The former Swiss scandal author Urs Allemann is dead
He caused a scandal with his story “Babyfucker”. But the author and text performer Urs Allemann also mastered the finer tones. He was 76 years old.
A brilliant performer: the author Urs Allemann.
Image: Lukas Lehmann/KEY
It was the last day of the reading competition for the 1991 Bachmann Prize when a Swiss caused a scandal. Urs Allemann, who has so far attracted attention in broad circles as the culture editor of the “Basler Zeitung”, reads out a text that would no longer have a chance today.
In it he presents the wild fantasies of a pedophile. The story “Babyfucker” later emerged from this. How times have changed: Back then, this controversial text about pedophile fantasies even received second prize in Klagenfurt.
When “Babyficker” was created, there were hardly any debates about abuse
Jury member Hellmuth Karasek praises the work as a provocation. And literature, he argues, must explore all boundaries of imagination and experience. She shouldn’t just be at home in familiar territory.
Many scandalous works in film, literature and art in the 1990s could still be justified in this way. The demand for political correctness can only be heard as a harmless, distant rumble of thunder.
Above all, there were hardly any major debates about child abuse at that time. Later, the example of the German Odenwald School shows that pedophilia was trivialized or tacitly tolerated for a long time, even in culture-oriented milieus.
Allemann always enjoys obscene things
The name of Urs Allemann, born in Schlieren in 1948, has since been inextricably linked with the provocative title “Babyfucker”. Wrongfully. He has earned a good name, particularly in poetry circles. Even the title of his 1988 volume of poems “Fuzzhase” reveals a joy in the obscene.
In those days, he, who had been living in Goslar in Germany for a long time, should have been presented with the Erich Fried Prize in Vienna. The jury wanted to honor the “experimental-anarchist approach” in Allemann’s works. The author understood how to break down traditional forms of poetry. This is how he found his own style.
He is considered a forerunner of today’s text performers
In his books he has always described violence and fantasies of destruction, which ultimately turn against language itself. In this respect, he can no longer accept the approach of the perfect, harmonious and perfectly formed classical music, but he has dealt with it intensively, for example with Hölderlin.
The jury of the Erich Fried Prize also praised Allemann as a forerunner of today’s performers. His readings were often anarchist happenings, far removed from traditional water glass readings. As his widow announced, Urs Allemann died last Sunday at the age of 76.
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