Switzerland from Within
Malcolm Pender does away with stereotypes in his survey of modern Swiss literature

Swiss-German literature has enjoyed an unprecedented status within the larger corpus of literature written in German during the past fifty years. The world renown of Max Frisch (1911-1991) and Friedrich Dürrenmatt (1921-1990) was based substantially on the plays Der Besuch der alten Dame (1956) (The Visit: A Tragi-Comedy), Biedermann und die Brandstifter (1958) (The Fireraisers), Andorra (1961) (Andorra) and Die Physiker (1962) (The Physicists) which mocked consumerism and political complacency, targets to be found well beyond Switzerland. Stiller (1954) (I'm not Stiller), Frisch's major European novel, which challenged, within the framework of other themes, a specifically Swiss self-perception for being stagnant and backward-looking and for refusing to re-examine values in the light of changing circumstances, was massively influential for subsequent Swiss-German literature. Both authors exemplify the fact that post-1945 Swiss-German writing has been frequently, and often fiercely, critical of a social and political system whose success in terms of stability and wealth has been the envy of Europe, and this is a feature which makes this literature accessible and relevant to a wider readership.

Other talented writers, less well-known outside German-speaking Europe, also contributed to the status of Swiss-German literature during this half-century. Adolf Muschg (b. 1934) and Peter Bichsel (b. 1935) are the most prominent of those who started publishing in the 1960s and are, in some respects, the most contrasting: Muschg, hugely productive and of great thematic fecundity and linguistic dexterity, was awarded the prestigious German 'Büchnerpreis' (the Georg Büchner Prize) in 1994, the third Swiss since Frisch (1958) and Dürrenmatt (1986), and his latest novel, Sutters Glück (2001), has enjoyed great success; Bichsel, who achieved immediate fame in 1964 with his collection of stories Eigentlich möchte Frau Blum den Milchmann kennenlernen (1964) (And Really Frau Blum Would Very Much Like to Meet the Milkman) and who has described himself as 'a writer of short pieces', has published relatively little but is equally highly regarded, not least for his mock literary biography Cherubin Hammer und Cherubin Hammer (1999).

In the 1970s other writers followed Muschg and Bichsel so that literature, with its counter-models, increasingly questioned the relevance and validity of the myths of official Switzerland and depicted the existential concerns of those living within this capitalist ethos. After 1971, when female suffrage at federal level was finally introduced, an increasing number of women writers showed in their work the effect of social forces on the individual. For Gertrud Leutenegger (b. 1948), whose novel Vorabend (1975) depicted the strains, especially for women, between the private and the public self in a society with strong unwritten laws, literature thus becomes 'an instrument for establishing our reality'. With this more radical view of writing went an altering perception of the function of the writer and a reassessment of Swiss literature written in the earlier part of the twentieth century - notably in respect of the work of Robert Walser (1878-1956). A reversal of the view that Switzerland is uniquely worthy of emulation, partly because of the assumption that her diversity of languages promotes social cohesion and partly because of her prosperity, occurred, notably in the major novel Die Rückfahrt (1977) by E.Y.Meyer (b. 1946); here the country itself, showplace of modern technologically based consumerism which has severed links to the repository of alternative wisdom offered by history, becomes a negative model for a world increasingly in thrall to the performance ethic.

Well on into the 1980s literature continued to address itself to restrictive and reductive aspects of society, to depict, for example, economic forces which appear either to be beyond political regulation or which a political elite is conniving to promote. The Swiss tradition of direct democracy figures prominently in the image of the country, yet again and again the work of, for example, Otto F. Walter (1928-1992) or Jörg Steiner (b. 1930) shows individual helplessness quite at odds with any notion of meaningful political control: there is, in the narratives of these authors, a perceived lack of protection for the individual in the political framework, and at the same time, those elements in the individual which are steadfastly resistant to social and political manipulation are identified and articulated. Often writers find contemporary significance by reworking traditional Swiss-German literary motifs, such as that of the returnee to Switzerland, Beat Sterchi (b. 1949), Blösch (1983) (Cow), or that of the Swiss house, Thomas Hürlimann (b. 1950) Das Gartenhaus or Gerhard Meier (b. 1917), Land der Winde (1990). In all these cases the motif becomes a vehicle for depicting concerns wider and deeper than, as often in the past, those simply involving the Swiss context.

The century ended with painful revisions of Swiss self-perception, mainly in relation to the country's role during the Nazi era. However, if older writers have continued to be exercised intellectually and emotionally by features of Switzerland, younger writers, because of their different historical experience, treat these features more dispassionately as paradigms for constraints which the daily reality of any Western advanced industrial society places on the individual. This is the case with two noteworthy arivals of the 1990s, Peter Weber (b. 1968) with Der Wettermacher (1993) and Zoë Jenny (b. 1972) with Das Blütenstaubzimmer (1997) (The Pollen Room).

Nonetheless, the formative influence exerted on the Swiss-German writer by the historical and political traditions of the country manifests itself in setting, theme and motif. But, as is the case with literature written in German elsewhere, the best writing from German-speaking Switzerland acquires universal validity and the Swiss point of reference becomes the model for a world beset by problems of environmental damage, rapid economic and political change and individual disquiet. For this reason, Swiss-German literature, especially of the last fifty years, deserves to be more widely known than is possible from the relatively slim corpus of work translated into English (indicated with titles in English). new books in german has, since its inception, showcased so many contemporary Swiss-German books with short presentations which, hopefully, will lead to many more translations of the good stories available and to reprints of existing ones.

Malcolm Pender is Emeritus Professor of German Studies at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, and is co-founder and co-editor of Occasional Papers in Swiss Studies.