When I read Heidi again, this time in German, I am struck by how much it is a novel about reading. But then, I was trained as a deconstructionist, which means a certain affinity for scenes of reading. Reading has been mourned for not being a national pastime, in a country where reading competes with climbing and rarely wins.
A persistent reader,
Anne
Dear Johanna Spyri,
In 1974, fifty-two episodes of the anime Heidi, the Girl of the Alps are broadcast every Sunday night on television in Japan, as part of a World Masterpiece Theater anime series. A former student of mine, T.Y., who has come to the United States to study anthropology, says she can still sing the theme song.
She brings back a 1994 book from Japan, Haiji kiko (Travels with Heidi) by Man Arai and Noriko Arai, which another Japanese student in sociology, H.S., is kind enough to translate for me. It is part travel diary, part travel guide, written by a married couple, he a well-known novelist, and she a housewife. It is her lifelong dream to travel to Switzerland. Noriko is eight years old when she first reads Heidi. She wants to be Heidi, surrounded by nature rather than the factory noise, screams of sirens, and sounds from the sewage canal that flows in front of her family’s subsidized house in a small company town. Her children grow up, her parents die, and she is confronted by the unfulfilled dream she has harbored since childhood of retracing the steps of Heidi’s author and climbing the mountains above Maienfeld. She imagines that what Heidi felt in Frankfurt is what you felt in the big city of Zürich, after you married and moved from Hirzel. It is what she feels when her husband is relocated to western Japan, farther and farther from Tokyo. She too reads Heidi as a book about becoming literate, about education, about the importance of female education, in particular.
Her husband agrees to accompany her to Switzerland as a way of enabling the fulfillment of her dream, of repaying her for having fulfilled her domestic role. Reading Heidi in the hotel room, he is reminded of his own favorite childhood story, Jiro’s Story. For him there are three kinds of men: those who are dead; those who are barely alive; those who have undertaken a sea voyage. Together they undertake a sea voyage by climbing the Alps. They hope to inspire others to undertake their own “travels with Heidi.”
On their return, Noriko becomes an author by writing “Three Conditions for Happiness I learned from Heidi.” They include waking up healthy; having food for lunch; sleeping peacefully. Noriko discovers a fourth condition for happiness: self-fulfillment, which she achieves by writing. She takes you as her inspiration, a housewife who begins to write in middle-age.
What do you think about Heidi becoming part of “cuteness culture,” that is, an idealization of childhood, a resistance to the rigidity of gender roles, and a market that caters to women as girl consumers up to the age of thirty?
I’m just curious.
Anne
Dear Johanna Spyri,
My father’s friend who lives in Maienfeld shared the following story: He met a young man from Japan who had finished secondary school with the highest score in English; his prize was a three-week trip to London. His father then sent him a ticket from London to Zürich, telling him he had to visit Heidi in Maienfeld. His uncle then sent him a ticket from Zürich to Berlin, saying he had to visit the new capital of Europe.
Anne
Dear Johann Spyri,
The Skymetro, or Automated People Mover, is Switzerland’s most frequented cable car, able to transport forty-two hundred passengers an hour from Airside Center to Dock E under Piste 10/28 at the Zürich airport. In 2006, light boxes, 160 in all, were installed every hundred meters, showing scenes from two short films, Heidi and Matterhorn. Diccon Bewes provides the following description: “The yodelling starts as the train leaves, followed by jangling cowbells and deep-throated alphorns, all from the loudspeaker system. And then she appears, as if by magic, larger than life outside the window. She turns her head of golden, braided hair towards us, blows a kiss and vanishes.”
This is who greets me now when I return to Switzerland, not my relatives (who don’t know I’m coming) and not my friends (who don’t have time for a trip to the airport), but Heidi, a bit too friendly, a bit too provocative.
I don’t expect you to commiserate.
