On the death of Peter Bichsel: Master of the form of possibility

The indicative of the facts meet the milk man: every morning at four, he delivers two liters of milk and 100 grams of butter to his customer. He knows Ms. Blums dented milk pot and her readable script, that is enough for him.

Ms. Blum, on the other hand, introduces himself to his milk man’s hands-“rosy, clumsy and washed out”-and considers getting up at four o’clock to meet him. In this request, a longing is masterly chipped, which will most likely not meet and therefore continues to blaze.

“The most important thing is silent,” said Marcel Reich-Ranicki in a review of the narrow band: “Secret nesting? No, reluctance, discretion, shy. And it is precisely this reluctance that the reader’s imagination owes a lot of gift. ”

Ms. Blum and the Milchmann

Also in “Explanation”, the last of the 21 everyday miniatures from “Actually Ms. Blum wants to get to know the Milchmann”, a longing is suffocated with Swiss German pragmatism: First Peter Bichsel praises the surprising, comforting, even warming of the snow, but then follows the imaginative destruction: “But he penetrates the shoes, blocks the car, brings iron rails and removes. lonely.”

Peter Bichsel was born on March 24, 1935 as the son of a craftsman in Lucerne. He grew up in Olten and became a primary teacher. In an interview with the Swiss online magazine “Republic”, in retrospect, he said in retrospect: “Writing has nothing to do with, it is an ongoing circumstances with the not. In my time as a teacher, I always lifted the essays of the so -called bad students when correcting it because I was looking forward to it. They wrote the more exciting essays than the talented. “

Bichsel’s minimalist prose also inspired Group 47 around Hans Werner Richter. In 1965 she gave him her price for a reading from his scarce novel “The Seasons”, which many more and the big Schiller Prize followed.

In “The Seasons”, the declared “little writer” Bichsel complained about his protagonist that he demands “a body, a hair color, a date of birth”: “The fool believes, he lives.” When the “children’s stories” appeared in 1969, in which a lonely old man no longer wants to call his table and no longer the clock, the author himself became the term for literary less people.

“There are people who become invisible by silence, and what they do does not leave any traces,” says Peter Bichsel’s story “Cherubin Hammer and Cherubin Hammer”. In it, a writer with self -doubtful writers meets a power -of -punch and charm, which leads to countless strange complications that continue to the footnotes.

Even in his numerous columns, which Peter Bichsel wrote until 2015, the struggle for the text is a constant topic. Between 1974 and 1981 he was speech of the Social Democratic Federal Council Willi Ritschard.

Whether he pondered on “Doctor Schleyer’s Isabelle -colored winter school”, whether about waiting and training or, like in his last book “The beautiful sister boredom” about airports and ski races: his incorruptible observation and at the same time a deeply human “thinking of the veneer” according to Gottfried Benn’s poem of the same name has been preserved for life.

During the Solothurn Literature Days, which Bichsel had founded in 1978, his white curly head was often seen at one of the wooden tables in the “Kreuz” cooperative pub. Now the German -language literature with Peter Bichsel has lost its greatest minimalist. On Saturday he died in Zuchwil near Solothurn, nine days before his ninety birthday.