Ludwig Hohl’s texts from his estate bear witness to intoxicated years
Published: Thursday, Nov 16th 2023, 11:20
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The work of Ludwig Hohl (1904-1980) has remained an insider tip to this day. In the run-up to the 120th anniversary of his birth on April 4, 2024, four volumes of texts from his estate have been published. They shed a dazzling light on the author.
Ludwig Hohl is an author of pithy aphorisms. "Some know nothing. Others do not understand what they know." This is a quote from "Notizen", his magnum opus. Even better known is this splinter of thought: "Switzerland suffers from premature reconciliation, which, strictly speaking, is nothing other than superficiality."
Rigor of thought and radicalism are trademarks of Hohl's prose. His best-known book, "Bergfahrt", stands for this. It tells of a hike into the mountains that leads inexorably to destruction. Hohl tells the story with a stylistic conciseness that also resonates with something magical. This gives the story an existential power that also makes a deep impression on flatlanders.
The Montparnasse scene
Four texts that remained unfinished shed new light on Hohl, who had to assert himself against external and internal resistance throughout his life. At the age of 18, he fled his parental home to emigrate and fulfill his dream of becoming a writer. In the 1920s, he led an intoxicating existence in the fashionable Montparnasse district of Paris, oscillating between dream and failure, friendship and loneliness. However, he was unable to make a living from writing and remained dependent on help from home.
The novella "The Strange Turn", written in 1929, is also set in Montparnasse. With intimate intensity, it follows a painter who vacillates between work and drunkenness. When the art dealer Schwänzel appears in his studio, he gives him his new paintings in exchange for a few "Fränklein", which he uses to buy alcohol.
It is a cramped existence that Hohl captures here. Anna Stüssi calls it a "livre ivre" in the epilogue: "a protocol of a state of emergency that stumbles and flies along in tirades and gyrations". However, the author himself was not satisfied with the result. He left the manuscript lying around, revised it from time to time over the years and finally, presumably around 1980, censored and mutilated it himself.
For this reason, it is now missing several pages that have been carelessly torn out. Hohl must have realized that "Die seltsame Wendung" does not have the same elementary urgency as the story "Bergfahrt", which was also written in Paris in 1926 and was not published until 1975, when it had matured into a complete work.
An author without a book
In 1931, Ludwig Hohl moved to The Hague, from where he looks back on Montparnasse a year later in the book "The Penultimate Station", now from a safe distance. In the Savoy mountain village of Dingy, a narrator named Hohl meets Mergault, an old "friend" from Paris, by chance. He is seriously ill with lung disease, but that doesn't stop him from drinking. The narrator keeps up with him.
However, the relationship between them remains ambivalent. While the narrator tries to write at night, the increasingly scheming Mergault disturbs him with his moods. Even though the account of this peculiar encounter remains unfinished, Hohl's descriptions of the valley and the surrounding mountains repeatedly reveal his mastery.
For many years, Ludwig Hohl was a writer without a book. This was not changed for the time being by the large work of thoughts and notes that he wrote from 1934 and which first appeared in 1944 under the title "Die Notizen". The hopes associated with it were not fulfilled. Instead, it resulted in a nasty legal dispute. In "Bericht über Artemis" (1949), Hohl complained combatively, at times polemically, that the publisher had refused to publish the second volume. The case went all the way to the Federal Supreme Court, where Hohl was vindicated on the grounds that a "freelance writer" lives from his "printed books".
"Fierce dark struggle"
The tension resulting from his lack of success led to brief treatment in a psychiatric institution as early as 1931. In his report "Ten Days", he bears witness to this by scrupulously documenting what he experienced.
The four new books, each excellently edited with pictures, commentary and afterword, are not among Hohl's most important publications. Rather, they show the rigorous author and thinker in a literary search process, which he once described in 1955 as a "fierce dark struggle", "until suddenly a powerful eruption came": "Die Notizen". Together with "Bergfahrt", they were to establish Hohl's literary fame late in the 1970s.*
*This text by Beat Mazenauer, Keystone-SDA, was realized with the help of the Gottlieb and Hans Vogt Foundation.
©Keystone/SDA
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