We are in the presence of a crime without a name. (Ziegler, The Swiss, the Gold, and the Dead)
“How can our border guards tell the difference between politically motivated German emigrants and German Jewish asylum seekers?” (Ziegler, The Swiss, the Gold, and the Dead). The Swiss offer two suggestions: underline the names of Jews in red ink or stamp the front page of their passports in the top left corner, with a circle approximately two centimeters in diameter around the letter “J.” Berlin opts for the latter. Switzerland admits three hundred thousand refugees, including twenty-five thousand Jews. Beginning in 1942, thirty thousand Jews are refused sanctuary when the border is sealed off. “Refugees are subjected to a rigorous interrogation before being allowed to benefit from the right to refuge on the soil of the Confederation. Capital benefits from the right to asylum without any enquiry” (Faith, Safety in Numbers).
Wilhelm Gustloff, the Swiss Nazi leader and former tuberculosis patient, maintains his headquarters in Davos until his assassination by the Jewish student David Frankfurter in 1936. Wounded Nazi soldiers and airmen as well as Allies are sent there to recover. Front companies purchase hotels to convert them into sanatoriums to channel money to and from Berlin through their bank accounts. Pro-Nazi organizations are provided cover by, for instance, the Savoy Hotel, which is made into a sanatorium renamed the Konsul Burchard Haus, owned by the Tuberculosis Association in Berlin, which provides meeting space for Nazis. Nazi youth disguised as tuberculosis patients are brought to the Fridericianum, a gymnasium. The Swiss become nervous about an economic enclave on Swiss soil and declare that hotels and land can no longer be purchased by foreigners.
Most Swiss were anti-Nazi during the war, but that doesn’t mean they were pro-Jewish. (Bardach, “Edgar’s List”)
Switzerland’s neutrality is first recognized under the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 and renewed by the Congress of Vienna in 1815. To be neutral means to be neither one nor the other. Does that mean queer? Is it a morally indifferent neutrality, simply an abstract opportunity for two enemies to meet on neutral ground, or a self-interested neutrality, whereby gold cannot be refused from either side?
Hitler has a bank account at the Bern branch of Union Bank of Switzerland for the foreign royalties of Mein Kampf, whose sales, once it becomes a school textbook, run into the millions, managed by the owner of the Max Amman publishing company.
In 1943 the United States implements Project Safehaven to prevent neutral countries from becoming safe havens for Nazi spoils. In 1944 the Allies declare gold transactions with the Third Reich illegal. In 1945, under the Currie Agreement, Switzerland promises to freeze German assets and not purchase anymore gold. In 1946 Switzerland signs the Washington Agreement, which results in a voluntary contribution of CHF250 million (in compensation for looted gold considered worth CHF1.7 billion), the return of nongovernment German assets (supposedly forbidden by its status as a neutral and eventually completed in 1952, when Germany repays its debts to Switzerland), and CHF20 million to compensate for dormant assets (a voluntary advance to establish the United Nations).
Israel has not yet been founded; there are no Jewish organizations at the table. There is an unwillingness to impose one’s will on allies; there is the task of rebuilding Europe; there is the growing threat of communism. Switzerland is not a defeated state, even if it believes it is being treated like one.
As the Swiss Inscription says: Sprechen is silbern, Schweigen ist golden (Speech is silvern [sic]; Silence is golden) (Carlyle, Sartor Resartus).
Swiss law firms approach wealthy Jews and offer to buy the freedom of their relatives in occupied countries; the assets of deceased or heirless Poles are returned to the Communist government of Poland to settle claims against the nationalization of Swiss property.
Switzerland has been outed. “The image of Switzerland as a small, independent nation bravely defending democracy, law and justice, refusing to get involved in the conflicts between its neighbors while maintaining generosity, solidarity and an openness to the world, especially through its humanitarian commitments” (Braillard, Switzerland and the Crisis of Dormant Assets and Nazi Gold) is put into question.
