In 1895, Panizza's play "The Love Council" premiered and earned him a year in prison for blasphemy in Munich. After serving his sentence, he went into exile in Zurich in 1896, where he was expelled again in 1898. He would have liked to stay. In "Vreneli's Gärtli," Panizza processes his uncomfortable situation as a refugee in Switzerland with unrestrained humor and ironic exaggeration into a fate of ancient proportions in a petty-bourgeois environment. "Vreneli's Gärtli" is the name of an inn in the forest near Zurich, and when he hears about it, the man immediately realizes: Vreneli is the Swiss version of Venus, and the Vrenesberg is the mountain of Venus; he must go there. And so he sets off to this graceful place, where he indeed meets Venus, a down-to-earth, pragmatic Venus of Swiss character, who looks deeply into his eyes and asks, "What would the gentleman like to drink?".