I enter the Café de la Terrasse for the first time with my friend C. She is not joining me as a fellow pilgrim; I am joining her for a pot of Ayurvedic tea. It is late afternoon. The patrons are almost all women, talking in pairs. They too have arrived from elsewhere. Most of them are speaking English.
The City
Personal Histories
Freiestrasse 103, Zürich
* * *
Paris is a big city, in the sense that London and New York are big cities and that Rome is a village, Los Angeles a collection of villages and Zürich a backwater.
Edmund White, The Flâneur: A Stroll through the Paradoxes of Paris (2001)
The most sincere compliment you could pay Zürich is to describe it as one of the great bourgeois cities of the world. … Consequently, for about the last 200 years, few places in the Western world have been quite as deeply unfashionable as the city of Zürich.
Alain de Botton, “The Discreet Charm of the Zurich Bourgeoisie” (2005)
I
We arrive by train in Zürich’s Hauptbahnhof and find ourselves in what in 1871 was considered one of Europe’s largest and most elegant railroad stations. An enormously large and colorful woman by Niki de Saint Phalle hangs suspended from the ceiling of a seven-thousand-square-meter pillarless hall. Emerging from the underground labyrinth on several levels known as the regional rapid train transit center, we face the Bahnhofstrasse, the most beautiful commercial street in the world. Behind us is the Bahnhofplatz with a statue of Alfred Escher, the man who brought trains to Switzerland, financed by his commercial bank, Credit Suisse, and below it the Shopville, the place that brought Sunday shopping to Switzerland, available only in train stations. Why not go for a stroll? The Bahnhofstrasse is only a mile and a half long, lined with linden trees, and free of traffic, apart from the streetcars, known as “Tram.” The weather is pleasant, the pedestrians peaceful, the street agreeable. We pass department stores and banks, jewelers and chocolate makers, Franz Karl Weber, where my brother and I once coveted the toys, and Och, where my mother once bought her skis and tennis racket. Before we know it, we’ve arrived at the Paradeplatz, where I insist we indulge in a truffe du jour (its cream so fresh, it must be consumed that day) at Sprüngli’s and admire the Georgio Armani clothes in what used to be the main seat of the Kreditanstalt, now Credit Suisse. Banks, after all, no longer require such spacious palaces. Is that the Zürichsee, you ask? The city, which once viewed the lake as a geographical liability as well as a source of fish, rebuilt its shores in the 1880s as a site of recreation. Now there are promenades on either side where in summer the entire city gathers on Sundays, to play Hacky Sack, push a perambulator, barter in languages from other continents, drink a glass of wine. On a clear day, you can see the snow-covered Alps. If there is Föhn, a warm wind blowing down from the mountains, known to cause headaches and make people irritable, even suicidal, the distant landscape will look even closer, close enough to touch. At the Bürkliplatz, where steamships offer tramlike transportation for those living along the lake, we cast a glance into the garden of the Hotel Baur au Lac. Charming, isn’t it? After crossing the Limmat where it flows out of the lake at the Quaibrücke, we head in the direction of the Bellevue and arrive at its right bank.
We could, instead, turn off the Bahnhofstrasse at the Rennweg, having decided to forego the enticements of commerce for a piece of urban history. Why not treat ourselves to the world’s best Butterbrezel, which we find at Honold’s, walk up to a bench on the Lindenhof, where in 1292 women who dressed as men surprised the enemy army and saved the city, to enjoy a view of the Limmatquai and the forested hills above it, known as the Zürichberg? We’ll make a brief detour to Kirche St. Peter, whose clock is said to have the largest dial in Europe and whose square has the city’s oldest bookshop. Why not walk down the tiny alleyways of what was once the medieval city to the Limmat, where on the left we will find the Schipfe, the old ferryman’s quarters, and on the right the Wühre, where small steamers used to dock. We walk past the Wasserkirche, where my parents were married and I was baptized, and past the Café Select, where my parents discussed politics with their university friends during the war (it has since been acquired by a pizza chain), to the Bellevue, home to the Café Odeon, where Lenin, Hemingway, and Joyce gathered, next to, but not yet displaced by, a Starbucks.
