literary writing. 'Botany of Madness' is his debut novel.