If, as a child, an over-Catholic pastor has drummed up the unquenchable idea that the sentences that were last heard during his lifetime after death, it seems to one not so good idea, dying man just the indestructible grin doctor Eckart Hirschhausen to set aside.
In "Hirschhausen in the hospice" happens exactly the same. "All talk of death has a systematic disadvantage," says Hirschhausen a woman who will live only a few days or a few weeks, "they always take place with the living." "Hmm," says the woman.
The idea of the classic I-go-there-where-it-hurts documentary is of course good and rewarding: look what happens in the last few meters of a life, if you just know exactly that the end is approaching. "Imagine, you are gone, you are no more, you are dead," says Hirschhausen at the beginning. "For whom is that really bad for you or for all who live on?"
Snippy dramaturgy
He wants to spend two days in a Bochum hospice to investigate this question, occupies a guest (as the residents are called here) for breakfast as desired a sandwich with bananas, helps with the evening laundry and talks with dying and relatives.
"I find it so difficult," says one who has just helped a loved one move to the hospice. "Mm," says Hirschhausen, and then he says "well!" and grasp the arm, and of course that is helpless, but probably anything non-helpless in such a situation would be an impertinence.
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"Hirschhausen in the hospice": Hirschhausen's idea of dyingMuch more disturbing, however, is the snippy dramaturgy of the program, which stands in the way of the quiet, thoughtful atmosphere in the hospice. While Hirschhausen is in the hospice, his two reporters Niko and Lisa are on their way to re-enact a collection on "Dealing with Death": They help a funeral director prepare a corpse, transport a coffin across the city with a cargo bike, and chat extralocker passers-by ("Hi, do you want to get in?"), call "how isses?" through the closed coffin lid and build a deathbed at the port of Hamburg, so that a palliative care physicians can show people who have sunk to it, on which acupressure points on the hand you have to press, if the dying person hurts somewhere.
In addition, Nena's "lighthouse" fizzles in the background: "Give me my hand, I'll make you a castle out of sand", and maybe there would still have been something between taboo and vitrification.
Then actually "The Doors" are still droning through the nightly hospice corridor: "This is the end" - oh what. And a hearse drives to "It's all over now, baby blue" from Bestatterhof. In between you can see Hirschhausen looking at a wild rabbit in the hospice garden. At the end he talks to a woman in the hospice, who is happy to do only nice things, to enjoy life. "Why did not I cut off a piece of it earlier?" she asks, without reproach to herself or anyone, rather astonishingly and precisely because of this, so impressively.
More of such moments could have caused the audience more than a lively Sarg Probelieger, who finds it in the wooden box "actually quite chilled".
"Hirschhausen in the hospice", Monday, 16.09., 20:15, ARD