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puzzle. In a sense it was also a psychological jigsaw puzzle, in that I was tracing the life of a person unlike myself in nearly all respects. He lived in another century, another country, another social class, he had a different educational level, a different culture, a different way of earning a living, he was a man, married with children, he had many opinions and interests which I do not share, and was a natural optimist, which I am not. The only characteristics that we have in common are belief in God and a love of books and beautiful landscapes. I think, however, that one important reason why people read autobiographies is that they wish to enter, for a limited time, into a different world and even a different personality.

But another reason is that we like to discover beneath the differences some of the similarities between the writer's world and our own, and to fill in the personal details that official histories do not provide. One does not have to live in the 18 th century to feel sympathy for some of Bräker's difficulties, such as the acute frustrations of an unhappy marriage or of being unable to obtain an education suitable to one's intelligence level. Sometimes little incidents jump off the page as being part of our own lives, as when, for example, Bräker's children are out walking and the youngest complains that he can't keep up with the others. And neither the differences nor the similarities of background and personality ever obscured the fact that I was getting to know a unique human being. He was often weak, frustrated, inconsistent, anxious or over-confident, but never boring, often unsuccessful in business and in relationships but never stopped doing his best in both, and completely dispelled the myth that writers in German have no sense of humour.

Bräker's story is of course also to some extent the story of a family and a small community, set in a remote region which does not attract all that much attention even today. To most non-Swiss the name will recall a breed of goats, now well known over most of the world - Bräker would have been pleased to know this. The beautiful butterscotch-coloured cattle, with cream-coloured linings to their ears, who also now graze its pastures would be strange to him, as would the numerous ski resorts. The Toggenburg consists of the upper half of the valley of the river Thur, which rises in a high ridge to the west of the Rhine valley, near the ski resort of Wildhaus, and flows first south-west, then slightly west of northwards to Wil. The rest of its course, flowing roughly westwards, traverses the canton of Thurgau. Today the Toggenburg is part of canton St. Gallen, in Bräker's time it was politically a separate territory.

From Wildhaus to Wil is about 32 miles on the map. It is high country, (Wildhaus lies at 3608 feet), and beautiful, but not spectacular: fields, pastures and forests, hilly rather than mountainous. There is one mountain peak, the Säntis, 8209 feet, which is truly wild, with jackdaw-haunted caves, and paths built out on trestles from the cliffs. There are still no large towns, like Bräker one must go to St. Gallen, famous for the cathedral of the former monastery and its library. Both are world-famous examples of Rococo architecture and built during Bräker's lifetime, from 1758 to 1767. Lichtensteig, the administrative centre of the Toggenburg, is only a few miles from Wattwil and built on a steep conical hill, it seems to have changed less than Wattwil, which is now a small sprawling town with blocks of flats and light industry.

Besides his autobiography and diary Bräker wrote a fair number of shorter works of many kinds: poetry, drama, part of a satirical novel, book reviews, history, literary criticism and dramatic dialogues. These have been mentioned at the appropriate dates and some indication given as to what they were like, particularly if they throw light on Bräker's life at those particular times. I have not, however, attempted to include a systematic appreciation of his writing as a whole. Much of his non-autobiographical work, though often very entertaining, is rather derivative, most of it also incomplete or in need of revision. Only in his autobiography and diary, where his own character and actions are the principal interest, does he come into his own as a writer. For a contemporary English reader this and the light that he throws on his own time and place are the main interest of his writings. For myself, the English writer that most closely resembles him is the 19 th century clergyman Francis Kilvert, though of course their circumstances were very different. Kilvert never saw war and revolution at close quarters as Bräker did, and he was better educated, though possibly less intelligent. But Bräker once said

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