Coming Out Swiss

by Anne Herrmann

  MS: She never had to make a decision for or against marriage. In the film it is Robert Allitson, the architect who has been given first the design for city hall and then a death sentence, and not Bernadine, who suffers from collapse from overworking for the “advancement of Women’s Position,” who serves as protagonist. “No two less lover-like” (Harraden, Ships that Pass in the Night) people fall in love only to have their ambitions thwarted again when Robert returns to the mountains without Bernadine and she appears to him in a vision.

  JCS: Every afternoon from four to six I read aloud to JAS in his study, where he lay on his sofa, his head supported by a brick-colored cushion with an immense plant of Saxifraga pyramidalis embroidered all over it. I used to say I was the only married woman who had read aloud to her husband not only the whole of Boswell’s Life of Dr. Johnson but the entire Decline and Fall of Gibbon two separate times.

  FS: RLS claimed I had the soul of a peasant rather than an artist. When Belle, my daughter, and I arrived in Europe to study at the Antwerp Academy of Art, we discovered they did not admit women.

  JCS: Dear Mary Clifford: “We are all as loyal as ever to that stern, wholesome Alpine valley, which has gained so much of true home-feeling for us in these two winters. I love it better than the South really, one feels a better human being, physically and morally, among the snows” (M. Symonds, Out of the Past). Yours, JCS.

  FS: I never liked England, the animosity of Louis’s friends.

  JCS: For RLS you were “his fantastically gifted wife—that woman of the quick live heart and the keen incisive genius” (M. Symonds, Out of the Past), although he never thought much of your housekeeping, given how often you misplaced things.

  FS: You are an artist. You sketch, paint, and embroider flowers. You make the house beautiful while leaving the housework to others.

  JCS: Your garden has become part of the National Botanical Gardens of Samoa. Editing the autobiography of my sister, who died in 1890, is too much for me. It is eventually published by Macmillan as Recollections of a Happy Life. I prefer listening to the singing of her cardinal. By 1892 JAS encourages me to leave Davos. KS eventually decides that my deep melancholy is too much for her boys to handle.

  KS: J. G. Jung, whom I consult in Zürich, advises me against settling in Klosters. In his view, it is the duty of a healthy woman to live among her own people down in the valleys.

  FS: My house on Hyde Street survived the fire that devastated San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake only because those who knew it contained the papers of RLS left other firefighting duties to protect it.

  JCS: Since his death, all I want is to sit still, to live without responsibility and to recover in spirit from the turmoil of my earlier life.

  * * *

  The Library

  The first English library at Davos was established at the Hotel Buol when John Symonds lived there, with thirty books in addition to volumes he contributed. In 1886 a public library was started, with a hundred books in a room rented in the Villa Sereinig, that after a year, in need of more space, moved to the Villa Florenza Magdalena. In 1887 a small chalet was built for the library next to the Villa Flora, later Villa Richmond, belonging to Dr. Ruedi, the favorite doctor of the English colony, opposite the Hotel Victoria. It became the only piece of property owned by the English community. In 1897 it was transferred to a stone building across from the Hotel Belvedere, next to the tennis courts, in time to commemorate the queen’s Diamond Jubilee. By now it contained more than five thousand volumes, half of which circulated, mostly in the categories of fiction and natural history. It was considered one of the most significant English libraries on the Continent. Open four days a week for an hour and a half, it was supported by subscriptions, donations, entrance fees to lectures of the Literary Society, and books left behind by visitors. Tauchnitz and other continental editions of English Authors were the most coveted. Symonds supported the library with both a donation and a subscription, although he didn’t expect to use it: “I have always found it best to buy the books I want; and I am of the opinion that people in general spend far too small a percentage of their income on the purchase of books” (J. A. Symonds, “Davos English Library”). In 1980 the building was torn down to make way first for the clubhouse of the tennis club and then for the Kirchner Museum, which was built in 1992. No one knows what happened to the books.

