In the early twentieth century, tourists and truth-seekers travelled to the Swiss Alps: to the nation of hoteliers, to alternative living on Monte Verità, or to a life alone in retreat. In this year's Ingeborg Bachmann Centre lecture, Seán Williams looks at three literary, non-conforming writers who were drawn to Switzerland, initially resided in its hotels, and later gravitated to spiritualist contemplation in nature for the articulation of the authentic self. The Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke is the most canonical. Algernon Blackwood was a popular and prolific British author of ghost stories. And Franca Kraig is unknown to academia: also British-born, she is recovered here from archival research, the contents of her suitcase left in the Alps, and local preservation in the valley she made her home. Amid a widespread sense of the end times in the interwar period, all three writers worked with the apocalypse as – in the language of Carl Jung – an archetype of individuation itself. Each trod a distinct but comparable symbolic path through the woods and up the mountain. For Jung, Rilke was psychological (if too little concerned with body and shadow). Algernon Blackwood was a theosophist, who among the Swiss Pines took solace in the work of Edward Carpenter: the mystic writer on democracy and sexual as well as what we’d now call gender non-conformity. And Franca Kraig borrowed from a Biblical template for an embodied narrative, in a time of epochal and personal transition. In her own words, she was an 'Englishman at present' who was being reborn woman. What was it about the alpine landscape, rural Swiss society, and the idea of the last days that enabled such poesis – of literature and life?
Seán Williams is Senior Lecturer in German and European Cultural History at the University of Sheffield and Germanic editor of Modern Language Review. He is also a journalist, broadcaster, and drawn to the Alps.
The lecture will be introduced and moderated by Andrea Capovilla (Director of the Ingeborg Bachmann Centre for Austrian Literature & Culture at the Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies, University of London).
All are welcome to attend this in-person lecture, which will take place at the University of London Senate House. Attendance is free, however, advance online registration is essential. Drinks will be available from 5.30 pm.
More information and how to book can be found here.
