Her first book, Harmlose, please, from 1970, and her last, the short story Stranger Enough, from 2010, dealt with losing a place and remaining a stranger, perhaps for life came from Warsaw via Auschwitz and Prague and in which she continued with survivors of the concentration camps and other travelers from northern Moravia in the Czech Republic to Switzerland.
She was born Erica Schefter in Šternberk in 1930. Her father, himself an author and silk manufacturer, was imprisoned as an anti-fascist during the war and was then arrested again as a German. Erica and her siblings were able to visit relatives in Zurich, where she attended the School of Applied Arts. Because she only had a temporary residence permit, she went to the USA in 1950, where she worked as a gold and silversmith. Only when she married her school friend, the sculptor Gian Pedretti, in 1952 was she able to return to Switzerland. The couple had five children.
Erica Pedretti first became known with artistic works, such as wing sculptures made of wood, fabric, latex, like the fallen wings of monumental insects or angels. She only began publishing at the age of forty and received the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 1984 for her text “The Model and the Painter”, which describes how Ferdinand Hodler paints the death of his partner Valentine Godé-Darel, which frightens him ” as long as it is not somehow banned, made visible and thus controllable”.
Faced with such power-conscious aesthetics, Erica Pedretti, with her attempting, fragmentary, organic formal vocabulary, was a significant voice at a time when one wondered what that could be: female art and female writing. Erica Pedretti died in Graubünden at the age of 92.