Either way, we have been making our way to the Stadelhofen, where we decide not to take the Forchbahn into the countryside beyond the city but rather continue up to the Kreuzplatz. From there it is just a few blocks up Klosbachstrasse to Freiestrasse and 103 is one house in on the left.
We decide to take the tram after all, considering the weight of our bags and that with climate change, the summers are no longer cold and rainy but surprisingly hot. We cross the bridge and try to catch the number 3 at the Central, but just miss it, because I’ve forgotten the fare, no longer remembering whether it is fewer than six stops. We choose not to wait and begin wandering through the Niederdorf, beneath the old city walls and the university buildings, past the library shaded by chestnut trees, past the bars and nightclubs, to the Heimplatz, which everyone has always called Pfauen. This is where the art museum and the theater are. This is where I used to meet my godfather, who came by train from Rüschlikon on the other side of the lake via the railroad station in the Enge. My godfather, who had only enough money for a train ticket and a cup of coffee, after spending all day in the library working on his book about the war.
You notice the many fountains and wonder whether the water is fit to drink. You won’t remember the communal stone cups dangling on chains or the lemons left behind after cleaning a syringe. But yes, the water is perfectly safe. From here we can take either the number 3 or the number 8 tram to Hottingerplatz, where I suggest we buy a slice of Wähe (a cross between a pizza and a pie, my favorites being apricot, plum, rhubarb, and spinach and onion) for dinner, before walking down Freiestrasse, past the ballet school that still exists, on the right, and the retirement community, once an orchard, on the left, to number 103. We could continue one more stop to the Römerhof, but we decide not to take the Dolderbahn up to the Hotel Dolder, open again after years of renovation, resisting the temptation to play a round of golf or take a walk in the woods, and instead walk down Klosbachstrasse to Freiestrasse, where 103 is again on the left. So far we have not left the map of the central part of Zürich provided by the standard guidebook.
Neubau an der Freiestrasse von F. Righini, 1889 (Stadtarchiv Zürich)
II
Freiestrasse: “the ‘free street,’ presumably originally in the sense of an open street, that is, not built up.”
Sebastian Brändli, Hottingen
In 1889 Francesco Rhigini built two nearly identical houses on two almost identical lots, Freiestrasse 103 and Freiestrasse 105, in the municipality of Hottingen, located at the foot of the Zürichberg. It was a desirable site, sheltered from the north wind, sunny, with a view of the city. The plans indicate two detached apartment buildings with a vaulted cellar, an apartment on the ground and first floor, and a second floor with two maids rooms, two guest rooms, and a Plunderkammer, or lumber room. Each apartment has four rooms, a kitchen, a WC and a bathroom, plus a veranda with a wrought-iron railing. The plans are signed by Rhigini, suggesting that he may have been not the client but the builder. The plan is simple, the architecture plain.
In a map from 1883, Freiestrasse between Klosbachstrasse and Konkordiastrasse has no houses, only an isolated farm. In the 1890s an area of once scattered settlements consisting of farms, hamlets, and country estates becomes urbanized. Streets crisscross the steep slopes of the Zürichberg; villas with gardens appear on its terraced inclines; streams and rivers, like Klosbach and Waldbach, are paved over. In the 1830s, when the old part of the city is freed of its medieval walls and moats, the municipalities offer places for growth. They are fiercely independent. People stay in their neighborhoods and join shooting, singing, and athletic clubs. Access to the city is by carriage thro
ugh the city gates or by foot over the Hottingerpörtli, today’s Pfauen. Until the beginning of the nineteenth century, agriculture dominates, specifically vineyards, although Hottingen continues to attract tradespeople and small-scale manufacturers, as well as home workers for the textile industry. Until 1890 goatherds come down daily from Fluntern and Oberstrass to the Altstadt, their milk directly dispensed into the pitchers of consumers. By 1910 agriculture has become a tourist destination.
The Escherhäuser, built between 1837 and 1840 on the Zeltweg, are the first apartment houses built in Hottingen for the haute bourgeoisie, making it the first Biedermeier, or early Victorian, suburban street. A building boom takes place in the 1870s; some streets are placed at right angles and one- and two-family houses begin to creep up the Zürichberg. In 1893, when the city incorporates eleven adjacent municipalities, Hottingen attracts more and more members of the educated and commercial bourgeoisie, in particular those connected to the polytechnicum and university. When the electric tram reaches the Römerhof in 1894 and the Dolderbahn, with its neo-Renaissance station at the Römerhof, opens a year later, agriculture, interspersed with an increasing number of villas, still predominates on the upper slopes, while below them it looks and feels like a city.
