AT THE SOLOTHURNER LITERATURTAGE in 2008, Verena Stefan publicly recalled her first encounter with the strange and striking word Fremdschläfer (alien sleeper), which a friend had read to her from a newspaper. The term's strangeness resonated strongly with Stefan, and its potential polysemy tempted he r to use it as the title of the book she was working on at the time. As the author takes care to explain in a postscript inserted in the back of the 2007 publication, it is originally a Swiss bureaucratic term denoting asylum seekers who are caught staying overnight at a place different from the one they have been assigned.

Most readers will know the author for her debut text Häutungen (Shedding, 1975)—simply described as a “buch[]” (book) by Stefan herself in the foreword accompanying it and, equally loosely, labeled “autobiografische Aufzeichnungen Gedichte Traume Analysen” (autobiographical notes poems dreams analyses) on its first page. In 1975 and the following years, in the wake of the second-wave feminist movement, Häutungen became a best seller, and Stefan's name has since been closely associated with the radical autobiographical turn of the time. Considering its impact, one could rightfully call it the Feuchtgebiete of its time. As is indicated by the fluid genre labeling, the text combines diary-style passages with essayistic and poetic writing. Häutungen did two things: first, it denounced all-too-common sexist and abusive behavior toward women and the patriarchal societal structures that render women powerless. And, second, from a highly personal perspective, the book described Stefan's path to lesbian love, beginning with her renunciation of men and leading to the gradual rediscovery of her “verloren gegangene eigenkorperlichkeit” (H, 17; roughly: lost familiarity with and lacking agency over one's own body). The reader witnesses the self-realization of the protagonist as an independent woman; toward the end she finds herself able “to ‘shed’ the constraints of patriarchal heteronormativity.”