Wolfgang Borchert in Switzerland Gordon Burgess Confined to bed with a debilitating illness from November 1945 onwards, the actor Wolfgang Borchert turned to writing and editing as a source of income. Acknowledging that the medical treatment and drugs he could receive in postwar Germany were inadequate, several of his friends took on the task of arranging medical treatment in Switzerland. This article charts the difficulties faced by Borchert’s friends in negotiating his journey to, and stay in, Switzerland with the British, French and Swiss authorities, and casts light on Borchert’s literary activities during the last weeks of his life in Basle. Introduction The Hamburg writer Wolfgang Borchert (1921-1947) is a household name in Germany, best known for his play Draußen vor der Tür (The Man Outside) about an ex-soldier who returns to the ruins of his home-town, unable to find a refuge either from his past or in the present. Between January 1946 and his death in Basle in November 1947, Borchert also wrote some fifty short stories and other prose texts, at the same time as writing book reviews and doing editing work for a number of publishers. He had always been prolific: as a teenager he had written, according to his own estimate, hundreds of poems (the vast majority of them occasional pieces of little literary worth or interest), and had authored three plays, in collaboration with another teenage friend.1 But Borchert had never intended to end up as a writer. His prime ambition, ever since he had seen Gustaf Gründgen’s play Hamlet in Hamburg in December 1937, was to become an actor.2 He took private acting lessons with Helmut Gmelin, at that time engaged at the Hamburg Schauspielhaus 1The following account revises and expands: Gordon Burgess, The Life and Works of Wolfgang Borchert (Rochester NY: Camden House, 2003), and Gordon Burgess, ‘“Sicher wird der Autor über meine brutale Chirurgie entsetzt sein.” Wolfgang Borcherts Überarbeitung des Typoskripts Erlebnisbericht aus russischer Gefangenschaft von Graf Konstantin zu Dohna (1947)’, in Jahreshefte der Internationalen Wolfgang Borchert-Gesellschaft, 7 (2005), 6-19. 2‘Gründgens’ Hamlet Ursache zu meinem Theaterfimmel — und Shakespeare’ [‘Gründgens’s Hamlet the cause of my obsession with the theatre — and Shakespeare’]. Letter from Wolfgang Borchert to his school friend Werner Lüning, 27 March 1946. Translations here are my own. 120 Gordon Burgess theatre as a director and producer, qualified with a diploma in acting in March 1941, and spent what he later referred to as the happiest time of his life as an actor in a repertoire company touring northern Germany around Lüneburg, from April to June of that year. The Second World War intervened, however, and Borchert was recruited into the army and sent to the Eastern front in September 1941, where the German army suffered appalling conditions. He was wounded, got frostbite, and was finally declared unfit for military service. On three occasions during the Second World War, he was arrested and charged with various offences against the State, and spent long periods in military jails. By the time the war ended, Borchert’s health was in a parlous state, not helped by his walking 600km from Frankfurt a.M. where he had escaped from captivity as a French prisoner-of-war, back to Hamburg. Once back in Hamburg, Borchert launched himself into the re-emerging theatre scene there, appearing in a review Janmaaten im Hafen (‘Jack Tars in Harbour’) and taking on the role of production assistant for a production of Lessing’s Nathan der Weise. But his health continued to deteriorate, and from the beginning of November 1945 Borchert was almost completely bedridden. Partly to make ends meet and to help pay his medical bills, he began writing short stories and sending them to newspapers and magazines in the hope of getting them published. The medical treatment he received ranged from his being bombarded with x-rays to being prescribed horse-meat by a homeopathic doctor. Nothing helped, and by the autumn of 1946 Borchert was needing almost round-the-clock attention, a situation exacerbated by both the early onset of a severe winter and the shortages of fuel and food in postwar Hamburg. It was about this time that he wrote Draußen vor der Tür, half-lying on a sofa, in the space of a week or so, commenting at the time, ‘man muß seinem kranken Körper etwas zumuten ehe man unterliegt’3 [‘you have to wrest something from your sick body before going under’]. It was ultimately due to his writing this play that Borchert was to spend the last weeks of his life not in his beloved and native Hamburg, but in a soulless single room in a clinic 3Quoted from Herta Borchert, Vergangenes Leben, undated typescript, p.173. Copy in the Wolfgang Borchert Archive, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Carl von Ossietzky, Hamburg, referred to subsequently as WBA..