  This is the history I have been able to construct with materials found in the Dokumentationsbibliothek Davos, although the building I remember across from the Hotel Belvedere, even then no longer in use, was wooden clapboard with a pointed roof. Why an English library in Davos? It belonged to an English colony I never knew existed because no one I knew was interested. The library has become what Pierre Nora calls a “realm of memory,” the repository of a life in English, a life in books, of no interest to those, like my parents, seeking to repatriate themselves not by reading but by rambling through landscapes that said they had come home.

  The Cemetery

  The Waldfriedhof, or woodland cemetery, is an invention of the early twentieth century. The terrain is sculpted by a stand of trees rather than landscaped like an English garden, and plain, uniform gravesites are loosely distributed, rather than arranged in geometrical uniformity. It is meant to provide a place of intimacy for the dead and their visitors in a natural setting. The Waldfriedhof in Davos, the second such cemetery in Switzerland, was designed by Rudolf Gaberel and completed in 1920, two and a half kilometers outside of town in a grove of larch trees, known as Wildboden.

  The request for a separate burial place for Jews began in 1903 and was finally successful in 1931. The Jewish cemetery stands adjacent, owned by the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities and separated by a stone wall. The idea of a cemetery, at first unknown to Jews, becomes a site of refuge for those in the diaspora: Antwerp, Berlin, Prague, Vilna, Kiev, and Odessa are some of the places of origin marked on the graves. Although room was made for 900, there are currently 185. The number of Jewish tuberculosis patients declined, and Davos has no Jewish community, apart from seasonal visitors who know it as a preferred summer resort due to the availability of kosher restaurants and shops. Unadorned stones face Jerusalem, and graves include the remains of unknown Jews from Buchenwald and three Jewish mountaineers from Vienna who lost their lives in 1923 in the region of the Jungfrau. Their graves were transferred from a decommissioned cemetery in Bern.

  Simple crosses made from larch wood with pointed roofs, increasingly weathered grey, stand in compact rows on the uneven topography of the forest floor. Although graves in Switzerland are dug up after twenty-five years, my mother’s has been there for more than thirty. After a lifetime in America, she settles in Davos to rehabilitate the library of the Hochgebirgsklinik or German sanatorium in Wolfgang that had treated primarily tuberculosis patients and had been closed for years. When she fell ill, a physician friend who directed the Thurgauisch-Schaffhausische Höhenklinik, a short walk from her apartment, diagnosed tuberculosis. Initially the Queen Alexandra Sanatorium, this was the only English sanatorium in Davos, opened in 1909 and closed in 1914, when the number of English dwindled from one thousand to thirty. When my mother failed to respond to antibiotics, her pain was construed as psychosomatic, given my parents’ pending divorce. She traveled to Zürich to seek additional medical advice; there she was diagnosed with cancer, lung cancer, although the primary tumor was never found. She died within a month. My brother and I transported her ashes in a cardboard box to the “city in the mountains.” Although my mother asked to have her ashes scattered, my brother decided on a grave. My father, having been nursed by my mother following a recent heart attack, never crossed the Atlantic to attend her funeral.

  My father lived another thirty years and once he retired from a university in northern California claimed Davos as his primary residence. He first arrived in Davos in the 1930s, when his mother, to escape the ravages of Stalin’s famine, smuggled him out of the Soviet Union. She placed him in the Kindersanatorium,
where he didn’t speak a word of German, while she, a pianist divorced from her Russian husband, looked for work in Basel, her Heimatstadt. Six years ago, on his way to Lucerne to celebrate Russian Christmas, he waited for the train at the Zürich Hauptbahnhof. Sitting on a bench on the platform, his head dropped against the shoulder of his oldest friend and his heart ceased.

  My parents lie in separate graves, which is my decision. My mother is buried in a cemetery with the man she might have married, a native of Davos, who during the war studied law with her in Zürich; and the man she did marry, an engineer who after the war took her to America. My father married two more times, a woman in his field who moved to California from Poland and soon died of ovarian cancer and an American of Russian descent who lived in San Francisco and awaited a kidney transplant at the time he sought a divorce in order to return to Switzerland.

