Ethics and Aesthetics in Jonas 
Lüscher’s Barbarian Spring
Yvonne Hütter
LMU München, Deutsche Philologie, Schelling Str. 3, RG, 80799 München, Germany
yvonne.huetter@gmx.net
The article claims that Jonas Lüscher’s first novel titled Barbarian Spring follows 
a twofold program: it is a book with a strong moral and political message, 
and at the same time it is challenging literature’s possibility to incite action. 
Therefore, the book stands within the tradition of the Enlightenment when it 
comes to educating the reader, and in a larger sense, believing in the social 
value of Bildung; yet, it simultaneously shows the limits of the Enlightenment 
frame by decomposing the linkage between moral knowledge and actual 
behavior. To pursue this twofold goal, the book intertwines traditional 
aesthetic forms with modernist goals, and demonstrates in the end the limits of 
applicability and fertility of both approaches in today’s context and when – as 
the text suggests – consequentialist categories are applied. The text diagnoses 
the malfunctioning of the syncretism of Capitalism, Christianity, and the 
Enlightenment not only when it comes to issuing rules for moral behavior, 
but also when it comes to giving meaning to experience. Following this second 
possible purpose of literature – sense-making – the book examines literature’s 
therapeutic possibilities, when therapy means the integration in or the creation 
of a coherent interpretational scheme.
Keywords: literature and ethics / Swiss literature / Lüscher, Jonas: Barbarian Spring / 
ethics and aesthetics / didactic function / therapeutic function / social engagement
149
Primerjalna književnost (Ljubljana) 40.2 (2017)
Fifty years after the Zürcher Literaturstreit, Switzerland in 2016 has a 
new literary controversy: Jonas Lüscher and Peter Stamm are debat­
ing – not less vigorously than Emil Staiger and his opponents at the 
time – on the purpose, possible impact, and adequate evaluation of 
art (Lüscher, Literatur; Stamm, Lieber). Leaving aside the personal al­
liances (pro/contra Lukas Bärfuss) and idiosyncrasies of the two coun­
terparts (both accusing the respective other as acting out of vanity), 
what remains is grosso modo the classical l’art pour l’art­versus­littérature 
engagée scheme that repeats itself with differing foci and contexts over 
time. Lüscher is taking the part of the committed intellectual; Stamm 
the part of the uninvolved, form­focused artist.
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Lüscher’s role and position in the recent debate seems to be in line 
with his first and hitherto only book Frühling der Barbaren (2013; 
Barbarian Spring 2014), which was received as book on the financial 
crisis respectively a book with a moral and political program. This di­
rection in the reception so far is induced by the plot and setting of the 
counterfactual novel (high­stakes London city managers experiencing 
the consequences of England’s national bankruptcy while on a luxury 
vacation in Tunisia) and by Lüscher’s biography: Lüscher was educated 
as an ethics teacher for primary schools, and was pursuing a doctorate 
in Philosophy at the ETH Zürich with a project on Richard Rorty and 
the role of narration for capturing social complexity.1 The aim of this 
article is to complement the existing readings by confirming that the 
book pursues a political­critical program, but that it is at the same time 
bringing into question the feasibility of such an approach. Diversely, in 
my opinion, the two most flagrant topics of Barbarian Spring are (a) its 
strong anti­capitalist message and its implicit incitement to act, and (b) 
its strong doubts about the possibilities of literature to influence social 
conduct and hence literature’s impotence when it comes to inciting 
action. Describing these mechanisms will be the first part of my argu­
ment, which will be divided into two subsections (the first valuating 
the text’s didactic aspiration and the second focusing on the novel’s 
style). The second part will analyze the peritexts and the narrative situ­
ation. Besides the more directly political and moral dimensions, the 
book thematizes other purposes that literature can serve and which can 
be summarized – following one of the major motifs of the book – as 
therapeutic, defined as the integration into or the creation of a coher­
ent interpretational scheme. Meaning and sense­making are the salient 
topics on this level. It is in pursuing a therapeutic program that ethics 
and aesthetics – according to the books presentation – could coincide, 
insofar as narration can create the frame of reference for meaning and 
consequently also meaningful behavior. It is important to notice that 
while the book diagnoses and shows the consequences of the loss of a 
coherent universal framework and asks indirectly for remedy, it does 
not deliver a new framework itself.
