Coming Out Swiss

by Anne Herrmann

  Homesickness may be susceptible to semantic vagueness, but the condition can feel lethal.

  My mother had a lifelong longing for Zürich, her Heimatstadt. This is where she was born; where she grew up not far from the lake; where she attended the Höhere Töchterschule, or girls’ gymnasium; where she waited out the war years, studying law and discussing politics, with mostly male friends. She will marry one of these men, and together they will leave for America. Before the war, she spends a year in Geneva becoming a simultaneous interpreter. After the war, she is offered a job as an attorney in a juvenile court outside of Zürich. She is eager to leave; she never anticipates staying. They settle first in Montreal and then in New York City. Montreal is a French-speaking city, and French is a Swiss national language. In New York, German speakers with limited English seeking work are in enormous surplus. The law she has studied is Roman law, and thus superfluous. She was never meant to be an emigrant. She will suffer her entire life from homesickness.

  Psychoanalytic critics such as Jane Gallop imagine the daughter as the nostalgic. The mother as mother is lost forever because the mother as homeland is irretrievably past. The female subject is hence in a foreign land. If the masculine fears losing something it never had, the feminine regrets never having had anything in the first place: “Man’s desire will henceforth be linked by law to a menace; woman’s desire will legally cohabit with nostalgia: she will not be able to give up her desire for what she can never have (again)” (Gallop, Reading Lacan).

  We returned every summer to live with my maternal grandmother in Zürich. This is the place that remains constant, as we settle and resettle from east to west across the North American continent. Now my mother lies buried in her homeland, and I, in a foreign land, return as the emigrant’s daughter. Expected to feel at home, I instead feel intensely homesick. Is it for her, or for this place? What is it about this place? Is homesickness the fate of the second-generation emigrant daughter, or a secondhand emotion passed down to the next generation? In America, they say you can’t go home again; in Switzerland, they know that even if you leave, sooner or later you’ll be back.

  Following the death of my mother, I transport a cardboard box from the West Coast to the East Coast to the Midwest. It is marked “Artikeln E.R.” I open it and discover copies of articles my mother wrote for Swiss newspapers between 1951 and 1964, when she was no longer able to practice law and had not yet entered the college classroom. She signed them Elisabeth Rütschi. The woman she might have been, “E.R.,” before emigration, before her entrance into English.

  Home seems to mean more than a reliable food source. Otherwise, why would he roll on his back on the wide plank floor and close his eyes to the sound of human voices? Or curl up in the sea-grass basket and listen to Monteverdi?

  On August 23, 1957, my mother publishes a piece in the Zürcher Woche, titled “Zürcherinnen, denen es schwer fällt, Newyorkerinnnen zu werden” (Women from Zürich who find it difficult to become New Yorkers). She claims that women from Zürich are among the most adventurous and curious, thus it is not surprising to find a number of them among the Swiss in New York City. Some of them have careers. These are the active ones, the most ready to adapt, free to return to their native city, where they easily reestablish old ties.

  Other women arrive with families. They follow husbands lured to America by intriguing career possibilities enabled by their degrees from the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule (Federal Institute of Technology, ETH). Their hands are tied. They will need to awaken their pioneer spirit, to cultivate patience and adaptability. Under new conditions and in possibly estranging circumstances, they have the opportunity to combine the best of the old with the best of the new, to create “ein Idealzustand.” Whereas men often solve conundrums through emigration, women continuously encounter new ones as emigrants.

  My mother was destined to be the first kind of Zürcherin, which is why becoming the second kind felt like such a betrayal.

