Swiss Literary Archives (SLA)

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Schweizerisches Literaturarchiv (SLA)

Hallwylstrasse 15

3003 Bern

Swiss Literary Archives (SLA)

Photo: Schweizerisches LiteraturarchivSchweizerisches LiteraturarchivSchweizerisches Literaturarchiv The Swiss Literary Archives owes its foundation to Friedrich Dürrenmatt who made it a condition of his donation that a national literary archive be set up with its help. Friedrich Dürrenmatt, in collaboration with Professors Peter Nobel and Peter von Matt, approached the Swiss government in 1987 with an offer of donation. This specified an arrangement whereby “a Swiss literary archive should be established for the literary estates that are of national importance” and this should be managed “as an annexed institution of the Swiss National Library” and provide access to its inventories for research purposes. Following preliminary informal talks with Alfred Defago, the former director of the Federal Office for Culture, an application was submitted to the Swiss Bundesrat  by Flavio Cotti, President of the Federal Department of Home Affairs, and received their approval meaning that the contract of inheritance could be signed on 27 June 1989. After a preparatory phase of just over a year, the Literary Archives were founded on 11 January 1991 shortly after Dürrenmatt’s death in December 1990. This subsumed the manuscript department of the then State Library – now the National Library.

The SLA collects first and foremost literary archives and estates of authors from Switzerland. Based on the collecting activities to date, thematic focuses have emerged. These are the two epochs of the inter-War years and literature after 1968 until the present. However, the SLA also purchases the estates of scholars and literary critics. A secondary area in the SLA’s acquisition policy is the purchase of the archives of cultural institutions in a broader sense, that is, those of publishing houses, writers’ associations, companies and newspapers. One new focus of the collection is to be literature by exiled émigrés in Switzerland as well as immigrants.

Notes and drafts, manuscripts, typescripts, letters, diaries, reviews, audio and visual documents, books and very different personal objects of writers are included in the archive or estates. With more than 250 (partial) estates, more than 60 authors’ libraries and the archives of living authors, the SLA possesses Switzerland’s most important collection of Swiss literature from the 20th and 21st centuries. Among the German-language literature you will find names like Hugo Ball, Peter Bichsel, Hermann Burger, Erika Burkart, Friedrich Glauser, Emmy Hennings, Hugo Loetscher, Gerhard Meier, Adolf Muschg, Erica Pedretti, Annemarie Schwarzenbach and Robert Walser as well as Nobel Laureate Carl Spitteler, who handed over his estate to the former State Library (today the National Library). As authors from very different origins write in and about Switzerland, the SLA is also home to the estates of the US citizen Patricia Highsmith and also has the (partial) estates of Hermann Hesse, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ulrich Becher, Rolf Hochhuth or Golo Mann in its inventory.