With a foreword by Joshua Cohen,
Yale University Press (The Margellos World Republic of Letters)
October 19, 2021

Revered by Bertolt Brecht and Max Frisch as one of Switzerland’s most commanding writers, Ludwig Hohl spent most of his waking hours with a pen in hand, collecting quotes from others and recording ruminations of his own. Composed between 1934 and 1936 during his residence in the Netherlands in a state of “extreme spiritual isolation,” The Notes is Hohl’s magnum opus: an assemblage of his epiphany-like observations, disparate in subject yet threaded together by a relentless exploration of the nature and origins of creativity. 

Inspired by Spinoza, Goethe, and many others, The Notes contends with the purpose of work, the vitality of art, and the inevitability of death—a valiant, uncompromising exercise in hope against the devastating backdrop of twentieth century Europe. This abridged edition, expertly translated by Tess Lewis and with an illuminating foreword by Joshua Cohen, introduces the reader to this remarkable work and its writer.

Praise for Ludwig Hohl

“Hohl is essential, we are incidental.”—Friedrich Dürrenmatt

The Notes is “as virulent now as it was decades ago and as readable as if it were written just now, esoteric-current, ‘little known’ but present, its language is urgent, [and] that, I think, is stature.”—Max Frisch

“[The word] ‘warren’ is precisely apposite to Ludwig Hohl, one of the secret masters of 20th century German prose. Hohl, who believed that creation in any fundamental sense lies outside human reach, developed acute powers of observation. He was a voyeur into the nuances and tremors of sensibility. Hohl experienced physical and psychological phenomena as interminably fragmented. With disenchanted scruple, he fitted these fragments into a language-mosaic of exceptional lucidity. Hohl did so from a literal underground, from a cellarage or below street-level cavern in Geneva. There, the teeming notes and aphorisms which constitute his opus (Die Notizen) in an always provisional mobile array, were hung on clothes-lines for inspection and revision. Hohl, whose very name [cave] is an omen, was a collector of silences and solitudes.

He came to distinguish between aloneness as suffocation, as sterility, which he identified with the flatness and dour Calvinism of his years in Holland, and the festive, fruitful solitude of the Alps. There is a solitude of the peaks and one of imprisonment, one of horizons and one of intractable confines. Out of authentic isolation, release can occur via a chance meeting, notably with a talismanic text (e.g. Goethe’s Maxims and Reflections or Spinoza’s Ethics, to Hohl the text of texts). Paradoxically, “the greatest, who are the solitary ones, have trust in the world,” a trust as in a brother. Theirs is the fraternity of the essential. This is Ludwig Hohl’s methodological point. Only solitude, difficult, humiliating, even corrosive as it is, can safeguard art and thought from corruption. The media, the lust to communicate by socially sanctioned and rewarded means, the manipulation of discourse towards approval and success, are an irreparable waste of spirit. Communication with others is a secondary, almost unavoidably suspect function. Language is true to itself only when it strives (always imperfectly) to address the “truth-functions” within itself. Echoing Kafka, whose penultimate parable of the “Warren” or “Maze” so uncannily prefigures Ludwig Hohl’s actual existence, Hohl believed that there is genuine communication only when the listener is “appalled” (entsetzt).”—George Steiner, Grammars of Creation

"Ludwig Hohl is a great discovery, an unjustly neglected author.”—Susan Bernofsky, author of Clairvoyant of the Small: The Life of Robert Walser

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