Peter von Matt has died at the age of 87. He had a heart for the villains and rogues of literature

To say Peter von Matt was temperamental would be a gross understatement. He came from the mountains; his distant ancestors were haymakers, and at heart, he remained a mountain dweller his entire life. And like every mountain dweller, he was a sleeping volcano. He smiled most of the time, but it was a deception; behind his eyes, arched by bushy brows, a dangerous blaze blazed.

Once, the volcano exploded in front of the cameras. That was in 1991, at the reading competition for the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in Klagenfurt. The German critics had just mocked the Swiss and their slow way of reading for the second time. Then Peter von Matt raised his fist high in the air and brought it down with a thunderous crash onto the table. Then he launched into a furious tirade, chanting every sentence with his fist, waving it and then coming down like a guillotine.

As soon as a Swiss person reads, it's immediately said they have a tongue like a snail, says von Matt, thundering his fist. And anyway, the Swiss have no material and no topic. The fist thunders again. "They live behind the stove of world history, in the warmth, everyone is filthy rich, fat." Again the fist thrusts heavenward and thunders on the table. "I'd like to ask my colleagues from the Federal Republic to show their bellies." Who is satiated?

On such occasions, it's often said that the Swiss simply haven't had as wonderful a history as the Germans. The fist thunders again. "They don't have this baseness, these outrageous atrocities. They've always only had a bit of half-baked democracy, warming their feet, but we Germans have the Russian campaign." The fist thunders again, and the audience holds its stomachs with laughter.

The performance is legendary. Anyone who wasn't familiar with Peter von Matt and his books until then knew by now: Here's a Swiss German scholar who speaks like someone from the mountains. But when his temper bursts, he thunders his fist like an angry god.

People may laugh out loud, but he means it seriously – in his own way. And that means: Art must be protected from the narrow-minded as well as the conceited. For Peter von Matt, the high and the low are equally close and far away. Nothing is alien to him, but unlike those who always have everything clearly before their eyes, everything must first become alien to him before he can learn to understand it and interpret it anew.

Peter von Matt was the great dowser of literature. Whenever he encountered the elemental phenomena of existence and their manifestations in art, he adhered more than almost anyone else to Eichendorff's verse: "A song sleeps in all things." Under von Matt's hands, what this enchantingly simple poem promises came to pass: "And the world begins to sing, / If only you find the magic word."

It makes no difference whether someone is boasting about the Russian campaign or hunkering down behind the stove, whether someone reads with the tongue of a snail or with a Prussian rasping voice. Art draws from many sources, both murky and clear, and it knows many forms of expression, none of which is inherently superior to the other. The beautiful, the good, and the true can be found in the gutter as well as in high society. Everything can be art, as long as there is something hidden within it that transcends its surface. Anyone who can touch it, whoever can grasp Eichendorff's "magic word," can make the world sing. Peter von Matt was such a person.

Perhaps Peter von Matt's special gift lay in his ability to hear with his eyes. He read Shakespeare and Virginia Woolf, both of whom were among his favorite authors; he immersed himself in the works of Patricia Highsmith and Max Frisch, and he always seemed to hear just as much as he read with his eyes. Books must have seemed like musical scores to him. He heard what he saw and also knew how to read and interpret what he heard. That's why he was one of the most gifted readers of his time.

He never found himself completely lost in his authors. He always revisited their works with relish, allowing them to become foreign to him once more, before learning to understand them anew, not better, but simply differently. For even though he always read the same words and sentences, he always heard something else resonating in them.

And when the great critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki once claimed that Peter von Matt was Switzerland's best writer, it may have been a spiteful quip directed at a faltering literary scene. It certainly wasn't wrong, even if Peter von Matt would never have called himself a writer. But at least in 2012, he was the only author to date to win the Swiss Book Prize for an essay ("The Calf in Front of the Gotthard Post").

It was a blow to German-language Swiss literature that a professor of German studies had won one of the country's most prestigious literary awards. Peter von Matt accepted it with stoic composure and was happy to accept the unusual honor. After all, he knew what was an open secret in Switzerland: He was not just a gifted reader, he was also a gifted writer.