Anne
Epilogue
* * *
“I’m Swiss”
I
In July 2010 McDonald’s introduces a new ad campaign, of which there are two versions on the walls of the Zürich train station. Each consists of a bright red background, with a small Suisse Garantie and Swiss flag in the bottom left-hand corner and the Golden arches and “I’m lovin’ it” in the bottom right. In the center in large white letters is “I’m Swiss,” except the “I” in each case is replaced, in one instance with an ice-cream cone and in the other with a french fry. In the case of the french fry, the caption under “I’m Swiss,” in much smaller letters, is “Für unsere Pommes Frites verwenden wir nur Schweizer Kartoffeln” (For our french fries we use only Swiss potatoes). In the case of the Soft Ice—vanilla ice cream topped with chocolate sauce in a plastic cup—the caption is Für unsere Glacés verwenden wir nur Schweizer Milch (For our ice cream we use only Swiss milk). McDonald’s is coming out Swiss. It is coming out in white letters on a red background, the colors of the Swiss flag. It is coming out in English, to guarantee its ingredients in German, for food items that rely on borrowings from the French, which is how we know the food items are Swiss. Coming out means coming out local in a globalized economy. It means revealing a secret that someone thought we didn’t know, even though the secret, in this case, is not shameful. It is meant to mitigate the shame that comes from being a purveyor of fast food whose brand is so ubiquitous it doesn’t need to name itself. The multinational becomes conscious of sustainability by revealing the national origin of some of its agricultural ingredients. It once again desires a nationality, in this case, even a multilingual one. Coming out is meant to cater to as yet unconverted customers, possibly Swiss, potentially left. It is meant to sell. Being Swiss in English, which is not an official national language, is a way to become cosmopolitan. The other way is to consume globally available food whose taste remains identical in spite of local ingredients. Are we surprised, or just skeptical?
“Swiss” is not just a word; it has become a logo. It guarantees many things—neutrality, quality, naturalness—but at this moment it also connotes cool. “Swissair” became “Swiss” to save itself after its shameful “Grounding,” which proved unsuccessful in as much as it is now an affiliate of Lufthansa. “Swiss,” that five-letter word with three “s”es, is so much sexier than “Schweizer/in” or “schweizerisch.” It is even more hip than “Suisse,” recently appropriated by the bank Credit Suisse, which used to be Schweizerische Kreditanstalt, at least in German. A first-person pronoun that is simply a letter of the alphabet capitalized and available for contraction with another letter doesn’t hurt either. It was made for a world where everything belongs to me because I have made it mine by calling it “my” something. The golden arches, placed opposite the Swiss flag, remind us that corporations are countries that only need to market themselves, without ever needing to govern, that is, count their citizens, provide them with sidewalks, or make them literate. Maybe what is coming out is that you really are what you eat, including the sign for not just what is yours, but yourself, namely “I.”
II
Bill Maher delivers a live performance in Portland, Oregon, on March 26, 2005, titled I’m Swiss, subtitled And Other Treasonous Statements. The show is a response to the second inauguration of George Bush, where “bullshit issues,” in particular gay marriage, have resulted in his reelection. Maher’s hatred for Bush leads him to line up the likely suspects: the war in Iraq, tax breaks for the rich, Bush’s response to 9/11, his cowboy costume. But these abominations lead to a further litany of what’s wrong with the country: reality TV, presidents from Texas, rap lyrics, Rush Limbaugh’s oxycontin addiction, fatness, and th
e politics of food. If the show has a theme, it is “legislating taste,” which means taking the opinions of some people and turning them into laws for all people. The church and children function as primary legislators. Only two of the Ten Commandments are also laws; in the name of protecting children, America is “cuckoo about safety,” so that “no one can ever die.” Maher “gets it”; he just can’t believe it, and above all, he doesn’t agree with it. When the bounty on bin Laden is raised from $25 million to $50 million to incentivize his capture, he gets the ethnocentrism that would think the goatherd on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan might find the initial reward insulting. But capturing or killing Bin Laden would have the same effect on terrorism as Ray Kroc’s death had on McDonald’s—none: “the franchise has been built.”
