Meyer with "ey": like the classic Conrad Ferdinand and the contemporary EY Meyer.

There are also a few Meiers in Swiss literature – at least more than Müllers.

You couldn't be more Swiss than Fritz Meyer.

And perhaps his fate also has something to do with the fact that a Swiss writer with that name became a tragic figure in literary history and was forgotten.

Juerg Altwegg

Freelance writer in the feuilleton.

  • Follow I follow

“Me Among Others”, published in 1957, is an existentialist novel from the lower class and begins with a skiing accident.

The first-person narrator is in the hospital for weeks, he is “the broken leg in room 24”.

He lost his parents, he works as an apprentice, and in the evenings he attends lectures at the adult education center.

Here he meets Katharina, who comes from better circles.

She casts a spell over him – erotic too.

However, her visits to the wrecked man who loves her become rarer.

The nurse Veronika brings the patient an orange every night.

The depths of human existence

Fritz Meyer tells stories with fantasies, dreams, memories and longings that mingle.

Again and again he starts to organize summaries.

The first-person narrator hears the dying of other patients being transferred to the bathroom "as casually as a shutter creaking in the wind".

After his release, he walks on crutches.

"I can't reproduce the horror of those minutes, because it hasn't the slightest connection to language": It's the moment when he discovers that Katharina has gotten involved with the professor.

"I would have to express myself in the manner of the worm as it squirms and twists."

Few people populate the narrative, which leads into the abysses of human existence.

Meyer lends a mythical dimension to his story of an unhappy childhood love.

Katharina's mother projected her unfulfilled longings and existential disappointments onto the orphan boy.

When he calls Katharina, lonely and desperate, he hears her voice in the background: "Is it Emil?" At the end of the story, he gets a name from his mother.

She dies of a heart attack that night.

Accompanied by "murderer" calls, he leaves the house.

“I Among Others” was published by the Zurich publishing house Fretz & Wasmuth, which had long been closed down and which used to be a top address and published a complete edition of the works of Hermann Hesse.

The new edition is an event.

Felix E. Müller, longtime editor-in-chief of “NZZ am Sonntag”, received his doctorate from Fritz Meyer.

In an afterword he recapitulates the life of the writer who died in 1964 and was three years older than Max Frisch.

Meyer worked as a teacher in a suburb of Zurich.

He suffered from "narrowing of horizons" during the years of intellectual national defense.

Müller compares him to Paul Nizon – for both of them Paris became a place of escape from the confines of Switzerland.

Space and time open up

For Müller, "I Among Others" is the most modern work of Swiss literature before 1960. He explains the lack of attention and forgetting with the emergence of a new generation.

The young writers freed themselves from the "barriers" of intellectual national defense.

In contrast to Max Frisch, Fritz Meyer missed the connection to her from afar.

Felix E. Müller compares his book to Frisch's "Stiller", whose "search for identity he pursued to the last consequence".