1 See his profile on his publisher’s webpage: http://www.chbeck.de/trefferliste.
aspx?action=author&author= 140723067 (last access 8.12.2016). Research so far: 
Beck, Hofer­Krucker Valderrama, Kleinpass, Reidy.
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Didactic aspiration vs. uselessness and dangerousness of 
literature
Rarely is there as clear a message in modern and postmodern literature 
as in Barbarian Spring. The characters are grouped in sharp antago­
nisms, and are the embodiments of morally charged stereotypes which 
can immediately be deduced from their names. The reader witnesses 
the obscene self­celebration of global capitalism in a 250.000­pounds 
wedding of London stock­traders at a luxury resort in Tunisia, and 
later the brutal implosion of parts of this same system when Britain 
goes bankrupt overnight, leaving the former filthy­rich wedding guests 
to face living without privileges, through the eyes of Preising (“Preis” 
in German means “price”), a Swiss industrial magnate who in loco 
gets invited to the wedding by the groom’s mother Pippa Greyling, 
an English teacher. Preising’s Croatian­German business executive is 
called Prodanovic, rooted in the Croatian verb pròdati (selling) (Hofer­
Krucker Valderrama 48, note 31). The most eye­catching exponent of 
London city traders explains the background of his nickname Quicky: 
“[Q]uick trigger finger. That’s why they were all so hot for me: the 
army, the firm and the bank” (Lüscher, Barbarian 90). Quicky worked 
as a mercenary in Iraq before becoming a businessman. The military 
analogy together with its implicit moral judgment is called to mind 
on more occasions. Watching the English traders at the pool, Preising 
states that, “Even in this state of near­nakedness […] they all looked 
like they were in uniform” (30). During the wedding, “People drank 
themselves into a stupor as though it was their duty, and went into the 
palm grove to throw up like they were executing some preordained 
plan” (88). The Brokers operate as an unconscious, strength­following 
mass, and not as single individuals who act on one’s own responsibility: 
“These young people were conditioned to hang on every word uttered 
by any confident speaker […]. It didn’t matter to them who was speak­
ing or what they were saying, it was all about the attitude of the person 
delivering the message” (86).
The sharp antagonism, with which the text works, is grouping the 
characters in agents and non­agents, whereby the second group is indi­
rectly supporting the first group’s actions by not opposing resistance. 
The exclusivity of this split is emphasized by alluding to but not work­
ing with other traditional antagonisms like Orientalism: calling to 
mind the orientalist categories (passion, irrationality, hospitality, etc.) 
but not using them underlines the universal propagation of capitalism: 
Preising’s Arab business partners are described in exactly the same terms 
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as their occidental counterparts, whereby recklessness and egotism 
combined with a talent for quick decision­making are the prevalent 
characteristics. Saida Malouch – her name blatantly makes reference to 
Edward Said – the owner of the resort and daughter of Preising’s busi­
ness partner in Tunisia, remains level­headed and cool­blooded after 
Britain’s bankruptcy: “It was time to act” (94). Orientalist features 
are used by orientals to sell their product (the 1001 Nights-Resort “was 
modelled […] on what market researchers thought a first­class tourist to 
Tunisia might imagine when he pictured a typical Berber settlement”; 
25). The universality of capitalism is also emphasized by the fact that 
“Daghfous” – the name of the family which would like to take over the 
Malouch family business but instead gets themselves swallowed – is one 
of the most widespread names in Tunisia, whereas Malouch (Moloch) 
provides the text’s moral evaluation: The world (Orient and Occident) 
is a global Moloch!2 The novel, therefore, is not part of the orientalist 
discourse and neither ostensibly of its postcolonial deconstruction,3 but 
plays with the orientalist tradition to underline its message, which is 
claiming the totality of global capitalism and moral corruption and the 
impotence of the humanist tradition in front of these facts.
The second traditional antagonism that proves neglectable in front 
of the more powerful division in agents and non­agents is the antag­
onism between the brute money­making business and high culture. 
S(t)anford Greyling, the groom’s father and Pippa’s husband, a sociol­
ogy professor, impersonates the academic elite with its wish for distinc­
tion that turns out to be only façade because Sanford is searching “ad­
venture” (44), driven by a death wish,4 and “acting like a teenager” (47) 
just like the London City trader telling about her Porsche­adventure on 
German autobahns, where “only her amazingly sharp reflexes, honed 
by all those hectic hours on the trading floor, […] had enabled her to 
cheat certain death” (39). Sanford refers the story to Preising “with his 
professional hat on” (39), but further on ends up having sex and mak­
ing wedding plans with Miss Porsche (106–109).
