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somewhat overshadowed by such heroic figures as the reformer Zwingli, born at Wildhaus, or by a best-seller such as Susanna Müller (1829-1913) who wrote a cookery book which was still being reprinted in the 1950s.

Bräker would not have been pleased by the subsequent fate of his work. Even the autobiography seems to have been thought of at first as an adventure tale suitable for children (editions by Peter Scheitlin, 1848, an editor who knew Bräker in his lifetime, and by Johann Anton Seitz, 1892). The 18th century was an age of adventure, and, as Bräker himself says several times, his adventures up to and on the field of Lobositz could easily be outdone by other writers in both history and fiction.

Switzerland lies at the heart of Europe and is a multilingual country, but efforts to reach a wider public by translation were slow in coming (the first was a French translation by Jules Broche in 1913). Nor was much opportunity taken to publish in other German-speaking countries up till the editions of Eduard von Bülow in 1852 and Adolf Willibrandt in 1910. Ludwig Zürn's edition of 1892 included many linguistic notes designed to help those not familiar with Swiss German, thus bringing out Bräker's national characteristics, a good thing in itself but one which may later have helped to relegate him into obscurity precisely because he was not a German national.

In 1890 the famous Sedwyla Verlag published an illustrated edition with 12 woodcuts. The didactic purpose of Bräker's writing fades out and the picturesque element takes precedence. This enhances the obvious importance of Voellmy's three-volume edition of 1945, despite its errors in chronology. It, too, contained parts of the diaries as well as the autobiography, and Voellmy claimed that all editions of the autobiography after his were abridged Today that is no longer true - Voellmy included the lengthy letter written by Bräker to Lavater, saying that he was the last to do so, but subsequent editors have revived it. Other editions have appeared since, but none on such an ambitious scale. Another French translation, by Caty Dentan, was published in 1973 and 1978 and the first English translation by Bowman in 1979.

Contentious issues in the study of Bräker's character:

Controversies form an essential part of Bräker's legacy, most of them incapable of resolution from the available evidence. To take a simple example, his interest in the Quakers and his admiration for the great war-leader Frederick II suggest contradictory answers to the question of whether he was a pacifist. Others are far more a matter of opinion, as when Voellmy excuses his flights into fantasy as evidence of vision, and Mayer emphasises his realism, whereas Ernst calls him "a refugee from the real to the ideal world". Even more complicated, however, are issues of politics and religion. We have already seen how the writer of the "Isis" obituary tried to portray Bräker as indifferent to politics, with Voellmy in his commentary able to demonstrate that this was not entirely accurate.

More seriously, however, his story has been used to present him as "the first proletarian writer" (title coined by the Schweizer Literarischer Lexikon, but an idea developed by Thalheim in his introduction and by Böning's biography, portraying him engaged in struggle with a reactionary environment. His political environment was reactionary, no doubt of that, but in all his writing that I have seen the evidence points to Bräker supporting the good aspects of the government of his time, rather than taking such little action as was possible for him against the bad aspects. The image of Bräker as hero of the proletariat is further enhanced by several translations published in Eastern Europe, (for example in Romanian in 1974 and in Polish in 1979). In East Germany, Peter Hacks brought Bräker and his comrades to the stage in "The Battle of Lobositz", published in Berlin in 1957. For a stage work in his homeland one must wait till the staging in Zürich in 1978-9 of Herbert Meier's "Bräker: eine Komodie". In 1972 a 15-minute videofilm, produced in Wiesbaden by Friedhelm Heyde, "Die Schlacht" [The Battle] recounted Bräker's experience of the battle of Lobositz. These visual presentations also show

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