Fritz Zorn

Fritz Zorn was the pen name of Rudolf Heinrich Fritz Angst, born on April 10, 1944, the elder son of Ernst Angst, a co-owner of the Holzscheiter rubber and leather works, and Ruth Holzscheiter, the founder's daughter. He grew up in Meilen, on the stretch of Lake Zurich's eastern shore known as the Gold Coast, in a household he would later call prohibitively harmonious, where conflict was simply never allowed to surface. He went to school in Küsnacht, took his Matura at a Zurich gymnasium, and read German and Romance philology at the University of Zurich, with spells of study in Lisbon and Madrid. In 1971 he took his doctorate there with a dissertation on the Portuguese writer Luís de Sttau Monteiro, published the next year under his own name, and he went on to teach Spanish at secondary schools in Baden, Zurich and Aarau. Outwardly it was a correct and successful life; inwardly it was one of long depression and loneliness, without a love affair of any kind. When a tumor appeared in his neck, a malignant lymphoma, he began psychotherapy, and then on paper he set out to explain how a young, rich, educated man could have been brought up, as he put it, to cancer. Drawing on the ideas of Wilhelm Reich, he finished the manuscript in the summer of 1976 and signed it Zorn, the German word for anger, in place of Angst, the word for fear. He died on November 2, 1976, at thirty-two. Mars appeared the following year from Kindler in Munich with a long foreword by the Swiss novelist Adolf Muschg, and it became a cult book for the restless young of the early 1980s, the Zurich youth movement above all. Translated into Swedish, French, English, Dutch, Polish, Spanish and Hebrew among others, it received a new French translation from Gallimard in 2023.

In 1976 Adolf Muschg received a manuscript from a former fellow student with a note saying it had to happen quickly. Muschg rang the publisher Kindler, who was waiting on his own book about Gottfried Keller, and named his price: only if you bring out Fritz Zorn. Zorn learned a publisher had been found the day before he died.