»Los Angeles, the Big Orange, lots of segments around nothing. In such segments he had spent his autumn. How green was this autumn.« Loetscher's melancholy satire revolves around the theme of ›autumn‹ in many ways: the season in a landscape between desert and ocean in which, strictly speaking, there is no autumn; autumn in the protagonist's life; and, ultimately, the autumn of a civilisation.

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.

Hugo Loetscher first travelled to Brazil in 1965. Thus began a love that never let the cosmopolitan Swiss writer out of its grip. Hugo Loetscher returned again and again, writing travelogues about Brazil for various newspapers, as well as the novel Wonder World. Eventually, he went beyond the seductions of the exotic to explore the contradictions of the land of his desires. A timelessly contemporary portrait of a country which, in Hugo Loetscher’s words, is still »condemned to the future«. »Brazil was also a form of travelling in my consciousness. The adventure. The fascination of the unfamiliar. The lure of the unknown. But then, behind all the exotic and the tropical, the discovery of the country’s social reality. The encounter with another world that has more to do with ours than we are generally willing to accept.« Hugo Loetscher

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.

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...

Hugo Loetscher’s best travel essays and reports, many in book format for the first time.

Hugo Loetscher was a writer who »wanted to experience the world that was conveyed to him.« From Switzerland, he embarked in all directions of the compass, often on commission for newspapers and magazines, writing knowledgeable, witty, sparkling essays and reports. Loetscher’s eye for the simultaneities and hybrid forms of a globalised world is profoundly modern; his style always original and surprising. This volume is a wonderful springboard for discovering – or rediscovering – one of Switzerland’s greatest authors and journalists.

Including photographs by René Burri, Tobias Hitsch, Willy Spiller and Daniel Schwartz as well as unpublished photos by Hugo Loetscher 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.

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.

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 boy sits on a river and puts his wooden boat to the water, a messenger quickly drifting downstream and announcing: Someone will follow. The boy became a man and a writer. And he did follow: In the tracks of the little boat of his childhood river, the Sihl in Zurich, he went as far as the Nile, the Amazon and the Yangtze. Hugo Loetscher takes stock of his life. He unfolds the themes of his life and work into a world-embracing autogeography, thus telling of the development of a global consciousness. Taking the reader along rivers, past bridges and canals to new shores, Hugo Loetscher's narrative flow is meandering, deep and effervescent with ideas and wit. The picture of a great writer takes shape, born unsolicited under the star constellation of the question mark. A doubter who knows that questions are often more beautiful than answers. And an incorrigible humanist.

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.