Christoph Geiser

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Christoph Geiser (born August 3, 1949 in Basel ) is a Swiss writer .

Life

Christoph Geiser is the son of a pediatrician and an actress. His younger brother is the legal scholar Thomas Geiser . After graduating from high school , he studied sociology at the universities of Freiburg im Breisgau and Basel . He dropped out of college and served several months in prison in 1970 for refusal to serve . He then worked as a journalist, u. a. together with Werner Schmidli , he founded the literary magazine Drehpunkt . Since 1978 he has lived as a freelance writer in Bern . In 1980 he was visiting professor at Oberlin College in Oberlin, Ohio, and in 1982 he went on a reading tour of Australia. He currently lives alternately in Bern and Berlin.

Christoph Geiser's prose and poetry was initially influenced by Kafka and Brecht and mainly dealt with disturbed family relationships. Since the mid-1980s and with Geiser's commitment to his own homosexuality , the topic shifted towards removing taboos from sexual obsessions .

Christoph Geiser is a member of the Association of Authors in Switzerland , the German-Swiss PEN Center and a corresponding member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry in Darmstadt.

Artistic creation

After the first volumes of short stories and poetry, Christoph Geiser achieved his first successes with the novels Grünsee and Brachland . Politics , society , family and homosexuality are the main themes of the early works. The clearest turning point in Geiser's work as a novelist can be found after Wüstenfahrt , a novel about a relationship with men, in the works The Secret Fever and The Prison of Desires . In it he turns to cultural-historical subjects, the life of the Italian baroque painter Caravaggio on the one hand and an imaginary confrontation between the Marquis de Sade and Goethe on the other. Especially in his most recent works Die Baumeister , Über Wasser and When the man in the moon awakens , Geiser dissolves conventional terminology with his association technique and the “capricious words”. In contrast to his first novels, Christoph Geiser is increasingly addressing an audience that is familiar with the expression of modern literary music.

Works

  • Better times (poems). Rainbow, Zurich 1968
  • Notification to fellow prisoners . Poems for the inmates of the Oberschöngrün prison, Solothurn. Lenos Verlag , Basel 1971
  • Everything here is under monument protection . Stories. Lenos, Basel 1972
  • Warning for low-flying aircraft . Poems and Mittelland stories. Lenos, Basel 1974
  • Bed and breakfast . Narrative. Lenos, Basel 1975; ibid. 1992, ISBN 3-85787-607-7 and 1977 Verlag Volk und Welt, Berlin (GDR)
  • Grünsee . Novel. Benziger , Zurich 1978 and 1979 Verlag Volk und Welt, Berlin (GDR)
  • Wasteland . Novel. Benziger, Zurich 1980 and 1983 Verlag Volk und Welt, Berlin (GDR)
    • New edition: Grünsee - Brachland . Two novels (plus CD-ROM). Ammann, Zurich 2006, ISBN 3-250-60091-1
  • Disciplines . Prehistory. Lenos, Basel 1982
  • Desert trip . Novel. Nagel & Kimche Verlag , Zurich 1984 and 1986 Verlag Volk und Welt, Berlin (GDR)
  • The secret fever . Novel. Nagel & Kimche, Zurich 1987
  • The prison of desires . Novel. Nagel & Kimche, Zurich 1992, ISBN 3-312-00181-1
  • Wishful anxiety (eight stories, illustrated by Hannes Steinert ). MännerschwarmSkript , Hamburg 1993, ISBN 3-928983-14-8
  • Barge, boys, go fast . A fantasy. Nagel & Kimche, Zurich 1995, ISBN 3-312-00207-9
  • The builders . A fiction. Nagel & Kimche, Zurich 1998, ISBN 3-312-00244-3
  • Above water . Passages. Ammann Verlag , Zurich 2003, ISBN 3-250-60059-8
  • When the man wakes up in the moon. A rule violation . Ammann, Zurich 2008, ISBN 978-3-250-60109-8
  • The angler of chance. Writing scenes . Edited by Michael Schläfli. Swarm of Men Script, Hamburg 2009, ISBN 978-3-939-54279-7
  • Nice mess . Not a family novel. Offizin, Zurich 2013, ISBN 978-3-907496-82-4
  • Nothing moves anymore. Murder stuff. Die Lunte in Spiegelberg Verlag, Zurich 2016, ISBN 978-3-939043-69-0
  • Missed places. Narratives . Secession, Berlin 2019, ISBN 978-3-906910-51-2
Essays
  • On the gradual disappearance of Switzerland, in "Passauer Pegasus. Zeitschrift für Literatur", 11th vol. H. 21-22: "Literatur aus der Schweiz". Krieg, Passau 1993 ISSN  0724-0708 pp. 15-25

