Literature Eric Bergkraut has made an intimate record of his wife's death

With Ruth Schweikert, literary Switzerland lost an important voice last year. Now the death log that her husband Eric Bergkraut kept in the weeks before her death has been published. "One Hundred Days in Spring" is an ambivalent read.

People of public interest have to expect that many strangers will be interested in their death. Journalists often research the circumstances of their death against the resistance of their relatives.

In the case of Swiss author Ruth Schweikert, it is the other way around: her husband wrote the book "One Hundred Days in Spring". In it, he intimately describes the course of her second bout with cancer, right up to her last breath on June 4, 2023.

Eric Bergkraut thus picks up on Ruth Schweikert's own illness journal from 2019: In "Days Like Dogs", she shared her experience of her first breast cancer with her readership at the time. The widower's new book thus legitimizes itself as a continuation of a public confrontation with the private, which was important to the author.

The only difference is that now the reader steps close to the deathbed of a 59-year-old woman with cancer. The reader's gaze is inevitably voyeuristic, although there is a significant difference between the two books: In her case, the private becomes political and literary, detached from her individual fate.

"You were a poet, I am not a poet," Bergkraut writes in the book. He is a documentary filmmaker by profession. He often addresses his deceased wife directly, recalling how they met, their love life, revealing grievances and details of family life with their sons. Bergkraut and Schweikert dealt with the latter in the comedy "We Parents", which they presented at the Locarno Film Festival in 2019. It therefore seems only logical to now share the loss of this "we" and the grief surrounding it with the world.

*This text by Tina Uhlmann, Keystone-SDA, was realized with the help of the Gottlieb and Hans Vogt Foundation.