  The scene is afternoon tea in a New York suburb: an immaculate lawn slopes down to a pond mirroring a stand of mature trees next to a recently acquired single-story home. The only signs of Swissness are the hazelnut cake, a ceramic dish brought back from Switzerland filled with chocolate, and the sound of Swiss-German. The topic under discussion in Zürich dialect is everyone’s Heimatstadt. All are suffering from a certain Heimweh, ranging from “verzehrender, geradezu lähmender Sehnsucht” to “einer leisen Wehmut, wie wir sie allgemein dem Vergangenen und den Jugenderinnerungen entgegenbringen,” “an all-consuming, downright paralyzing pining away to a slight sadness induced by childhood memories or other reminiscences.” They begin by praising their Heimatstadt: so small, and yet so varied, so livable, and so versatile. Women and store windows are dressed up with equal elegance. On a single day one can take a dip in the lake, shop for groceries on the way home, and arrive in time for the theater. A paradise for women with small children. And the parks, with those beautiful green lawns that one doesn’t have to mow, with canvas chairs anyone can relax in, unlike the hard metal ones they have in Paris or those dreary cement blocks they call benches in New York City. Not to speak of those parks surrounded by cyclone fences where any mother feels like she’s been caged in. It’s impossible to shop on the spur of the moment with children on Fifth Avenue. If one had to take a break, there would be no appropriate tea room.

  My mother admits that Zürich is beginning to resemble a forgery: the white boats on the blue lake; Saturday-night church bells; concerts in the nave of the Grossmünster; festivities with dancing in every public square. Were their husbands wrong in bringing them to America? Someone chimes in: “Don’t you remember the tram conductors who close the door on you if the children don’t hurry? Or the landlord who, when he sees the kids, won’t rent to you? How can you forget how often it rains, making it impossible to go to the park, much less recline in a canvas chair?” My mother gently reminds them that even people in Zürich dream of the south, of overseas, imagining life will be easier there. Although “wenn sie der Schuh der Wirklichkeit etwas drückt,” “when the shoe that is reality begins to pinch a bit,” Swiss emigrants will put a golden glow on their Heimatstadt.

  In the same box, I come across a poem, written on a manual typewriter on a loose sheet of onionskin. It is dated Davos, March 1958. I am still in first grade, but my father is on sabbatical and we are spending part of the year in Davos. This is where he began his sojourn in Switzerland in the 1930s in the children’s sanatorium, having arrived from Russia with tuberculosis and a Swiss mother and no knowledge of German. This is where my brother completed the Alpine Mittelschule, after leaving a midwestern high school with a low lottery number, fluent in Swiss-German but with little command of written or High German. And where my mother lies buried in the Waldfriedhof, because the cancer had already metastasized, after the divorce proceedings had already begun. And where my father has now joined her.

  The poem, untitled, is written in English:

  Heimweh is a sound that never dies.

  It sometimes quiets down.

  It can be a man that means what you have lost,

  It may be a lake with an island or

  a mountain covered with glittering snow.

  It sometimes almost goes away

  and comes again and holds you in its grip

  when you, with tears, read “Heidi”

  to a little girl.

  My mother writes in a foreign tongue even though she has returned, at least temporarily, to her Heimat. The daughter, who has been taken out of school, has not yet learned to read. The mother, a nonnative speaker, will have to teach her, but she has little patience. She reads Heidi to her instead, but in what language? The daughter will mimic her mother’s tears, induced by Heidi, a girl with whom she never quite identifies. She inherits her mother’s homesickness and, having learned to read, will find her home in English.

  Resisting selves thrust into alien languages.

  Heidi is a girl who has been told
by a boy, Peter, the goatherd on her grandfather’s alp, that reading is difficult, too difficult, and thus something to avoid. When Heidi arrives in Frankfurt, it is not her companion Clara’s tutor, but Clara’s grandmother who motivates Heidi to read, by generating interest in a book she plans to give her as a gift. The story, told not just in words but in pictures, is that of the prodigal son. This has been understood as the grandfather’s story; he squanders the family fortune, serves as a mercenary in Naples, returns with a son whom the village refuses to recognize, and, when his son dies, ends up a recluse on the alp. Heidi’s desire for literacy is fueled by a longing to see herself as the protagonist. But to become the prodigal daughter, she must suffer from homesickness. In Frankfurt, Heidi sleepwalks, is mistaken for a ghost, and leaves the front door wide open, ostensibly an invitation to thieves, but obviously a way to stage her departure. Returning home means not just returning to the alp but to God. To him, one can say all, even as Heidi learns he will not necessarily answer her prayers at the time they have been received. When she teaches Peter to read, it is so that he, in her absence, can read to his grandmother who is blind.

