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  Scientists replied in the positive a long time ago as to whether passive smoking can cause addiction. They also ascertained that people who were exposed to their parents’ nicotine intake during childhood, not to mention during the embryonal phase, are without doubt more in danger of becoming addicted than others. They also concluded that people with depression are more inclined to become addicted to nicotine or people addicted to nicotine are more likely to become depressed. Also known is that the brain’s structure changes once it has become accustomed to the nicotine and that these structural changes remain even when the addiction has long been vanquished and normal behaviour has been restored. A multitude of rats had to lose their lives for these conclusions to be achieved. There are thousands of experiments that appear in publications like the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and the Journal of Addictive Diseases, most of which have alliterative titles: Smoking, Stress and Negative Affect: Correlation, Causation, and Content Across Stages of Smoking. It’s amazing what these studies, especially the empirical ones, bring to light: for example, only 61 per cent of smokers asked in a survey said that they were addicted to nicotine. The others apparently believe that they only smoke when they want to, and don’t grasp that desire is a functional mechanism of addiction. 78 per cent of smokers believe that they could stop smoking if they decided to. They’re right to a certain extent – but by making this statement they’ve merely transposed the problem; they’re not in the position to make that decision. Why are people unable to fulfil a wish where nothing stands between them and the object of their desire? What does it mean to want something in cases like this?

  If one wishes to clarify this scientifically one must start with Freud, who positioned psychology on a scientific foundation and yet couldn’t give up cigars when he was already gravely ill with throat cancer. (In winter 1898 he encountered the twenty-year-old, practically immortal Mark Twain in Vienna, they moved in the same circles and maybe even bought cigars in the same tobacconists.) Of course there is the possibility of approaching addiction through depth psychology, but I have always had a certain scepticism of the Freudian model because I wasn’t sure how to identify evidence to the contrary. What form must the factors take to topple Freud’s constructions of thought? Only a refutable theory is a good theory. Besides, from the outset of this pursuit of my addiction I’ve had the impression that the explanation for my behaviour isn’t somewhere deep within my unconscious but barely under the surface, it’s actually there for all to see in the structure of my personality. It suffices to narrate what’s still clear before my eyes, I don’t have to lie on a sofa for that. Most importantly, I have to change my behaviour. What do I do with the situation that I once again find myself in? How do I regard myself? Which mechanism of my thinking, which characteristics do I make use of in certain situations? What can I do to govern my behaviour and overcome the automatism of thought and action?

  Of course it doesn’t hurt to reread the entertaining Freud and look over the garden fence to see what science, the new cognitive psychology most of all, has to say on the subject. Indeed I owe some of my reflections to researchers like Saul Shiffman of the University of Pittsburgh, who busies himself with the so-called ‘tobacco chippers’ for his research; those rare, enviable individuals for whom it suffices over years or decades to smoke only one or two cigarettes a day, without ever becoming addicted. Chippers are for addiction researchers what LTS (Long Term Survivors) or Non-Progressors are for HIV researchers: their existence seems to prove that a solution to the problem is within reach. What mechanism is it that separates the lucky few from the masses? Perhaps scientists will one day find the smoker gene or the addiction gene with the help of the chippers, perhaps there’s a disposition, a switch that one just needs to flip. But scientists can’t deliver all the answers. I’m telling my story because I’m searching for a completely different explanation for why I slipped into addiction. Why did I still choose to poison myself and inflict lasting damage to my brain of my own freewill while knowing of the risks, after being fumigated by my parents, after having to watch utterly sickening anti-smoking films in year seven that ought to have inoculated me against addiction in the style of A Clockwork Orange, and even after having to watch a leg amputation on 16-mm film, why did I still choose to smoke for decades? I’m not looking for a gene. I don’t want more rats to die. I’m looking for images, stories, the sensory aspect of my addiction. I’m also aware that it won’t be enough to talk about it. I have to relearn.

  For many people, including myself, the disposition to have an evident weakness for all products containing nicotine was effectively determined while still a baby. The ways into addiction are all very different and this is precisely why it is necessary to tell them. Besides the normal ascent routes (as mountain climbers like to call them) I’ve already covered, there are some interesting alternative ones. M., who grew up in a small, backward village in Dalmatia, told me that when she hurt herself as a child she was treated with schnapps and tobacco. The cut would be washed out with home-distilled plum schnapps and plugged up with a quantity of hand cut tobacco before being bound. The tobacco would dissolve into the wound over the course of days and weeks until it had melted into her small body, or so the girl must have thought, or would even perhaps still be wet under her skin after the bandage had been taken away. M. would go on to smoke up to sixty cigarettes a day; she spent nearly all the money she made doing her bookseller apprenticeship on cigarettes.

  As I’d suffered from so-called chronic or spasmodic bronchitis since earliest childhood – a diagnosis that wasn’t really a diagnosis and was consequently never confirmed – I was sent to a health spa somewhere in southern Germany at the beginning of my second school year for three weeks, one or two years after that New Year’s Eve. The diagnosis simply described the symptom of a recurring impulsive or convulsive mucus congestion and inflammation of the bronchial tubes. Up to that point I’d always been tucked up in bed with a few consoling words whenever I had one of these spasmodic attacks of breathlessness. My breath was heavy and rattling, I actually thought I would suffocate, and for an hour coughed my mucous heart out. When I’d finally overcome the acute attack, completely lifeless and with a thin but audible whistle in my lungs, I would lie on my back as I intuitively knew that any movement, any agitation, would make an additional breath of oxygen necessary that I just couldn’t muster.

