HK: It is difficult to be a guest in a country that is one’s ancestral home.
AH: To speak the language, with hesitancy, even archaisms.
HK: To see one’s name carved on tombstones in a place one has never been.
AH: To penetrate, as an introvert, the isolation of the Swiss.
HK: According to Yolande Jacobi, a Jungian psychoanalyst I meet in Zürich, the greatest obstacle to a life of the imagination for a Swiss is the sin of self-indulgence, the fear of wasting one’s time, the compulsion to work.
AH: Your Varieties of Love is republished in 1960 as a mass paperback, “an uncensored abridgment,” with a scantily clad woman on the front cover and a tantalizing offer on the back: “an unforgettable gallery of women gripped by every kind of passion known to the human heart.”
HK: At that point I am a freelance writer and have to make money.
AH: The recurring object of desire in these stories, for both men and women, is the young man. The only one set in Switzerland is “The Wasp,” about a music teacher who agrees to take on a sixteen-year-old pupil, a gifted musician who plays “football like a fox” and looks like the Belvedere Apollo. Together they admire the wasp that on sunny days awakens between the window panes and which together they name Wolfgang. The pupil imagines bicycling through the Alps with his teacher; the teacher imagines traveling with his pupil to Sicily. Intoxicated by this friendship with a boy who has no father and a mother who has no time, the teacher seeks to make a gift of the Stradivarius he has so far only lent him. The mother, once she discovers the violin’s value, is unable to accept either the gift or future lessons. The teacher cuts the wasp in two with his nail scissors in front of the pupil, who doubles over in the snow, emptying the port wine they regularly share. The teacher departs for his yearly sojourn in Sicily, his heart once again “weary and heavy with loneliness.”
HK: A condition that is all too familiar: “the fear of loneliness in solitary men who were striving, with the exuberance of drink, to cross an unbridged human gap; and I knew the silent, remorseful solitude into which each would be withdrawn in the morning” (Kubly, Native’s Return).
AH: “Nothing was so gloomy as Zürich in a winter storm, nothing such a trap for the human spirit” (Kubly, Varieties of Love). This line resonates.
HK: And yet, wouldn’t we agree with Thornton Wilder when he claims that Zürich is “the only city in Europe in which I would like to live?” (Kubly, At Large). This is where he drafted the third act of Our Town, during a brief affair with Samuel Steward, whom he met through Gertrude Stein.
AH: Clearly the mother, who discusses the situation with a teacher at her son’s school, imagines an expensive gift will lead to exchanges even more unacceptable.
HK: The dedicated teacher as fraud, as nothing but “the deception of a barren life,” which is what I learn when I begin to teach.
AH: His indeterminate marital status as a form of queerness.
HK: The boy’s name, Taugerwald, a permutation of Taugwalder, a family of professional guides from Zermatt, about whom I am told, “There will always be a Taugwalder on the Matterhorn.” And yet the twenty-one-year-old son is deciding between becoming a mountain guide and leaving the valley to become an artist. When I return two decades later, he has become a locksmith near Neuchâtel.
AH: We return to Switzerland recognizing that the qualities the Swiss bring out in us are ones we would rather repudiate. We forget to say Sie, because the Swiss in America are all du to us. We are afraid to laugh in public, because it will make heads turn. We fail to understand why the Swiss don’t invite us into their homes.
HK: I spend twenty years living in the cities of the world before returning to William Tell Farm in Wisconsin.
AH: The first time I visit New Glarus is on Labor Day weekend in 1962, the summer we move from New Jersey to Illinois. We attend the William Tell performance, produced every year since 1938, in Swiss-German, in the outdoor amphitheater of Elmer’s Grove, before it moves to your family farm. For someone who regularly returns to Switzerland, “little Switzerland” seems less Swiss than American, a transplanted Swissness rooted in the rural Midwest.
HK: I return to New Glarus as the Wunderlicher, the “odd one.” “We have never had anything like him in the family before,” says my grandfather. I am a reader in a community where reading is frowned on. I fail as a farmer on a farm where no one but a Kubly has ever lived. When my father tells me he plans to paint “Nic H. Kubly and Son” across the barn, I tell him, in that case “you shall have to have another son” (Kubly, At Large).
