Adelheid Duvanel

Adelheid Feigenwinter, eldest daughter of Georg Feigenwinter (1904-1997), president of the criminal court in Basellandschaft, and Elisabeth Lichtenhahn, spent her childhood and youth as the eldest of four children in a strict Catholic family in Pratteln and Liestal. The family lived in a multi-story single-family house with a large garden in the then rural Liestal, close to the Ergolz and the Schleifenberg. She was on the one hand an introverted, shy and sensitive child, but on the other hand imaginative and creative when it came to reciting fairy tales, stories and radio plays she had invented herself, which she had suitably illustrated. Early on, she had the reputation of a child prodigy in elementary school as well as within the family. After dropping out of high school, she attended the Sacré-Coeur Catholic Institute for Girls on Lake Neuchâtel in French-speaking Switzerland for a year. In the early 1950s, the family moved into a ground-floor apartment in a modern apartment building. Adelheid came directly to the new apartment after boarding school. Throughout her life she suffered from "numerous psychological crises, destabilizations and depressions" and was treated psychiatrically for the first time. In a psychiatric clinic she was subjected to treatments with electric shocks and insulin injections due to the diagnosis of "schizophrenia". She was unable to complete an apprenticeship as a textile draftswoman for health reasons, but graduated from the Kunstgewerbeschule in Basel with courses in painting and graphic arts. She published her first story at the age of 19. Her early texts appeared under her pseudonym "Judith Januar" in the feuilleton and the "Sonntagsblatt" of the Basler Nachrichten, respectively. She was able to sell her first painting at an art exhibition in Liestal. In 1962 she married the painter Joseph Edward Duvanel and lived in Basel. In addition to her feuilletonistic and literary work, she worked as an office clerk and as an employee in an opinion research institute. The couple belonged to the Basel bohemian scene. During the marriage she stopped painting for several years. In 1964 their daughter Adelheid was born. From spring 1968 until September 1969, she lived with her husband and daughter on Formentera. Later, she was forced to live in a shared household with her husband's mistress and their child. The marriage was divorced in 1981. Duvanel had little financial means after that and lived in seclusion, but wrote journalistic texts and painted again from the late seventies. Until her death, she took care of her daughter (1964-2005), who had AIDS and was addicted to drugs, and her grandchild, always interrupted by stays in the psychiatric clinic in Basel. She died of hypothermia on the night of July 7-8, 1996, while under the influence of medication in a grove near Basel. Adelheid Duvanel was the sister of the journalist Felix Feigenwinter (* 1939) and the sister-in-law of the publicist Gunild Feigenwinter (* 1940).