Christoph Geiser 1980

Summary

CHRISTOPH GEISER IS A QUIETLY FRIENDLY young man, impeccably dressed in simple, durable clothes, always accessible, never too busy or absent-minded, always ready with precisely articulated answers, explanations, advice. One feels his unobtrusive presence, his constant alertness. Christoph Geiser was born in Basel, Switzerland, on August 3, 1949, the first of two sons of a pediatrician and a former actress. Upon graduating from the Humanistisches Gymnasium in 1968, he launched the literary periodical Drehpunkt, which he co-edited with the writer Werner Schmidli. He also began studying sociology at the Universities of Basel and Freiburg i. Br., but broke off his academic pursuits in 1969, moved to Bern, and worked as a journalist for the maverick socialist magazine Neutralität and for the newspaper Vorwärts, an organ of the Swiss Labor Party, before deciding to become a freelance writer. His own leftist political orientation had been conditioned by the arteriosclerotic humanism of his Gymnasium, by his discovery of Bertolt Brecht, and by the activist student movements of the 1960s. He put his political theory into practice by declaring himself a conscientious objector to military service for political reasons; as a consequence, he spent three months in jail. His political activity was, in part, a way of liberating himself from family tradition. And so was his writing, in which he found his own medium of expression and his own form, starting out with poetry, proceeding to prose poems, short prose texts, a long narrative, and novels. His subject matter is taken from his own life and his social and family background. His perspective is that of a first-person narrator who selects what he wants to tell and omits what he does not. At first, this narrator could have been compared to a mirror or a mold, then to an attentive but aloof spectator; then he became an individual facing the world and himself, striving to achieve communication with real people and real things. In 1968, at the age of nineteen, Christoph Geiser published a book of poetry and prose, Bessere Zeiten, which was followed in 1971 by a volume of poetry, Mitteilung an Mitgefangene, and a year later by Hier steht alles unter Denkmalschutz, a collection of prose stories which are almost prose poems.