Behind the main railroad station, in the flat valley of the River Sihl, is the Aussersihl, where the presence of industry, the working class, and newly arrived foreigners provides fertile ground for socialism. The red flag flies for the first time on May 1, 1891. Beginning in the 1850s it has the largest increase in population growth of any area in Switzerland. People with little money move into quickly and cheaply built rental barracks. They service the necessary but unsightly functions required by an urban environment: locomotive repair, animal slaughter, incarceration, and salt and gasworks. Taxes are low, social services few, and there are many more children here than in other parts of the city. On Sundays, inhabitants of the Aussersihl participate symbolically in urban life by strolling with everyone else down the Bahnhofstrasse.
Zürich has never had a court. By protecting itself against dandies and femme fatales, it has upheld the traditions of bourgeois industry and efficiency. Being receptive rather than productive, it seems provincial.
By 1907 Hedwig Bleuler-Waser—one of the first Swiss women to receive her doctorate from the University of Zürich and the wife of Eugen Bleuler, the director of the Burghölzli, who, by hiring C. G. Jung, introduces psychoanalysis to the city—calls Hottingen the Quartier Latin of Zürich. She is writing a Festschrift for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Lesezirkel Hottingen, a literary society founded in 1882 at Gemeindestrasse 51 (torn down in 1932 and now a Reformhaus and restaurant), by two brothers, Hans and Hermann Bodmer, descendents of Johann Jakob Bodmer, the Enlightenment reformer, and Karl Bodmer, the painter of Native Americans. Hans, who becomes president in 1900, begins as a mechanic, studies engineering at the polytechnicum, and eventually completes a doctorate at the university. The literary society provides an education for those whose further learning is mostly a matter of chance, members of the striving Bildungsbürgertum. It is a melting pot for bookbinders and bakers, tailors, and professors, and Berufslosen, those without a profession, mostly single women. They want to feel a social bond by having read the same things; having read the same thing they hope to encounter a conversation partner. Part of their reading material arrives at their doorstep through Lesemappen, portfolios of illustrated magazines, circulated on foot by maids and errand-boys, who pick up the portfolio on Tuesday and deliver it on Wednesday with new material, within a month or two of the periodicals’ appearance, for two-thirds of the price of a regular subscription. Members are invited to literary evenings, where authors are selected based on the quality of their writing and are asked to speak on subjects of their own choosing. Members participate in festivals where historical events and literary worlds are presented with utmost realism carried through from invitation, to room decoration, to costume, to stage performance.
Gottfried Keller, who lives in Hottingen between 1882 and 1890, is the writer most often invited by the Lesezirkel to appear at its literary evenings. In a collection of short stories titled Die Leute von Seldwyla, he describes Seldwyla as a small city somewhere in Switzerland, surrounded by city walls, half an hour from a river, “beautifully situated in the middle of green hills, where the sun, but no coarse air, enters after noon.” The club identifies with this pre-urban idyll and imagines that by re-creating Seldwyla during one of its festivals, Hottingen might preserve itself against the encroachments of the city. By the 1890s the Lesezirkel has over one thousand members, half of Zürich’s Bildungsbürgertum. Until 1913 it holds a virtual monopoly over literary and cultural evenings, author celebrations, and large festivals. World War I divides the Germans from the German-Swiss and makes the Swiss-Germans more interested in being Swiss. By the 1930s radio threatens books, films are cheaper than festivals, and interest in German literature diminishes: Nazi authors are unsuitable and nonpolitical authors are immaterial. The Bildungsbürgertum has been displaced by “the American way of life”: cars, bars, jazz, and weekends. By 1940 the Lesezirkel has come to an end.
Francesco Rhigini arrives in Zürich in 1880, a scene painter for the theater. The urban scene is changing all around him, and he changes his address several times, always within a few blocks of the houses he builds on the Freiestrasse. His brother, a painter, lives with him for a while, but it is not until Francesco dies and leaves a widow that we know he was married. He lives briefly on the Englischviertelstrasse, in an “English” neighborhood with detached houses built closely together and close to the street, neither villas nor tenement buildings. It is a garden community, based on the English model, a kind of stage set for the bourgeoisie.
