Reading: Norbert Gstrein reads from his latest novel «Im ersten Licht» (2026)

Description

Gstrein's century panorama «Im ersten Licht» begins in 1920. In a rural area of Austria, horribly disfigured soldiers from the First World War live in a villa converted into an invalids' home. Among them is Ernest Eller, a son of the noble owners of the estate. His family has declared him dead because he does not want to face his fiancée as a monster. Gstrein's protagonist Adrian Reiter, who works as a hotel servant near the villa, has known Ernest since childhood and cares for him. Ultimately, he cannot help him: Ernest sets the villa on fire and shoots himself. Reiter limps: his father, a k. & k. postal clerk, made him crippled with an axe blow to the leg so he wouldn't be drafted into the First World War. Later, thanks to the Eller family's support, he can study; he becomes a high school teacher and marries a colleague. The heroic deeds of the Austrian army become his obsession. His student Martin Baumgartner, who admires him, fights in the Second World War as a soldier of the Wehrmacht in the East. During a front leave, he visits the teacher. The teacher takes the soldier's reports as calmly as those about the deportation of Jewish families. Adrian's wife can no longer tolerate her husband's opportunism. She leaves him shortly after the war ends. He later, in 1961, meets Vivian in the South English Downs, who becomes his second wife and helps him start a new life, although she also carries a dark story. Norbert Gstrein is one of the most renowned German-speaking writers of our time. The mathematician by training has distinguished himself with novels, stories, and essays, for which he has received numerous awards. His most famous works include the novels «Die englischen Jahre» (1999), «Das Handwerk des Tötens» (2003), «Die Winter im Süden» (2008), and «Als ich jung war» (2019). Gstrein has a talent for creating complex stories and characters in his unmistakable, simultaneously sober and poetic language that one cannot forget. Adrian Reiter in the novel «Im ersten Licht» is a vivid character: observer and follower, everyman and oddball, a person capable of nuanced perceptions and at the same time ideologically influenced, one who becomes guilty through looking away and inaction. But he is not just an antihero. He is close to us; we understand him better than we might like. His life runs as little in straight lines as Norbert Gstrein's labyrinthine novel, which impresses with its architecure as much as with its precise language. Its strong plot has – in the 1988-set coda – a highly sophisticated ending. After the reading, there will be the traditional soup.

Highlights

• Reading by Norbert Gstrein
• Excerpt from the novel «Im ersten Licht»
• Venue: Garage Wetzikon

General Information

Norbert Gstrein presents his latest novel «Im ersten Licht», set in Austria in 1920. The reading takes place at the Garage Wetzikon and offers insights into the complex story of the protagonist Adrian Reiter.

Location

Bahnhofstrasse 24, 8620 Wetzikon ZH, Switzerland

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