The ability to take action of the mentioned groups is further high­
lighted by their counterpart: the text ridicules and judges Preising’s 
incapability to take decisions by paralleling his problems with deciding 
about closing or not closing “the second­to­top button of his shirt” 
2 My gratitude goes to Katharina Schillen for her Arab skills and help with name­
research, and to the reviewers for constructive critique.
3 Although, Laura Beck’s brilliant talk gives an example of how fruitfully postcolo­
nial theories can be applied to Lüscher’s book. 
4 As the trip to the Berber cave dwellings proves (58–59).
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(40), and compensating or not compensating for the loss of a camel 
driver’s herd by giving him 15,000 francs. Preising’s “agonized wres­
tling was cut short by Saida, who [instead took action] […] and told 
the chauffeur to drive on” (24). The text’s moral judgment is also made 
clear via the comments of the frame­I­narrator on Preising’s conduct 
regarding the camel driver scene (“Preising could always find reasons 
for not taking action”; 23) and the I narrator’s comment on Preising’s 
behavior more generally (“Preising wasn’t inclined to give too much 
thought to greater or higher things, or at least he wasn’t willing to do 
anything more than just think about them, and certainly wasn’t pre­
pared to shoulder the responsibility that came with them”; 67).
Preising tries to circumvent guilt and responsibility but has to face 
the fact that his firm is using Dinka children to assemble pieces – a fact 
that he comments by “maintaining a contemptuous silence” (130). The 
moral message is overly clear: one can be guilty by being a spectator! 
Choosing the hot theme of child labor is a strategy to direct the reader’s 
emotions: the topic is so absolutely morally wrong that the implied 
author can implicitly count on the abhorrence of the reader. When 
some of Preising’s business partners elaborate on “what a delicate sub­
ject child labor was […] Much more problematic than your average do­
gooder might like to think” (7), then it is clear to the reader on which 
side s/he has to stand. None of the characters in the embedded story 
qualifies for identification, and the novel’s cartoonish experimental ar­
rangement does not allow ambivalence. The reader’s self­assurance lies 
in filling the gap: in not being either of the stereotyped characters, and 
therefore, in not acting without thinking properly and in not finding 
excuses for non­action, consequently, in embracing the novel’s moral­
ity, which follows the Christian caritas code and the Enlightenment 
code of taking responsibility for one’s decisions.
This didactic strand is further underlined by the “novella” (Novelle) 
genre.5 Kleinpass traces the features and transformations of the Novelle 
genre by making reference to Goethe’s and Heyse’s poetic theory rep­
resented in Barbarian Spring, and sees one of the differences between 
the genre­convention and Lüscher’s version in the lack of a Tugendideal 
(ideal of virtue): the world, according to Kleinpass, has become in­
scrutable for Preising (35) and Hofer­Krucker Valderrama states, that 
Preising experiences the confusion and complexity typical of globaliza­
tion (49). I do not agree. I think the text – beyond Preising’s distor­
5 Unluckily, this gets lost in the English translation which does not reference the 
genre after the title like in the German original. 
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tion, and primarily via the frame­I­narrator’s valuation of Preising’s ac­
count – denounces every recourse on incomprehensibility very clearly 
as evasive move: Preising uses overly complex constructions to skip 
responsibility but his entanglement in guilt is crystal­clear. Otherwise, 
Preising’s non­acting – his “disconcerting irresponsibility” (Kleinpass 
34, my translation) – would not classify as unerhörte Begebenheit (out­
rageous occurrence) in the Goethean sense.6 The Tugendideal, which is 
lacking in the text, must be embodied by the reader.
However, Kleinpass is right that the novel – and this is where the 
metafictional self­deconstruction of the text begins – marks the middle­
class intellectuals together with their enlightenment ideal of Bildung as 
useless in today’s context. Consequently, this applies to the novel it­
self: the moral message is overly clear, yet literature’s potential to incite 
action is not equally evident. The text challenges a direct causal con­
nection between reading literature and social conduct, between moral 
knowledge and actual behavior, and underlines this by showing the 
uselessness and unpredictability of literature’s impact.
