Contrary and Audacious

Works by Adelheid Duvanel and Fleur Jaeggy are widely displayed in bookshops at present. Now in her eighties, Fleur Jaeggy is this year’s winner of the Grand Prix for Swiss Literature. Adelheid Duvanel, who died in 1996 at the age of 60, also received multiple awards. Yet both of these Swiss writers have only been rediscovered in recent years. Fortunately, the two publishing houses Limmat Verlag and Suhrkamp Verlag are re-issuing Jaeggy and Duvanel’s works.

But why did these authors previously sink into obscurity? Why have they (to date) not been part of the canon of Swiss literature? And what about all the other older Swiss female authors? Why are writers such as Maja Beutler, Claudia Storz, Gertrud Wilker and Anna Felder so little known? Why is Max Frisch’s Homo Faber and Dürrenmatt’s Physiker read in higher education institutions and university seminars, but not Verena Stefan’s Häutungen or Gertrud Leutenegger’s Vorabend? Or texts by Duvanel and Jaeggy? These were the questions that Germanists Valerie Meyer and Nadia Brügger delved into in their research project on women authors.

The project resulted in the book Widerstand und Übermut. Schweizer Schriftstellerinnen der 1970er-Jahre (“Resistance and audacity. Swiss women writers of the 1970s”). The book’s authors speak of “buried genealogies”, lines of tradition among women writers that exist but are barely visible.

In their attempt to trace these lines, networks, connections and informal structures, the two literary scholars explored how the feminist movement began to fight back against patriarchal society norms in the 70s, how women authors came to together in organized groups, developed their own forms of literary expression and used their writing to denounce patriarchal power structures.

With this project, the two researchers have continued the work of an older generation of Germanists, women such as Elsbeth Pulver and Beatrice von Matt, who sought to reappraise literature by women and bring it to the fore. “We want to close the gaps in Swiss literary history, where women have repeatedly been marginalized, suppressed or excluded,” Nadia Brügger says.

It was very difficult for women authors to establish themselves within the patriarchal society of the 70s. “The public intellectual was male, that was the accepted understanding,” says Brügger. “The idea that a mother could simultaneously be an intellectual who comments on socio-political issues was barely conceivable back then.” In fact, it was only with the introduction of women’s suffrage in 1971 that women were accorded at least some degree of involvement in political and societal discourse, even though the traditional gender norms stubbornly persisted in people’s heads.

Adelheid Duvanel encapsulates it succinctly in her letter to Maja Beutler: “... can you picture Friedrich Dürrenmatt doing the hoovering? Or Max Frisch? I don’t want to compare myself to these eminent figures, but let’s face it, people can easily picture Maja Beutler and Adelheid Duvanel hoovering their apartment.... That’s simply astonishing.”

The call for female self-determination stirred, or rather shook, Switzerland up well before the 1970s. Iris von Roten’s book Frauen im Laufgitter, published in 1958, was feminism avant la lettre, so to speak. Even back then, von Roten demanded gender equality, which sparked outrage across the country. Following the publication, she experienced widespread rejection as an author and withdrew from public life.

Through activism, solidarity and autonomous organization, the feminist movement of the 70s did subsequently succeed in partially undermining the patriarchal structures, putting up resistance and creating their own writing spaces where feminist concerns could be aired.

Meyer and Brügger reveal how the literary landscape of the time gradually enabled access and participation through networks and jobs for women in publishing. “For literature, Edition R+F played a significant role,” says Valerie Meyer. Through the Gosteli Women’s Archive, the two scholars had access to the estate of the publisher Ruth Mayer and were able to bring the history of the publishing company Edition R+F to light.

It was thanks to the publishing director Ruth Mayer’s dedication that many women authors were able to get their books into print at all. Mayer directly approached women authors and valued previously unpublished texts. Today, the publishing house “sechsundzwanzig” run by Jil Erdmann has picked up the thread with a similar orientation, championing feminist literature as well as artistic solidarity and visibility.

Mutual exchange and networking were also very important for the growing number of female voices and enabled poetological discourse. Brügger and Meyer exemplify this with the correspondence between Adelheid Duvanel and Maja Beutler, as well as the work and dedication of writer and media pioneer Laure Wyss.

The feminist awakening in the 70s achieved a lot. “Numerous debuts of women authors were published and pioneering works were written,” says Nadia Brügger. But much of it has sunk into obscurity since. Literature by women was readily written off as faddish or trivial. Female literary voices were marginalized in public discourse and subjects such as domestic violence, lesbian love, physicality, belonging and family life were disregarded as private and emotional – their political dimension, persisting to this day, was never considered.

“It was important to us to uncover the lines of tradition,” the Germanists comment. What is our writing of today built on? The women authors of the 1970s anticipated much of what today is seen as a self-evident part of public debate.

Verena Stefan’s 1975 book Häutungen, for instance, was a groundbreaking work. It was received with equal measures of enthusiasm and controversy and was published in English under the title Shedding. Stefan went against every convention and wrote in a radically feminist voice.

The book, which consists of individual autobiographical accounts, discusses the feminist liberation from prevailing patriarchal power structures. Stefan outlines this liberation by means of the protagonist’s emancipation and sexual transformation, but also experiments with a style of writing that unmasks the patriarchal structure of language and radically departs from it. Stefan thus preempted the feminist language criticism of the linguist Luise F. Pusch.

Another epoch-making work, albeit in a very different vein, was Gertrud Leutenegger’s debut Vorabend, also published in 1975. The author said of the book that it “picked up on something that was in the air”. The novel describes a shift in perspective experienced by the protagonist as she walks the route of the May Day demonstrations in Zurich on the evening before the event. Strolling through the city, the young woman’s attention is drawn to the margins, the things on the sidelines that link to her own memories and associations. Leutenegger thus brings the repressed, forgotten and invisible to the fore, juxtaposing the individual with the collective.

The works by Leutenegger and Stefan were cult books back then and received much attention, yet they are not (so far) part of the canon of Swiss literature. Over the course of their research project, Valerie Meyer and Nadia Brügger trawled through countless pages of paper in the Swiss literary archive and unearthed many a treasure. 

For Valerie Meyer, the early prose of Erika Burkart, who is better known as a lyricist, was a significant discovery, in particular her works Rufweite and Moräne. “In Burkart’s non-linear, fragmented style of writing, what initially appears unconnected becomes interlinked over the course of reading the work,” explains Meyer. “It made for an exciting reading experience.” 

One of Brügger’s personal favorites is Trocadero by Hanna Johansen. The novel’s protagonist is placed in an inexplicable situation, a palace-like labyrinth, where she is at the mercy of mystifying instructions. “The fundamental situation in the novel mirrors the existential experience that women are exposed to in society,” says Brügger.

Johansen’s Trocadero is currently only available in French translation, while Erika Burkart’s novel Rufweite, Erica Pedretti’s debut Harmloses, bitte and Liebe Livia by Laure Wyss are all out of print – as are many other works, including those by less well-known women authors. The material of an entire generation of female writers is lying dormant in the nation’s archives, waiting to be retrieved and rediscovered.

In the last part of their book, the researchers present a selection of works by women authors, providing an impetus for further reading. For educational institutes, higher education settings and universities, and even for publishers and cultural institutions, the book is an ideal source of inspiration and encouragement to keep the memory of Swiss women’s literature alive.

Picture credits: Unless otherwise stated, the pictures are privately owned by Yvonne Böhler.