Awards

literature

  • Martin Schellenberg: Fabrics, motifs, shapes in the work of Christoph Geiser . At the same time Diss. Phil. University of Zurich 1987 (Philosophical Faculty 1)
  • Malcolm Pender: The "literary I" as Vantage Point , in: Rejection and Emancipation. Writing in German Speaking Switzerland 1945 - 1991 , ed. Michael Butler and Malcolm Pender. Berg, New York & Oxford 1991, pp. 156-170
  • Rosmarie Zeller: The "New Novel" in Switzerland: The Untoldability of the Modern World , Seges, New Volume 11, Universitätsverlag, Freiburg 1992, pp. 55–60
  • Michael Gratzke: love pain and lust for text . Figures of love and masochism in literature . Königshausen & Neumann , Würzburg 2000, pp. 265–270
  • Martina Karena Schneider: The "Coming-Out" of language , Kiel 1996
  • Michael Schläfli: From the battlefield to the oasis? Notation as a writing procedure with Christoph Geiser , Swiss Literature Archive , Bern 2006 (Series: Arbeitsberichte, o. No.)
  • Gonçalo Vilas-Boas: From the “island” into the world. Contemporary Swiss authors on a journey to East and West. (Christoph Geiser and Christian Kracht ), in Isabel Hernández & Ofelia Martí-Peña (eds.): An island in a united Europe? Situation and perspectives of literature in German-speaking Switzerland , Weidler, Berlin 2006, pp. 107–122
  • Michael Schläfli: The origin of Christoph Geiser's novels "Grünsee" and "Brachland" , in: Quarto. Journal of the Swiss Literary Archives Hermann Burger, Bern 2007, pp. 19–27
    • ders .: "The text comes out of the darkness!" Christoph Geiser writes "In the open air enclosure" , in: Hubert Thüring, Corinna Jäger-Trees, Michael Schläfli, eds .: Beginning to write. A cardinal moment of text genesis and the writing process Wilhelm Fink Verlag , Munich 2009 (series: Zur Genealogie des Schreibens, 11)
    • ders .: From the dungeons of invention. Christoph Geiser writes against reality in: Quarto. Journal of the Swiss Literary Archives Writing in Prison, Bern 2014, pp. 81–87
  • Joanna Wolf: Christoph Geiser , in this. & Konstanze Fliedl & Marina Rauchbacher, eds., Handbook of Art Quotes. Painting, sculpture, photography in German-language modern literature . Volume 1. De Gruyter , Berlin 2012 ISBN 3110205009 pp. 218–222
  • Rosmarie Zeller: Playing with Discourses. On Christoph Geiser's handling of language , in Regula Schmidlin ... [et al.] Ed., Language use and language awareness. Implications for Language Theory . de Gruyter Mouton , Berlin 2015, pp. 39–54
  • Sabine Haupt : Other truths from other spaces Christoph Geiser measures the limits of the homo-heterotopos in "Missed Places" , May 24, 2019, in: https://literaturkritik.de/christoph-geiser-verfehlte-orte-andere-wahrheiten- homo-heterotopos, 25705.html

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Book review in the show 52 best books on Swiss radio (February 17, 2019)
personal data
SURNAME Geiser, Christoph
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss writer
DATE OF BIRTH August 3, 1949
PLACE OF BIRTH Basel