“Carl Laszlo, Auschwitz survivor, art collector and art dealer with Hungarian roots, and German author and translator Udo Breger, born during World War II with close ties to key figures of the Beat Generation, meet in Basel in the late 1970s and early 1980s. One hopes to establish personal contact with William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and Allen Ginsberg, while the other turns out to be a mediator who, against the backdrop of the Holocaust and its effects on Jews and Germans, seeks not only to cultivate his friendship with Laszlo but also to create historical clarity for himself. In this field of tensions, literary activities repeatedly lead to unusual situations in Basel and New York, which occasionally contain a certain comic element and offer insights into the thoughts and actions of two contrasting, yet complementary characters…”
(translated from the blurb of this edition)
Udo Breger (1941) is a German author, translator and publisher with close ties to the Beat Generation. Breger studied English and Romance Language & Literature at the University of Göttingen from 1964 to 1971, during which period he also ran an art gallery in Göttingen. Between 1968 and 1975 his Expanded Media Editions published and organised projects with Joseph Beuys, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin, William Burroughs and others. In the mid-1970s Breger translated Robert Shea’s and Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! Trilogy for Sphinx Verlag, Basel. With the exception of a couple of years spent in Sweden, Breger has since then worked in Basel as a publicist and translator of works by Walt Whitman, Alan Watts, John Lilly, William Burroughs, Franco Beltrametti and others for various publishing houses including his own. During his stays in the USA between 1978 and 1992 he met Andy Warhol, Herbert Huncke and Buckminster Fuller to mention some of his many overseas friends and acquaintances. Breger’s Expanded Media Editions and his magazine Soft Need has published works by cut-up artists Jürgen Ploog, Carl Weissner, Jörg Fauser, William Burroughs and Brion Gysin as well as works by Allen Ginsberg, Claude Pélieu and Gerard Malanga. Together with Axel Heil and Peter Weibel, Breger curated the exhibition ‘The Name is Burroughs‘ in ZKM Karlsruhe and the Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg in 2012.
Carl Laszlo (1923-2013) was a Swiss/Hungarian psychoanalyst, art collector and dealer and writer. Laszo grew up in Hungary and while most of his relatives were murdered in Nazi concentration camps, he himself survived Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald. After the war he settled as a psychoanalyst and art dealer in Basel, Switzerland and was granted Swiss nationality in 1968. Laszlo published his experiences in Auschwitz as Ferien am Waldsee. Erinnerungen eines Überlebenden in 1956 and in Der Weg nach Auschwitz. Jugend in Ungarn in 1987. Flamboyant, gay, obtrusive and snorting coke incessantly, Laszlo made his mark as an art dealer and collector and was introduced to William Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Allen Ginsberg by his fellow-townsman and counterpart Udo Breger.