Emil Zopfi
Presentation 21.9.98 International Writing Program, University of Iowa
I am Emil Zopfi from Switzerland.
But I think I'm not a typical Swiss writer, for two reasons.
- Initially I was a Electronics and Computer Engineer and until the age of 40 I worked for companies like IBM or Siemens. Many Swiss writers are teachers or have studied languages.
- I am an enthusiastic alpinist and sports climber. The average Swiss writer, however, dislikes sport and prefers red wine, Italian food and smokes pipe.
But being more serious: The typical Swiss writer doesn't exist. Switzerland is a small country with an extremely complicated political and geographical structure. We have four languages, German, French, Italian and Rumantsch and therefore we have "four literatures", as we say. The Swiss society is multicultural, 20% of our 7 Million population are immigrants and they develop the so-called fifth literature, written in dozens of different languages.
I speak Swiss German. Swiss German is only a spoken language and therefore all Swiss German writers have to write in "High German" which is in fact a foreign language. But our literature is strongly influenced by the literary currents and fashions in Germany.
When I started writing in the early 70ties, German and Swiss writers were discovering the so called "world of labour" as a new topic. For a while "Literature of the world of labour" was a strong current in German literature. It was a fact that literature before told much about the life of artists, of rich people or freaks, but almost nothing about the life of the great majority, the working class. Neither conveyor belts and computers did exist in literature nor the people who operated it. Writers hadn't access to the factories and workshops.
Therefore workers and employees were encouraged to write about their experience and tell their own stories. "Take up the pen", wrote Friedrich Duerrenmatt, one of our most important writers, in a poem. So the idea to write about my experience as a computer engineer crossed my mind.
My first novel came out 1977 and was entitled "Each minute costs 33 Francs". The plot is set in a computing centre. I tell the story of a night shift, one man is missing, the computer breaks down, the operators desperately try to restart it.
"Take up the pen" is a strong political message. It implies that everybody can be a writer and everybody has important experience to share with others. It implies that writing should reflect real life and not literature. The source of literature should be the reality not only the library. I have taken up the pen and focus of my writing is still today my personal experience.
Of course becoming a professional writer and journalist I found other topics besides of the world of labour. I wrote about very personal experiences, e.g. a book about the death of my mother. I wrote historic novels, e.g. the "The Factory Bell", telling the story of the first industrial strike in Switzerland. I wrote children's books. And I wrote about climbing and alpinism.
The story "A Cold Night on the Rock" was one of my first fiction texts about climbing. It is based on a hard experience and it is, like my first novel, the story of a desperate night. A young and an old climber reach the summit of a mountain but because of the late hour and the fog they don't find the way down and have to spend the night on the mountain face. It's a story about life and death, about fear and hope, about young and old.
Isolated on top of a mountain in a desperate situation man behave more sincere as down in the valley. They cannot hide their real character. Therefore I consider the mountain face as a stage for stories that mirror everyday's live clearly. It's a mirror that shows the truth. "Why do we climb mountains?", asks one of the protagonists the famous novel "Mountain Trip" of Ludwig Hohl who is one of the greatest Swiss writers of this century. The climber answers: "To escape prison." The mountain face is the way out of the prison but it's a prison itself.
In my story the mirror metaphor appears in the dreams of the young climber
(E.g. page 5: It was like climbing on the surface of an enormous flat mirror.)
(And page 9: Is it possible to choose any other life but a climber's, when you have seen the sun in the big walls that are like mirrors, when you have heard the sound of the wind on the ridge and the clicking of the quickdraws in the bolts in the vertical rock, when you have tasted the feeling reaching the summit after a hard fight on a great route? The whole week while working at the lathe he saw noting but those pictures; he heard the wind and he felt the cold of the night in the rocks.).
The mountain donates the writer a perfect dramatic frame: The ascent, the top, the descent are three basic parts of a plot. And so the mountain stands as a metaphor for life.
I published the story in 1976. Later I made a radio play out of it. Ten years later it became a part of the novel "The Wall of Sila", which tells not only the night but also the day before and the day after. Two years ago I translated the first version into English for the collection "The Colour of the Black Mountains". Translating is not the correct expression, I have rewritten the text completely including new developments in climbing techniques and new political viewpoints.
Swiss literature is traditionally highly political, critical and realistic. Under this aspect I'm close to the tradition that has been set off by our great writers of the last century, e.g. Gottfried Keller. We are a land of mountains and the mountain as a topic and as a metaphor is very often found in our literature. One of the first poems, written by Albrecht Haller in the 18th century, had the title "The Alps". The great English alpinists who climbed first the Swiss Alps were often also great writers. And I'm sure you remember "Heidi", the romantic children's book, written 100 years ago by Johanna Spyri. But reading modern Swiss literature you will discover that Switzerland is no longer Heidi's land.