  My mother’s desire, as an urban Protestant, is neither for the alp nor for God. It is for her Heimatstadt. Unlike my mother, I have no Heimatstadt. I become nostalgic for the very home that might have made me homesick.

  The cat continues to wander over to the Catholic church, in search of those who will lean down and pet him on their way to mass. Even he has feelings of homesickness, for those who originally thought that he belonged to them.

  Nostalgia is the desire for what cannot be defined, le désir d’on ne sait quoi. French has no word for home: “pays” can mean the part of the country one is from, or the country itself; German confuses “Heim” with “Heimat”: “home” is meant to coincide with “nation,” and the nation inflicts itself on those along its nonnatural borders. In my mother’s case: “Dieses Heimweh ist der verborgene Maler, der das Bild, das die Betroffenen von Amerika haben, oft ungerechterweise trübt und grau erscheinen lässt und das ferne Zürich in einenen goldenen Schimmer zu tauchen vermag, in dem alles Menschlich-Allzumenschliche einfach wegtouchiert ist.” “Homesickness is like the painter behind the scenes, who allows the picture of America to become too grim and grey, and immerses the image of a distant Zürich in a golden haze, thereby erasing all that is human—all too human” (Rütschi, “Zürcherinnen, denen es schwer fällt, Neuyorkerinnen zu werden”).

  In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Milan Kundera writes: “Litost is a Czech word with no exact translation into any other language. It designates a feeling as infinite as an open accordion, a feeling that is the synthesis of many others: grief, sympathy, remorse, and an indefinable longing. The first syllable, which is long and stressed, sounds like the wail of an abandoned dog.”

  Eva Hoffman in Lost in Translation describes nostalgia as “pregnancy without the possibility of birth”: “As I walk the streets of Vancouver, I am pregnant with the images of Poland, pregnant and sick. Tesknota throws a film over everything around me, and directs my vision inward. The largest presence within me is the welling up of absence, of what I have lost. This pregnancy is also a phantom pain.”

  Europe moves east; the writer replaces the doctor. Homesickness, difficult to translate, finds its home in metaphor: it is like an accordion that ceases to close, like a pregnancy that fails to terminate.

  Nostalgia returns once again in the form of a German neologism. Ostalgie, nostalgia for the very thing no one thought one could feel the loss of: the material things made in the GDR everyone thought no one wanted. These are the products for which consumers constructed product biographies, ways of using non-user-friendly products impervious to product innovation, enmeshed in the biographical narratives of their users. These products enjoy a symbolic afterlife, defying the very capitalism that put them out of business, fueling the very capitalism that seeks to exploit them as ossified commodities. They symbolize the desire for a desire that has vanished—for a socialist state, for a western materialism—leaving its products to be consumed as a form of camp. They appear in glossaries and dictionaries that keep the old brand names alive among citizens whose country has disappeared. They reappear in a shared language where memory (Gedächtnis) and memories (Erinnerung) require two different words.

  Ostalgie: an excess of memory in a time of amnesia.

  Fernweh, or “Farsickness”

  * * *

  Fernweh. The antithesis of Heimweh, or homesickness.

  The longing of those from small places for open spaces, those from the north for the south, those who know where they belong for somewhere they have never been.

  It doesn’t go both ways.

  The Swiss have Fernweh for Italy, for burnt sienna and empty piazzas as opposed to the myriad shades of green resulting from endless rain.

  Italians appreciate the cleanliness of Swiss streets and the punctuality of Swiss trains, but they don’t long for either. They respect them.