For Preising, literature is a topic for small talk: “Books are a wonder­
ful ice­breaker” (Lüscher, Barbarian 28) and apparently this seems to 
work for establishing contact with Pippa (28); citations from canonic 
texts “tended to crop up a lot in social situations” (76). Literature, as 
far as Preising is concerned, is a vehicle for intellectual narcissism. Once 
the situation heats up in the resort, Preising saves the poem that Pippa 
recites at her son’s wedding but not Pippa, and he is also “ignoring 
some desperate guests who made a grab for the door handles” (124–
125) of the only available car, in which Saida and Preising leave the 
scenario. Against this background, saving the poem (69) becomes the 
sentimental gesture of an egoist who is trying to cover his inhumanity 
by staging his devotedness to art, a gesture of striking similarity to the 
real­world middle­class intellectual’s horror in front of the destruction 
of Palmyra and the simultaneous human indifference and reference to 
complexity when it comes to taking action and helping the people who 
live there.
Pippa really seems to have believed in the Enlightenment’s idea of 
progress via formation, but this former faith of hers is clearly marked 
as naïve given the sharp contrast with reality. The topic of the poem 
The Axe Handle by Gary Snyder, that Pippa wants to recite at her son’s 
wedding, is formation by emulation: “‘When making an axe handle / 
6 Goethe famously defines “Novelle” as type of text structured by one central out­
rageous event or conflict – the “unerhörte Begebenheit” (outrageous occurrence).
Yvonne Hütter:     Ethics and Aesthetics in Jonas Lüscher’s Barbarian Spring
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the pattern is not far off.’ And I say this to Kai [my son] / ‘Look: We’ll 
shape the handle / By checking the handle / Of the axe we cut with’” 
(70). The poem itself draws the analogy between the shaping of an axe 
handle, the shaping of society, and the shaping of literature: “Pound 
was an axe / Chen was an axe, I am an axe / And my son a handle, 
soon / To be shaping again, model / And tool, craft of culture, / How 
we go on” (70). Applied to her son, Pippa reflects: “It was obvious that 
in shaping her axe handle, she’s taken some duff measurements. […] In 
any case, she was adamant that reciting a poem at his wedding wasn’t 
going to change a thing” (71–72).
As far as the novel goes, Pippa is right and wrong about the capaci­
ties of literature for engineering reality. Presumably, she did not suc­
ceed in shaping her son, and as she has foreseen, reciting the poem at 
her son’s wedding turns out to be a disaster (84–88). However, there is 
a striking example of how literature actively and decisively contributes 
to the formation of actuality in the novel:
In an attempt to get Preising’s attention again [during their adventure trip to 
the Berber dwellings], Sanford served up the tale of the traditional Tunisian 
wedding feast. This basically consisted of a roasted camel with couscous. But 
the camel, which was cooked whole, was supposedly prepared in the refined 
manner of a Russian Matroschka doll, being stuffed with a whole sheep, which 
in turn was stuffed with a goat stuffed with a bustard stuffed with a dozen 
quails, each of which had been stuffed with barberries and dates. Preising was 
skeptical. He had the feeling he’d heard this story, or something very like it, 
somewhere before, and in the context of a joke, what’s more. (53–54)
This does not stop Preising from using the story on his account “to 
impress some of the young people [at the wedding]” (89). “Quicky, 
who had a sharp mind but a very poor knowledge of literature, and 
who’d only half­listened to Preising’s story the night before, was able 
to reel off the entire recipe for roasted camel verbatim, entrancing his 
audience with the prospect of an authentic Tunisian feast” (121). The 
infuriated mass of former rich parvenus subsequently puts the recipe 
in action, substituting several missing ingredients with dog­puppies, 
which requires the murder of their owner Rachid, and the flames for 
the roasting set the whole resort on fire. The recipe that Sanford sells as 
Berber folklore is a passage (without counterpart in real life) from T. 
C. Boyle’s novel Water Music. Therefore, parts of Boyle’s fictional text 
become reality in Barbarian Spring, evidencing that literature can form 
reality but one cannot foresee in what way: instead of a just society one 
might end up with a roasted camel!
