For the next couple of years Burger focused on his career in literary studies, writing his thesis on Paul Celan and his habilitation treatise on contemporary Swiss literature.
His academic experience is reflected in the loosely autobiographical novel "Die künstliche Mutter" ("The Artificial Mother") which won him the Conrad-Ferdinand-Meyer-Preis in 1980.
School Report for the Attention of the Inspectors' Conference") was published in 1976 and made into a movie by Swiss film director Beat Kuert in 1979.
It is about a teacher who has to tell the conference of inspectors about the development of his pupils, but speaks about death cult, graveyards and burials in a very detailed way.
The second chapter announces the author's suicide intention: a red Ferrari is bought, because saving money no longer makes sense.
Burger's depressive and desperate moods grew with his literary acclaim, leading him to write the "Tractatus logico-suicidalis" (1988), a collection of aphorisms advocating suicide.
The 1046 aphorisms are about the sentence "Gegeben ist der Tod, bitte finden Sie die Lebensursache heraus."
When he was young and wanted to build his style of writing, he did copy passages out of literature (e.g. by Thomas Mann) and filled their syntax with new content.