“What country is this? What year are we in? Janet Jackson’s milk-shake was on the television for one second, and America was permanently traumatized. I tell you, when that was going down I was telling people ‘I’m Swiss.’ I live here now but I’m actually a Swiss, nationally.” Being an American in a country run by right-wing Republicans is so repugnant that it requires changing one’s nationality. Maher doesn’t hate America; he loves it, but why, he asks, “does it always have to be the stupid country?” Why can’t America be a hip country, “where the president has a permanent tan and expensive suits and has a Versace mistress and there’s pictures of them fucking on a boat but nobody cares because that’s amore?” It’s anti-gay marriage, and yet Abu Ghraib is so “overwhelmingly gay,” “Rumsfeld shouldn’t step down, he should come out.” “Of course the Catholic church doesn’t want gay men to marry: half the priesthood would walk out the door the first day and marry the UPS driver.” Maybe people could agree on a compromise: “(1) people who are already gay are okay, but no new gays; (2) there could be gay marriage but no gay mortgage; (3) just let lesbians marry, since marriage is kind of a chick thing anyway and men don’t really want to do it, since marriage was something cooked up by women in the Catholic church to stamp out oral sex.” Maher supports gay marriage not as a gay man, not as a man who is pro-gay sex, but as a pot smoker. Gay sex, like pot smoking, although widely practiced, makes participants noncitizens. Maher comes out straight by saying that personally he is revolted by “hairy man ass sex” but he would never ask that his opinion be made into law. His straightness involves a speech act and relies on the impersonation of gayness: Daniel Lieb[es]kind’s feyness stands in sharp contrast to the 1776-floor Freedom Tower he has been asked to design to replace the World Trade Center. When Maher reports that the president does not believe in evolution, his exasperation leads to the reiteration of “I’m Swiss. Are you Swiss too? A lot of Swiss here.” Swissness provides an alternative to both political parties, since even elected Democrats fail to advocate for the legalization of marijuana, gay marriage as opposed to civil unions, and legislation to address climate change. His final message to the terrorists, as well as his audience: “Hate the Dutch! I’ve been to Amsterdam. If freedom is what bugs you so much, scare the shit out of those pot-smoking, whore-mongering motherfuckers and leave us Swiss people alone!”
Coming out Swiss means betraying the United States by engaging in un-American activities, or at least anti-American humor. Maher is not revealing the secret of his Swiss ancestry; he is renouncing his United States citizenship and doing so as a comedic act. But why Swiss? Certainly not because of its visual coolness. Being an American, at least for liberals, progressives, libertarians, even lapsed Catholics and potheads like Maher, is shameful. “Swissness” refers to a disenfranchised minority, represented by, among others, the inhabitants of Portland, who have lost the election and imagine themselves living in a separate country. “Swissness” is also an empty signifier. How many Americans have ever met a Swiss? How would they know how to be Swiss? Finally, Switzerland is the butt of the joke. It is small, insignificant, and interchangeable, and what goes on there can’t possibly matter as much as the United States presidential election. If the Swiss really are traditional, reserved, precise, that’s not a bad thing, given that Bush makes uninformed decisions based on misinformation that alienate him from just about everybody, but above all, Old Europe, where Switzerland is.
Maher’s coming-out scene for the DVD audience is enhanced with background visuals that consist of childlike drawings and captions with arrows pointing to the iconic Matterhorn, Swiss Chalet, and St. Bernard. St. Moritz (137 km), Zürich (68 km), Geneva (53 km), as well as the United States (6500 km) all have signs indicating direction as well as distance. So, where exactly in Switzerland are we? The next shot is a map of Switzerland surrounded on each side by its neighbors—France, Italy, and Germany—just in case anyone needed to be reminded of its exact location. The final shot shows a cuckoo clock superimposed on a Swiss flag that echoes Orson Welles in The Third Man: “The Italian Renaissance was full of crimes and excess, and yet it gave us the greatest masterpieces of art. … Switzerland had lived in peace for three centuries, and what’s she given us? The cuckoo clock.” Welles never apologizes for confusing Switzerland with the Schwarzwald in southern Germany, unlike Paul Krugman, the economist. In his August 17, 2007, New York Times editorial titled “The Swiss Menace,” meaning Obamacare, that is, the perceived attempt to “Swissify America” through mandatory health-care coverage, he describes the Swiss as “lederhosen-wearing holey-cheese eaters.” He corrects himself in his next column by recognizing that he has confused Switzerland with Austria.