AH: The Swiss do not welcome back their prodigals: they fear them, and in some way they can’t acknowledge, they envy them. Those who do not have the courage to leave do not approve of those who have chosen not to return.
HK: Inasmuch as we come back, Americans speaking Swiss-German, they marvel at us.
AH: We return as natives to a place we have never lived.
HK: I return to Switzerland as the professor who rents an apartment in the Niederdorf, who makes hay with other farmers. These things are simply “not done.”
AH: I live in a hotel; I fail to renew contact with my brother.
HK: “I discover my Americanism by leaving America” (Kubly, At Large).
AH: And yet Italy allows you to triangulate the unbearable heaviness of being that comes from both Switzerland and America.
HK: I apply for a Fulbright, which we sometimes forget is an educational exchange program funded by the sale of U.S. military equipment in storage depots all over the world after World War II. There were sixteen of us on our way to Italy in 1951, “to study the use of humanities in the democratization of a former totalitarian people” (Kubly, An American in Italy). My project involved “the use of the theater in international communication.”
AH: You meet a Swiss guard in Rome with whom you share a mountain patois and who takes you into the guards’ quarters, which you describe as “a tiny twenty-third canton,” where the language, food, newspapers, and calendar photos decorating the cells of the celibate are all Swiss. You meet a schizophrenic Swiss baroness in Milan and a wealthy vintner from Glarus on Capri and a woman who presents a Lambretta motor scooter from her Lucerne charities to an orphanage in Naples.
HK: It was “as if I had been suddenly liberated into a sunlight of freedom from the stifling cocoon of Swiss Calvinism and American Puritanism” (Kubly, An American in Italy). And yet, every day I am asked whether I can help someone go to America, an America of Hollywood films and the McCarran Act that limits immigration to 5,645 Italians a year.
AH: In Switzerland you find the possible Italian origins of Kubli, who are latecomers to Glarus, that is, they arrive in the fourteenth century. They are thought to be peasants or anti-papal political refugees named Capelli, the Italian word for hair. The first Kublis in the archives are Kubli genannt Zopfi, “Zopf” in Swiss-German, meaning a braid of hair that seems to refer to the custom of Kubli men wearing their hair long. The sons of the first Glarner Kubli distinguish themselves as soldiers by fighting against their ancestral Italy. In America, Kubli is anglicized as Kubly.
HK: My cousin Kap prefers to see us as descendants of the Walsers, the nomadic Alemanic tribes pushed out of Germany in the sixth century, who were poor and sought free land, the land in the Alps that was highest and least fertile. In the ninth century, they settled in the Valais, thus their name, and in the fourteenth century they climbed over the Segnes and Panixer Passes and settled above Elm.
AH: You negotiate your outsider status in Switzerland by identifying with the marginalization of women.
HK: I am made an honorary brother of the tailors’ guild for Sechseläuten in Zürich, the festival that celebrates the public burning of winter; I attend the Landesgemeinde of Glarus, the annual outdoor legislative assembly of voters, which includes only men; when I am invited to the Bähnli-Abschied, or “farewell to the little train” that has taken people the eight and a half miles up the Sernf River from Sch
wanden to Elm since 1905, I notice that only men are invited as distinguished guests.
AH: You make a point of meeting a Fräulein Pfarrer, to see how one of the 120 “lady pastors” manage in such a patriarchal country; you ask for an appointment with Elisabeth Blunschy when she is elected the first female president of the Nationalrat six years after women received the vote; you invite the governor’s wife to join you on the final journey of the “little red train,” which you think you can get away with as an American.
HK: As someone whose unorthodox social conduct might be tolerated.
AH: I’m telling you, it’s still that way.
Intermission
AH: The founding of New Glarus remains a singular case in the history of Swiss emigration. The town of Schwanden invites interested communities in the canton of Glarus to discuss the possibility of participating according to their means in leading a group of immigrants to a specified destination in the western part of the United States. All except two communities, who join later, create Der glarnerische Auswanderungs-Verein or the Emigration Society, with instructions for the Experten, or leaders, who are sent ahead to buy land and statutes regulating the rights and responsibilities of the immigrants.
