Coming Out Swiss
Page 21
Anne
Dear Johanna Spyri,
I’m not sure why I’m dragging you up another alp.
A five-minute cab ride for a set fee takes us across the channeled Rhine from Bad Ragaz to Maienfeld, past the recently constructed Swiss Heidi Hotel. Shunned by locals as a new eyesore, it positions itself against both the luxury hotels such as the Meierhof in Bad Ragaz, for an international clientele seeking physical rehabilitation, and the Heidihof above Maienfeld, for those, especially Japanese visitors, seeking Swiss hospitality while visiting the Heidi Village. There is also a Heidi-Hof Hotel in Hakuba, Japan. The Swiss Heidi Hotel is not meant to attract primarily Heidi enthusiasts but rather also hikers, mountain bikers, and wine tasters. Leisure activities once associated with childhood are now marketed to adults who find themselves either not wanting to grow up or not wanting to grow old. You can still “check-in” twenty-four hours a day, but the originally advertised “Convenience-Food” in the cafeteria and the “Chill-Out” music in the bar have been replaced by a restaurant with a panoramic view and meeting rooms for more than “business as usual.”
The cab drops us off at the Heidihof, which makes it possible to visit the Heididorf, in particular Heidi’s House—The Original. The three-hundred-year-old house, located in an original Walser settlement, was de-modernized in 1997 to recreate a rustic household of 1880, the year, more or less, you walked past it. Heididorf, otherwise known as Ober-Rofels, is where you imagined Heidi lived. The house was never built as the set of a film, nor was a film ever made on its site, except for one scene in the 1955 Heidi and Peter. This endows it with an authenticity that allows it to be marketed as “the original.”
The Heidihaus, at a time when the postal system is threatening to eliminate post offices in many small villages, has secured its own postmark and stamps my “passport” to confirm that I have been here. (B. decides to pass.) “This is where Heidi lived,” proclaims the taped loop, in German and English, “Switzerland’s most famous girl.” “Authentic furnishings arranged in a natural and realistic manner” indicate Heidi’s room, which we know she never had. The closet holds a fancy dress, which we know she never brought back from Frankfurt. Heidi’s bed is covered with a “leaf-filled duvet,” somewhere between the hay you have her sleep on and the down-filled duvet visitors will find on their hotel beds.
Anne
Dear Johanna Spyri,
At one point you imagine immigrating to Berlin, after you discover, like so many of us, that mothers tend to prefer sons. What are your options? You could immigrate to Argentina, like your favorite brother, Christian, a surveyor, who marries an English woman who speaks no German and returns to Switzerland only twice. You could remain in the parental household, unmarried, like your two younger sisters. Or, like Aunt Regula, your mother surrogate, you could regret not being a man and after two broken engagements maintain a lifelong friendship with a man who immigrates to New York and returns every year to visit you.
Instead, you console yourself with reading, in a small room behind the common sitting room. The book you read over and over again is Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister (1795–96), from which you borrow the subtitles for your novel and its sequel: Heidi’s Years of Learning and Travel (1880) and Heidi Makes Use of What She Learns (1881).
I seem to be digressing.
We have bypassed the red, or Kleiner Heidiweg, from the train station to the Heidi village, which takes an hour and a half, by taking a taxi. I suggest foregoing the blue, or Grosser Heidiweg, from the Heidi village to the Heidi alp and back through the town of Jenins, which takes four and a half hours, since you’ve already taken it, or should I say, invented it. Instead, we take the Heidi Erlebnisweg, or “Heidi Adventure Trail,” subtitled Wandere, Spiele, und Lerne or “Hike, Play, and Learn,” advertised as a forty-five-minute walk. Implemented on the hundred-year anniversary of your death, July 2001, the trail consists of twelve stations. Heidi’s story is told not chronologically but thematically. Each rest stop offers quotations from the novel, in both German and English, with illustrations by the official Heididorf illustrator and a hands-on exhibit, that is, put your hands in this hole, sit on this bench, drink from this spring, that is, “some activity,” according to the tourist brochure, “that children and families might want to engage in to reinforce their experience with Heidi, her story and the surroundings.”
What do you think it means “to reinforce one’s experience with Heidi”?
