Schilten. Schulbericht zuhanden der Inspektorenkonferenz

by Hermann Burger

Unter dem Künstlernamen Armin Schildknecht arbeitet der 30-jährige Peter Stirner im abgelegenen Dorf Schilten im Kanton Aargau als Lehrer. Allerdings unterrichtet er längst nicht mehr das, was der Lehrplan vorsieht. Der nahe gelegene Friedhof bestimmt das Thema: Todeskunde. In seinem Debüt von 1976, einem der wichtigsten Romane der Nachkriegszeit in der Schweiz und nun in der Kollektion endlich wieder zugänglich, zeichnet Hermann Burger minutiös eine Obsession und dabei so subtil wie gnadenlos die Psyche eines ganzen Landes.

Genres: German Literature

462 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

About the author

Hermann Burger was born in 1942 in Burg, Canton of Aargau; his father worked for an insurance company. He enrolled at the ETH Zurich in 1962 and began studying architecture, but switched to German literature and art history in 1964. The publication of the poetry collection "Rauchsignale" ("Smoke Signals") in 1967 marked the beginning of his literary career, followed by the prose collection Bork in 1970. For the next couple of years Burger focused on his career in literary studies, writing his thesis on Paul Celan and his habilitation treatise on contemporary Swiss literature. He taught at universities in Zurich, Bern and Fribourg and worked as a literary editor for the Aargauer Tagblatt. His academic experience is reflected in the loosely autobiographical novel "Die künstliche Mutter" ("The Artificial Mother") which won him the Conrad-Ferdinand-Meyer-Preis in 1980. It was dedicated to his wife and its first edition has the dedication „Für Anne Marie“.
Burger's first major novel "Schilten. Schulbericht zuhanden der Inspektorenkonferenz" ("Schilten. School Report for the Attention of the Inspectors' Conference") was published in 1976 and made into a movie by Swiss film director Beat Kuert in 1979. It is about a teacher who has to tell the conference of inspectors about the development of his pupils, but speaks about death cult, graveyards and burials in a very detailed way. Archetypes of this novels are Franz Kafka and Thomas Bernhard. Burger mixes reality and fiction, and the more one reads about him, the more one finds out, that Burger writes about himself, his own suffering.
He won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 1985 for his story "Die Wasserfallfinsternis von Badgastein" ("The Waterfall-Eclipse of Badgastein"). 1988, a changing of publishers from S. Fischer to Suhrkamp took place in a spectacular way.
The novel "Brenner" (in two volumes, four were planned), shows a protagonist wrapped in cigar smoke, who tells his life - Burger himself was a cigar smoker and descendant of cigar producers. Volume 1 has exactly 25 capitles, like a cigar box contains 25 cigars. Each capitle's name contains the name of a famous cigar brand. The second capitle announces the author's suicide intention: A red Ferrari is bought, because saving money no longer makes sense. It is about the divorce and the grief about having no contact to his two kids. Burger's last lessor was emeritus historian Jean Rudolf von Salis (= „Jérôme von Castelmur-Bondo“ in the novel). The last months of Burger's life and a review on his 46 years are described detailed in this roman a clef, he describes all coining persons (under changed names).
Burger's depressive and desperate moods grew with his literary acclaim, leading him to write the "Tractatus logico-suicidalis" (1988), a collection of aphorisms advocating suicide. The 1046 aphorisms are about the sentence „Gegeben ist der Tod, bitte finden Sie die Lebensursache heraus.“ (Death is given, please finde the cause of life.) The title remembers Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The book about suicide was viewed by the critics with sarcasm, and the seriousity of his suicide plans were not recognized. On February 28, 1989 he committed suicide in Brunegg by taking an overdose of sleeping pills. Not until Burger's death the critics saw similarities to Jean Améry and his book Hand an sich legen (that Burger knew).
Burger's early promoter Marcel Reich-Ranicki, literature critic, wrote March 3, 1989, few days after his death, in an obituary: „Hermann Burger war ein Artist, der immer aufs Ganze ging, der sich nicht geschont hat. Er war ein Mensch mit einer großen Sehnsucht nach dem Glück. Die deutsche Literatur hat einen ihrer originellsten Sprachkünstler verloren.“ („Hermann Burger was an artist who went the whole hog every time, didn't conserve himself. He was a man with a big longing for happiness. The German literature has lost one of her most inventive language artists.")
H

Reviews

[Lorenz Ruesch · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Der Lehrer glaubt, die Schüler heranzubilden, aber in Wirklichkeit sind es die Schüler, die ihn in einem jahrzehntelangen Verschleiss heranbilden."

[Marion Jaggi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Herrlich kurioser Blick auf typisch Schweizerisches. Zum Schreien lustig und gleichzeitig auf eine gewisse Art tieftraurig. Sprachlich ein Genuss. Nahe an 5 Sternen.

[Bruno Baumgartner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wenn man Thomas Bernhard mit etwas Arno Schmidt'scher Klugscheißerei und helvetischem Bürokratendeutsch gewürzt haben will, ist man mit Schilten bestens bedient. Man wird in die Geschichte magisch hineingezogen, teils durch die grandiosen Wortkaskaden, teils durch das sich nur langsam entwickelnde Wissen um das Schicksal des Protagonisten.

[Beat Nussbaumer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spachlich ein Genuss bis zur letzten Seite, ohne überladen oder aufdringlich zu werden. Das muss ein Schulmeister geschrieben haben!
Inhaltlich eine Abrechnung mit dem Schulsystem der 60er in der Schweiz und ... von heute. Erinnerungen an die eigene Schulzeit kommen auf und stellen die in ein neues Licht. Was soll "Schule" sein, was macht Schule mit uns und was können wir besser machen?
Nur das Schlusswort von Remo Largo gibt Auskunft dazu.