Udo Breger (1941) is a German author, translator and publisher with close ties to the Beat Generation. Breger studied English and Romance Language & Literature at the University of Göttingen from 1964 to 1971, during which period he also ran an art gallery in Göttingen. Between 1968 and 1975 his Expanded Media Editions published and organised projects with Joseph Beuys, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Allen Ginsberg, Brion Gysin, William Burroughs and others. In the mid-1970s Breger translated Robert Shea’s and Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! Trilogy for Sphinx Verlag, Basel. With the exception of a couple of years spent in Sweden, Breger has since then worked in Basel as a publicist and translator of works by Walt Whitman, Alan Watts, John Lilly, William Burroughs, Franco Beltrametti and others for various publishing houses including his own. During his stays in the USA between 1978 and 1992 he met Andy Warhol, Herbert Huncke and Buckminster Fuller to mention some of his many overseas friends and acquaintances. Breger’s Expanded Media Editions and his magazine Soft Need has published works by cut-up artists Jürgen Ploog, Carl Weissner, Jörg Fauser, William Burroughs and Brion Gysin as well as works by Allen Ginsberg, Claude Pélieu and Gerard Malanga. Together with Axel Heil and Peter Weibel, Breger curated the exhibition ‘The Name is Burroughs‘ in ZKM Karlsruhe and the Sammlung Falckenberg, Hamburg in 2012.
Udo Breger’s Identity Express was originally published in an edition of 500 by the Swiss Caos Press in 1979. This compilation of Breger’s fine-tuned ‘écriture automatique’, notes and intimate photographs of friends has a ticker tape text by Jürgen Ploog running across the pages from beginning to end, which functions as snippets of information viewed from a window in an inside-out and outside-in express hurtling through sceneries and memories stored in the author’s mind. Gregor Kunz’s cover art based on a photograph by Wolfgang Schulz and Ralph Gabriel’s elegant design form the icing on this fine cake, now made available again by Moloko Plus.