  Swiss can have Fernweh for America, because it is big and empty and ugly, which makes it exotic. The landscape makes up for whatever is lacking in the buildings, whether loveliness or longevity.

  Americans don’t have Fernweh. Many have never been out of the country; some have never left the ranch. They are in search of something else. When they can’t find it, they forget what they’ve been looking for. When they do find it, they become surprisingly sentimental.

  The Swiss no longer have Fernweh for America. On every city block, last-minute vacations beckon to the Seychelles to Mexico to Shanghai to Dubai to the Maldives. Why travel to the same place twice? Why decide today when tomorrow’s bargain might be even better?

  The far away has become the new near.

  The near is so close it is no longer worth noticing.

  Where is the traveler who has unexpectedly gone missing?

  The Mountains

  The Alp(s)

  * * *

  A is for alp(s).

  The Alp

  The Alps separate Switzerland from Italy, providing twenty-three passes for the journey to Rome, with one hospice at St. Bernard. Early travelers are terrified: some ask to be blindfolded, and others hold a vinegar-soaked sponge to their noses to mitigate altitude sickness.

  The Alps cover two-thirds of Switzerland and are the site of 60 percent of its tourism.

  The alp is the communal summer pasture that supports the village cow herd from June to September, in order to allow the grass in the valley meadows to be harvested as hay. Meadows are fertilized with composted manure so desirable grasses predominate and hay can be harvested each year without letting fields lie fallow. No one is permitted to send more cows to the alp than he can winter, to bring animals for temporary pasturage, or to sell a cow within a stipulated period of time after the end of the alp season. Trees anchor the mountainside soil, protect the watershed, reduce avalanche danger. They shelter livestock during storms. The alp limits the growth of forests and the spread of settlement and thus makes possible the Alps, a vacationland.

  The communal localism that resists (male) in-migration and favors out-migration, regulates existing renewable resources by preventing overgrazing. Men emigrate as mercenaries or to build tunnels. They become Swiss Guards at the Vatican or royal bodyguards to the French king. Men and women inherit equally through partible inheritance, but residence, even if it includes ownership but does not include descent through the male line from a prior member of the community, does not include citizenship. Descendants who have never lived in the village are citizens; those who are not citizens, in spite of wealth and influence, are denied membership in the community. Thrift is encouraged, and risk is to be avoided. No one ends up landless; no one ends up rich. Many remain celibate.

  Those who go to school might become priests or postal bus drivers or ski instructors. Those who leave are likely to return to spend their vacations harvesting hay.

  The Alps are the most environmentally threatened mountain
system in the world.

  Of all tourists, 75 percent arrive by private car.

  The Mountaineer

  The first mountaineers are people who live in the mountains, chamois hunters, and crystal gatherers. Those who come to the mountains are known as travelers or “strangers.” In 1827 “Switzerland” is still used to describe any area of France, Savoy, Piedmont or Italy that contained mountains.

  The initial strangers are scientists who come with thermometers and barometers to study glaciers, avalanches, thunderstorms, the boiling point, and red snow.

  In 1723 Johann Jacob Scheuchzer, a Swiss professor of physics and mathematics at the University of Zürich, fellow of the Royal Society of London, and correspondent of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, draws up a compendium, canton by canton, of all species of dragons known to exist in the Swiss Alps. He is the first to study the Föhn.

  In 1729 Albrecht von Haller, a Bernese physician and mathematician, compiler of the first book on Swiss flora and director of the salt-works at Roche, publishes a poem titled Die Alpen, a didactic poem subtitled “An Attempt at Swiss Poetry,” reprinted thirty times in his own lifetime. The first edition is printed anonymously, the second with Haller’s name, and subsequent editions with his name followed by numerous honorary titles. He is the first Swiss to be read outside of Switzerland, although German is for him a foreign tongue. He speaks Swiss-German and French, but he writes in German to prove that it is as suitable as English for didactic poetry. For some, “Swiss writer” is no longer an oxymoron. From 1976 to 2000, Haller appears on the Swiss 500-franc banknote.