There you can check whether you have ever participated in an amnesia experiment.
Many thanks.
About the idea underlying SPLINTER
Before I started work on SPLINTER there were many things in my life I would sooner have forgotten. For example how I once, when utterly exhausted and befuddled by jet lag, went astray in my own hotel room. I’d meant to go to the bathroom but found myself outside in the passage. The door had swung shut, needless to say, and my key was on the bedside table. The only other thing you need to know is that I’m not a pyjama fetishist. All I wear as a rule is a short T-shirt, with the emphasis on
My ride down in a fully occupied lift, the horrified expression of the woman behind the reception desk and the giggles of the bellhop who escorted this half-naked German back to his room – I would have swallowed an amnesia pill on the spot if it had blotted out my memory of this toe-curling episode.
I would have done so
Hand on heart: Would you take a lovesickness pill if one existed?
Or an amnesia injection after a particularly embarrassing or – worse still – tragic experience?
You may think that this question – and with it the entire theme of SPLINTER – belongs in the realm of science fiction. But don’t be misled. Scientists (criminals too, alas) have long had access to substances that can eradicate recollections from our short-term memory – and I’m not just talking about mental blackouts occasioned by excessive alcohol intake: Flunitrazepam, for example, which has sadly gained notoriety as a so-called date-rape drug. In combination with other narcotics, it ensures that rape victims cannot remember the horrible crime perpetrated on them.
But research into drugs that erase long-term memory is ongoing. Biologists from New York and Rehovot, Israel, have discovered an active substance that blocks an important protein in nerve tissue if injected into the cerebral cortex. This, however, induces complete amnesia.
Mark Bear of the Massuchusetts Institute of Technology is conducting some rather more specific research in this field. He wants to get rid of bad memories without affecting good ones. ‘Wouldn’t that be nice?’ he asked in the 14/2008 edition of DER SPIEGEL for 31 March 2008, under the title ‘Der Sprache des Gehirns’ (‘The Language of the Brain’, an extremely readable article by Jörg Blech on the present state of research, which I link with my website, www.sebastianfitzek.de.)
Bear, who assumes that traumatic experiences etch themselves more deeply into our nerve tissue than positive ones, is looking for a pharmacological substance that will focus solely on these deeper ‘engravings’.
I myself am in the fortunate position of not having so far undergone any experiences as traumatic as those inflicted on Marc Lucas in the novel you’re holding in your hands at this moment, so I won’t presume to pass judgement on people so desperate that they yearn for deliberately induced amnesia. While writing SPLINTER I came to realize more and more that I don’t want to relinquish a single one of my memories. Neither of the day I received the news that my first book was to be published, nor of the night my mother died. I believe that people are the sum of their memories, and if there is any reason for our presence here on earth, it may be to accumulate as many of them as possible during our journey through life.
Before I forget…
It has become almost a tradition for me to begin my acknowledgements by thanking the reader. So thank you.
To be quite frank, you aren’t in the forefront of my mind while I’m writing. I’ve so far received thousands of emails addressed to fitzek@sebastianfitzek.de (which I really do answer personally, by the way, even if it sometimes takes me a while), and many of them contradict each other. What one person likes another thinks is stupid, and vice versa, so I stick to what I did in my first thriller, THERAPY: I simply write a story
This book is dedicated to my brother Clemens Fitzek. We are seven years and eight hours apart, the eight hours being what it seems to take to drive along the urban expressway between Charlottenburg and Köpenick. Although we see each other so seldom, I feel profoundly attached to you. Thanks so much, and not for your medical advice alone.
Sabine – the same goes for you, of course. I’d have been lost without all the invaluable professional tips you gave me.
I owe a very special debt of gratitude to Dr Marcus Schuchmann, who gave me some valuable medical advice in the cheap Berlin restaurant where we’d taken refuge from a shower of rain. Unfortunately, I can’t reveal your field of expertise without giving away the end of the thriller. Next time, you’ll get more than a measly hamburger, I promise!
Sandra, I thank the screenwriter who wrote you the leading role in the film of my life, even though I now have to get to grips with its side effects: for instance, the little remarks that upset the endings of my stories – and improve them as a result!
BB, how glad I am we didn’t dump your father’s car in the lake that time. We really came within an ace of doing so. I thank you today for the experience I was able to incorporate in Splinter and hope your unwitting father never reads this.
Gerlinde, you’re crazy but wonderful. A lot of things have changed, but your unstinting friendship and support endure. I can’t thank you enough for them (and for introducing me to the radio oracle).
Zsolt Bács, you got rather short measure in my last acknowledgements, even though you gave me one of the most helpful tips for my thriller THE SOUL-BREAKER when I was suffering from writer’s block. You’ll get something nice for it, but remember Santa Claus: one big present is enough.
I sometimes come across people who look more innocuous than me but are even crazier. For instance, Thomas Zorbach and his team from vm-people. Anyone who manages to induce his colleagues to stage my book readings by lying down in mortuary refrigeration drawers (thanks, Oliver Ludwigs) has more than earned his place in these acknowledgements.
People who work with me have to be prepared for the worst every day. My editor, Carolin Graehl, got a shock when she returned from holiday and overheard Andrea Ludorf (who looks after my reading trips) terminate a phone call with the words: ‘
Carolin’s fears were groundless. I hadn’t had an accident; I simply needed the thing for my reading (better not ask why).
Christian Meyer, a very good friend who had really only wanted to accompany me to the reading, had to push me on to the stage in the said wheelchair. I had previously bullied him into wearing a surgical gown and mask.
Thank you all for joining in this tomfoolery. Take seriously what you do but never yourself. That’s my favourite motto, and it applies to Manuela best of all. You not only do a splendidly professional and meticulous job (you’re my quick-out brain!) but laugh at all my silly antics as well. What I thank you for most, though, is your friendship.
If I look like a fighting machine at my next reading it’ll be down to Karl Raschke, former personal trainer to Graziano ‘Rocky’ Rocchigiani, who thinks, for some obscure reason, that he has to develop me into an iron man. I’m so exhausted by the end of a work-out, I don’t have the energy to cancel our next appointment. Thanks, Kalle. But for you I’d still be a fat, lazy couch potato. In other words, I’d still be happy.