Literature "so öppis wie d wahrheit" about grief as a struggle with oneself
How can you find your way back to life when a loved one has lost theirs? Olga Lakritz's first novel in Zurich German, "so öppis wie d wahrheit" , shows grief as a struggle with oneself. However, the political aspect remains pale.
15.10.2025, 06:30
SDA
Grief immerses memory in a dense fog. The nameless first-person narrator of "so öppis wie d wahrheit" cannot remember what happened the last time she met her ex-boyfriend. And he died shortly afterwards.
In her second novel, author Olga Lakritz, who grew up in Zurich and lives in Biel, traces how a young woman battles the depression that sets in after a stroke of fate. She consults a psychotherapist, reconnects with friends and revisits her childhood. Lakritz skillfully assembles the therapy sessions, conversations and returning scraps of memory into an overall picture that becomes clearer the longer it goes on.
While Lakritz wrote her debut "Das Ampfermädchen" from 2023 in High German, she wrote her new work in dialect. Her characters speak Zurich dialect, using words such as "chlübe" for "pinch your skin" or "e bsetzti" for "a squat". This does not detract from the flow of the reading.
Focus on inner life
However, when the novel ventures onto an explicitly political level, it is not entirely convincing. As is first hinted at and then becomes more concrete, the "left-wing activist" died at the hands of the police, who had targeted him because of his skin color.
In doing so, the author opens up a thematic field around racism and racial profiling, which she only sparsely illuminates in the narrative. The insights into the left-wing activist milieu remain anecdotal and vague.
In contrast, the narrator's inner life is vividly portrayed. The quick-witted exchanges with her therapist and the flashbacks to her own parental home are unforgettable. Here the author shows her skills as a spoken word artist, with which she made a name for herself in her youth, for example as the U20 Swiss Poetry Slam champion. The book is an unembellished account of self-doubt and self-isolation, from which the narrator fights her way out, sometimes sabotaging herself in the process, and somehow carries on regardless.
*This text by Ramon Juchli, Keystone-SDA, was realized with the help of the Gottlieb and Hans Vogt Foundation.
