Literary Work of Mourning  Guinea Pigs of Death

The poet Nora Gomringer has written a remarkable prose volume: an obituary for her beloved mother, filled with many episodes from family life. This literary work of mourning is moving, yet also witty – without ever losing depth.

Having very well-educated and, in particular, famous parents can be difficult, as they are usually strong, though not necessarily easy, personalities. The poet Nora Gomringer knows a thing or two about that. She is the daughter of the Germanist Nortrud Gomringer, née Ottenhausen, and of Eugen Gomringer, the founder of Concrete Poetry. Nora Gomringer has now dedicated a book of remembrance to her mother, who died in 2020: Am Meerschwein übt das Kind den Tod (“The child practises death on the guinea pig”). The playfulness of the author’s language is already evident in the subtitle: it is not an Nachruf (obituary), but a “Nachrough”. Yet the book is by no means coarse or rough – quite the opposite.

Gomringer loved her mother, who encouraged her to write from an early age, provided her with literature, and was also her first editor. “My mother was the literary figure in the household”: that may sound surprising, but for Gomringer, true literary people are first and foremost readers – and her mother read voraciously, devouring everything, while daughter and father, as writers, read only selectively.

Romantic girls are consistently boring

“I write after her as a daughter who misses her, as an angry woman, as a silenced poet,” Nora Gomringer summarises her state of mind. She also lost a wise mentor, someone who taught her the importance of humour and laconic wit – and who warned her: “Don’t be a romantic girl. They are consistently boring!”

The “Nachrough” surely helped Gomringer to find her way back into her own life in the face of such a profound loss. Her morbid disposition, she says, has grown even stronger since her mother’s death; she has been “more death-conscious than ever before”, unable to see anything “without the impression of death. As though he were a bailiff who has put his cuckoo sticker on everything.”

The dead cast long shadows

Of course, Eugen Gomringer, who died in August 2025, is not left unmentioned – he appears as a personality very much focused on himself and his art. He was often an absent father and at best a “sporadically monogamous” husband. He claimed everything, including the mother: “She is not your mother, she is my wife,” he once told his daughter. Why her mother never left him – despite an eight-year separation – is something the daughter cannot explain. A great deal of understanding must have been required, she suggests, though this understanding “was apparently unrelated to forgiveness.”

Perhaps the current boom in memoirs has to do with the widespread feeling that we are living in a time when many things are coming to an end. This strengthens the desire to preserve the past, at least in the form of books of remembrance. But beware: “The dead cast long shadows. And if you’re not careful, you live in them your whole life,” reads another noteworthy sentence in this book full of noteworthy sentences.

February 2026