Originally published 1975 | ||
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Mars is an autobiographical essay by Fritz Angst under the pseudonym Fritz Zorn. Adolf Muschg wrote its long and engaged foreword.
In the book, written after the author was diagnosed with cancer, Zorn describes and criticizes his environment, entourage, and upbringing in one of the wealthiest lakeshore neighborhoods of Zurich, Switzerland, where he claims to have been “educated to death.”
The book mainly contains the theory that cancer can be caused by a neurosis.
Zorn laments his “unlived life”: though he apparently became successful in the eyes of the bourgeoisie (he attended university and became a teacher), his whole life was "wrong." He suffered from depression and never had friends or a girlfriend.
The book was published in 1976, and it has been translated into several languages. Alex and Daniel Varenne developed a comic book based on the book in 1988, and Darius Peyamiras wrote and directed a play drawn from it in 2001.