Why is reading a book, as an experience, no longer sufficient?
The climb through the woods on a worn path takes us to an access road used by local mountain-bikers. The afternoon is coming to a close, and the path is not particularly picturesque. All those with children have long since descended. Two hours later, we arrive at the final station, but there is only an unmown meadow. We are greeted by another collection box, even though each sign has been financed by at least half a dozen local sponsors. A small hand-painted sign says, “food and drink, three minutes.” We follow it to the Heidialp and order—I know you can’t guess—a bottle of Heidiland mineral water. This one is on me. The young man portraying Peter takes my money before he and the older bearded man playing Grandfather head down the access road in their car, eager to check on their cows.
Where is Heidi?
I realize I am asking tough questions.
Anne
Dear Johanna Spyri,
Since I haven’t heard from you, I’m beginning to think you might be away. I know that once you became a widow, you often traveled. To Montreux, for example, where you spent each fall. They say you preferred Ferienbekanntschaften, “acquaintances made while on vacation,” to friends.
Is that true?
If it were true, is this something you would recognize, much less reveal?
You did succeed in burning all the letters that you wrote when they were returned to you.
Anne
Dear Johanna Spyri,
Wouldn’t you agree that most of your closest friendships were with women? Of the letters we still have, among the most passionate are to Betsy, the sister of Conrad Ferdinand-Meyer, one of the most famous Swiss writers of your day: “Dearest Betsy, I thank you for your love, I thank you for your words, that do my heart good; it is always a comfort to be near you, especially when you are completely with me, but also when I am able to be near you in writing, or you near me; I love your being from the depths of my heart. And yet I can’t bring my heart to my lips” (Zeller and Zeller, Johanna Spyri/Conrad Ferdinand Meyer). Is this the rhetoric of Pietism, something you learned from your mother, a published poet, or the language of romantic female friendship, something you might have grown comfortable with growing up in Hirzel, a household of fifteen consisting almost exclusively of women?
When Betsy moves to Geneva after her mother, Elisa Meyer-Ulrich, the host of a literary salon and someone you adopted as surrogate mother, drowns herself, Hedwig Kappeler takes her place. She is a boarder attending the Höhere Töchterschule in Zürich. She will help you move into your final apartment, visit you until your death, and inherit your desk. She will greet your attending physician, Marie Heim-Vögtlin, the first Swiss female doctor.
You will maintain a lifelong friendship with Henriette Devaley, the oldest daughter of the household where you stayed in Yverdon.
I know you insist that it is better to be a good mother than an educated woman, but you did sit on the board of the Töchterschule for almost twenty years, where you were instrumental in hiring the Genevan Camille Vidart, the first female teacher at the school and the first translator, although anonymous and subsequently forgotten, of Heidi into French. And you did begin learning Latin at fifty. Biographers are obsessed with explaining the decade-long depression after the birth of your only child, Bernhard, the gifted violinist who studied law and died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-nine. And your marriage to Johann Spyri, attorney, city clerk, editor of a conservative newspaper, who is more interested in writing his editorials than in conversing with
you over either lunch or dinner.
I think we can agree it was his loss.
Anne
Dear Johanna Spyri,
Considering that you grew up in such a large household, why are forty-seven out of forty-nine of your stories about orphans?
You claim to be homesick for your mother, your aunt, and your Heimat, and yet you fail to return to Hirzel for twenty-five years.
Please explain.
Anne
Dear Johanna Spyri,
I’m not sure how to read your continuing silence.
Your first story, “Ein Blatt auf Vrony’s Grab,” appears in the Bremen Kirchenblatt, meant to raise money for the nuns’ disability pension. It is not signed.
It is 1871, the height of the Russian colony in Zurich, a hotbed of revolutionary thought.
A collection of stories, “for children and for those who love children,” entitled Heimatlos, follows in 1887. Only with Heidi do you forego your initials “J.S.” and for the first time sign your name.
In Bremen, you visit relatives and Pastor Veitor, whose daughter Helene is responsible for pushing the wheelchair of her sister Lina. The youngest sister, Adelheid, is ten years old and nicknamed Alli.
Years later, you will invite the pastor’s granddaughter to stay with you in Zürich.