  The most illustrious grave belongs to Ludwig Kirchner, a German expressionist who arrived in Davos during World War I, lived in close proximity to the Waldfriedhof, and took his own life.

  The City

  Public Histories

  “Athens on the Limmat”

  * * *

  “A True History That Never Happened”

  In the 1870s Zürich sheltered the largest and most politically active émigré community in western Europe. When two exiled populists, Petr Lavrov and Mikhail Bakunin, came to recruit followers from among its university students, the city became the center for Russian revolutionary activity abroad. Lavrov posited the acquisition of knowledge as a moral imperative; Bakunin likened it to the accumulation of capital. Switzerland was open to asylum seekers and had no extradition law for political crimes, and the authorities intervened only if Swiss citizens were involved or foreigners interfered in Swiss politics. Because of a lack of cooperation on the part of the Swiss police, the city on the Limmat became home to a well-organized system of Russian spies.

  By May 1873 the Russian colony had reached a total of 300 inhabitants, 104 of whom were women, of whom 73 were studying medicine at the university. In May 1873 the tsar issued a decree, or ukaz, stating that any woman student who remained in Zürich past January 1874 would be denied entrance into institutions of higher learning and access to government jobs. The women were accused of advocating free love and learning obstetrics to perform abortions. Higher Courses of Education for Women had been opened in St. Petersburg, and the Medical Surgical Academy, under the auspices of the Ministry of War, had inaugurated a special training program for midwives. At the Trial of the Fifty in 1877, considered the first judicial platform used to propagate revolutionary views, between eight and eleven of the sixteen female defendants had studied in Zürich. Most belonged to the Fritchis, an all-female group of revolutionaries, named after their Zürich landlady.

  Nadezhda Suslova arrived from St. Petersburg in Zürich in 1865 to complete her medical studies, after women were expelled from the Medical Surgical Academy following the Polish revolt in 1863. The University of Paris, which opened its doors to women in 1863, the first university in Europe to do so, did not accept her, and the women’s medical colleges in America did not meet her expectations. Two years later, she asked to sit for her doctoral exams, without ever having registered as a student. By law women were neither allowed nor disallowed from registering, so Suslova became the first woman to acquire her degree from the University of Zürich. She responded: “I may be the first, but not the last. Thousands will follow me.” Following the assassination of Alexander II in 1881, quotas for Jews were established at universities, and the Women’s Medical Courses in St. Petersburg were closed once again.

  Zürich provided the site for what came to be known as “the experiment.” Its university was young and small, its professors recruited in part from the ranks of those who had participated in the revolutions of 1848, primarily in Germany. The goodwill of a group of enlightened patriarchs sanctioned by law what had already become custom, namely women auditing lectures, including anatomy classes, in a coeducational setting. The professors referred to students as Studierende, rather than Studenten or Studentinnen. They hoped other universities, especially German-speaking ones, would follow, but Prussia, the last to open its doors to women, did so only in 1908.

  Once women completed their degrees, they failed to find employment in public institutions. Instead, they created their own. Marie Heim-Vögtlin, the first Swiss woman to obtain her medical degree, opened her own practice in 1874 and later cofounded the first women’s hospital—funded by women and run by female doctors for female patients—and nurses’ training school in Zürich, the Pflegerinnenschule. Susan Dimock, her best friend at the university, returned to Boston to establish a nurse’s training program at the New England Hospital for Women and Children. Dimock died in 1875, at twenty-eight, when the steamship Schiller went down crossing the Atlantic to Europe.

  Scene I

  Characters

  SK: Sofia Kovalevskaia (1850–91), the first woman to receive a doctorate in mathematics and hold a chair in mathematics at a European university.

  EKS: Emily Kempin-Spyri (1853–1901), Europe’s first female doctor of law and founder of Emily Kempin’s School of Law for Women at New York University.

  MCT: M. Carey Thomas (1857–1935), the second president and primary architect of Bryn Mawr College.

  FK: Florence Kelley (1859–1932), general secretary of the National Consumers’ League, chief factory inspector for the state of Illinois, and resident of Hull House.

