chapter announces the author's suicide intention: a red Ferrari is bought, because saving money no longer makes sense. It is about the divorce and the grief about having no contact to his two kids. Burger's last lessor was emeritus historian Jean Rudolf von Salis (= „Jérôme von Castelmur-Bondo“ in the novel). The last months of Burger's life and a review on his 46 years are described detailed in this roman a clef, he describes all coining persons. Burger's depressive and desperate moods grew with his literary acclaim, leading him to write the "Tractatus logico-suicidalis" (1988), a collection of aphorisms advocating suicide. The 1046 aphorisms are about the sentence „Gegeben ist der Tod, bitte finden Sie die Lebensursache heraus.“ (Death is given, please find the cause of life.) The title remembers Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The book about suicide was viewed by the critics with sarcasm, and the seriousness of his suicide plans were not recognized. On 28 February 1989 he committed suicide in Brunegg by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. Not until Burger's death did the critics see similarities to Jean Améry and his book Hand an sich legen (that Burger knew). Burger's early promoter Marcel Reich-Ranicki, literature critic, wrote on 3 March 1989, few days after his death, in an obituary: Hermann Burger was an artist who gave everything of himself, never held back. He was a man with a great longing for happiness. German literature has lost one of its most inventive literary artists. His work—mainly prose—was coined by very precise investigation. He e.g. has sworn the magic oath because he wanted to write about a magician (in Diabelli). The oath created a fascinating new challenge for him: Describing Diabelli's tricks without breaking the oath. Burger was very faithful in linguistic matters, too. When he was young and wanted to build his style of writing, he did copy passages out of literature (e.g. by Thomas Mann) and filled their syntax with new content. The protagonists of his novels and narrations try to describe the situation of their lives in a way that is linguistically virtuosic and in love with details. Those protagonists mostly are diseased and the receiver of their texts is very often a higher authority, e.g. the „Inspektorenkonferenz“ (inspector's conference) in "Schilten" (1976). Hermann Burger's literary estate is archived in the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern. List of works Rauchsignale (1967) poems Bork (1970) prose