Brothers

 My brother Heinrich and I come from a family of six children. Heinrich is the oldest, I am the second oldest. Even as a child, Heinrich stood out because he was not very active and always let others do things for him. My father had built up a successful household goods business in an Austrian provincial town in the south of the country and then did the same in Vienna, where we grew up. But he kept the shop in the provincial town. The Vienna shop was very successful, grew bigger and bigger and at some stage had ten employees.

After graduating from high school, Heinrich was employed in the Vienna shop, and I followed a little later. When my father died, we both became equal owners of the business and it went very well for many years. But there was always tension because Heinrich didn't get on with the staff and in the end, he just concentrated on the bookkeeping in the background. I didn't realise for a long time that he was making a lot of mistakes until one day we had the tax office in the shop and were notified of fines. Heinrich was very angry about it, felt unfairly treated and ran away.

As it turned out later, he had immediately taken the train to the other business in the province and had not continued at a transfer station, but had gone to a church. There he had started to cry and scream violently. He told a priest who tried to calm him down that someone was trying to poison him, but could not be calmed. The police and ambulance were called to the scene and he was taken to a nearby psychiatric hospital.

It turned out that he had apparently been developing a persecution complex for several years. He confided in me that he was being sexually abused by a shoemaker who had a shop near our store and that the cook at the restaurant across from our store, where he had always had his lunch, put poison in his food. He could hear the voice of a lawyer who was preparing a lawsuit against him. I have to say that I hadn't noticed any of this. It was only clear that he had withdrawn into a small room in the shop to do his bookkeeping and no longer spoke to anyone. It hadn't occurred to me that it was a mental illness.

After this incident, he returned to the business after some time. He told me that he was taking medication. He always trusted me, but not his siblings, who had broken off contact with him long before. I tried to burden him as little as possible with difficult tasks so that, without letting him notice, he had a protected workplace in some way.

It wasn't easy, but it worked for a few years until one day he started shouting on the street in front of the shop and accused the chef at the restaurant across the street of trying to poison him. He was admitted to a psychiatric hospital again. After his release, he told me that he was being irradiated in his apartment and that's why he had covered the walls with metal plates, which didn't help much though, as he said. When the house was sold, he had to rent a different apartment, which I helped him with and he willingly accepted the help. There too, he covered the walls with metal plates. He then moved out of this apartment as well because the metal plates didn't help. The same thing happened in the new apartment. He moved a total of six times. Sometimes he slept in the bathtub to be better protected from the radiation. Over the years he was repeatedly admitted to a psychiatric hospital.

The business was ultimately sold, and we are both retired today. In the meantime, I managed to persuade him to move into a sheltered housing facility. There he couldn’t put metal plates on the walls, but because he is taking medication, he seems to accept this. We meet about once a month. I organise the meetings as uncomplicated as possible, and I do it this way: I know that he regularly goes to a church at certain times and sits there for hours, motionless, at a side altar. I then go there and just sit down next to him and we say almost nothing. That way, he knows that I am there for him, without me wanting to correct him about the delusions that he still has and occasionally expresses when we meet. I have learned to simply acknowledge his strange ideas.