III
The 2007 film Helvetica is a documentary about a typeface. “Nobody doesn’t know what Helvetica is.” It is the font of governments and corporations. Signs for Greyhound, Toyota, Nestlé, Verizon, North Face, J.C. Penney, Staples, Target, Lufthansa, Crate and Barrel, and New York City Transit, as well United States tax forms, are all written in Helvetica. It wants to look accessible, transparent, accountable; it wants not to look overly authoritarian. It even invites interpretation: to some, American Apparel looks cheeky, while American Airlines looks sober. It is clear, readable, and above all neutral. As one of the designers interviewed put it: “Most people use it because it is ubiquitous. It’s like going to McDonald’s instead of thinking about food because it’s there. It’s on every street corner so let’s eat crap because it’s on the corner.” It is beautiful and timeless. It is not damaging or dangerous. It is the “perfume of the city.” It is the typeface of capitalism. It is the typeface of socialism. ABH: anything but Helvetica. It is simple, clean, and boring. It is a global monster. It is modern.
Helvetica is to typeface as Toblerone is to chocolate. (Müller, Helvetica)
No one except a Swiss, or the friends of Swiss or Switzerland, would know that it has anything to do with Swissness. It was designed by Eduard Hoffman, the manager of Hass Type Foundry in Münchenstein, Switzerland, who had the idea, and Max Miedinger, a graphic designer turned traveling salesman, who did the drawings. Hoffman wanted to make modern the typeface Akzidenz Grotesk, a traditional nineteenth-century German sans serif, and called the result Die Neue Haas Grotesk. But Haas was owned by D. Stempel AG in Frankfurt am Main, whose marketing director feared that such a name would not fare well in the United States. He suggested instead the name “Helvetia.” Hoffman said one couldn’t name a typeface after a country, since “Helvetia” is the Latin name for Switzerland, so everyone agreed on “Helvetica,” “the Swiss typeface.” The name seemed perfect, since Swiss typography in the 1950s was identical with the international typographic style. The world needed a rational typeface that could create order after World War II and itself remain neutral. Once it was introduced, there was nothing like it. There has been nothing like it since. Stempel was bought by Linotype in Bad Homburg, Germany, which still owns Helvetica. The font closest to Helvetica available on my PC is a clone called “Ariel.”
Some years ago a young intern in our New York office, when looking at an old map where Switzerland was named Helvetia, said, “Fancy naming a country after a typeface.” (Müller, Helvetica)
The influence of Swiss designers was most strongly felt in the United States. It was heralded by Herbert Matter’s arrival in New York in 1935. After his work on the Swiss pavilion at the World’s Fair in 1939, Matter had become prominent as a photographer and designer. His house styles for the New Haven Railroad and Knoll furniture in the 1950s are now in the canon of graphic design history. In 1952 he began teaching at Yale. His “Swissness” went unremarked, and his photomontages were too early to be included in the exhibition of “Recent Swiss Posters” held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1951. (Hollis, Swiss Graphic Design)
If Swissness is a secret, it is an open one. Helvetica is everywhere, but no one knows it is Swiss. It is the opposite of Swissness as a series of stereotypes: the Matterhorn, the chalet, the St. Bernard. If it is shameful, it is because even “the Swiss typeface” is owned by a German company. That the name is in Latin keeps it a secret. Helvetica comes out by saying not “I’m Swiss” but, in spite of being Swiss, “I’m ubiquitous.” Even if it also means sameness, dullness, invisibility, as long as it creates order and conveys information, who cares?
Coming Out Swiss Page 22