This, too, had to do with listening. He heard his sentences before he wrote them. That's why his books are a reading pleasure of the highest order: no German jargon, no stilted sentences, no fussiness; his books are written in the most beautiful spoken language. You could watch Peter von Matt read and think; you could see his ears glowing when he struck a striking chord, and you could almost sense his glee when he sneaked a little joke between his sentences.

Born in 1937 and raised in Stans, Peter von Matt came into contact with both mountains and books from an early age. The mountains stood majestically at his doorstep, and inside his family, numerous book people worked as printers, publishers, and antiquarians. He studied German in Zurich and earned his doctorate under Emil Staiger, whose assistant he became and whose chair he took over in 1976. Peter von Matt was similar to his teacher in astonishingly many respects, yet at the same time, in crucial respects, his antithesis.

Both were eroticists of reading, and both possessed, in addition to the gift of perceptive reading, that of precise expression. As university professors, they equally influenced far beyond the university. But where Staiger established prohibitions on thought and sought to defend beauty against the onslaught of the supposedly ugly of modernity, von Matt breathed the spirit of the anti-dogmatist. He was drawn precisely to where things became wild, where the wilderness stirred, where the all-too-human invaded the spheres of art with noise and tumult.

Peter von Matt was never interested in literature solely for its artistic sake. He always sought traces of a human comedy that showed humanity as it really was: entangled in contradictions, tragic and comic at once, malicious and passionate.

As a German studies scholar, Peter von Matt was therefore less a literary theorist than a curious anthropologist, constantly researching people and the diverse hardships of their existence. While poets might have told him a lot about poetry itself, he was even more interested in what they had presciently placed about life in their books.

This thirst for knowledge found expression in Peter von Matt's essayistic works, which most German scholars regarded with suspicion simply because he thought freely and boldly dispensed with the supportive corset of footnotes. He evaded the rules of the academy, regularly refusing to quote from secondary literature, which he nevertheless knew down to the subtleties of exegesis—and wrote far better than most of his profession.

Although Peter von Matt was a popular and successful university professor, he did not seek his merits through academic achievements. He did not publish major editions, leaving the works of Gottfried Keller or Robert Walser to others; he did not distinguish himself with large-scale symposia or spectacular research projects. He excelled as a publicist. And from the book titles alone, it was easy to see that he preferred dealing with villains and hapless souls to aesthetes and lucky ones. Betrayal and ruin simply promised more excitement than bourgeois mediocrity.

In 1989, he dedicated a study to "The Faithless in Literature," and in 1995, he caused a sensation with "Depraved Sons, Wayward Daughters," who told him about the manifold family disasters in literary history. Most recently, he published a study of his favorite characters: "Evildoers, Dry Skulkers, Luminous Figures." Peter von Matt didn't have to have been a mountain dweller. He knew that those characters who stand at an angle within the world know more about it.

Among them was the hunchbacked, diminutive Lichtenberg, in whose portrait Peter von Matt found one of his most beautiful, delicate images. Lichtenberg mused about what one could do with books besides reading. For example, according to Lichtenberg, one could stand on them to get a better view out the window. Von Matt transformed this into an enchanting aphorism, which also resulted in the smallest self-portrait imaginable: "The insights made possible by standing on the book thus achieve a balance with the insights that arise from reading the book."

This is how we must imagine Peter von Matt: When he read a book, he did so with the awareness of simultaneously standing on many other books, just as every poet works on the shoulders of his predecessors. What precedes his own thinking and writing always resonates.

And one last thing: Peter von Matt was not only an important teacher and a great author, he was also a citizen, a public figure, a citizen who spoke out when necessary. He was not a genuinely political mind; he had no party membership card. He was also a buccaneer in political matters. The moral law did not reveal itself to him from a higher morality, but from the consciousness of Him who made human weakness the measure of what is humanly possible. Peter von Matt was not an idealist; he was a moralist who understood the needs and despair of the human soul because he knew them from poetry and from life.