Bärfuss, born in 1971, has been a freelance playwright and prose writer since 1997. Just one of his plays, DORA - The Sexual Neuroses of Our Parents, has been brought to the stage, but two others have been performed as readers theatre productions.
During his talk with the Hungarian literary historian Imre Kurdi at the event at the Goethe Institute, Bärfuss said he had held several jobs before he decided to start writing for a living, including one as a bookseller. His first works were love letters, he revealed, to the woman who his now his wife and the mother of his children. As a writer cannot build a serious cannon of work on love letters, he sought out other prose forms.
People are inclined to stylize their own life, and in certain cases this is what makes a writer a writer, Bärfuss said. If the public accepts the role of the speaker at the podium at a talk such as this, it legitimizes this role, he added.
Bärfuss said he grew up in an environment where contact with the theatre, in the conventional sense of the word, was limited. His experience was rather influenced by amateur theatres.
When Bärfuss established the 400asa student theatre together with Samuel Schwarz, he said it was reward enough to get an audience.
Bärfuss said the theatre was a primitive form of art in certain terms. There is no intimacy in theatre, and perverse tendencies can be bravely brought to the surface, he added.
Although Bärfuss was in Budapest for the first time, he said he had already formed a picture of the city, something he has been unable to do for Zurich, even after living there for some twelve years.
Author: Éva Kelemen / Photo: Dániel Kováts
