In view of certain features of our times, one can hardly escape the impression of a growing loss of reason, of common sense, and of sound feeling. All the more worthy of attention is the primal capacity of every single human being, as a thinking creature, to find steadiness and orientation at any time in oneself and from oneself.

This site aims to place working materials at the disposal of interested fellow citizens – materials that serve engagement with two abnormalities and can contribute to critical examination and to independent, confident judgement: the abnormalities that concern every one of our fellow humans as potentially affected persons, namely the brain death concept and the presumed-consent system in the event of intended organ removals.

The fact that in the often one-sided public media presentation – usually in the context of advertising for organ donation – contents such as those set out here are scarcely mentioned or are frequently passed over, and receive little or no consideration from official information bodies, makes their free availability all the more necessary.

According to the so-called brain death concept, the death of a patient is supposed already to have occurred with the clinical finding of definitive, isolated failure of the brain organ, while the patient’s body is still being kept alive by intensive-care measures (e.g., mechanical ventilation) in its cardiac–circulatory and other organ functions: the inconceivability of a death said to have occurred in a living body.

More or less well known, the clinical picture of irreversible, isolated loss of brain function is the very precondition and the very state in which, under the Transplantation Act, organ removals “from deceased donors” may take place and in fact do take place. And this is in truth what is meant when the organ donor card states: “In the event that, after my death, donation of organs/tissues for transplantation becomes possible, I declare …”

With the other abnormality – once again being pursued at present – called the presumed-consent system, the aim is to create the possibility, if need be even without the knowledge and consent of a severely ill patient affected by loss of brain function, of legally carrying out a life-ending intrusion upon that patient’s body, life, and dying by removing his or her organs – while, for this very purpose, the body is kept alive by intensive-care measures until the organ removal that ends this state.

Under such a regime, this can be prevented only if the patient, beforehand, has declared and documented objection to such an encroachment upon his or her body and life by strangers interested in the patient’s organs – or if, depending on the legal design, relatives can credibly convey the patient’s refusal.

Thus, potentially for all affected fellow citizens, the following stand before us: the impossibility of declaring a supposed death to have occurred in a living body (brain death concept), and the inconceivable legalisation of the capacity of strangers to carry out, by surgical organ removal, a life-ending violation upon the bodies, lives, and dying of defenceless, severely ill patients – possibly even without their knowledge and consent (presumed-consent system).

The intellectual bankruptcy of the brain death concept and the moral bankruptcy of the presumed-consent system thus threaten, in principle, every fellow human being. This can be countered effectively only through the individual insight of each person.

Given these abnormalities, the author no longer considers it permissible to keep silent about his conviction that the brain death concept is a phenomenon of collective derangement, and that the presumed-consent system represents a scarcely less pathological aberration of the human being.

Readers will be able to find, on the basis of the content presented here, that any soothingly downplayed assessment of the abnormalities named could be achieved only at the price of insincerity – and even then without doing justice to these phenomena as they are.

It should also be made clear that this site is not about organ transplantation as such. That is not its subject. Nor is there any intention to influence the will of fellow humans for or against the readiness for organ donation – and thus for organ removal. This must remain for each person to decide. The legal framework permits it; and seen in that light, anyone who voluntarily and informed wishes to declare readiness for organ donation should at least be able to do so in knowledge of as many of the associated aspects as possible. This site seeks to contribute, at least, some things worth knowing in that regard.

All the more decisively, it must be made clear that the presumed-consent system constitutes an attack upon the human being – upon the body, upon dying (which still belongs to life), and upon dignity (which encompasses the body). It must therefore never be incorporated into the Transplantation Act and given force of law. This site wishes to continue a culture of discussion that accompanied the process of transplantation legislation in Germany some thirty years ago – not least in the hope of preventing the people of this country from being wrong-footed by the imposition of presumed consent, as has already happened elsewhere.