All of your work will be published in Germany, with a family-owned publisher, F. A. Perthes, located first in Bremen and then in Gotha. As a result of Heidi’s immediate and immense success, the firm is bought out, goes public, and Emil Perthes is forced out. He spends years in litigation and finally ends up bankrupt.
How do you feel about this?
Anne
Dear Johanna Spyri,
What made you invent a new name? You claim that Heidi is short for Adelheid. This has never been the case, either in Graubünden, where the story takes place, or in Zürich, where you grew up. In Frankfurt, no one has heard of the name. “It can’t be the name you were baptized with. It can’t be a Christian name,” Fräulein Rottenmeier, the stern housekeeper, scolds the eight-year-old child. Heidi has just arrived from the Swiss Alps to be the companion of Clara, the daughter of a wealthy businessman, four years her senior and confined to a wheelchair. When Clara asks whether she should call her Heidi or Adelheid, the orphan insists that Heidi is all she knows. Adelheid is the name of her mother, whose death precipitously followed her father’s, resulting in her orphan status. That Heidi stems from Adelheid she has just learned from her aunt Dete, who is trying to dispose of her unwanted charge by fulfilling the request for a girl “apart, not like the others.”
In Frankfurt, Heidi is referred to simply as “the Swiss child.” “Swiss” in this case means illiterate, ill-mannered, “barbarian,” rather than noble savage, “born of mountain air, never touching the ground.” It means not knowing that one does not refer to servants by the informal du. When the housekeeper mandates that Heidi call them by the formal Sie or the third-person er, she uses both simultaneously. When she is told to refer to the grandmother as Gnädige Frau (Honored Madam), she does so literally, that is, Frau Gnädige (Madam Honor). The servants in turn have been told to call her “Mamsell.” Heidi sighs at the thought of having three names.
In 1997 Heidi is found to be the third most popular name in Switzerland.
She joins Cleopatra and Cher, among others, as one-name female stars.
I thought you might find this interesting.
Anne
Dear Johanna Spyri,
In 1931 the copyright to your story expires, and the demand for sequels becomes insatiable. You produced one, to appease your favorite niece, Anna, but apparently that was not enough. You did of course tempt future storytellers by giving your last chapter the title “Parting to Meet Again?”
The first person we meet is Charles Tritten from Lausanne, second translator into French, who begins by adding four chapters to your sequel to justify writing his own sequel, Heidi Grows Up (1938). By “growing up,” he means being sent to an international boarding school in the French-speaking part of Switzerland, becoming a schoolteacher, and giving up teaching school to engage in eldercare and marry Peter. Then, Tritten claims, he was forced to write a sequel to his sequel, to answer the question posed by hundreds of his readers: do Heidi and Peter have children? This is exactly the kind of question you insisted on never asking. Tritten’s second sequel is called Heidi’s Children (1939).
Heidi has not one but three children, twins she gives birth to, and Marta, whom she adopts, the sister of a schoolmate from Lausanne who has taken her place as schoolmistress. The naming of the twins, one boy and one girl, once again raises the issue of Heidi’s name, which is both not one and short for Adelheid, her mother. Because her mother was a sleepwalker, the name “Heidi” is rejected as unsuitable. While the boy twin is named after his grandfather, Tobias, the girl, Martali, is named after Marta, Heidi’s adopted daughter who turns out to be her cousin.
Are you still following?
The grandfather dies, and the secret of his wife’s identity is revealed when she turns out to be Marta’s grandmother. This breaks another of your cardinal rules: orphans never find their biological parents.
My favorite moment? When the grandfather uses pieces of dried apple to signify Switzerland’s original three cantons, Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden, which unite and swear allegiance: “The men of these three cantons promised to help each other just as a husband and wife do when they take each other’s hands in marriage.”
I’m surprised these books were available in the university library.
Anne
Dear Johanna Spyri,
I hope this doesn’t come as too great a shock, but these sequels are less the successors of your book than of the first film version of Heidi (1937), starring Shirley Temple. Most people in the United States have heard of Heidi because of this film. Dörfli is no longer in Switzerland but located south of the Schwarzwald. Germany becomes interchangeable with Holland, when Shirley Temple, now no longer Heidi but the Hollywood child actress, performs a song-and-dance routine in wooden shoes. Holland becomes interchangeable with Austria, when Shirley Temple joins a group of children to perform a courtly dance in powdered wigs and formal dress.
