Spiked: The professor's delicate handwriting

Sometimes his tall figure would appear outside our window, and then we knew: Our neighbor, the professor, was refueling again. He accepted the invitation to tea a few times. Prof. Dr. Werner Weber, professor of literary criticism at the University of Zurich and former head of the features section of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, owned a modest country estate in our distant neighborhood. It was his childhood home, as he was proud to point out, because Werner Weber came from a modest background. When we hunted deer in the fall, we always hired a shooter "bi de Frau Wäber obe", which is still the main exchange today; the cottage is so remote. Thanks to Werner Weber, Hermann Hesse and Paul Celan also found out where Schottikon was.

When I think of him, I think of the huge distance the journalism industry has come, not only technically, from lead typesetting culture to digitized text management, but also intellectually. The two paths must have gone in opposite directions. Technology has become more and more complex as it has advanced into the editorial offices: the successors of Werner Weber not only have to deal with content, but also with form. Journalistic job profiles, on the other hand, have become so differentiated that a journalistic authority like Weber would no longer be conceivable today.

This difference becomes apparent in the letters that Weber wrote and received. Thomas Feitknecht has compiled, organized and annotated them with endless patience (Werner Weber. Briefwechsel des Literaturkritikers aus sechs Jahrzehnten, Verlag NZZ). The book is a single, unnostalgically sober reflection on the changing times and values and a reminder of the years between 1939 and 2000. Weber - always with a fountain pen, in his delicate handwriting and sometimes on small cards, which suited his careful choice of words so well - corresponded with Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, Nelly Sachs, Paul Celan and again and again with Max Frisch; the two rubbed shoulders. In those days, the feature editor still sent separate copies of the book reviews to the authors; no one left Weber's editorial office without a respectful, individual greeting. When Hermann Hesse once ordered 250 separate copies of an article dedicated to him, Werner Weber was so embarrassed that he asked back whether it was really the right thing to do.

Weber's pen pals were also authors such as Otto F. Walter, Ludwig Hohl, Walter Matthias Diggelmann, Hans Boesch, Hermann Burger, Gertrud Leutenegger, Adolf Muschg... all young people at the time who needed dialog and encouragement. The fact that he liked some of them and didn't trust others was one thing. The other, however, was the caring curiosity with which he repeatedly inquired about the progress of their work. He gave advice in response to questions and was almost always the first reader. His response had an inimitably elegant form: a mixture of honest openness and polite condescension. The authors, even those on the left who didn't really like the NZZ, experienced this affectionate, inquiring interest as a blessing in their lonely business of writing.

At the time, they were touchingly clumsy when it came to pagination. One of the authors, who was to prepare his great work for publication in installments, wrote: "What I would like to know is whether you think these chapters en block (!) are suitable, how many installments that would mean, or how many MS pages would make a sequel." Weber didn't care, he had his metteur for that. In return, he replied to the author: "On rereading it, my admiration has not only been strengthened, but increased. Science - intuition - design with you in one, as if it were nature - and yet it is the highest achievement of conscience...." The letter was sent to Golo Mann, the preprint concerned "Wallenstein".

Feitknecht's extremely carefully edited volume of letters is part of an imaginary library about the changing journalistic culture in this country: a powerful reminder of wonderfully old-fashioned personalities and working styles, when there was no A and B mail and the editors' letters were not deleted from the mail server but archived because they were so enchanting that they are still worth keeping and rereading today.