GERMANY:IT COULD be a home movie shot by a loving son. In it, 79-year-old Bettina Schardt jokes about getting old before becoming melancholy and telling how her bad hips make it difficult to keep mobile. Sometimes, she says, she goes without meals because it's too hard to get up, writes Derek Scally in Berlin.
The nodding man sitting beside her could be her son, but he is Roger Kusch, former state justice minister in Hamburg and Germany's most prominent right-to-die campaigner.
The video made last Saturday is Bettina Schardt's last testament.
"I can't say I've really suffered," says Ms Schardt, an unmarried and childless retired nurse.
She is not terminally ill or in pain: she has had a long and happy life, but wants to die now because she's afraid of a slow, lonely decline among strangers in a nursing home.
After half an hour, Mr Kusch is seen leaving the apartment. With the camera still running and after a short "auf wiedersehen", Ms Schardt takes a cocktail of prescription drugs. Within minutes she is lying dead in her apartment in Würzburg, northern Bavaria.
Three hours later, Mr Kusch returned for his video camera.
"For years I have campaigned for self-determination to the last breath," he said after showing extracts from the video to shocked journalists.
He told how Ms Schardt had contacted him after talking first to Dignitas, the Swiss right-to-die organisation that helps about 140 people to kill themselves annually, more than half of whom are German. "It's unworthy of a modern, enlightened society to have to send people who want to die to Zürich," he said.
With his public provocation, Mr Kusch hopes to make the right to die a "central pillar of a modern society . . . not something only discussed in theory at seminars".
The lawyer is used to provocation: last March he presented a "suicide machine" that looks like a kitchen radio but allows the user to self-administer a sedative, then a dose of poison. The machine has yet to go on the market, he said, because of the difficulty posed by a lay user attempting to locate a suitable vein for the drip.
Jörg-Dietrich Hoppe, president of the German Medical Association, condemned Mr Kusch as "an egotistical cynic [who] has exploited the loneliness of an old lady in his craving for recognition". German politicians, too, reacted with horror to the video and plan to close loopholes in the law that will prevent Mr Kusch from facing prosecution.
Though euthanasia - "killing on demand" in German - is illegal, providing passive assistance is not, providing the assistant is not present at the time of death.
Ms Schardt's suicide comes days after prominent Social Democrat politicians came out in favour of "living wills", obliging doctors to respect the wishes of patients for treatment, or to be allowed to die.
Euthanasia is a particularly sensitive taboo in Germany, where more than 100,000 mentally ill and handicapped people were put to death by the Nazis.