Switzerland has never been a colonial power, like Holland, nor has it ever had a monarchy, like Austria. But why am I telling you this?
Heidi is not homesick for the mountains but sad because she won’t be home for Christmas. Grandfather, rather than patiently waiting on the alp, shows up in Frankfurt and makes a nuisance of himself by randomly knocking on doors, ending up in jail, escaping from jail, and leading a chase scene in a horse-drawn sleigh. The scene I have never forgotten from my own childhood viewing is the one where Fräulein Rottenmeier smashes Heidi’s Christmas present, a snow globe containing a miniature scene of grandfather in front of his hut, against the fireplace. She also drops Clara’s porcelain doll on the stone floor, but that makes less of an impact.
The 1993 Disney version of Heidi is filmed in Austria, and the trailer suggests that those who enjoyed this film might also want to watch The Sound of Music.
This is probably more than you want to know about the Americanization, via Austria, of Heidi.
Anne
Dear Johanna Spyri,
New Glarus, Wisconsin, known as “America’s Little Switzerland,” has hosted a Heidi Festival the last full weekend in June for the past forty years. Located on the Sugar River, forty-five minutes south of Madison, two hours west of Milwaukee, and two and a half hours west of Chicago, it’s close to a ten-hour drive from where I live.
“Heidi Festival” means a dramatic performance of Heidi, combined with garage sales, arts and crafts in the park, ethnic food stands on the sidewalk, and, when night begins to fall on a hot summer day, a street dance with live music. All of this is much more reminiscent of summer festivals in small towns in the Midwest than of Switzerland.
Performances of “your” play begin at 10:00 a.m. in the air-conditioned auditor
ium of the New Glarus High School, with local actors, including the former owner and operator of the meat market, who has played grandfather every single year. The goats, one young and one old, are cooperative, if not engaged with the action on the stage. The kittens, their eyes barely open, seem a bit too young for dramatic roles. Heidi appears only after the minister and grandfather have discussed her at length, and before she even sets foot on stage, we know that grandfather intensely dislikes women like Dete and doesn’t think much of girls in general. But this seems to be the fault of Lucille Miller’s 1936 adaptation, Heidi: English Language Adaptation, Dramatized from the Book of Johanna Spyri. Heidi seems overly solicitous toward her grandfather’s loneliness and overly imperious about what he “must do,” making her less the dependent child than the domineering wife.
When the person appears between the acts to entertain specifically “those less than three feet tall,” the answer to his question for the audience about where the previous scene has taken place is not Dörfli but “Berkeley.”
The California dairy industry has begun an ad campaign against Wisconsin, “America’s Dairyland.” The artisanal bakery, in continuous operation since the first settlement of New Glarus, has just gone out of business.
The Heidi Festival is modeled on Tellenspiele, reenactments of the William Tell legend, regularly staged in Switzerland since the early sixteenth-century and in New Glarus since 1938.
In 2010 a Swiss newspaper lists the ten most important Swiss people in history. No sign of William Tell. The two women to make the list are Heidi and Helvetia, neither of whom, as you know, existed.
Anne
Dear Johanna Spyri,
The only copy of Heidi I find in my possession is in English, published in 1959, part of an “Around the World Treasures” series that boasts a “unique BOOK-WITHIN-A-BOOK.” This feature consists of a thirty-two-page introductory section that tells the story in full-page illustrations with captions for those children “still too young to attempt the full story as originally written.” In an introductory section titled “About This Book,” the life of the author is retold in addition to one “Swiss” custom, namely candles on Christmas trees: “The children were not allowed to become satiated with Christmas delights, for the wax candles on the tree were never lighted for more than one hour, and then not necessarily on Christmas Day, but somewhere in the Christmas week. So the tree when it was lighted, had love and admiration lavished on it, that no tree that blazes away all through Christmas knows.” We never spent Christmas in Switzerland; instead we imported candles for the tree and by lighting them, technically broke the law.