Background
Adolf Muschg was born on May 13, 1934, in Zollikon, Switzerland, to Friedrich Adolf Muschg, a teacher, and Frieda Anna Ernst Muschg, a nurse.
1988
At the event 'A Dream of Europe' in Berlin
President of the Akademie der Kuenste, Berlin, in the new academy building on Pariser Platz
Rämistrasse 71, 8006 Zürich, Switzerland
In 1959, Muschg received a Ph.D. from the University of Zurich.
Adolf Muschg was born on May 13, 1934, in Zollikon, Switzerland, to Friedrich Adolf Muschg, a teacher, and Frieda Anna Ernst Muschg, a nurse.
Muschg attended a boarding school in Schiers and a gymnasium in Zurich before enrolling at Cambridge University. He earned his doctorate from the University of Zurich in 1959.
Adolf Muschg began his teaching career in a Zurich high school. In 1962 Muschg moved to Tokyo to teach at the International Christian University. In 1965 he wrote his first novel, Im Sommer des Hasen (“The Summer of the Hare”) based on his experiences teaching in Japan. Written when Muschg was thirty-one, the novel received relatively lavish critical attention for a new novel, and was an instant bestseller.
From 1967 to 1969 he taught at Cornell and from 1969 to 1970, at the University of Geneva. During this time he wrote two successful volumes of short stories, Fremdkoerper (“Foreign Objects,” 1968) and Liebesgeschichten, Entfernte Bekannte (“Distant Acquaintances,” 1976).
From 1970 to 1999 Muschg was professor of German language and literature at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zürich.
Adolf Muschg is active in politics as a member of the Social Democratic party.
Many of Muschg’s stories are about wasted lives and missed opportunities, repressed individuals who explode, and supposedly controlled lives that suddenly derail.
Since 1976 Muschg has been a member of the Academy of Arts, Berlin; he is also a member of the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur, Mainz and the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung, Darmstadt. In 2003 he was elected president of the Berlin Academy but left the presidency in December 2005 because of disagreements with the Academy's senate about public relations.
Muschg's preoccupations are psychological and social, concerning repression, self-awareness and the relationship between art and therapy. For Muschg, as an intellectual, art (literary and otherwise) aids in making sense of the world.
Quotes from others about the person
“Adolf Muschg is a master of the short story. An erudite scholar, a superb stylist, and an astute observer of contemporary middle-class Swiss society, provides valuable commentaries on many contemporary issues that go well beyond Switzerland.” - Judith Ricker-Abderhalden
“Many scholars claim that he is at his linguistic best in these shorter formats. In general the stories deal with the Swiss malaise of alienation from society, which is often metaphorically expressed as sickness and disease (another common feature of contemporary Swiss-German letters). The many characters feel powerless to act or express themselves in an environment that inhibits personal growth, and they are thus forced to resign themselves to the status quo.” - Robert Aker
“Although Muschg’s narratives are vivid testimonies to the absence of love and the omnipresence of estrangement, indifference, misunderstanding, insecurity, and failings of all sorts, they are not pessimistic in tone. Muschg neither judges nor condemns. Instead, he pleads convincingly, with great compassion but without sentimentality, for a more humane world.” - Judith Ricker-Abderhalden
Adolf divorced his first wife and then married Hanna Johansen, a writer, in 1967. Adolf has one son, Conrad Michael, from his first marriage, and two sons, Philipp Jonathan and Benjamin Niklas, from his second marriage.