Swiss Review 2/2018

17 Swiss Review / March 2018 / No.2 Literature series After returning from Asia, Morgenthaler found no home and no peace. As a tuberculosis patient he lived in Arosa and Davos, then in Ascona, where miraculously the light- hearted novel “Woly, Sommer im Süden” was written, in the Waldau mental institution in Berne (he almost com- mitted murder out of jealousy), in a psychiatric hospital in Mendrisio and finally in Berne in 1927 where the den- tist Marguerite Schmid took care of him and tried to get his life back on the right track. After the expressionism of the Asian novels and the humour of “Woly”, he finally un- leashed tragic, absurd succinctness in his poems, the last and most shocking of which reads: “Dear God, /strikeme dead. / Take me from this barren life. / Then I’ll give you a peck on the cheek.” CHARLES LINSMAYER Hans “Hamo”Morgenthaler described the Burgdorf district, where hewas born on 4 June 1890, as an “innocuous potato patch in central Switzerland”. Left without a mother and suffering misfortune at a young age, he studied botany, zo- ology and geology but was driven right from the start by the irrepressible desire to live “well and dangerously”. His first novel “Ihr Berge”, published in 1916, documents how he firstly developed a passion formountaineering but took it to such an extreme that he almost lost all his fingers to frostbite in 1911. In 1920, he apparently threwhismountaineering equip- ment into a glacial crevasse in protest at mass tourism. But before that he pursued another desire – adventure in the Asian jungle. He enjoyed “days in paradise” in a newly dis- covered “primeval home” when he worked for a company searching for tin and gold in theMalaysian jungle from1917 to 1920 and experienced the “night-time song of the jungle” and “all the wonders of dark-skinned women”. However, his adventure had fatal consequences. Right up to his death he is believed to have suffered from syphilis – which was never medically proven – and malaria, which he brought to Switzerland, before contracting the tuberculosis that he died from in 1928 aged 38. Sensuously seductive Before that he evoked the Asian land of his desires in nov- els twice – euphorically and with sensuous seduction in 1920 in “Matahari. Stimmungsbilder aus denmalayisch-si- amesischen Tropen”, a book which Hermann Hesse and Emmy Hennings raved about, and with a sceptical and critical tone where the jungle seems like hell in “Gadscha Puti. EinMinenabenteuer”. This book was rejected by the publisher Orell Füssli to the chagrin of the author whowas desperately short of money, and was not published until 1929, after his death, by Francke-Verlag. Also published posthumously was “In der Stadt. Die Beichte des Karl von Allmen”, a dark and sinister book about the city as the un- restrained whore of human urges and abysses, which the solitary reveller Von Allmen succumbs to in a kind of “metropolitan frenzy”. The Asian jungle – heaven and hell The “poor poet” Hamo Morgenthaler enjoyed his best days in the jungle of south-east Asia and, for better or for worse, never freed himself of it. “It seems to me now that I al- ready knew when I said my good-byes in the mountains re- splendent in autumn snow that my departure did not mean sep- aration and unfaithfulness, that I was not going away but rather returning to a primeval home and a new world that, while completely new to me, was still a place of past experience and untainted primitiveness.” (From “Matahari. Stimmungs- bilder aus dem malayisch-sia- mesischen Dschungel”, Zurich 1920, out of print.) BIBLIOGRAPHY: The following titles are available: “Dichtermisere. Ein Hans-Morgen- thaler-Brevier”, edited by Georges Ammann at Orte, “Hamo, der letzte fromme Europäer” and “Der kuriose Dichter Hans Morgenthaler. Briefwechsel mit Ernst Morgenthaler und Hermann Hesse”, both edited by Roger Perret at Lenos-Verlag. CHARLES LINSMAYER IS A LITERARY SCHOLAR AND JOURNALIST IN ZURICH