Peter Bieri, Swiss author of ‘Night Train to Lisbon’, dies

Peter Bieri/Pascal Mercier at the film premiere of 'Night Train to Lisbon' in Bern in 2013 Keystone / Marcel Bieri

Swiss philosopher Peter Bieri, also known as novelist Pascal Mercier, has died aged 79, his publisher Hanser Verlag has announced.

As Mercier, Bieri celebrated his greatest successes with novels such as Nachtzug nach Lissabon (Night Train to Lisbon) in 2004 – later turned into a successful film – or Das Gewicht der Worte (The Weight of Words), which was published in 2020 and will now remain his last work.

“We have lost a great thinker and novelist,” his publisher Jo Lendle said in a press releaseExternal link on Tuesday. Bieri died on June 27.

After graduating from high school in Bern, Bieri studied philosophy, classical philology, Indology and English in London and Heidelberg. Shortly before completing his studies in Indology, he switched to philosophy out of fascination for Indian thought. In 1971, he received his doctorate in Heidelberg.

After researching and teaching at Berkeley, Harvard, Bielefeld and Marburg, Bieri was appointed to the Free University of Berlin in 1993. His areas of expertise included epistemology and moral philosophy. A core problem of the philosophy of mind, the Bieri Trilemma, is named after him. He held a chair at the FU Berlin until 2007.

When his first novel, Perlmanns Schweigen (Perlmann’s Silence), appeared in 1995, Pascal Mercier was an unknown. But after the second, Der Klavierstimmer (The Piano Tuner) in 1998, the secret got out that the author was a philosopher from Bern who taught in Berlin. Bieri, then 51, revealed to Der Spiegel that he feared the malice of his professional colleagues after being unmasked as the author. Academics think that publishing fiction as a renowned professor “is not something one does”, he said.

Philosopher and storyteller

In 2013, his novel Night Train to Lisbon was adapted into a film. British actor Jeremy Irons plays a modest Bernese school teacher who, spurred on by two coincidences, travels to Portugal to track down a doctor and poet whose world of ideas magically attracts him.

The book sold millions of copies and was translated into more than 40 languages. “One of the best books I have read in a long time,” said Chilean author Isabel Allende. The film, directed by Billie August, attracted hundreds of thousands of cinema-goers in Switzerland and Germany alone.

In the same year, under the name Peter Bieri, he published A Way of Living. On the Diversity of Human Dignity. In 2014 he received the Tractatus Essay Prize of the Philosophicum Lech for it.

“The philosopher has learnt from the storyteller – and vice versa. His novels bring the great questions of humanity to life,” Lendle wrote.