„Hausierer im Interieur“: Außenseiterfiguren in Hermann Burgers Erzählungen
'Peddlers Indoors': Outsider figures in the stories of Hermann Burger

Summary/Abstract: Hermann Burger, a consummate ‘artist with language’, chronicles the existential troubles of strange eccentrics in dizzyingly, labyrinthine lengthy sentences which are crammed with foreign words and neologisms. Burger is considered to be one of the most original and most controversial writers in contemporary German-Swiss literature. This essay focuses on selected stories of Burger and characterises their protagonists, who are either mentally or physically handicapped or else highly gifted and cranky and who tell of their lives in orgiastic verbal tirades. Their attempts to overcome the barriers separating them from the external world fail and this eventually leads to their mental or physical death. This analysis emphasises both the linguistic and stylistic peculiarities of Hermann Burger’s prose as well as certain autobiographical elements in it. Burger was overcome by own mental suffering to the extent that in 1989 he took his own life.

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