"From the Cradle to the Grave" 1908-1912

Books 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, 1A, 17

Wölfli conceived the series of nine Books as a coherent work, which he titled “From the Cradle to the Grave; Or; Through Work and Sweat, Suffering and Ordeals, Even through Prayer into Damnation. Manifold Travels, Adventures, Accidental Calamities, Hunting and Other Experiences of a Lost Soul Erring about the Globe;or, A Servant of God without a Head Is More Miserable Than the Most Miserable of Wretches.” (published in German in 1985).

The text runs on without interruption from Book to Book. “From the Cradle to the Grave” contains over 2,970 pages and 752 illustrations in pencil and colored pencil. At the end of the Book, in 1912, Wölfli gives instructions to the printer, K. J. Wyss in Bern, regarding the title, execution, price, and distribution of the Book.

Wölfli first ordered the written folios into thin Books, then bound them together into the thick Books we have now. Wölfli added the chapter headings later, to judge from the dates, applied in 1910 and 1911. The chapter headings are done in red pencil and squeezed into the small available space between the lines. All texts are painstakingly dated.

The narrative “From the Cradle to the Grave” is dated in two ways: by the dates the work was written (1908-1912) and by the dates within the narrative (1866-1872). As the child "Doufi" (a nickname for Adolf), Wölfli is the hero of the travel experiences. As the narrator of these experiences, he signs as the adult author, "Adolf Wölfli." In addition he signs sometimes with "Writer," "Draftsman," and "Musician," and often as "Accident," "Victim of Misfortune," or "Calamity Victim" (German: Unfall or Unglücksfall).

Wölfli's talent and inclination to write were already manifest in 1895, when, in response to the admission questionnaire at Waldau, he wrote about his life. This "Short life description" ("Kurze Lebensbeschreibung") of eleven pages is subdivided into five chapters: "My Youth," "Further Blows of Fate and Disasters," "In Prison," "The Sun Brings It to Light," "The End," describing real events of his life and giving exact names and addresses.

“From the Cradle to the Grave” recounts Wölfli's imaginary life story in the form of a travelog of "nature explorers." The hero of these imaginary adventures is Wölfli from ages two to eight. The child Doufi is accompanied on these travels to different parts of the globe by an ever-growing group of relatives and friends, members of the "Swiss Hunters and Nature Explorers Traveling Society." Wölfli situates the adventures in the period of time still "beautiful" for him (1866-1872), the time before the death of his mother and the beginin of his life as a foster-child.

Wölfli begins his story with a journey of current interest and popularity at the time--emigration to America in 1865 at the age of one year together with his family. After a stay of about ten months in New York the family moves to the island of St. Helena, where two fictive siblings of his, Klara and Ernst, become teachers but soon die of typhoid fever. Because of her "homesickness," the mother and the two-year-old Doufi, accompanied by his brother Johann and his fictive sister Lina, return back Europe. They land in Gibraltar and continue their trip on foot. En route they meet Princess Stephanie of Belgium, who gives to Mrs. Anna Wölfli a letter of recommendation as companion to royalty at the court in Vienna. Because of a "crisis" concerning the father, the family has to return from Vienna to Bern. Wölfli starts school at Steingrüebli. Transported into an actual episode of his life, Wölfli interrupts the fictional story and refers the reader to the "Continuation of this text," that is, to the continuation of the real life story, "to be read in Book no. 5. In this auxiliary text Wölfli relates memories of his childhood and youth and subdivides the text into chapters similar to those in his "Short life story." He again faithfully recounts the events from his schooldays in Steingrüebli until his discharge from the St. Johannsen prison in 1890, this time embellishing the whole with poems and anecdotes. At this point, "not to get lost in my story, I march right back into St. Johannsen, into an office specially furnished for me, with a Havana in my mouth and a full mug of beer on the table, in order to be able to tell exactly the next chapter." He then describes a fictive trip on foot across France to Spain, undertaken in 1887-1888 with two colleagues from work, "in order to decrease the burden of unemployed on the capitalists back in the above-mentioned city of Bern by three heads." After arriving in Madrid, he shows his two friends the "domicile" in which he supposedly lived as a child with his family in 1866. At this point in the text he breaks off the narrative, and with a flashback--"Now I put myself back in the year 1866. Arrival of the Wölfli family in Cordu"--he returns to the imaginary story in Book 1 and continues the description of travel adventures in different countries and continents, "more or less over the whole earth."

We now know a good deal about the literary sources available to Wölfli. An entry in the medical history of 1924 reads: "He loves to browse in illustrated magazines, has a good memory and what he has seen once he remembers and it has a certain influence on the pictures made shortly afterwards." Morgenthaler also writes: "The geographical data are as a rule quite correct and put together from an atlas; his calendars, illustrated advertisements, brochures, and the like also serve as source."

In Waldau, Wölfli was familiar with the asylum library and read many of the books available in it. The library contained books with travel descriptions and edifying devotional literature, as well as daily and weekly newspapers, monthly magazines (among others, „Garten-Laube“ and „Daheim“), a humorous magazine of witticisms, and various almanacs. One of the sources Wölfli used most was the illustrated magazine „Über Land und Meer“, which he quotes again and again. He cites the passages and illustrations that interested him, indicating the exact year, volume, title, and page. It is important to note that Wölfli used these illustrations exclusively as sources of information and stimulation for his texts and not as models for his illustrations. On the other hand, „Über Land und Meer“ and its layout on the whole served as his model for the design of his Book in regard to title, data about editor, author, printer, place of publication and the page numbers on the individual volumes. Wölfli himself lists other sources: „Album illustré du reseau des chemins de fer Suisse“, „Die Garten-Laube“, „Der Planet Erde und seine Eigenschaften“. Wölfli binds a brochure of „Brehm's Tierleben“ into the beginning of Book 10. In this publication he found information about exotic animal species and lists of names, for which he developed a great passion. Single issues of weekly magazines, brochures, and almanacs were found in Wölfli's belongings: „Deutsche Romanbibliothek“, „L'Illustration“, „Berner Heim“, „Berner Woche in Wort und Bild“ and the calendar „Mission Romande“.

In his study Adolf Wölfli als Leser, Ralph Schroeder reports finding in the Waldau library a book titled „Reise einer Schweizerin um die Welt“ [Travels of a Swiss woman around the world], by Cäcilie von Rody, published in 1903, acquired by Waldau in 1904. Wölfli must have read this book. It shows striking parallels to his descriptions of the travel route to America, of New York and other North American places, as well as the names of persons which occur in Wölfli's Book. According to Ralph Schroeder and Dieter Schwarz, Swiss schoolbooks that included descriptions, tables, poems, and prayers were a most important literary source for Wölfli. He quotes them from memory throughout his narrative work. Many of the themes that preoccupied Wölfli were also of general interest at the time and were emphasized in the popular illustrated magazines: accidents, catastrophes, floods, collapsing bridges, sports festivals, music societies, descriptions of foreign countries, balloon launchings, the Swiss hotel industry, automatic machines, and so on.

(Elka Spoerri)