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Not a matter of style
Barbarian Spring dovetails an overly clear moral message with serious 
doubts about the possible impact of literature as a whole, apart from 
which form literature uses to pursue this educational goal. The form 
Barbarian Spring deploys is an intertwining of traditional forms with 
modernist goals: the conservative narrative styles, due to their anachro­
nism, are not causing the consequences they were intended for in the 
enlightenment tradition (educating the reader directly), but they create 
disturbance and display the text’s artificiality (and attempt to educate 
the reader indirectly).
The novel has two I­narrators: Preising, who is telling about his busi­
ness/holiday trip to Tunisia, and the frame­I­narrator, another patient in 
Preising’s psychiatric clinic who functions as the editor of Preising’s story. 
Preising’s very peculiar way of presentation is an exposition of bourgeois 
narration: his old­fashioned, mannerist way of talking is commented on 
and ridiculed as early as page one by the frame­I­narrator: “À propos, for 
heaven’s sake! – that was one of his affectations, larding his speech with 
archaic turns of phrase he knew full well nobody else used anymore” (1). 
His frequent use of antiquated terms accompanied by French particles 
(“his wife, très charmant”; 15) and his excessive use of hypotaxis is typi­
cal for the narration in the tradition of the nineteenth century: the style 
seems a parody of Thomas Mann, whose The Magic Mountain with its 
topos of the clinic as refuge out of time and space might well be a pre­
text for Barbarian Spring. Ronald Speirs comments on the poetology of 
Mann and other non­modernist writers during the Third Reich:
[M]ostly they employed a mixed mode of fiction, well established in Ger­
man literature since the Enlightenment, one which incorporated realistically 
observed detail into various types of didactic or exemplary narrative. Their 
common aim was to defend humanity against its despisers, and to offer some 
vision of hope, however precarious, to set against the fear on which tyranny 
depends. (Speirs 165)
This seems to be Preising’s approach: he tells the frame­I­narrator a 
story to prove his point (1) and to implement a didactic program (“You 
could never be sure whether Preising’s stories were true or not, but that 
wasn’t the point. What mattered to him was the moral of the story.”; 
10). His statements are an (inauthentic) enactment of humanism and 
the Enlightenment’s hope in moral progress by cultural education. 
When Pippa voices misgivings on whether or not to recite the poem at 
her son’s wedding, Preising tells her with great pathos:
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[‘T]his poem goes way back in time, into the history of many generations, 
and also points the way forward to future generations. It reflects,’ he contin­
ued, getting into his stride, ‘the Great Chain of Being. One day, your son will 
become a father himself, and when he does, he’ll think back on your words. 
It’s really important, this poem. Pippa, you have to recite it this evening’. (72)
As I have shown above, this framework – even if it were not corrupted 
as in Preising’s case who uses Bildung to click with other people – is 
marked as outdated and does not apply to today’s society: Preising 
“knew next to nothing about the relationship between grown­up chil­
dren and their parents” (72).
Preising’s pseudo­message together with his conservative style serves, 
beyond its speaker’s intent, the modernist goal of defamiliarization and 
alienation. The reader, like the frame­I­narrator, stumbles over certain 
words and constructions of Preising’s presentational mode, unmasks 
Preising as an intellectual snob and takes the Brechtian critical position in 
front of this overly artificial character. However, this is not all: the reader 
also deconstructs the Brechtian goal, which is still in the Enlightenment 
tradition of believing that awareness incites actual acting. The text strik­
ingly shows that knowledge or awareness is not enough to act because 
in Preising’s case, action is not incited by knowledge: once Preising has 
learned that his company is based on child labor, he does nothing; as he 
does nothing in front of the camel driver’s despair although he knows 
well what should be done. The novel decomposes the Enlightenment’s 
linkage of progress of knowledge with progress of justice, especially 
when seen from a consequentialist perspective hence when judging the 
consequences of an action or non­action and not the agent’s intent. This 
can also be shown via Pippa’s disillusionment, Sanford’s opportunism, 
and, when all of these strands are put together, the implicit self­reflexive 
prognosis of the impact of the novel Barbarian Spring on social conduct. 
Pippa’s cultural­educational intent may be authentic but she attains no 
results. Sanford’s moral sense and his sociological and psychological 
knowledge about the behavior and desires of men his age gets promptly 
substituted with new interpretations that suit and sustain his behavior 
and desires (108–109). The reader may be alienated (and therewith ex 
negativo know what s/he should do), but will that change anything in 
the real world according to the text’s own prognosis?
