Swiss-German has borrowed recklessly from the French: Trottoir for “sidewalk,” as opposed to Gehsteig; Billet for “ticket,” as opposed to Eintrittskarte. The German, not the French, sounds pretentious. My aunt gave her French poodle a French name, “Le Vent.” Every summer, she and my uncle, a dentist who was also a painter, drove to southern France. It all began when she, the daughter of a Swiss grocer, left to be the governess in a French château. After that, whenever my uncle fell asleep on the couch to the radio news in standard German, my aunt sat in her armchair reading literature in French. Her room, facing the back, was cool and impeccably groomed, her wardrobe, because of her size and aspirations, handmade from imported fabrics. She died, her glasses on her nose, a book still in her hand, the first corpse I ever saw, her armoire lined in provençal fabric.
I say my parents were both Swiss. But every Swiss person harbors a relationship to somewhere else, real or imagined. Everyone who leaves, for economic or humanitarian reasons, eventually returns. My mother, who wanted her ashes strewn, is buried in Davos. My father, who considered Davos his pied-à-terre, never lingered for more than a few days. My mother traced her ancestors to farmers along the Lake of Zürich. She never felt at home in English, she never felt at home in things English, including America. She never recovered from that Swiss malady known as Heimweh, or homesickness, the feeling one harbors for Switzerland when one would rather not be elsewhere.
My father lived in Moscow until he was twelve, with a Swiss mother and a Russian father. My grandmother, a prodigy pianist, trained my grandfather’s voice for singing opera rather than litigating cases after the October Revolution. Following his affair with the leading lady on an American tour, my grandmother filed for divorce. She smuggled my father out of Mother Russia to Switzerland, where he changed his Russian name to his mother’s maiden name. An engineer in the United States during the Cold War, he too harbored secrets. The Cold War insisted he not know Russian. His accent betrayed only his Swiss past, which, because it was not the only past, never led to being sick for that home he never had. He felt at home everywhere, and thus nowhere.
Do I ever panic?
I hear two young women speaking Swiss-German in Central Park. They have no idea I am listening, much less that I am able to understand every word they say. It sounds so strange, and yet so familiar. I’ve never liked the sound of Swiss-German, and yet Swiss-German was the private language I used with my mother to understand what seemed foreign to us about the United States, making the unfamiliar familiar by discussing it in a language no one else understood. I refrain from sharing my secret. I was born in New York City. I too find the scene, with its fresh dusting of snow, picture-perfect, but I won’t be taking a picture to take back home. I could offer to take their picture, but that would require explaining that I’m not really Swiss, since I’ve lived here all my life; I’m not really an Auslandschweizer or Swiss abroad, since I never emigrated; and yes, it is amazing I still speak Schwyzerdütsch. And so I remain silent.
Switzerland took its name from the canton Schwyz, one of three original cantons to form the confederation by engaging in an oath on the meadow Rütli in 1291. It is there that in 1440 William Tell assassinated the Habsburg bailiff Gessler, that many of the mercenaries left from to fight in foreign wars, that citizens were taxed who married someone from another canton. The geographically central becomes politically marginal because it is Catholic and rural. It is typical, like any heartland. Like so many nineteenth-century narratives of nationhood, both the Rütli oath and the Tell legend have been deconstructed as historical fictions.
How would anyone know to ask, unless I had already told them? Once they know, what will they do with that knowledge? The other place remains a secret, an open secret, but isn’t that the most dangerous kind? They will want to explain everything by saying it is because I am Swiss.
They will want to visit Switzerland because it is so beautiful; they will want to avoid Switzerland because it is too expensive.
They wish they knew another language. They want their children to grow up bilingually.
No they don’t.
How do they know?
A secret that is public knowledge, that one never stops explaining. Like people on their cell phones talking to a public that doesn’t want to hear. A public that becomes increasingly privatized, where speaking to no one is no longer something others shouldn’t know about.
Living in the Fifth Switzerland
Switzerland is a small place, a country slightly larger than the combined areas of Vermont, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.
It is the poorest country in Europe in natural resources. One-quarter of its sixteen thousand square miles is rock, ice, or water. Seventy percent of its area is covered in mountains.
One out of every ten Swiss passport holders lives abroad. One stays because it is impossible to leave—it is so beautiful—or one leaves because it is impossible to stay: 60 percent of Swiss living abroad are women.
The fifth Switzerland: all those who are Swiss citizens but don’t live in Switzerland. Its current population, 715,710, makes it equivalent to the fourth largest canton. In 1992 Swiss abroad were given the right to vote. In 1996 the Swiss Abroad Place in Brunnen, Lucerne, received a granite plaque commemorating it as a site of potential pilgrimage.
All Swiss abroad begin in one of four Switzerlands.
