Otto Friedrich Walter

Otto F. Walter (5 June 1928 born as Otto Friedrich Walter – 24 September 1994) was a Swiss publisher (Walter Verlag), author and novelist, which is well known in the German language countries. Otto Friedrich Walter was the younger brother of Silja Walter, a Benedictine nun in the Fahr Abbey and also a popular writer.

Early life Otto Friedrich Walter was born on 5 June 1928 in Rickenbach, Solothurn, being the youngest child of Maria Anna Cäcilia Walter-Glutz, and the younger brother of Silja Walter (1919–2011) and further seven sisters. He spent his childhood in the rural Rickenbach near Solothurn. Otto Walter, his father, owned a printing company, and had made a small family company to one of the most prestigious printing companies and publishers of Switzerland, the Roman Catholic-oriented Walter Verlag in Olten. The only son was seen as the successor of his father, and therefore he was sent from 1940 to 1942 to the monastery school at the Engelberg Abbey, that he called a restricted area exclusively for men, but he abandoned. Otto Friedrich finished his scholar education at the Kollegium Maria Hilf in Schwyz from 1945 to 1947, thenafter he started a three-year education as a bookseller in Zürich, and graduated from the beginnings of the career that was expected of me. In 1952, he married, three sons were born at the intervals of three years, but he divorced in 1964.

Walter-Verlag Otto F. Walter's father died in 1944, and after first working in the father's company, he became a volunteer at a printing company in Köln: he worked for the publisher Jakob Hegner as editor, before returning to the Walter Verlag. He now learned the publishing operation and the work of a publisher from scratch, as warehousemen and billing clerk, and his way led up to the position of the vice director and joint owner. In 1956 Otto F. Walter was the manager of the literary editorial in the Walter publishing house, and rebuilt engaged and successfully, a demanding program line, which at the end of the 1950s became one of the best, most innovative publishing addresses in Switzerland. Authors such as Alfred Andersch, Peter Bichsel, Helmut Heissenbüttel, Alexander Kluge, Kurt Marti, and Jörg Steiner were published, but not Otto F. Walter himself. The publications of the publishing house suffered from the leakage of Walter, and in the 1990s it was acquired by the Patmos publishing group.

Achievements as writer In 1959 Walter's first novel "Der Stumme" (literally: The Silent) found the attention of a wide readership, published in the Kösel Verlag München, as well as three years later the novel "Mr. Tourel", and again three years afterwards appeared the theater play "Elio oder Eine fröhliche Gesellschaft" (literally: Elio or a happy society). Especially the two novels convinced the criticism and achieved a very positive feedback. In 1980 Otto F. Walter started the work on the extensive family and era novel "Zeit des Fasans" (1988, literally: Time of the pheasant), in which Walter sat with his own origins and Switzerland's position during the Third Reich.

Otto F. Walter died after a long disease on pulmonary cancer in Solothurn on 24 September 1994.

Awards (excerpt) 1959: Charles-Veillon-Preis 1972: Kulturpreis Kanton Solothurn 1977: Buchpreis Kanton Bern 1980: Preis der SWR-Bestenliste 1987: Schillerpreis SRF Zürich

Literature Martin Zingg: Otto F. Walter und Paul Celan. Ein kleines Kapitel Verlagsgeschichte. Edition Isele, Eggingen 2007. Patrick Heller: „Ich bin der, der das schreibt“. Gestaltete Mittelbarkeit in fünf Romanen der deutschen Schweiz. Lang (= Europäische Hochschulschriften 1), Bern 2002. Elsbeth Schild-Dürr: Otto F. Walter – Sperrzone und Wunschland: eine Werkbiographie. Benteli Verlag, Bern 1992. Gerda Zeltner: Das Ich ohne Gewähr. Gegenwartsautoren aus der Schweiz. Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1980.