  Setting

  The Jules Verne Bar, a panorama bar on the eleventh floor, with a view of downtown Zürich.

  Time

  The 1880s.

  FK: I arrived in Zürich in 1883, having lost my degree from Cornell University. My trunk had been taken off the train on the way to Oxford. I asked to have it put back on, but it was left there. When I reached the university, I was told I didn’t need a degree, that the degree I had from an American university had no value. I wanted to study social science, but instead I became a student of government, or Staatswissenschaft. I was the only woman to study with Julius Platter, a Tyrolean, who transformed political economy from the study of laws into that of significant social questions, until a Swiss woman joined me the following year.

  EKS: I wanted to study law, but as a woman I had to register under Staatswissenschaft, which remained the case until 1902. By the time women were allowed to practice law in Zürich, in 1898, I will have been certified mentally incompetent. Initially I thought the new tramway, built by an English firm and powered by horses, too expensive, so I walked for over an hour from the Enge, where I lived with my husband and three children, to the university.

  MCT: In Leipzig women were allowed to attend lectures but not to stand for degrees. In Göttingen women were barred from lectures, but the university granted degrees to foreigners in absentia. When the entire male faculty voted on my petition in Göttingen and turned it down, Mamie and I decided to leave Leipzig, the center of comparative philology, for Zürich. It was provincial, of course, but generous. Unlike Leipzig, where we were violating centuries of student culture, five hundred male heads no longer turned “like fields of wheat in the wind” (Horowitz, The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas) when we walked across the town square.

  SK: I arrive in Zürich in 1873, for the birth of my sister’s first child. Aniuta has married Victor Jaclard, a Communard, who manages to escape to Switzerland on my husband’s passport. She wants me to stay, to study with a student of Karl Theodore Weierstrass, with whom I have been studying mathematics in Berlin. After four years of private lessons, where I visit him every Sunday and he visits me one other day a week, Göttingen agrees to grant me a degree. My sister imagines Weierstrass and I are getting too close, but in the end she discourages me from leaving him. My parents begin to suspect my marriage is not a real marriage. I am beginning to think this “fictitious marriage” should not have lasted this long.

  EKS: We all knew who you were, Sofia. I from reading a book titled Das
Buch der Frauen (1896) by Laura Marholm, which devotes one of its six psychological portraits to you.

  MCT: In a speech I deliver in 1907, where I argue for the importance of graduate schools for women’s colleges, I mention your name as an example of female genius.

  FK: I marry one of your compatriots, a medical student. We keep our marriage secret. We speak only German together. He provides me with books from a secret library, the Russian library. “Coming to Zürich, the content of my mind was tinder awaiting a match” (The Autobiography of Florence Kelley). I discover socialism. I discover scientific solutions to social problems. Once the University of Pennsylvania rejects me for further study in advanced Greek, my father agrees to allow me to enroll at the university in Zürich.

  MCT: In Zürich I write a thesis, “Swinburne’s Place in the History of English Poetry,” in three days, but Mamie and I have been reading his Poems and Ballads since we were students at Cornell University. I replace the religious renewal my mother experienced as a Quaker with the religion of culture, with reading literature as a source of spiritual renewal. Mamie will help me write the thesis. I will never reconcile my longing to be an artist, to transform the beauty and pleasures of Europe into poetry, with my interest in comparative philology as a form of evolutionary science. I will try to make Bryn Mawr College an outpost of Leipzig in America.

  FK: I want to ensure that German economic writings are known throughout America, where, in 1886, after the first May Day parade in Chicago, I say to Engels that this is where the revolution will take place. May Day is followed by the Haymarket riots and the hanging of anarchists. I will translate The Conditions of the Working Class in England into English. As an English speaker, I will remain suspect within the Socialist Labor Party. I never succeed in learning Russian, the language one hears most often in sections of Zürich like Oberstrass and Fluntern. “It was a joke among the polyglot students that the Russians were so busy with the future that they never knew whether the snowcaps were clear and lovely or shrouded in fog, any beauty that survived despite our modern capitalist civilization being unworthy their notice” (The Autobiography of Florence Kelley).