A short ABC of writers in Switzerland

Ambrose, David. The man who turned into himself, 1993. Ambrose, born on 21 February 1943, was born in rural working-class Lancashire but studied law in Oxford and has lived for decades in Switzerland, married to a Swiss artist Lauren Ambrose, from 1979 until her death in 2019. His credits cover script work on “at 20 least films, four stage plays and many hours of television”.

These include the controversial mockumentary Alternative 3 (1977), described in the Guinness Book of Television Facts and Feats as “the biggest hoax in television drama”, about an international effort to escape global warming on a doomed planet Earth by establishing a colony on Mars.

I don’t know whether Elon Musk saw it, but many viewers apparently took the scientific fantasy as literally true and phoned government offices in alarm. The scare may remind you of Orson Welles’ 1938 radio spoof War of the Worlds. The two were already friends.

Ambrose had met Welles on set in Romania when he was 25, and the great director became a lasting friend and mentor who gave him a “one-on-one course on screenwriting”.

David Ambrose

But Ambrose seems to have vanished from public view since 2019 when he published his memoir A Fate Worse than Hollywood, with anecdotes about a galaxy of stars.

He had the bad luck to choose an unbeatable title for his first novel. Based on the many worlds theory of quantum physics, it’s “a brilliant feast of mental analysis” according to one reviewer — “disturbing but also exhilarating”.

He wrote many novels after that based on the human implications of advanced physics theories. I recommend dipping into the 166 reviews of the novel on goodreads.com if only for the vehement criticism as well as ecstatic notes, such as “fascinating”, “a great mind-bending mystery”, and “Do NOT read this book”, “Prose this bad should be a punishable offense.” It will teach you not to trust everything readers write.

Bichsel, Peter. Eigentlich möchte Frau Blum den Milchmann kennenlernen/And Really Frau Blum Would Very Much Like to Meet the Milkman, 1964. Who could have guessed such a thin collection of 21 short stories – some 60 pages in all – could have been such a success? That is, winner of the premium German-language Gruppe 47 prize and selling over 200,000 copies in a couple of years. For the 60th anniversary of its publication, a 163-page edition added new stories and archival material to “one of the classic works of short prose in 20th-century German literature”.

Bichsel, born the son of an artisan in 1934, died just short of his 90th birthday on 15 March 2025 in a retirement home in Solothurn, the Northern Swiss town where he was a school teacher and lived for much of his life.

He has been described as a master of the miniature, and even his later novels were slim, though never slight, while focusing on minor incidents of life. Spoiler alert: Frau Blum never gets to know the milkman and communicates with him solely with her food orders (signs of an earlier time when men delivered milk and took orders for groceries).

Peter Bichsel

Bichsel married in 1956. The couple had a daughter born that year and a son the year after. From 1968 Bichsel was able to make a living as a journalistic commentator, often on Swiss life. From 1974 to 1981 he was an advisor to Swiss Social-Democrat Cabinet Minister Willy Ritschard.

In all he published dozens of books of stories and more than 1,000 columns. At 82 he told an interviewer he had stopped writing after having a stroke affecting his vision. However, "I’ve never been a passionate writer," he insisted. "I consider myself terribly overrated."

The Swiss literary journalist Martin Ebel noted: "I’ve yet to hear anyone ever speak badly of Bichsel."

But the author remained critical of Swiss self-satisfaction: "Switzerland believes nothing can happen to it. We overestimate our popularity. We overestimate our power. We continue to live on the goodwill of others, our prominent little pinprick on the map."

One of Bichsel's columns in the 1980s was entitled "Geneva is in Switzerland". A friend in Frankfurt asked him what was going on in the Swiss city. Bichsel didn't know what the man was talking about. It turned out his friend was referring to disarmament talks. "What my German friend could not have known is how far Geneva is for us Swiss-Germans," Bichsel observes.

Geneva enables Swiss in other parts of the country to feel secure. "Other parts of the world have problems, but they are not our concern. There is where the problem of refugees is found, there is where you find the problem of world hunger, the problem of civil war. We all believe too much in our [safe little] island."

Canetti, Elias. Die Blendung(Bedazzlement)/Auto-da-Fé, 1935. “One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century,” according to goodreads.com, was Canetti’s only fiction. He was awarded the 1981 Nobel Prize in Literature "for writings marked by a broad outlook, a wealth of ideas and artistic power". One reader accurately describes this early work as a “grand cynically modernistic novel”.Another comments: “The unrelenting comic irony suggests that everyone is deceiving not only everyone else, but also themselves.”

Elias Canetti

The underlying message is clear: “Writing during the ascendancy of fascist and communist totalitarianism in the 1930's, fiction is the only effective tool for overcoming the insanity of ideological logic.”

Professor Marjorie Perloff explains: “Canetti’s novel, written shortly after Hitler came to power in Germany, can be read as a parable of the Nazi destruction of traditional intellectual and aesthetic values in favor of the New Order.”

Salman Rushdie observed: “The remorseless quality of the comedy builds one of the most terrifying literary worlds of the century.” On the other hand, another reviewer declared: “Bah I really hated this would not even pass this to my worst enemy.”

