In these nineteen stories, many of them hitherto unpublished, there is one theme that constantly returns: ›Der Buckel‹ is about damaged people, the cast-outs and under-privileged, who furnish a telling example of Hugo Loetscher's narrative range and variety. The stories are told with unfailing artistry, precision and cryptic irony. Their playful lightness of touch and pleasure in yarn-spinning do not hide the fact that it is precisely man's vulnerability that can be translated into literature.

Can blue eyes see? asked the mandarin when he encountered European barbarians for the first time. Can blue-green eyes see? asks Past. Not at the Imperial Court of Peking, but in a European city like Zurich, a good three hundred years later. Not in a realm faced with the decline of its dominion, but on a continent that has lost its significance. The question about the ability of his eyes to see reminds Past, an ex-employee of an obscure cultural foundation and specialist for commemoration days and New Year celebrations, of incidents from his eventful life. It leads him back to almost all parts of the earth, it evokes penetrating stories and anecdotes, with a disturbing, intoxicating juxtaposition of continents, times and images in which boundaries and centres dissolve and the familiar is revealed in the alien and the alien in the familiar. A balance of an intensive life by an eternally curious man who thinks on a wide scale merely for professional reasons, and who is full of vitality, scepticism and thoughtfulness – and of a serenity reminiscent of the Far East.

Among the ›Papers of an Immune Man‹ can be found the story of a man who invites guests to his own funeral feast as well as the story of another man who plans an assassination in a house of waxworks; the reader encounters a puppet murderer, a sinful priest; a rebel from the Peasants' War; a nursery rhyme becomes a political issue; and Leporello's aria of the cities can be heard. This and other ›papers‹ are mirrors and counter-images of the immune man, his interpretations and longings…

A European man encounters the myths of life and death of a foreign culture: a hymn and even more an elegy, written for a little girl. The European man assigns this ›wonder world‹ to a series of stories, transforms these stories into images, juggles with them, plays with his image stories, shows them to the little girl and becomes enmeshed in them himself.

The stories told by Hugo Loetscher are conduct fables. The animals do not talk like humans but behave like animals, though in situations not always of their own choosing such as the mule in the army, the poodle at the beauty contest, the monkey in the rocket or the rat in the laboratory. A ›comédie animale‹ whose morality lies in its depiction.

From the Alps to urbanity: It is not in Albrecht von Haller's glorification of the Alps that Loetscher sees the origins of Swiss literature, but rather in the autobiography of Thomas Platter, the country lad who leaves the mountains to try his luck in Basle, the city of humanism. Thus we are afforded an unconventional outlook, through and beyond literature, on an identity stretching from Salomon Gessner's false flute idyll to the uncomfortable atmosphere of Gottfried Keller's Seldwyla, from the hasty shelters of Ludwig Hohl to Adrien Turel's yearning for the future. A remarkable gallery of figures is thereby assembled, including the »poor devil« Friedrich Glauser, the unusual Marxist Konrad Farner and the gifted »phoney« Blaise Cendrars. The essays are not wholly impersonal when the author writes of his »difficult admiration« for Max Frisch or his remembrances of Friedrich Dürrenmatt, who plays a leading role in this collection. One learns a few things about people such as Adolf Muschg and Niklaus Meienberg in a Swiss chat room. Whatever the debate at hand, those who read instead of climb will once again enjoy brilliant essays by Hugo Loetscher.

A Laundry Room Key or lists of expressions for the word ›to work‹, the eighth deadly sin or a Swiss girl by the sea are all treated by Hugo Loetscher as inspiration for stories like the ones in this collection. What holds these critical and amusing ponderings together is a Helvetic theme, displaying a predilection for individuality and balance. But Hugo Loetscher always breaks the boundaries of these Swiss themes with the natural cosmopolitanism that distinguishes him as an author – whether he's writing about his experiences at the post office counter or posing the question: What if God were Swiss? In these commentaries on Switzerland, Loetscher shows himself to be a committed satirist who has mastered the art of opening the gates to the Swiss soul.

For the immune man, the world, from his earliest childhood, is a stage. He nevertheless uses his talent for telling stories and observing the world in order to 'immunise' himself against brutality and hypocrisy. How else could one suffer this world? In a self-critical analysis of the I in the form of an abundance of short stories, Hugo Loetscher describes the epoch in which this ego developed.

The story of a man who boosts the economy with his plan to build the ark. Nobody really believes in the coming flood but everybody uses it to make money. The economy flourishes and eventually collapses in a series of scandals – as does the culture industry. Noah's situation deteriorates until one person can say in the end: »Now only a deluge can save him.«

A stroll through literature and myths. Animals, allegedly the brothers and sisters of humankind, are used by people not only for their physical needs - without animals, literature and painting would be very different from what we are accustomed to. As if being an animal wasn't hard enough to begin with - human beings humanized animals. One of the consequences: they began to speak. And thanks to their humanization, the animals behaved like reasonable people, nothing humans was alien to them. Hugo Leotscher has gathered incredible material from all the nooks and crannies of world literature and shows that almost no author known to us could have lived and written in the absence of animals. Remember Kafka and the beetle...