  I can barely remember this first stay at the spa. It felt like a very long time, I was glad when my parents finally drove down the driveway, crunching the gravel in front of the building to bring me back home, even if they did suddenly feel very unfamiliar to me. The following summer – and this is where my memory is far sharper – my Aunt Anna took me with her to the Frisian island of Borkum. A doctor had told my parents that the higher ozone content in the northern sea air would be good for me as the irritation would encourage expectoration, and though he hadn’t prescribed this trip he recommended it urgently.

  Most of the doctors I’ve had dealings with in my life should have their licences revoked. Incidentally, having lived in the US for many years, I have learned to really appreciate the American criminal liability system, whereby medical malpractice and incorrect diagnoses can result in absurdly high (from a European perspective) penalties and compensation pay-outs. If you have only ever dealt with European doctors you cannot possibly imagine how reassuring this threat of legal action is for patients. I still clearly remember how an orthopaedist in Cologne that treated my mother (who was effectively under his spell) told me one day when I was about twelve years old that holes had developed in the cartilage in my knees. From that day on, he said, I shouldn’t ski or ride a bicycle and must avoid using stairs, especially going down, at all costs. I should also expect to have stiff knees by the time I was thirty. He then prescribed me ten mud-packs and sent me home for what I thought would be a life of immobility. I’m now forty-four years old and have recently, as I’ve mentioned, completed a triathlon in a reasonable time, and ta
ke eight- or ten-hour mountain walks whenever it suits me. I can’t imagine how my life would have turned out if I’d followed this apparently well-regarded doctor’s instructions. Maybe a light would have switched on thirty years later and I would have understood that at the time I had had a choice between a mobile and an immobile life; a choice my mother’s orthopaedist wanted to make without thinking for two minutes about the enormous consequences that his instructions would have had on my life, not to mention the national economy. I would quite possibly have had stiff knees today.

  The good, ozonic North Sea air was what brought me to Borkum. The healthy, bracing climate was – apart from my father’s newly discovered passion for sailing – also the reason why my parents bought the mansard-roofed house in Flanders. I clearly remember my mother standing before me in the small kitchen in Cologne trying to explain the correlation to me, her eight-year-old son, as well as she could. She stood leaning against the sink unit with her legs crossed at the ankles looking very pensive. I focussed on the acrylic flowers glued to the tiles behind her while she blew smoke over my head, and after she had guided the irreversibility of my condition right before my eyes – which could, according to her, only be calmed but never cured – her gaze roved out of the window. Back then I already knew that eight kilometres away in a north-westerly direction, yellowish, acrid smoke was being emitted from the smokestack of the Bayer plant in Leverkusen, one of the biggest chemical facilities in Europe.

  It was only years later, when tennis balls were no longer white but neon green, when Empfangsanlagen in airports were no longer called Empfangsanlagen – receiving stations – but terminals, when the first forest damage reports landed in the first paper recycling bins and a huge hole suddenly opened above the Antarctic, back then, when the first progressive citizens disposed of their CFC-contaminated fridges and most of the Green politicians of the new movement stopped knitting in parliament and set aside their needles in embarrassment, that the ozone and along with it the word ‘ozone’ experienced a radical revaluation. It was at this time that citizens’ relationship with their ozone first flailed. Suddenly, from one day to the next, the harmless irritant gas became the arch enemy and the ominous term for the poison was given the extension ‘-alarm’ to form a composite that evoked the British bomber groups of World War Two. The Ozonalarm was the logical successor of the Fliegeralarm – the air raid warning; once again there was an invisible danger delivered from above that one was powerless to protect oneself from.

  I spent the days on Borkum in a sea water wave pool and wasn’t sick once. Aunt Anna took extended walks and would always bring me back something: sweets, mussels. I don’t remember much else from this holiday. Later, much later, I found out that my chronic or spasmodic bronchitis was (and is) asthma provoked by allergens. As house dust and dust mites (who love to romp in duvets, pillows and old mattresses) belonged among the provokers, I shouldn’t have been tucked up in bed during my shortness of breath or choking fits under any circumstances. It would have been far better to have sent me out to play in the garden for half an hour. I remember a big, beige-coloured woollen carpet covered in a dark brown gridded pattern in my childhood bedroom that, without straining my power of imagination, offered itself up as an extensive, very American-appearing street network for my Matchbox cars. I spent entire afternoons lying on my stomach, pushing cars along, sniffling with itchy eyes on this carpet warmed by the sun and I still have the somewhat musty, tickly scent of the unwashed natural fibres in my nose today.

  The relief I experienced on Borkum had less to do with the bracing Friesian climate than it did with the guaranteed dust and mite-free wave pool and the freshly renovated and newly furnished hotel room that my Aunt Anna paid for with her lavish Brinkmann pension.