“I ask myself if Auschwitz is in Switzerland,” says the outgoing Swiss president Jean-Paul Delamurz; Rolf Bloch, president of the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities, says “Switzerland was not Auschwitz”; Wenn Auschwitz in der Schweiz liegt (If Auschwitz were in Switzerland) (1997) is the title of a series of essays by the Swiss writer Adolf Muschg. Switzerland is finally on the map; it is no longer confused with Sweden. How un-Swiss, to have banks audited, to be publicly probed in front of foreigners, to be subject to global scrutiny.
The World Jewish Congress (WJC) is founded in Geneva in 1936 to fight Hitler and defend the Jewish community in eastern Europe. The WJC is part of the World Jewish Restitution Organization, a group of international Jewish agencies seeking restitution of former Jewish property and assets from former East European communist countries. In 1997 the president of the WJC is Edgar Bronfman, CEO of the Sea-gram Company, one of the world’s wealthiest men—with a personal fortune of $3 billion—who develops an interest in his Jewish faith when his father dies. He has brought Kurt Waldheim to trial, Russian Jews to Israel, and now international media attention to Switzerland. Survivors are dying. Their assets lie dormant in Swiss banks. The WJC takes on the cause of the rejected heirs.
The response to being outed is shame or denial. The Swiss response is defensive, legalistic, obstructionist, and self-righteous. France has fallen, and Switzerland is completely surrounded by Axis powers. Germany is Switzerland’s principal European trading partner. Maintaining good economic relations remains vital to preventing an invasion. In case of a German victory, it remains prudent to continue business as usual.
On December 19, 1996, the Swiss Federal Council names the members of the Independent Commission of Experts Switzerland—Second World War (ICE), chaired by Jean-François Bergier and composed of eight historians, to conduct a legal and historical probe into the gold trading and foreign currency transactions within the context of World War II.
On February 6, 1997, the Swiss banks create a $70 million humanitarian fund for “needy victims of the Holocaust” in the United States, Europe, and Israel.
On August 12, 1998, Credit Suisse and UBS agree to a global settlement of $1.2 billion, in response to the class action suit filed by 18,000 plaintiffs for $20 billion in unreturned Holocaust assets.
The largest public pension funds in the United States threaten to divest their shares in Swiss corporations. The United States threatens to block the merger of SBC and UBS that will create the largest bank in Europe. Is this a conspiracy to destroy Switzerland as a world financial center because it threatens markets like London and New York, or is this the last chapter of the Holocaust coming to a close?
Swiss get up early but wake up late. (Swiss saying)
Swissair stops serving Swiss chocolates wrapped like gold bars on both domestic and international flights. In 1997 the Swiss business community reprimands Swatch for its ad campaign during the World Ski Championship in Sestriere, Italy, saluting the two Swiss athletes who have won gold medals: “As always whenever there is gold, a good part of it ends up in Switzerland.”
Is secrecy a sign of insecurity? What motivated my father to open numerous accounts and leave them unaccounted for? Was it a desire to secure wealth by circumventing the state? Was it lack of loyalty to any nation state? Was it a need for anonymity once the American wife he sought to divorce filed a deposition that threatened to reveal the names of the buildings with tiny brass plates? “The nature of the secrecy laws made it such that a depositor was often closer to his Swiss trustee with regard to financial matters than he was to his own family” (Vincent, Hitler’s Silent Partners). Customers for secrecy services are always located elsewhere and in that sense do not exist.
Art
Christian Boltanski was born in Paris in 1944 to a secular Jewish physician father who con
verted to Catholicism and a gentile novelist mother who wrote under the pseudonym Annie Lauran and briefly opened a gallery that showed only Yiddish art. His mother came down with polio, which made her unable to walk, so she used her sons as canes. When the war broke out, Boltanski’s parents divorced, and his father lived for a year and a half under the floorboards of their apartment. After the war, his parents remarried, and his mother became a Communist. His parents and four children lived in a large apartment on the rue de Grenelle, where they all slept in the same room. “Eighty percent of my parents’ friends were Jewish survivors of concentration camps, and almost all of them were Communists” (Gumpert, Christian Boltanski).
