A REMARKABLE anthology of suicide letters is fast becoming a Christmas bestseller in Germany, signalling a new fascination and openness about a centuries-old taboo.

Although the book, Ich möchte jetzt schließen (Let me finish) is not exactly a typical stocking filler, it fits into a trend that is gripping Europe.

The final odyssey of terminally ill British patients to a suicide rendezvous in Switzerland has become the focus of chatrooms dedicated to the techniques of killing oneself. In addition, prominent suicides — such as that of Hannelore Kohl, the wife of the former German chancellor, who had an allergy to sunlight — are becoming the raw material for theatre directors and popular novelists. A musical depicting the suicide of Frau Kohl in 2001 is due to premiere just before Christmas in the Bonn opera.

However, the anthology, compiled by Udo Grashoff, a medical historian, is not a sensationalist gimmick and for many readers is providing real insights into the act of suicide.

Germany — with its high rates of suicide in the former East Germany — is in mid-field in the European suicide league, below Estonia, Hungary and Finland, but significantly above Britain’s reported figure and well ahead of Mediterranean countries. Officially, there are more than 11,000 suicides each year in Germany — the unofficial figure is almost double that — compared with almost 7,000 fatal car accidents. In Britain, the suicide figure averages about 5,500 a year.

Yet the suicide taboo has prevented serious analysis and public discussion of the phenomenon. As a result, suicide chatrooms have opened, disclosing details about how long a rope has to be to hang oneself. Inhibitions are disappearing.

“The moral condemnation of the churches, but also the heroic description of suicide by some philosophers, has led to a distorted view of the phenomenon,” Dr Grashoff said. “At last we’re coming round to seeing suicide as neither particularly honourable nor scandalous, just a normal expression of failure that happens in our society.”

The Roman Catholic Church in Germany banned the burial of suicides until 1983: Berlin’s suicide cemetery is hidden in the Grunewald Forest, full of chambermaids who killed themselves after being made pregnant by their employers.

Many of the suicides related in the book explicitly ask relatives to disguise the cause of death. Elisabeth Geuter, a woman doctor, took her seven pedigree cats to an exhibition in Switzerland. Then she wrote a farewell letter that reads like the basis of a thriller.

For the police, she set out the precise dosages of the drugs that killed her: Kalypnon, Cyclobarbital and Lepinal, and asked the chief inspector not to order an autopsy.

In a separate letter she urged her husband to tell their social circle that she had died in a car crash. “They will believe it — the November weather, the fog, my driving skills.” She declares that she only ever loved her husband — and reminds him to pick up the dry cleaning.

A 28-year-old fireman tried to slit his wrists, then to hang himself and finally set himself on fire. He wrote the times of each stage of his staggered death in his suicide note: 9.00, 9.30, 9.45 and finally 13.00 hours. In fact, he died from his wounds nine days later.

A policeman of 26 wrote to his fiancée: “Dear Lissy, tell my mother she should put the garden gnome on my grave.” The East German policeman had lost official documents and was worried that the communist authorities would send him to jail.

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