About Cows and Migrants: Beat Sterchi’s Blösch in Context with Transcultural Literature in German Switzerland

Abstract

Throughout the last two decades of the 20th Century, there has emerged a kind of literature in German-speaking Switzerland, which is written by authors of foreign cultural background and who seldom use German as a second language. In parts, these writers are descendants of migrant workers who have come to Switzerland from South and South-East European countries in the wake of guest-worker recruitments from the 1950s onwards. In effect they are political or economic refugees. For a long time the only larger migratory text by a ‘local author’, the novel Blösch by Beat Sterchi from 1983, would remain hidden. This text describes with great eloquence the fate of a guest-worker from Galicia, who suddenly starts working on a Bernese farm and later in a slaughterhouse and at the same time finds himself in a ‘third space’ (Homi K. Bhabha) moved between here and there. The article tries to examine and highlight the various border and identity phenomena, which are focussed on by Sterchi, and show that such texts are able to cast a different light on the discussion about a “Swiss literature” which has been primarily based on classical canonical sources.