The Swiss author Gertrud Leutenegger has died at the age of 76

If the German-language literary scene today is characterized primarily by the loudness of its self-promotion, then she was one of its quietest, yet all the more authentic, voices. In 1975, Gertrud Leutenegger made her debut with the novel "Vorabend," a psychological masterpiece that combined political topicality with something timelessly stubborn.

That the world was in flux was evident in the subject matter of this story. In Zurich, people were preparing for demonstrations in the late aftermath of the '68 movement. The novel's narrator walks the planned routes through the city on the eve of the events.

The fact that increased attention to the course of the world can also bring one's own history into focus is an insight that gains significance here for the first time. Gertrud Leutenegger has repeatedly reexamined this in her literature: in kaleidoscopic miniatures, short stories, and major novels.

From the very beginning, Leutenegger, born in Schwyz in 1948, was searching for a world order in which the subjective and her own biography could also be considered. Her work rejected the notion of the self. This alone was a bit of a provocation in the politicized 1970s, when some writers were accused of living in ivory towers.

In an early letter to Suhrkamp publisher Siegfried Unseld, the young author insists on her view of things and, even at the age of 26, presents a poetics that has remained valid for many decades. "Vorabend" then sounds almost like a term for a state of consciousness: "This throbbing pause between events, this state on the threshold of decision. It also hints at its dangers: perishing between times. But also a promise: as if everything could just begin."

Gertrud Leutenegger wrote this way. With great alertness and sensitivity for ruptures and upheavals. She took luminous biblical and mythological material and wove into it patterns of the private, sometimes even the autobiographical.

"Vorabend" was followed by "Ninive," a visually stunning novel about young love between two unequals. It features a motif that will continue throughout the work: nature as an unavoidable truth. In a kind of night vigil, the two young people sit before the remains of a giant whale being towed across the country by train, only to be dismembered.

It is these powerful images of a nature spiraling out of order that remain in Leutenegger's novels. In the 2008 book "Matutin," it is the birds that, as the star witnesses of creation, stand against their worst enemy, mankind.

Six years later, "Panic Spring" was written, taking place under a suddenly changed sky. The Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull has erupted, paralyzing air traffic. The blue sky over London is no longer streaked with vapor trails and stands lush over an encounter that is also typical of Gertrud Leutenegger's social worlds. On a Thames bridge, the first-person narrator meets a newspaper vendor and befriends the man who bears a strange birthmark on his face. It is both a disfigurement and a distinction. They start talking, and the mere fact that the man tells us about himself seems like the beginning of a tender love story.

Love and affection are often only hinted at in this Swiss author's work, a subtle approach, as is also present in the 1994 novel "Acheron." On a Japanese train, the head of a sleeping woman falls onto the shoulder of another. The first-person narrator, who comes from Europe, engages in a game of bodies and cultures. The character Tenko is a traveling saleswoman and a fleeting figure in the air. The novel tells of searching and finding, and of foreignness.

Being on the move to find oneself is also one of Gertrud Leutenegger's major themes. Two geographical and psychological vanishing points recur repeatedly: childhood memories and previously uncharted territory.

That even home can become foreign is demonstrated by the books set in Ticino, where the author lives. The demonic, at times tenderly described figure of Orion, a stargazing architect who has lost his footing, appears repeatedly. In the novel "Pomona" and in "Late Guests." Literature is a shorthand for life, but there are often long stories behind it.

Gertrud Leutenegger, who received the Schiller Prize of the Zurich Cantonal Bank, the Solothurn Literature Prize, and the City of Zurich Art Prize for her work, was not a writer of unequivocal clarity. Her literature was full of tilting images. "A gliding, a shifting is everything," she once said. Stylistically, she mastered this effect with virtuosity. Her atmospheric images, which were always also sketches of states of mind, could be lingered on for a long time, admiring an art that today seems almost old-fashionedly precise.

Reading Siegfried Unseld's entry in his travel notes, where he recounts how he first met the young Swiss author in Zurich, one might think that her accuracy was already out of date. "She seems almost like a Suhrkamp fairytale," Unseld writes.

For Gertrud Leutenegger, reality never formed into a closed system. Her novels and short prose were open to the reader's realities. The fragmentary, the unpainted, plays a major role here. "I have no material; I only have my flotsam and jetsam," she writes in the volume "Partita," which collects the author's notes. Elsewhere: "The false totality of every portrait shatters into the delicate, relentless dialogue of fragments." For Gertrud Leutenegger, the light became the heavy, and the heavy became the light.

Gertrud Leutenegger died on Friday at the age of 76 in her home region of Schwyz, according to Suhrkamp Verlag.