Under presumed consent it would indeed be possible, while one is still capable of decision, to lodge a binding objection against organ removal in the event of illness with definitive loss of brain function. One would, however, also be compelled to do so in order to protect oneself from violation and to prevent strangers from intervening in one’s own process of dying. – With the legalisation of the presumed-consent system, the madness looms of having actively to protect oneself against something that is not only barred by fundamental rights but to which no one has – nor can have – the slightest right.

Among the grave consequences of the brain death concept – consequences that violate human dignity and are, in their effects, almost diabolical – is the threefold killing of the human being (here in the sense of: termination of life) with completion of diagnostic brain-death determination. This does not content itself with the mere mention of its result but, before the signature line on the protocol form, ends with the prescribed sentence: “Accordingly, the death of the patient is established on …”

What is characteristic of the situation is that, in clinical routine, this does not mean that all those who, focusing on the examination process and its result, sign the protocol sheet at the end must inwardly share the appended declaration of death or be fully aware of its more concealed implications. In any case, the patient is declared dead on paper in contradiction to the observable vital signs of the body – thus, first, formally killed contrary to reality. Along with this goes, second, a juridical killing, since as a deceased person he or she has ceased to possess the legal capacity of a living person (e.g., no longer bearer of the right to life and bodily integrity; relatives’ right of funerary care). In the event of organ removal there follows – with the patient’s vital state maintained by intensive-care measures up to that point – third, the patient’s physical killing. No one has ever disputed that what remains on the operating table after organ removal is a corpse.

With its aggressive potential for harm, this entire complex of problems confronts every alert fellow citizen with the necessity and the task of critical scrutiny and of penetrating towards a reality-adequate grasp of what one encounters, beyond verbal declarations, in the clinical state of irreversible loss of brain function (IHA, brain death), in the absurdity of the brain death concept, in the event of organ removal, in the misconceived idea of the presumed-consent system, and so forth.

This also includes the clarifying examination of the relation between wording and meaning in the vocabulary and turns of phrase common in everyday discussion and in the promotion of organ donation – often one-sidedly narrowed in perspective towards potential organ recipients. The seizing of opportunities for critically deepened orientation and clarification is urgently required, lest one be swept along unawares by the whirlpool of sometimes mellifluous yet often misleading terms such as: ‘organ donation after death’, ‘organ shortage’, presumed consent as a ‘culture of organ donation’, as ‘a testament of love for humanity beyond death’, irreversible loss of brain function as a ‘reliable sign of death’, this state as a ‘death that remains hidden externally’, and the like.

A central concern of this site is to oppose the systematic denial of the life of severely ill patients with irreversible loss of brain function by the brain death concept and its grave consequences – among which is the threat to the image of the human being, and thus to the human being himself or herself.

For in the reality-remote, reductionist, brain-centred, and anthropologically stunted view of the brain death concept, the human being as a bodily–psychic–spiritual being is switched off, and central, unavoidable questions are blanked out – for example: the anthropological significance of the clinical state of irreversible loss of brain function; a realistic grasp of the essence of the living; the relation of consciousness and body; the processes in the essential domains at a person’s death; what dying under conditions of organ removal entails; what consequences the continued existence of bodily constituents in other persons after one’s own physical death might have for the deceased; and much else besides. Such further research questions and hence expanded tasks that arise from the matter itself are at least to be raised in outline.

It is the inner untruth of the brain death concept itself that virtually compels the critically exploring and recognising individual consciousness to see through its untenability – and causes its sometimes gaudy soap bubbles to burst at the lightest touch with reality.

The phenomena of the zeitgeist described can be effectively countered by unmasking recognition, but also by a more conscious grasp and preservation of human dignity – above all in looking up to the possibility and never-ending task of the human being’s knowing, and thus self-creative, appropriation of his or her essence: the higher human within the human.

Friedrich Schiller once called out to artists: “Humanity’s dignity has been placed in your hands, / Preserve it!” In our day the dignity of the human being is, to an extent perhaps never seen before, also placed in his or her own hands, self-responsibility, and self-development. In this sense, the contents of this site are entrusted to the reader’s judgement.