Rhigini does not live in the houses he builds, apart from a brief period between 1895 and 1902, when he lives at Freiestrasse 105. My grandfather, Emil Rütschi, who receives his medical degree in 1906, moves to Freiestrasse 103 in 1907, the year his first child, Emil, is born. His wife, Anna, is twenty-one years old. In 1918 Emil the father reappears at Freiestrasse 103, having served as an officer, one presumes, in the army medical service during World War I. Between 1907 and 1918, Anna, my grandmother, is listed as living at Freiestrasse 103, while my grandfather, now assistant municipal doctor, lists three additional addresses between 1912 and 1918, in three distant and disparate parts of the city, Aussersihl, Oberstrass, Wollishofen, for his medical practice. Could it be that he practices medicine as a form of social service, or is he simply moving up in life? From 1918 until 1925, my grandfather lives in the house owned by his wife’s two brothers, who bought the house from Rhigini shortly after it was built. Heinrich Keller, or Heiri, is a businessman who marries Rosalie Corrodi, with whom he has two children. Heinrich lives at Freiestrasse 103 until his death in 1919, while Rosalie lives on as a widow until 1938. It is her portrait that hangs on my dining room wall: “Christmas 1890.” Hermann Keller is an engineer, unmarried, who supposedly travels to America and whose address is Freiestrasse 103 until 1948. In 1925 my grandfather becomes the owner of a similar house in the Seefeld, closer to the lake, at Mainaustrasse 32. He lives there for three years, until his death in 1928, at the age of fifty-one. In 1948 Anna, who has been a widow for twenty-three years, returns to the Freiestrasse. My mother, Elisabeth, born in 1921 at Freiestrasse 103, moves to Mainaustrasse 32 when she is four and loses her father at the age of seven. It is the company of her aunt Rosalie she seeks at Freiestrasse 103, in preference to that of her mother.
My parents live at Freiestrasse 103 in 1949, the year they leave for America.
My uncle leaves the Mainaustrasse in 1939, at the age of thirty-two, when he marries a woman named Bichsel. He returns just five years later, after she has taken her life. He remarries in 1945 and in 1958 resides again at Freiestrasse 103, this time as its owner. My uncle Emil, my aunt Alice, and my grandmother Anna are now its inhabitants, while my uncle has had his dentist’s practice around the corner on Asylstrasse,
just below the Römerhof, since 1935.
At my grandfather’s funeral on September 17, 1928, the city alderman commends him for his many years of service to the city of Zürich, first as assistant to the municipal doctor, then, for the final two years, as municipal doctor, or Stadtarzt. The alderman mentions that he was the son of a farmer who came to the city to study medicine at the university. The day of his death, the Apollo Cinema and Variety Theater, the largest in Switzerland, with two thousand seats, announces its grand opening. In news from America, tornadoes have destroyed five schools in Nebraska, South Dakota, and Iowa, and in San Juan four-fifths of all houses in a ten-kilometer radius have been razed by a hurricane. Citizens of Zürich are encouraged to drink lots of cider and are reminded that grapes, chestnuts, and plums are in season at the market.
III
Schneebedeckte Dächer in Zürich, oil painting by Emil Rütschi, 1968
Christmas card for Kinder in Not (Children in need), 1998
Between 1889 and 1890, the house that Franz Rhigini builds on Freiestrasse 103 has doubled in price. What will he do with this money? By 1910 the verandas with wrought-iron railings have been partly encased by windows with etched glass. By 1945 the empty lot on the corner of Freiestrasse and Klosbachstrasse has been filled in by a large apartment building whose apartments all have two balconies, one off the living room and another off the kitchen. From my room on the second floor, the former bathroom that has been converted into a bedroom, I see across to the kitchen balconies, where the husband’s suit saturated with last night’s cigarette smoke has been hung out to air. My single wooden shutter slams against the dirty stucco wall to let the light in, but domestic dramas rarely spill into spaces where they could be observed by neighbors.
Coming Out Swiss Page 14