In the early 1990s, Boltanski creates a series of installations with titles like The Dead Swiss, Reserve of Dead Swiss, Archive Dead Swiss, and Dead Swiss on Shelves with White Cotton. Dead Swiss consists of 174 black-and-white photographs clipped from the obituary pages of Swiss newspapers sent to him at the rate of sixty to seventy a week. Boltanski reshoots the already grainy images and enlarges them to slightly larger than life-size. In Reserve of Dead Swiss, hundreds of rusted biscuit tins with snapshots pinned to them form a tall, narrow corridor. The stacks are unstable; during one installation they fall to the floor and are left there. The exhibit includes the photograph of one Swiss who is not dead, with a document inside the tin that says the image is untrue. “Of course someday it will be true.” In Archive Dead Swiss, the photographs rest on wooden shelves with the light bulbs of small gooseneck desk lamps just inches away. Boltanski remembers when the Tate Gallery bought one of his pieces, Dead Swiss on Shelves with White Cotton: “When I sold it, the curator mentioned that the cotton would go yellow in a few years time, so I told him that he could change it. He also said that the photos would fade, so I told him that’s okay, there are always more dead Swiss—I don’t care which ones you use. Moreover, even the shelves were not going to fit, as they had been made for a different room! And the curator asked, what did we buy? And I said well, you’ve bought photos of dead Swiss and shelves with white cotton. But it’s not an object, it’s an idea” (Semin, Garb, and Kuspit, Christian Boltanski).
Boltanski has no particular interest in the Swiss or Switzerland.
“Before, I did pieces with dead Jews but ‘dead’ and ‘Jew’ go too well together. There is nothing more normal than the Swiss. There is no reason for them to die, so they are more terrifying in a way. They are us” (Alphen, “Deadly Historians”).
“I chose the Swiss because they have no history. It would be awful and disgusting to make a piece using dead Jews—or dead Germans for that matter. But the Swiss have no reason to die, so they can be anyone and everyone, which is why they are universal” (Semin, Garb, and Kuspit, Christian Boltanski).
“The Swiss … are ‘naturally healthy,’ and yet they are dying all the time … just like everybody” (Wilson, “Christian Boltanski”).
The word “reserve” suggests that when the Swiss die, as one critic surmises, “they quite naturally end up in a bank vault” (Wilson, “Christian Boltanski”).
Swissness
Keywords
Heimweh, or Homesickness
* * *
A cat is as subject as a mountaineer to homesickness.
(Oxford English Dictionary, 1805)
Heimweh, or homesickness, was first recorded by Swiss physician Johannes Hofer in his 1688 medical treatise, Dissertatio de Nostalgia oder Heimweh. He describes the illness suffered by a young man who, to complete his studies, travels from Bern to Basel. The patient begins to feel sad. He develops a fever, fails to eat, loses sleep, becomes distracted. He scorns all things foreign: the air, customs, conversation. He thinks only of his fatherland. He is reminded of it in his wanderings; he creates images of it when he is alone. He weakens to the point that it looks like he is dying. There is no remedy other than returning home. Simply hearing of this possibility, he begins to breathe more easily. By the time he arrives just a few miles outside of his Heimatstadt, he has fully recovered.
Hofer names this illness “nostalgia,” nostos meaning “return to one’s native land” and algos meaning “suffering” or “sorrow.” Greek is the language that in the late seventeenth century turns a set of symptoms barely distinguishable from sadness or melancholia into a diagnosable disease. Two centuries later, the symptoms will have disappeared. They acquire other names: shell shock, post-traumatic stress syndrome, depression.
Nostalgia medicalizes as well as Europeanizes a condition whose national idiosyncrasies get lost in translation: maladie du pays is the name given to the suffering of Swiss mercenaries in France; el mal de corazón is the illness diagnosed among Spanish soldiers in Flanders toward the end of the Thirty Years’ War (1616–48).