  Three in the afternoon, M.’s out. I’m standing two steps in front of my cleared desk, the sun falls slantwise through the large window. I breathe in. I breathe out. I seek out a place just under my nose where the air streams past, I focus my attention on my breath as it passes this spot, every single molecule. My mind is like a gatekeeper making sure no one sneaks in unnoticed. I observe my air as if there were really such a thing as my air. We always believe that every noun refers to something tangible, to a creature, a thing, at least a condition. But words can deceive us, they can lead us to believe that a particular thing exists. What is it supposed to be – my breath? Does it constitute my respiration, the functional structure, the positive and negative pressure generated by the diaphragm? Or is it perhaps the forty-odd-year history of my breathing which is, despite my predisposition, quite a boring story with countless repetitions? Does it indicate the three to five hundred thousand cubic metres of air that I have breathed and – if I reach an average age – am yet to breathe? Or only a single intake of air in this moment, a huff verified with a pocket mirror – my life’s breath? Like so many words, the word breath also disintegrates as soon as it undergoes a precise inspection, practically nothing remains of it. The only thing that can be proven to exist are my lungs, whose cells are continually being replaced. And the air that I breathe in and breathe back out in a new composition. And my will to live. Even my lungs are no longer the same organ that I exposed one filterless Pall Mall after the other to when I was sixteen. Not a single cell, nothing whatsoever remembers these times. The same goes for the cilia in my bronchia, responsible for the removal of tar mucus, which were thankfully replaced long ago. Breath, breathing, breathed air: I’ve struggled with it for as long as I can remember. I could never get enough of it. Because I wanted to live. When I did sport there was no limit to my energy, but the feeling of not being able to get air was always familiar to me.

  I slowly breathe in, I slowly breathe out. I’m now completely relaxed and begin my exercise. I imagine that a grass-green pack of Salem No. 6 is lying on my desk.

  I stand there, motionless, I don’t give in to the impulse that ambushes me in this moment. I let the time that I’ve allowed myself to pass. There’s a beeping from down below, a truck is reversing in the industrial yard, the drink delivery for the Mai-Thai bar. I breathe in. I breathe out. I focus on the place under my nose. My arms hang slack at my sides. I don’t reach out. Why don’t I give in to my urge? It’s more than a desire, it’s greed. I tell myself it’s a craving. Only it’s different to the craving my therapist talks about, it’s not over after two minutes. I’ve chosen this kind of experiment because I’d like to maintain this tension over a longer period of time. I’m interested in what comes after, I want to know what comes when the two minutes are up. What lies beneath? I set out into the terra incognita of addiction.

  I slowly breathe in, I slowly breathe out. Do I reach out for the cigarettes or do I leave them there? I could take the two steps, rip open the pack, take a cigarette and light up. In less than a minute I could take the first drag and the whole nightmare would be over. But do I even have a choice? Ultimately I have placed myself in front of the desk because I have decided against the cigarettes from the outset. And yet the eventuality that I will reach out is actually accounted for within the confines of my experiment. It must be included, otherwise my restraint counts for nothing.

  I hesitate, I waver, I persevere. I don’t say yes or no. Time stands still. Nothing moves. I can’t move because I don’t have an answer to the question I’m asking myself. I’m missing an inner instruction, I have the feeling I could do myself damage, no matter my conduct, as if I could break or rupture something within myself, maybe some fibres in my heart. (One breaks the will of a person, one breaks his resistance. One pulls oneself free when one is trapped). Am I really trapped? Or can I not cope with my freedom? There’s no actual reason to do one or the other. There are the cigarettes, and here is my desire. I imagine that the desire doesn’t belong to me, but to the object of my consideration, my desired object. For a moment it seems that it’s a property of the object that I desire. My will no longer belongs to me. I shelve everything that could lead to a decision. I am completely empty.

 
; It wouldn’t hurt anyone if I took a cigarette. I don’t need it, I just want it. But I deny myself it – because I can. When it’s particularly difficult to abstain I tell myself: I can take it, but not now. I can take it in ten minutes if I feel the same as I do now. I always conduct this kind of conversation with myself in English and I imagine that it’s Milton H. Erickson, the founder of modern hypnotherapy who died in 1980, who is speaking to me in his inimitable, fatherly, serene way. If you believe, I hear Milton’s voice say, that this object means something to you, if that really is the case, then you can have it now or in a short while, you do have the option to take it, no one’s stopping you, you can do it at any time. If you leave the object for a little while, you can also have it later. You can see that it’s lying ready for you. You can sense that you can take it, it is really there. The effort is minimal, you can take it anytime, soon, it costs you practically no effort. If you concentrate on the object, you can perhaps also sense that you can leave it there. It’s not really that complicated, and you can decide soon. No matter whether you take it or not, there’s very little you need to do. You actually have it already, if you want it, you have it right before your eyes. And when you don’t want it, you don’t need to do much since it’s lying in front of you. It’s still there, like it was to begin with. Look within yourself and try to work out whether you’ve decided one way or another, try to find out what’s preferable or more important, the object lying there as it is, or the wish to take it from its place.