Jürg Amann 1991

Summary

THE SWISS AUTHOR JÜRG AMANN was born in Winterthur in 1947. The son of a lyric poet, he himself wrote poetry almost exclusively before moving to Berlin in 1969, where be began to experiment with other genres, including drama and narrative prose. As a youth he had wanted to study film, but as Switzerland had no film school he turned instead to German literature at the University of Zurich. In 1973 he received his doctorate with a dissertation on Franz Kafka, and from 1974 to 1976 he worked as a director at the Zurich Schauspielhaus. Since that time he has written ten plays and published numerous volumes of stories, novellas, and poetry, and he continues to write in a variety of prose forms.

Amann's works reflect the artist's struggle to understand himself and his world. “I will always try harder to know who I am … The better I know myself, the better I understand humanity.” Yet he is far from the self-indulgent artist. Many of his works deal with the problems of human relationships and how art can cut off its creator from genuine experience, can blind him to the sometimes destructive effects his selfabsorption can work on those around him. “I am interested in the vulnerability of people and of the world,” he said, “I always try to place myself on the side of the injured.”

This theme stands at the center of the collection of monologues that Jürg Amann read with his Oberlin class this semester, Nachgerufen (1983). The monologues take the form of letters written to various German literary figures by the women who were their friends, lovers, or wives. Amann studied the historical accounts of the relationships and used them to craft fictionalized expressions of the women's disappointments and sufferings. Of the voices he brings to life, some are angry and embittered at having their individuality ignored, while others are resentful because they had to sacrifice their intelligence, sensibilities, and hopes to the men's aspirations, or even to their whims. Taken together, the eleven monologues reflect a tension between artistic creation and the emotional price it can demand. The last monologue is dated 1979, and is Amann's self-reproach for his behavior in an intimate relationship. Writing from a woman's perspective allows him to keep a certain distance as he attempts to understand a woman's plight and at the same time probes his own inner self.