Familienbild (1903). The Welti family, with Albert in the foreground.
Albert Jakob Welti (October 11, 1894 – December 5, 1965) was a Swiss writer and painter.
Life
Welti was born in Zürich-Höngg. As a son of the famous painter Albert Welti, Albert Jakob Welti was also to be educated as an artist. He studied at the academies of arts in Düsseldorf, Munich, London, and Madrid. He lost both parents in his young days: first his mother died in 1911 in Munich, then his father in 1912 in Bern. A heavy typhus fever on the Balearic Islands in the early 1920s brought the turning point from painting to writing.
Having returned to Switzerland, he chose Chêne-Bougeries near Geneva as his place of work. Maroto und sein König, a historic play, came into being (1922), then Servet in Genf (1930). At the Swiss National Exhibition of 1939 [de] in Zürich, the dialect drama Steibruch was premiered extremely successfully and later also made into a film. Only at the age of 50, Albert J. Welti's first novel was released: Wenn Puritaner jung sind (1941); then followed the second novel Martha und die Niemandssöhne (1948), which played in the politically and socially stirred Geneva. He continued the critical questioning of the Swiss present with a number of extensive and unconventional novels.
In a large number of essays and speeches, Welti took a stand on cultural, literary, and political questions of his time. All these large and smaller works showed him as a commentator of great intellectual independence. The last work, Bild des Vaters (1962) is a sensitive artist's portrait, which finally put him at the same level with his father. Besides other novels and plays, this author also wrote several stories and radio plays, in which the dialect often got a chance.
Albert J. Welti received a number of honors and prizes for single works by the Schweizerische Schillerstiftung (1931, 1942, and 1948) and in 1954 a prize for his complete dramatic works. From 1933 to 1965 he was in the board of the Gesellschaft Schweizerischer Dramatiker, from 1946 to 1951 he was the president of this society.