Preising’s doctor has difficulties in diagnosing his pathology: it is 
not the “common depression” (10) of the frame­I­narrator, “Yet in our 
inability to see ourselves as capable of taking action we were alike” (10). 
A possible reason why Preising’s pathology is so difficult to diagnose is 
that Preising’s pathology is the normal mental condition of most of the 
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novel’s presumable readers (and the present commentator): educated 
and living in capitalist societies, with a moral consciousness yet incapa­
ble of acting, reading novels while elsewhere people are suffering, and in 
doing so actually thinking of themselves as serving humanity. Preising 
ends his story (which culminates in assisting the massacres in the resort, 
the arresting and presumable death of Saida, and the Dinka children 
assembling pieces for his firm) with “‘Come on, […] Supper should be 
ready” (132). Laura Beck reads Preising’s pathological prudence as a 
comment on Switzerland’s neutrality. I think this can be enlarged: the 
clinic might as well be the Christian West, the fortress of Europe, the 
cradle of Enlightenment that goes to supper while clearly knowing that 
millions suffer – this because of various reasons, but connected via our 
disinterest and thereupon within our frameworks by our guilt.
As previously mentioned, the moral message gains clarity by taking 
a critical stance in front of the possibilities embodied by the charac­
ters; but at a second level, the novel suggests a familiarization with 
the characters, whether that be Pippa’s disillusioned faith in educa­
tion, Sanford’s opportunism, or Preising’s lethargic intellectual vanity. 
While clearly knowing what should be done (and thereby taking the 
critical stance), it is more likely that the reader will find excuses for 
non­action (and therewith fall in the category of “Preising”), find new 
elaborations for pursuing personal gain (the category of “Sanford”), or 
embrace defeatism (the category of “Pippa”). Yet, will this new aware­
ness to be one of these three characters change anything?
The displaying of intent against consequences (the strong moral 
drive together with serious doubts about its impact) is a possible key 
to the “wrong­question(s)­enigma” that frames the text: “‘No,’ said 
Preising, ‘you’re asking the wrong questions’ (1); ‘Look here,’ he said, 
‘I’ll prove it to you. À propos of which, I’ll tell you a little story […] 
with a moral to it’ ” (1–2). Additionally:
So, what had been the point of all this – this sad story full of tragic coinci­
dences? It was a tale with no didactic purpose to it. Preising seemed deeply 
downcast by his own story […] “So what was the point of your story then?” I 
pressed him, mercilessly. Preising’s response seemed pregnant with some secret 
knowledge on his part, yet also a deep anxiety about what he knew. “Once 
again, you’re asking the wrong question,” he said. (132)
Besides being a veritable conundrum for generations of literary schol­
ars, on a formal account it is an elegant possibility to have it both ways: 
to set the agenda of engaged or moral literature while challenging the 
feasibility of such an approach and avoid one­sided answers.
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Therapy and the creation of coherence
Hofer­Krucker Valderrama interprets Preising’s narration as redirec­
tion activity (49). I agree but would emphasize the role of the frame­
I­narrator in this evaluation: it is the frame­I­narrator’s comments 
that set the moral tone by dropping the keyword “responsibility,” and 
therewith suggest from the start to read Preising’s narration as manoeu­
ver of exculpation: “Now, I realized straight away that, even with the 
first sentence of his story, Preising had effectively succeeded in absolv­
ing himself of all the responsibility for the events that subsequently 
unfolded” (Lüscher, Barbarian 4). But who is this I­narrator who stages 
Preising’s account, and what are his reasons for telling?
