An autobiographical story by the unjustly forgotten, brilliant Swiss storyteller Walter Vogt – unpublished to date
Two men in one bed, one sleeping, the other one talking. This story deals with love in times of the AIDS-crisis: A spared man falls in love with a much younger infected man whose death seems within reach. In monologue form, the older one reflects on their relationship, on what separates them, on sexuality, bought sexuality, but also on friendship, identity and on gender. An unsparing text that Vogt himself thought could not be published.
Kurt Marti wrote about Walter Vogt: »The ecstatic fascinated him, but at the same time he retained the keenly observant eye of the intellectual. The hunger for experience as well as the hunger for knowledge drove him forward. The openness with which Vogt finally dared to speak about himself is astonishing! Whatever he wrote and spoke about, he wrote and spoke about himself. It’s true, every author does that, but not all of them do it as openly, as obsessively and as smart as Vogt«. Vogt’s impressive text is flanked by a ›prequake‹ by Christoph Geiser and an ›aftershock‹ by Kim de l’Horizon.
Walter Vogt, born 1927 in Zurich, died 1988 in Muri near Bern, studied medicine and became an radiologist, then a psychiatrist. After an illness, he started as an author in 1961, writing novels, short stories, theatre plays, radio plays, television plays and poems. Vogt was a founding member and later president of the Olten Group. He received several literary awards, including from the city and canton of Bern.