German-speaking Switzerland. Zürich is its capital, the largest city in Switzerland, not Bern, the seat of the federal government, not Basel, fifteen minutes on the tramline to Germany or France. But German in what sense? German-speaking Swiss can understand all of the 120 Swiss-German dialects but refuse to speak any of them except their own. The German Swiss in part despise, in part shrink from, in part absorb what is German. Christopher Hughes has suggested, “There is a splendour in good High German, the German of the stage, the German that commands: in comparison, dialect sounds like a mixed farmyard, many hens and a few geese, unwomanly, unlearned, inurbane.” Dialects exclude, including other Swiss; they also bind, the Swiss against the Germans. One would rather be speaking English: the language of neutrality, of capital, of the global.
When a German Swiss and a French Swiss meet, the language they have in common is foreign to both: German, the language of Germany. French Swiss pride themselves on their mastery of German, in particular the literary ambassadors who translate German Swiss literature into French; they wonder why their provincial compatriots insist on clinging to their dialects. By far the largest number of Swiss who live abroad in Europe live in France. In a recent poll, all French-speaking cantons voted to join the European Union; in a recent opinion poll, 29 percent of French speakers were not averse to the possibility of seceding from Switzerland.
My mother was able to choose between Italian and English as a second foreign language when she attended the gymnasium in the 1930s. In 1996 an amendment to the federal constitution mandated that German be taught as the second language in French-speaking cantons and French in German-speaking cantons. Zürich broke the contract by insisting that English be the first foreign language taught in its schools. Italian is spoken in the Ticino but also in Graubünden. In Graubünden they speak Swiss-German as well as Romansch.
What is Romansch? A language closer to Latin than either French or Italian. A language one learns, in one of three variants, only at home. Unlike Italian, it is spoken in a single canton. Romansch, the only national language I have never learned.
If one were to take linguistic communities the size of Romansch, Switzerland would now have ten languages, not four. But not all languages are equal. Italian resents its possible degradation to the status of an immigrant language: there is a difference between Albanian, Serbo-Croat, and Portuguese, on the one hand, and a Swiss national language, on the other.
Of the Swiss abroad, 76,330 live in the United States. I am registered at the consulate in Chicago (to be disbanded and moved to New York City), which means I receive a complimentary copy of the Swiss Review: The Mag
azine for the Swiss Abroad six times a year. I am encouraged to vote, to send my children to Switzerland for summer camp, to return for the yearly reunion of the Swiss abroad. I have joined the 1 million Americans who claim Swiss descent, but I have failed to join a Swiss American club.
I am not that Swiss.
I am not that kind of Swiss.
I have lived in the fifth Switzerland all of my life. I have also resided in the other four. First grade in Davos (I and IV). Before I learned to read in any language, I was taken out of school. My mother, a nonnative speaker, taught me to read in English, in Switzerland. At the same time, I learned to ski. Skiing: the actual lingua franca of a mountainous, multilingual country. The year after high school, having studied French in the United States since sixth grade, I attended a language institute in Lausanne (II), where my two best friends were Japanese and German. I stayed on as a camp counselor in Montana-Crans (II), with a roommate from Paris. For a brief moment, I might have passed as trilingual. After college, I attended the University of Zürich (I), thinking I would stay to teach English as a second language. I stayed long enough to complete a Licentiat in English, as a native speaker, and watch my English deteriorate. I knew I wouldn’t be staying. I knew I couldn’t live in two languages, each of which diminished the other.
I remain a citizen of Basel, my father’s community of citizenship, although I speak my mother’s Zürich dialect, Züridütsch. We spent the summer months living with my grandmother in Zürich, in an apartment where three vacant rooms awaited our return. We spent one day each summer visiting my grandmother in Basel. After ten years in Agno, near Lugano (III), with a second husband whose name identified him, and thus her, as members of the Basel elite, she returned to the city a widow. My brother and I would stay with her in a house with two grand pianos and a pergola, while my parents traveled and sent us postcards in English.
All Swiss citizens are entitled to provision in case of illness or poverty, but only citizens were allowed to use the common land. As resources, like communal fields and forests, diminished and populations increased, Swiss were encouraged to emigrate; foreigners are not encouraged to immigrate. In 1770 only 60 percent of the residents of Zürich were citizens. In 1789, no foreigner had become a citizen of Zürich for 150 years. With sufficient capital and skills, one can become a citizen, but only for a fee.
In 1734, thirty-five hundred emigrants left the canton of Zürich for America. The voyage took three to four months, with ten weeks at sea, where two hundred died. They were all agricultural laborers and tradesmen, most of them poor. There was no room to expand either resources or households. A third of the community would emigrate, although not all went to America. Half of those who emigrated already had been separated in some way from their community of origin due to death or divorce, abandonment, or illegitimacy. They received a small sum of money and renounced all future inheritance. The decision was absolute and irrevocable. Once they arrived, everything turned out to be different: the land was flat, there were no rocks, the wood was free, the soil was fine like in the garden. Inherited traditions were renounced, which made the pastors uneasy and encouraged them to denounce the undertaking. In many cases, there would be no letter; in most cases, no voyage home.