Born in Ruse, Bulgaria, to a Sephardic Jewish family, Canetti (1905-1994) spent much of his life after 1980 between London and Switzerland, where he had lived as the only boy in a boarding school. Canetti describes his two years at the boarding school in Zurich, from 1919 to 1921, as “a time without fear” and “the only perfectly happy years” of his life.

By the age of seven, Canetti spoke Ladino (medieval Judeo-Spanish), Bulgarian, English, and some French. His mother insisted he also learn German. He also learned Swiss-German (which his mother despised) at the boarding school. For his mother he wrote a five-act verse tragedy in Latin with an inter-linear German translation for her, filling 121 pages. In 1944 he said he would continue to write in German despite the Nazis “because I am Jewish”.

His wife Venetiana "Veza" Taubner-Calderon Canetti (born on 21 December 1897 in Vienna) was a writer, too, but her works were only published under her own name posthumously. They married in 1934. She died in London at 65. Canetti later married Hera Buschor (1933-1988). Their daughter Johanna, born in 1972, has published a dual-language volume of classic French short stories in German.

Canetti took a chemistry PhD in Vienna in 1920. He also first conceived of his novel when he was 24. When published, the book was praised by Thomas Mann and Hermann Broch. He published nothing except a play between 1938 when he fled Vienna until 1960 when the 495-page Crowds and Power appeared, translated two years later into English. The goodreads site says: “It explores Shiite festivals and the English Civil war, the finger exercises of monkeys and the effects of inflation in Weimar Germany.”

Susan Sontag records that the 1960 book speaks of Hitler only indirectly and mentions Freud only in a footnote. Wikipedia’s entry says: “It reads a bit like a manual written by someone outside the human race explaining to another outsider in concise and highly metaphoric language how people form mobs and manipulate power.”It adds: “This work remains important for the insights it provided into the Eastern European upheaval [of 1989] which can be understood within the framework Canetti puts forth.” Other studies link it to the 21st-century’s US politics.

Zurich’s Zentralbibliothek (Central Library) has 130 boxes of his unpublished papers, including notes from his research for Crowds and Power still remaining sealed.

He was notoriously involved briefly with the English novelist Iris Murdoch (1919-1994), and reportedly appears as the mysterious and powerful, charismatic but sinister men in her novels. The Flight from the Enchanter is dedicated to Canetti. Murdoch’s husband called him “the primal power figure. Iris's one-time lover, tyrant, dominator and master. Teacher too, and inspiration. The great all-knowing Dichter”. He was also called “the god-Monster of Hampstead” by his biographer. But according to Julian Preece, “his name was the last Murdoch recognised two months before she died.”

Canetti’s posthumous memoir from the sealed papers, released with his daughter’s permission in 2003, was dismissive of Murdoch’s later writing, particularly her preoccupation with Oxford types. In turn Murdoch wrote an unpublished novel entitled The Monster, described as an excoriating fictional portrait of Canetti, though the papers apparently show her as the pursuer in the relationship.

One scholar, by contrast, suggests Canetti's dismissive remarks stemmed from his frustration that Murdoch published 26 novels while he had only one to his name. And in London’s literary circles, the only Englishman who had read Die Blendung after Canetti first sought refuge was the Sinologist Arthur Waley. Canetti remarked: "Imagine what it means in a large country, which for me was the country of Shakespeare and Dickens, to have one single reader."

Hohl, Ludwig. Bergfahrt/Ascent, 1975. “The best book about mountaineering” according to one critic, though its 100 pages apparently also read like a parable of human striving. First drafted in 1926, it was rewritten at least seven times over the next five decades. The translation in 2012 was the first of his voluminous works from a lifetime of writing to appear in English.

Hohl (1904-1980), son of a pastor, born in Glarus, famously lived in poverty in a Geneva basement from 1954 to 1974, suffering from alcoholism. He was married five times. Critic and film director Alexander J. Seiler said after his death: “Everything that Hohl wrote took place in the early morning hours, after four hours of sleep following drunkenness, in a lucidity that was only achievable for him at the price of his drunkenness.”

Ludwig Hohl

His fellow Swiss author Adolf Muschg stressed the accessibility of Hohl’s stories, as distinct from his reputation as a difficult writer in his philosophical notes. “They should not just be found in anthologies. They should be published in school readers. They can show young readers how powerful language can be.”

Hohl himself had been expelled from school for his alleged bad influence on other students. The first volume of his Notizen (Notes) sold less than 200 copies. As a result, the publisher refused to publish his second volume. Hohl sued and won, but this book did just as badly.

An inheritance improved his circumstances in later life. But he suffered several physical illnesses and only in his last decade did he begin to receive literary prizes. Despite the public admiration of major Swiss authors, however, wikipedia reports: “Hohl's influence remains extremely limited. Most of his works are out of print.”

Hohler, Franz. 111 einseitige Geschichten (111 one-page stories), 1983. Zurich cabarettist and author Franz Hohler (born in 1943) indulged his pleasure in short stories by publishing 111 of them – each a short page long – in his 40th year, from Franz Kafka to John Lennon, including Bichsel and Canetti, as well as himself, though not Hohl. Bavarian radio described it as “a book you can read standing in the bus or subway: an ideal pillowbook for overworked brains with high standards”.

Living in the Swiss Alps, Peter Hulm is along-time reporter, editor and information consultant for international organizations. He also has a M.A. in Mass Communications Research from Leicester University.