Details on his background can be easily overlooked because they 
are presented en passant in a very few lines at the height of Preising’s 
apocalypse­narration:
In effect, what Preising was presenting me with here was a variation of the by­
now familiar theme of “Where were you when Britain went bankrupt?” Latter­
ly this genre had taken over from the earlier “Where were you on 9/11?” […] 
Incidentally, my two answers to the respective questions were: sitting in front 
of a portable TV in the boardroom of a haulage firm in Bayreuth, where all the 
staff had gathered to watch the tragedy unfold; and watching a flat­screen TV 
in the cafeteria at the University of Lucerne [Britain’s bankruptcy]. (99–100)
It is impossible to determine which position he held in the haulage 
firm. What is sure is that someone with a practical job in Bayreuth 
decided to go to Lucerne. Choosing a small university out of one’s 
own region most presumably coincides with wanting something spe­
cific there. The University of Lucerne had only three departments until 
2016 (Barbarian Spring was published in 2013): Theology, Cultural 
and Social Studies, and Law. The Law school includes a Center for 
Transport Law,7 but the fame of the University lays in its research in 
theology and social ethics.8 The text leaves open what the frame­narra­
tor was doing at the University of Lucerne, but transport law does not 
integrate as good with the rest of the text as theology: next to judging 
Preising as irresponsible, the frame­I­narrator comments several times 
on the cynic behavior of the bankers, who declared money “released 
7 https://www.unilu.ch/fakultaeten/rf/institute/kompetenzstelle­fuer­logistik­ 
und­transportrecht­kolt/ 
8 https://www.unilu.ch/fakultaeten/tf/institute/institut­fuer­juedisch­christliche­
f orschung­ijcf/
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the potential to achieve great things. Yet this greatness was mostly mea­
sured in terms of the square meterage of living space in Cape Ferrat” 
(67). There are several recourses on Christian imagery in the text (e.g. 
Rachid’s name, which means “who has the faith,” the recurrence of 
purgatorial fire, etc., see Kleinpass 34) and the frame­I­narrator feels 
responsible for the text’s unity and clarity, which can be seen from his 
repeated corrections of Preising’s accounts (see Lüscher, Barbarian 84, 
88). It could even be assumed that Preising, together with his whole 
story, is an invention of the frame­I­narrator. But for what reason?
Next to his presumed studies in Theology, the only other thing that 
is known about the frame­I­narrator is that he lost his child. The reader 
discovers this when Preising tells the I­narrator that Pippa lost her sec­
ond child:
“For someone like me, who never had kids […] it’s hard to imagine what it 
means to lose a child. You, though, […] know only too well what it means.” 
No, actually, I didn’t. Preising was mistaken. Just because you’ve experienced 
something, it doesn’t mean that you know what it means. […] Some things are 
so senseless that there is no point in trying to give them meaning. (33)
This fictitious rejection of trying to give meaning is an analogon of 
Preising’s impossible but necessary “moral of the story.” It is plau­
sible to presume that one of the “wrong” questions that the frame­
I­narrator is asking (and which initiate the text) is the question for 
meaning and the “why.” When facing existential aporia like the loss 
of an innocent child the problem of theodicy is not far off. The frame­
I­narrator’s fixation with global justice and his moral evaluation of 
Preising might as well be his redirection activity. Preising tries to dis­
tract himself from his own guilt, while the frame­I­narrator tries to 
distract himself from the absence of guilt – and sense. Literature and 
narration, traditionally, have not only been connected with moral 
education but also with meaning. Sense arises by integrating punctual 
experience into a coherent narration (Taylor). Following the frame­I­
narrator: experience in itself is nothing. Only interpreted experience 
is meaningful, and interpretation is possible only in reference to a 
larger framework. What Barbarian Spring diagnoses is the incongru­
ity of the traditional frameworks – Enlightenment and Christianity – 
with today’s experience: it is impossible to generate a meaningful and 
successful story by reference to one of the two. This can be due to a 
problem inherent in the framework itself (as in the case of theodicy) or 
due to the incongruity of different frameworks: the Enlightenment’s 
ideal of Bildung, as presented in the novel, has become an attitude 
Yvonne Hütter:     Ethics and Aesthetics in Jonas Lüscher’s Barbarian Spring
161
(Preising), capital (Sanford), or useless because without impact (Pippa) 
when confronted with the reality of neoliberal capitalism. The same 
is true for the more genuinely Christian or metaphysical framework: 
the apocalypse in Barbarian Spring is not to be followed by salvation 
(Hofer­Krucker Valderrama 45). Emblematic is the Bible reference at 
the end of Preising’s account: “English tourists could be seen walking 
down the dead­straight road across the desert like latter­day Israelites 
leaving Egypt” (125). The biblical quotation works as a joke, not as 
carrier of meaning.
Preising’s quest for the “moral of the story” and the frame­I­narrator’s 
quest for meaning are both presented as pressingly needed yet presum­
ably idle. Both choose narration as the royal road to achieving their goals 
but get hampered by the multiplicity of frames: Barbarian Spring, al­
though imagining Britain’s bankruptcy, is not showing the bankruptcy 
of capitalism but the bankruptcy of Christianity and the Enlightenment 
as frames of reference when connected with capitalist society.
