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Carl Spitteler: 100 years since the Nobel Prize in Literature

Name: Carl Spitteler: 100 years since the Nobel Prize in Literature
Start: 2019-04-04T00:00:00+02:00
End: 2019-04-04T23:59:59+02:00
Location: Liestal

4 April 2019

In Liestal, Alain Berset speaks at the celebration of the centenary of Carl Spitteler’s Nobel Prize. Spitteler is the only Swiss-born writer to have received it and, in his words, “der grosse Unbekannte der Schweizer Literatur- und Geistesgeschichte”.

He first jokes about the fourteen years of work on “Prometheus und Epimetheus”, which console him a little about the AHV reform. Then he returns to the speech of December 1914, “Unser Schweizer Standpunkt”, a plea against internal division and for neutrality at the start of the war. Spitteler, he says, embodies civic courage: “Dafür, dass Feigheit vor dem Freunde eben nicht von Freundschaft zeugt, sondern von Feigheit.”

Speeches on this site