The role of language in the construction of identity and the Swiss crime novel in Friedrich Glauser's 'Gourrama', 'Der Tee der drei alten Damen' and 'Schlumpf Erwin Mord'

Friedrich Glauser (1896–1938), a German-speaking Swiss author prolific in the 1920s and 1930s, is best known for his protagonist of five crime novels, Wachtmeister Studer. In this project, I consider the role that language plays in multilingual societies and their popular productions in the first novel to feature Wachtmeister Studer, Schlumpf Erwin Mord (Erwin Schlumpf, Murder), and in Glauser's two earlier novels, Gourrama and Der Tee der drei alten Damen (The Three Old Ladies' Tea). I demonstrate here that Glauser's language choice cannot be reduced to expressions of local color, the simple dichotomy of familiar versus foreign or a rejection of one political system over another. Rather, characters engage in performances of language, such as storytelling and translation, as part of their effort to construct identity within their multilingual communities. On a generic level, these explorations of language use challenge the boundaries of the popular forms in which Glauser wrote, the novel of the French Foreign Legion ( Legionsroman) and the crime novel (Kriminalroman).; The cultural and political context in which Glauser was writing similarly influenced what linguistic choices this author made and how his works were then read. In the 1930s, a Swiss dialect literature (Mundartliteratur ) was also gaining a foothold amidst an increasingly conservative cultural atmosphere. Despite inclinations in the media toward associating Glauser with such popular forms of regional literature, Glauser's presentation of language use extends beyond the nostalgic and patriotic use of dialect typical of contemporary Swiss dialect literature, highlighting instead individual performance of Swiss diglossia. Looking at the representation of Schlumpf Erwin Mord as diglossic and therefore itself a performance of the linguistic situation in Switzerland, I argue for a connection between Glauser's construction of linguistic authenticity and Jeremias Gotthelf's almost a century before him. Returning to a presentation of language as part of the performance of identity similar to that in Gourrama, Glauser moreover creates a national hero in his Wachtmeister Studer by depicting a linguistic landscape with which the Swiss reader could identify.