The title of the book Barbarian Spring is followed by a definition by 
Franz Borkenau put before the main text: “What is barbarism in actual 
fact? It is not the same thing as cultural primitivism […] It is a state 
in which many of the values of an advanced civilization are present, 
but without that social and moral coherence which is the prerequisite 
for a culture to function rationally” (0). The question is: Who are the 
barbarians? Reidy is right in stating that the word “barbarian” never oc­
curs in the text, but only in the peritexts (160). Without the Borkenau­
quotation one might be tempted to attribute the term to the brutaliza­
tion of some of the Londoners after the crash – using the word then in 
its ostracizing and self­assuring function – but with the given definition 
by Borkenau the answer can only be that barbarism describes the cur­
rent state of affairs: it is the syncretism of unrestrained capitalism and 
Enlightenment or Christianity which does not “function rationally,” 
which lacks “coherence.”
In Barbarian Spring, the society whose value­system is based on 
Christianity and the Enlightenment but whose praxis is capitalistic is 
diagnosed with something very similar to depression: it has become 
incapable of understanding itself as an agent, and it has lost the experi­
ence of meaning, with a cure (active substance and method of applica­
tion) yet unknown. The Borkenau­citation goes on: “But it is precisely 
for this reason that ‘barbarism’ is also a creative process: once the over­
all coherence of a culture is shattered, the path lies open for a renewal 
of creativity […] There is no historical basis for believing that the end 
result will be some tabula rasa” (0). There is neither any “historical 
PKn, letnik 40, št 2, Ljubljana, avgust 2017
162
basis” for believing that there was ever a Golden Age of Coherence, nor 
that it might ever become real. The state of coherence itself is Utopia. 
However, following Wolf Lepenies’s Melancholie und Gesellschaft, 
this would be the place of literature and narration: imagining a cure. 
Literature, to function as therapy, would have to lift itself up to the 
level of frame working.
However, this is not what Barbarian Spring does; it stops with the 
diagnosis. Barbarian Spring, notwithstanding its clear moral message, 
valuates the probability that literature can induce this sort of action as 
pretty dim: awareness is not enough to actually start acting, and this 
also counts for the awareness to live in Barbaria.
Lüscher’s book takes a more humble and sceptic stance than its au­
thor. Involved literature does not necessarily have the consequences 
which are intended. Still, in the book’s evaluation the ostensibly unin­
volved counterprogram could be subsumed under Preising’s category.
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Etika in estetika v romanu Pomlad barbarov 
Jonasa Lüscherja
Ključne besede: literatura in etika / švicarska književnost / Lüscher, Jonas: Pomlad 
barbarov / etika in estetika / didaktičnost / terapevtskost / družbeni angažma
Prispevek analizira prvi roman Jonasa Lüscherja Frühling der Barbaren (2013) 
in ugotavlja, da roman razvija dva koncepta: ima izrazito moralno in politično 
sporočilo, istočasno pa izziva potencial književnosti, da bralca spodbudi k 
dejavnosti. Roman se uvršča v tradicijo razsvetljenstva, tako v ožjem smis­
lu, saj gre za vzgajanje bralca, kakor tudi v širšem, saj tematizira družbeno 
vrednost »omike«, vendar pa istočasno opozarja tudi na meje razsvetljenske 
drže, ko razgradi vezi med moralnim védenjem in dejanskim vedênjem. Pri 
razvijanju teh dveh konceptov roman prepleta tradicionalne estetske oblike 
z modernističnimi idejami in prikaže meje uporabnosti in plodnosti obeh 
pristopov v sodobnem kontekstu, zlasti glede na posledice. Besedilo diagnos­
ticira nepravilno delovanje sinkretizma med kapitalizmom, krščanstvom in 
razsvetljenstvom, in sicer ne le tedaj, ko gre za vzpostavljanje pravil moralnega 
vedenja, temveč tudi tedaj, ko gre za osmišljanje izkušenj. Roman upošteva 
postopke osmišljanja kot drugo možno funkcijo književnosti in pri tem pre­
verja njene terapevtske zmožnosti, pri čemer je s terapijo mišljena integracija 
in kreacija koherentne interpretacijske sheme.
1.01 Izvirni znanstveni članek / Original scientific article
UDK 821.112.2(494).09Lüscher J.:17