HK: The stipulation is to create a community in Illinois, Missouri, Indiana, or Ohio, somewhere with a healthy climate, available springs, good soil, sufficient timber, and a potential market. The leaders, neither of whom speak English, are instructed to seek the assistance of Wilhelm Heinrich Blumer, a Swiss who has settled in Allentown, Pennsylvania. They are to buy twelve hundred acres of land all in one piece, provide initial shelter and food, and guide the early settling.
AH: Of the two leaders, Nicholas Dürst is to keep a detailed journal and return to Switzerland once their instructions are fulfilled, while Fridolin Streiff is to remain with the colony for three years and regularly report back.
HK: The instructions for the emigrants are equally elaborate: They are to choose their leaders for the voyage and pay for their trip, unless they belong to a community able to extend a twelve-year interest-free loan. They will each be given twenty acres of land, which they are not allowed to dispute and have to pay for within ten years. They are not allowed to leave the colony for three years, except to return to Switzerland.
AH: They are to build a church and school and at all times provide for the ill, the widowed, and the orphaned.
HK: On April 10, 1845, a group of 193 emigrants—the majority weavers, textile workers, slaters, and laborers—depart under the auspices of the Emigration Society. They travel by wagon via Zürich and Basel to Rotterdam, from Rotterdam to Baltimore by forty-nine days at sea, from Baltimore to Columbia, Pennsylvania, by rail, with canal boats to Pittsburgh, via barges to Cincinnati, and by steamboat to St. Louis. From there they travel to Galena, Illinois, and then through trackless country to New Glarus, where 108 emigrants arrive on August 15, sixteen miles north of Monroe, twenty-five miles southwest of Madison, on the west bank of the Little Sugar River, in what was then Wisconsin Territory.
AH: The textile industry in the 1840s has displaced skilled and semiskilled artisans; by 1844 there is an overproduction of manufactured goods, leading to a reduction in labor; crop failure has led to a rise in the price of potatoes. Since grain cannot be grown at such high altitudes, breadstuff is imported from Italy, Hungary, and Russia and becomes unaffordable.
HK: Repeatedly, land that has not been spoken for either has insufficient water or forest or is deemed unhealthy or too small. Vast swaths of prairie are still available but judged undesirable.
AH: The land has been stolen from Indians like the Sauk and sold to settlers and speculators. No Indian settlements remain in this area after the defeat of Black Hawk in 1832, although in the summer small groups return to camp and beg for food.
HK: In spite of the organization, instructions, statutes, even constitution of the colony, the voyage itself remains the most intimidating aspect of the entire enterprise. One of the leaders of the emigrant group, Matthias Dürst, a tinsmith who provides many of the emigrants with dishes, has also left us a diary. He describes how the travelers have never been to sea and curse the Emigration Committee for their ignorance. The emigrants are not told they need to pay for food and lodging during the several-month voyage; food on the transatlantic ship is insufficient and eventually inedible, including potatoes in the hold so rotten that one “could believe [oneself] to be lost in a swamp or morass because one’s feet sink in over the top of one’s shoes” (Schelbert, New Glarus 1845–1970); on shore they are repeatedly overcharged, especially for excess baggage, not knowing what to bring.
AH: In the Clements Library I read in Fraktur the original report of the Committee of the Emigration Society, published in Glarus in 1847. It includes the diary of Joshua Frey, whom Blumer chose as his replacement to accompany the leaders out west and provides a detailed record of their itinerary, which takes them by train from Detroit to Marshall, Michigan, passing through Ypsilanti, Ann Arbor, and Dexter, which is where I currently live.
HK: Once they arrive: “America is no Glarus land. For there, there is only one, but a good road, and villages every ¼ league, or houses where one can speak to people; but here, there are very many and bad roads which often cross each other, running over prairies taking ½ day to cross, or through equally long stretches of timber in which there are many by-roads and other roads leading sometimes to settlements—such roads are often better than the chief roads; then again 10 to 20 miles with no house, and when finally one reaches a house we cannot understand each other; often we meet people who give little or nothing for good money. All these things one at home cannot imagine” (Schelbert, New Glarus 1845–1970).
