Adolf Muschg

Adolf Muschg (born 1934 in Zollikon, canton of Zurich) is a Swiss writer in German and a longtime professor of literature. Associated with the Gruppe Olten, he has worked across fiction, drama, essay and teaching, and he remains one of the more visible German-language writers of postwar Switzerland.

He studied German and English literature and philosophy at the universities of Zurich and Cambridge, and took his doctorate with a thesis on the sculptor and playwright Ernst Barlach. After teaching in Zurich between 1959 and 1962, he held posts in Göttingen, the United States and Japan. From 1970 to 1999 he taught literature at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.

His writing moves from the experimental prose and plays of the 1960s to more intimate stories later on. Recurring concerns include the comfortable middle class of his own country, the tensions between individuals and authority, and, in his more recent books, love in old age. His 1993 novel Der Rote Ritter, running to more than a thousand pages, is a playful retelling of the medieval Parzival and is often read as postmodernist. He also wrote the foreword to Fritz Zorn's controversial memoir Mars, which stirred a scandal in Switzerland. Critics have argued that some of his subjects lay beyond his direct experience.

Muschg has belonged to the Berlin Academy of Arts since 1976 and served as its president from 2003 until 2005, when he stepped down after disputes with its senate. He received the Georg Büchner Prize in 1994, among many other awards. His papers are held in the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern.