„Aber was ist als Ganzes überhaupt darstellbar?“ Zum literarischen Schaffen von Erica Pedretti (1930–2022)

Abstract

Erica Pedretti, who deceased on July 14, 2022 in her 92nd year, leaves behind an extensive and important literary oeuvre. In the forty years of her literary career, between 1970 and 2010, she published fourteen major prose works, wrote seven radio plays and seven essays, and also created three picture-text. Trained as a goldsmith and silversmith, then and for life active as an object artist, she became a writer in the course of the 1960s because she could only cope by writing with her loss of homeland in Czech Moravia. Her texts remained consistently shaped by this experience, even though she repeatedly used distancing effects in the confrontation with it in new literary ways. The article follows her literary publications from Harmloses, bitte (1970) to fremd genug (2010) and shows that she has become a literary innovator in Switzerland and far beyond in several respects: she broke, in literary distancing, the silence about the suffering of German speakers in the history of Czechoslovakia, contributed significantly to the renewal of experimental writing by women, proved to be a pioneer for the “decade of women” in Swiss German-language literature, belonged to the forerunners of the “New Radio Play” in the German-speaking world between 1970 and 1976, and, through her early thematization of double and multiple belonging as a migrant, anticipated what literary studies began to recognize as the literature of migration in the course of the 1990s.

Keywords

• Moravia
• Switzerland
• migration
• visual arts
• “decade of women”
• experimental writing