Adelheid Duvanel – “close to you”: in a great loneliness

The Swiss author and painter Adelheid Duvanel, who died in 1996, has been rediscovered in recent years. Her disturbing stories, in which the author designed everyday dramas on one to three sides as from another world with incomparably metaphorical language, were posthumously celebrated in the German -speaking area. In them, people try to get along in an enemy world. “I write in great loneliness and I live in great loneliness” wrote Duvanel about himself in a letter that can be found in a new collection of her letters published by Angelica Baum.

In 2021, “Far from here” was published in the Limmat publishing house, a compact volume with all the author’s stories. The book title summed up the discrepancy between the lived and perceived reality in the language of Duvanel. The drama did not have to invent this, because her life was a single tragedy, only occasionally crossed by moments of happiness. The collection of her letters, which she wrote from 1978 to 1996, now bears the title “close to you”, which seems quite suitable, since it always tries to create a closeness to the addressee with intimate details.

Born in 1936 in a bourgeois family and grew up in the small town of Pratteln, Duvanel had experience with psychiatry in her youth. It was treated with both insulin syringes and with electric shocks. Her marriage, which was closed in 1962 with the painter Joseph (Joe) Duvanel, from which the daughter, born in 1964 and named with the mother’s first name, was not harmonious. Nevertheless, the husband, who lived with another woman, played an important role for the author until his suicide in 1982. The toxic relationship with him, her permanent shortage of money or even poverty and the concern for her drug -addicted daughter, who was called as she and who gave birth to a child at the age of 20 and then fell ill to AIDS – it cost all immense strength and substance, as can be read in the letters.

Again and again she goes to psychiatry for “relaxation” to escape her highly problematic everyday life. In 1996 she suffered an amnesia, does not even remember that she has a granddaughter and is found dead in a forest near Basel in summer, died of hypothermia “under the influence of medication”.

The volume opens with an important letter to Otto F. Walter, who became aware of Duvanel’s texts in Baseler Zeitungen and recommended the promising author to the Luchterhand publishing house connected to him. Most letters are aimed at the girlfriend and Bern author Maja Beutler and Duvanel’s editor Klaus Siblewski at the Luchterhand publishing house. As reading progresses, it becomes clear that Duvanel burdened her addressees beyond a tolerable limit with their fate. Maja Beutler and also the Luchterhand reader Siblewski always supported them, in particular the permanent clammy duvanel often sent money amounts and packages with food.

Surprisingly, this collection of letters also find loving letters to her horny ex-husband Joe Duvanel, whom she addresses with changing pet names such as “Rollboll”, “Robombo” or “Grolo”. From her daughter Adelheid, who accompanied her to a sanatorium for asthma sufferers in Davos, she writes as “Jä-Jä” or “Ju-Ju”.

Joe Duvanel seems to have been connected to the end of the 1960s, so that, despite all the humiliations collected from him, she could still write him in 1979 that she could not love anyone as: “My kiss should hover like very nice, velvety moths and tickle your eyelashes with their light wings.”

The majority of the letters is drawn by the most intimate revelations about Duvanel’s tragedies experienced. The search for closeness to people and the impossibility of being able to produce them passes through the correspondence mainly with Maja Beutler. Duvanel can actually only make an intimate closeness in the letters. In a letter from late summer 1981, she hopes “that we do not” spare each other ‘, that is, that we have no false fear of revealing us “.

Angelica Baum (ed.): Adelheid Duvanel, close to you. Letters 1978–1996. Limmat-Verlag, 896 pages, born, 44 €.