Eric Bergkraut has kept an intimate record of his wife’s death
Published: Tuesday, Aug 20th 2024, 10:40
العودة إلى البث المباشر
Last year, literary Switzerland lost an important voice in the person of Ruth Schweikert. Now the death journal that her husband Eric Bergkraut kept in the weeks before her death has been published. "One Hundred Days in Spring" is an ambivalent read.
People of public interest must expect that many strangers will be interested in their death. Journalists often research the circumstances against the resistance of relatives.
In the case of Swiss author Ruth Schweikert, it is the other way around: her husband wrote the book "One Hundred Days in Spring". In it, he intimately describes the course of her second bout with cancer, right up to her last breath on June 4, 2023.
Eric Bergkraut is following on from Ruth Schweikert's own illness journal from 2019: In "Days Like Dogs", she shared her experience of her first breast cancer illness with her readership at the time. The widower's new book thus legitimizes itself as a continuation of a public confrontation with the private, which was important to the author.
But now the reader steps close to the deathbed of a 59-year-old woman with cancer. The reader's gaze is inevitably voyeuristic, although there is a significant difference between the two books: In her case, the private becomes political and literary, detached from her individual fate.
"You were a poet, I am not a poet," Bergkraut writes in the book. He is a documentary filmmaker by profession. He often speaks directly to his deceased wife, recalls how they met, their love life, reveals grievances and details of family life with their sons. Bergkraut and Schweikert dealt with the latter in the comedy "We Parents", which they presented at the Locarno Film Festival in 2019. It therefore seems only logical to now share the loss of this "we" and the grief surrounding it with the world.*
*This text by Tina Uhlmann, Keystone-SDA, was realized with the help of the Gottlieb and Hans Vogt Foundation.
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