AH: And your ancestors?
HK: Nicholas and Verena Elmer leave the canton of Glarus in 1847, taking with them four children. Two more children are born in America; the youngest, Anna Marie Elmer-Elmer, becomes my grandmother. Oswald and Barbara Kubli leave Glarus in 1853, taking four sons, Hans Ulrich, Paulus, Jakob, and Oswald. Paulus and Jakob die of cholera the first year. Hans Ulrich loses a leg in the Civil War. They have three more children, two of them also named Paulus and Jakob, stonemasons who lay the foundations of most of the houses in New Glarus built before 1930. Oswald becomes my grandfather. Maria Elmer and Oswald Kubli marry in New Glarus in 1874 and their son, Nicholas, my father, is born in 1882.
AH: None of them have spent a night away from Elm, the village at the end of the Sernftal, also known as the Kleintal or Chlital, the smaller of two small valleys, the second highest village in the canton, a canton with a population of forty thousand, less than twenty-five miles long, where they burned the second to last witch in Europe and staged the first industrial strike.
HK: In spite of the fact that differences between the Grosstal and Kleintal are transplanted to the new world in the form of a brief secession by a twenty-five-person faction to the other side of the Little Sugar River and that none of the original settlers are farmers, much less wheat farmers, 450 more immigrants join the colony by 1860.
AH: By 1856 official ties with Glarus have been dissolved, and by 1879 young men begin to leave to create their own colonies in Minnesota, the Dakotas, California, and Oregon. Twenty acres, as they learn on arrival, turn out to be nothing.
HK: Thirty of the original settlers return to Switzerland, but only six remain: “Everything in the old country appears close and contracted by comparison; and, as some have expressed it, that there seemed hardly room to breathe there” (Luchsinger, “The Planting of the Swiss Colony at New Glarus, Wis.”).
AH: New Glarus becomes the wealthiest farm community in Wisconsin.
HK: After the Civil War, when wheat growing moves to the Great Plains, New Glarus turns to cheese-making, which is not transplanted from the old country, since the cheese-makers who join the colony are primarily from Bern, but nevertheless signifies Swissness. Because the original cheese-maker has been trained in Holland and New York, most of the cheese produced here is Lim
burger and cheddar. Emmentaler, or “Swiss cheese,” brings a higher price but has a much smaller market. In 1905 there are twenty-two cheese factories; by 1915 only three remain. By then the Helvetia Milk Condensing Company, later known as Pet Milk, has opened a plant in New Glarus and pays each farmer a few cents extra for every gallon of milk. In 1962 it ceases operations.
AH: At which point, what option is there but tourism?
HK: In 1965, for the 120th anniversary of New Glarus’s founding, the Heidi Festival is inaugurated as a way to cash in on the success of William Tell, and in 1969 the Hall of History is built, the first joint venture between Glarus and New Glarus.
AH: When the New Yorker sends Calvin Trillin to New Glarus on assignment, in 1975, he quotes one resident as saying: “We’re trying to keep our heritage, but we’re trying to make it a salable commodity too.” Unlike the “Danish” town of Solvang, California, New Glarus relies on the historical fact of its Swiss immigrants, while the descendants of those immigrants see the Swissness being promoted as increasingly less about the heritage of Glarus.
HK: Since then, the links between old and New Glarus steadily have become stronger, in part promoted by the Friends of New Glarus in Glarus.
AH: In Heritage on Stage: The Invention of Ethnic Place in America’s Little Switzerland, Steven Hoelscher makes the case for “Swissscapes,” or what he calls “the efforts to create a recognizable themed place, in landscapes deliberately contrived to appeal to the outsider.”
HK: New Glarus becomes the global guardian of Swiss heritage and values that no longer seem to exist in Switzerland, such as yodelers, men’s choirs, and Swiss wrestlers.
AH: By the 1990s, “much of the impetus for the New Glarus memory work came not from the village itself, but from Switzerland” (Hoelscher, Heritage on Stage).
HK: I belong to the last generation to speak Swiss-German at home. By the time I return to New Glarus in the late 1960s, the identity I had sought to escape by leaving has become a commodity that people want to sell.
Coming Out Swiss Page 18