The redemption of my brother is at hand

Cyman Dahlem (53) my younger and only brother (*1967) spends his days doing — nothing… Well, he does something: he gets up in the morning around 7:00. Leaves the home of his mother, our by now 80 year old mother Oda where he has been living in the main front room of 40 square meters since 1999. Her ex-husband the well-kown international art-dealer Franz Dahlem begged her for over a year to take in their mentally ill son, before that he was for 5 years on the street, a lost young man, who received the diagnosis of “paranoid shizophrenia” in his early twenties. I remember well in the summer of 1990 when I visited him then in Düsseldorf — I was about to go to Israel where I wanted to come up with a Ph.D. thesis, and he had begun “strange talk” about the KGB spying on him, about him needing to suffer for the whole family etc. A year before then he had broken down and cried, begging me “not to leave him” but to stay in Germany. Our other brother Filipp had died in 1984 at 19, when Cyman was 16 and a half. He had found him dead in his room…

Cyman leaves his mother’s apartment early each morning and wanders the streets of downtown Cologne, Germany — a city of about 1 million people. He picks up the left-over alcohol bottles from the bottles on the streets of the richest country in the world; he imbibes their remains. He brings in the bottles for the deposit value. Heets his legal guardian, Mr. Heidemann, once a week on Monday mornings at 9:00 and receives 40 Euro per week, which he uses to buy strong alcohol “Kornklar 39%” and “dope” (grass) from a…