The fifth Switzerland exists because Switzerland, reluctant to extend citizenship, refuses to lose its emigrants. Until 1992, this did not include Swiss women, in particular those who married foreign men. If a Swiss woman abroad married a non-Swiss man and failed to alert the embassy or consulate where she was registered, she lost her Swiss citizenship. My mother, who received a law degree in 1948, never voted. As a woman, I live with 34,496 other Swiss women registered at embassies or consulates in the United States. As women, we received the right to vote in Switzerland in 1971.
In 1874 Switzerland nationalized its army, requiring the entire able-bodied male population between eighteen and sixty to remain in its reserves. Eventually eighteen was raised to twenty, and sixty was lowered to forty-two. In 2003, the discharge age was lowered once more, to thirty, for an average of 262 days in service. For three weeks a year, young men of all classes and cantons who have not sought exemption for religious reasons enjoy a respite from the routine of daily life. On the one hand, there is the renewal of friendships in a homosocial setting; on the other hand, the lack of military involvement in any world wars.
Gertrude Stein thought that “writers have to have two countries, the one where they belong and the one in which they really live. The second one is romantic, it is separate from themselves, it is not real but it is really there.” What, then, does it mean to have two countries, one in the rupture between spoken and written German, and another in the rupture between German and English? A high school teacher declared I would never write competently in English, given that I spoke another language at home. A college professor claimed to detect the Germanisms in my written English, frustrated they had not yet been eliminated. Where do I belong? Where do I really live? The United States is really there, a hyper-power, but is that what makes it real? What must it repeatedly disavow in order to maintain its positive illusions? Whenever I return, Switzerland seems real again, but is it really there, at the heart of Europe, increasingly not a part?
I have tried to live in Switzerland. To enjoy the stillness and avoid the sadness on Sunday afternoons in Zürich when only couples and families with perambulators are found on silent streets. To obey the unwritten rules in inheritance disputes that privilege married brothers with children over single sisters who are childless. To accept that the prodigal will never be welcomed home. But I have done so unsuccessfully.
I prefer a country where citizenship is determined by jus soli. No one judges me by my family name or asks what my father’s profession is. Switzerland, without a monarchy or aristocracy, relies on the oligarchy of its elite families, whose names are common knowledge and who share a set of norms. These norms are largely urban, protestant or atheist, and middle-class. I too believe that good food should not be a class privilege; that drug addiction is a not a criminal or moral issue, but one of public health; that government is meant to protect minorities, not further empower elites.
How at home do I feel on this soil? Like many Americans, I too have lived like an itinerant. I have moved from the East to the Midwest to the West Coast to the East Coast to the Midwest, across the continent in the footsteps of my father’s career, from one coast to the other pursuing an education. But I have settled. I have settled in the middle, where no one wants to be; in the heartland, where no one wants to stay. What do I say when people ask me where I’m from?
When did you move here?
I was born here.
I thought you said you were Swiss.
I am.
When are you coming back to Switzerland?
I’m not.
Where did you say Michigan was?
In the middle.
Since 9/11 I have felt increasingly like a foreigner; I feel more and more European. The norms I share with African Americans, Democrats, intellectuals, and Old Europeans have become more and more unfashionable.
Religious rather than linguistic differences make all the difference in Switzerland. Catholics claim their religion is that of the original nation; Protestants claim theirs is what made the nation modern, and therefore what it is. Very few Swiss attend church, and yet they are more likely to be theologians than philosophers, to build bridges than to write poems. They are more likely to climb mountains than to read, leading to such statements as “There is no such thing as Swiss writing” or “Swiss literature is a contradiction in terms.”
In my reading, I have learned that Switzerland has always been a nation of newspaper readers. In the 1830s, it had one of the highest numbers of newspapers per capita in the world. The newspaper is the glue of the “imagined community,” the community in anonymity. Benedict Anderson reminds us: “Reading a newspaper is like reading a novel whose author has abandoned any thought of a coherent plot.” It is performed in silen
t privacy, repeated at daily intervals throughout the calendar, and replicated by myriads of other readers, whose existence one is confident of, but whose identity one will never know. A secular ritual. My Basel grandmother, who spent part of each summer in Montana-Crans, took all three of her newspaper subscriptions with her.
Outside of Switzerland, one easily forgets there is a Switzerland. There is little to remind one that it still exists. The Swiss are more likely to know the president of the United States than of their own nation. The Swiss executive consists of seven members, with each member also filling a cabinet post. Each year someone is designated spokesperson. At least one of the seven must be from the Italian-speaking part and one from the French-speaking part, even though each part represents less than one seventh of Switzerland.
The fifth Switzerland is a political fiction. It means living no place, nowhere.
It does not mean an imaginary island, impossibly ideal. Nor does it mean a perfect polity.
Writing from the fifth Switzerland means writing about an imagined country from a place that doesn’t exist.
Swissness
Keynotes
Coming Out Swiss Page 2