Among soldiers and seamen, nostalgia is diagnosed primarily as an excess of memory. Soldiers are conscripted, often displaced for the first time from the villages they have never left. Sailors are impressed, kidnapped onto the next ship as soon as they arrive in port. They are prevented from engaging in farewells. Their stays are indefinite, with no hope of leave or return. Their activities are limited, frequently characterized by tedium. If in the eighteenth century interest in nostalgia takes place primarily in German-speaking regions, in the nineteenth century it shifts to France, to those physicians seeking to reduce desertions from national armies like Napoleon’s. Leave is granted only to those suffering from nostalgia. Knowing this, soldiers feign its symptoms. It becomes known as “hypochondria of the heart.” The symptoms, among them idleness, daydreaming, even erotomania, infer a lack of manliness.
Is nostalgia an attempt to medicalize an afflicted imagination, or the symptom of a medical imaginary?
A long-haired cat appears out of nowhere. The afternoon feels like Indian summer, and he finds me hanging linens on the line. Once the temperature drops, he insists on coming in. Sick of not having a home, he already knows where the food bowl he has never had might be.
One estimate puts the number of Swiss who served as mercenaries in foreign armies between 1400 and 1800 at 1 million, another at 2 million. Treaties were made between cantons and foreign princes granting a monopoly of recruitment for a stated number of soldiers for a term of years. During the Reformation, under Huldrych Zwingli’s influence, the practice began to come under attack. A national foreign policy required the control of individual military service; mercenaries could not compete with professional armies. In Protestant cantons like Zürich, industry came to replace military service abroad as a way to enlist an excess of workers. The Swiss constitution, ratified in 1848, made it illegal.
Theodor Zwinger, who in 1710 published De Pothopatridalgia, claimed that Swiss soldiers became nostalgic when they heard the “rustic cantilena,” Kühe-Reyen or ranz-des-vaches, the sound of bells as cows are being driven to pasture on the alp. Others, like Johann Georg Zimmerman, writing in 1764 of his experiences as a doctor in Switzerland, claimed that the condition was not limited to or preeminent among Swiss. It was not cowardliness but constraint, the prohibition against an accustomed “native freedom” that produced longing for one’s native soil.
Is it cowbells or church bells that make one feel at home, when place is governed by two seasons—on and off the alp—and time is marked by fifteen-minute intervals chiming from a clock?
In the nineteenth century, unmarried girls enter domestic work as an alternative to factory employment. In Johanna Spyri’s story, Heidi’s aunt Dete leaves the village of Maienfeld for Frankfurt, exchanging work as a maid in a hotel in Bad Ragaz for life as a domestic worker in a German family. She insists that Heidi accompany her. As the companion to Clara, the only child of a wealthy widower—twice her age and confined to a wheelchair—Heidi develops symptoms of homesickness, diagnosed by a friend of Clara’s father, a doctor.
Marie, the Swiss maid in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, is heard crying in the attic room, the only one with an open window, because she “would rather go without a bath than without fresh air.” Is she cr
ying because her father, dying of throat cancer in a valley in the Grisons, will leave her fatherless, no longer at home in the world, or because, “at home, she had said, ‘the mountains are so beautiful’”? Mrs. Ramsay, having taught her “how to make a bed, how to open a window, with hands that shut and spread like a Frenchwoman’s,” is irritated by the lack of hope. She would like to say something, but fails to find the words.
Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy arrives on the Upper West Side ashamed to be from a place where the only thing to be said about it is that one had fun there. In the twentieth century, unmarried girls become au pairs in domestic spaces meant to simulate home. Lucy has read about homesickness, “from time to time, when the plot called for it”: “A person would leave a not very nice situation and go somewhere else, somewhere a lot better, and then long to go back where it was not very nice.” She is surprised that this has happened to her, that having longed to leave, she now longs to go back. When Antigua comes to her, in the form of an emissary from her mother, “apart from everything else, she left behind her the smell of clove, lime, and rose oil, and this scent almost made me die of homesickness.”
Coming Out Swiss Page 5