DU STIRBST NICHT (You aren't dying / You won't die) won Kathrin Schmidt the Deutscher Buchpreis in 2009 and attracted more media attention to her person than any of the poetry and novels for which she had won several prizes previously in her career. It is the writer's second novel after suffering a brain hemorrhage in 2002 that put her in a coma from which she regained consciousness after two weeks, at the age of forty-four finding herself hemiplegic, having undergone major surgery, and—suffering from Broca's aphasia—unable to speak. The narrative begins with Schmidt's alter ego–protagonist Helene Wesendahl waking up to find herself in exactly this state. The author bestows much verifiable biographical data onto her protagonist, and, by giving her the surname Wesendahl, she creates a name that is literally “close to home,” Wesendahl being a district of Altlandsberg, which lies to the northeast of the author's home city, Berlin. In a complimentary step, the reader of Du stirbst nicht confirms the resemblance of author and protagonist that is thus suggested through their crucial contextual knowledge of Schmidt's own stroke, which—not unlike in the case of Roche's trauma writing—may indeed haven driven them to pick up the text in the first instance.

Despite this resemblance—or perhaps precisely because of it— Schmidt closely guards her professional identity as an author, especially once having won the Buchpreis for Du stirbst nicht. Against the backdrop of an increasing number of publications of autobiographically inspired illness narratives, Schmidt insisted her book was different, effectively arguing for it to be considered as real or proper, that is serious, literature. Indeed, for Schmidt, the majority of illness texts do not qualify as literature (in a traditional sense). The author is frank in her explanation of why she dissociates herself from writers such as Christoph Schlingensief, Georg Diez, or Jurgen Leinemann, all of whom also published in 2009, and in conjunction with this rejects an understanding of her novel as an example of writing as therapy: “Ich habe das nicht als Therapie angesehen.