We caught pike and char. This tin-coloured lake at dawn, from which we extracted superb fish, had a sort of adventurous, fairy-like atmosphere. I’m a Pisces, and so more at home in water than on land. Sometimes I set off from the shore at Allaman and arrived at Rolle or Morges after four or five hours swimming. People would let me telephone home or lend me a bike or a shirt, which I would send back by post. I loved that, being the drop-in swimmer.33
Maillart, Schwarzenbach and Bouvier trace the familiar arc of a journey. For much of the twentieth century the youth of the advanced technocratic economies searched for nirvana in the east. This might take the form of altered states and guitar riffs in Portland or Hari Krishnas on the Tottenham Court Road in London. These days it’s a gap year filled with a spot of orphanage work, clubbing to hallucinogens on Ko Phangan. Bouvier’s 1950s road trip seems the last authentic flourish of this romance, sparked by those first Romantics on Lake Geneva.
When you drive up to Chandolin on the switchback road above the Valais, you wonder why one might leave such a landscape. It’s a vertical world, the valley disappearing and reappearing at every turn, growing more distant. Ella Maillart made her home here from the last snow to the first, in a chalet she named ‘Atchala’ after her beloved sacred mountain in India. A tiny converted chapel in Chandolin today houses a museum to her life and work. It was a Sunday when I made my way up, and a neighbour had left the door open for me. There were her Olympic medals, her old rucksack, her walking boots. I was the only visitor.
What made her set out on a spiritual quest? ‘The last war sent me down to the clean life of the seas, for ever rid of illusions about our civilization. This war compels me to search for “the meaning of all this”’.34
Intrepid traveler and Olympic medalist Ella Maillart in Chandolin, 1982
In a caption to a photograph taken on the Simplon Pass, before leaving Switzerland for Afghanistan in June 1939, Annemarie Schwarzenbach asked herself the same question: ‘Why do we leave this loveliest country in the world? What urges us to go east on desert roads?’35
Annemarie fell off her bicycle in the Engadin and suffered injuries from which she died at age thirty-four in 1942. The tiger mom burned her papers. In the 1980s her writing was rediscovered by a new generation of travellers, feminists and lesbian activists. She answered her own question about why she set out on the road: ‘The real motivation of every true traveller is the yearning for the absolute.’
In a hotel clinging to the side of the mountain just below Chandolin, I watched the news feed from Ireland where the first ever referendum in support of gay marriage had just passed with a resounding majority. The country was jubilant. There was an impromptu party in Dublin Castle yard. I remembered the Special Branch parked outside the Rotunda Hospital in Dublin in the early 1970s, taking photographs of disco queens leaving the one Irish gay club. I thought of Patricia Highsmith on gay bars: ‘a dark door somewhere in Manhattan, where people wanting to go to a certain bar got off the subway a station before or after the convenient one, lest they were suspected of being homosexual’.36 And lovely Annemarie, my thin white duke, one foot up on the running board of the Ford. The mountain village was quiet. Outside my window was an old cheese hut up on posts, a relic, an original chalet. The woodwork precarious but still standing. It was Whit Saturday and church bells tinkled, echoed by others further down the valley. A thousand marriages got underway.
Our next group of writers belongs in the Swiss post-war world of the late twentieth century. The silver spoon is back in the mouth. Max Frisch, like Dürrenmatt, conducts a love–hate relationship with his home country, undermining its William Tell myth. Fritz Zorn’s one novel set on Zürich’s gold coast seems to point an accusing finger at terminal wealth. Daniel de Roulet takes stock of a politicised youth. Peter Stamm is Switzerland’s best-known twenty-first-century writer, whose quiet, understated style might suggest a new direction. All of them present different facets of their home country to the world.
14
WILLIAM TELL FOR SCHOOLS
Frisch, Zorn, de Roulet and Stamm on the Swiss identikit
Swiss propaganda poster, 1916: Send the freeloaders flying
I am young and rich and educated, and I’m unhappy, neurotic, and alone.
Fritz Zorn
On a May holiday weekend I’m taking the motorway from Basel to Zürich, passing through the Habsburg tunnel. It’s a kilometre and a half long. Above me, looking out over the Aar river, sits the castle from which the dynasty traces its eleventh-century origins. The Schloss is in good shape, flying the family standard high above the valley.
Guntram the Rich was the daddy of them all: Rudolfs, Leopolds, Adolfs and Maximiliens land-grabbing down through the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages, the Reformation and the Restoration, the ages of enlightenment and industry, steam, electric power and on into the upheavals of the twentieth century. They became ever more powerful. They had the run of much of Europe and sundry possessions in the Americas for the best part of a thousand years. Now that’s leadership. The First World War cut the dynasty down to size, as it did so many others, and the Second World War relegated them to shiny, happy people in Hello!, Royalty and Majesty. There they are leaning over their own baptismal fonts with new Maximiliens and Rudolfs in arms, in the paparazzi light.
Emerging from the tunnel, I drive into the Aargau hills. Habsburg is at the northernmost tip of the Jura, where the mountains come down to the Aar, the Reuss and the Limmat, threading their way through islands in the stream before losing themselves in the Rhine. It’s an unassuming place from which to start a dynasty. There isn’t much razzmatazz about the Habsburgs in Argovia, the Anglicised name for Aargau. No interpretive centre or theme park. The most you’ll get on a Sunday is a bouncy castle. But a history of royal Europe is a history of forgotten corners and local bigwigs made good. I drive past the large, boxy aluminium factory with its shunting yards, through villages selling bio fruit and vegetables on the honour system, the produce laid out on folding roadside stands. Tractors putter in the neat vineyards. There’s a smell of silage from the fields and wild garlic from the undergrowth.
From a distance it could be a manor farmhouse raised that bit higher with the village of Habsburg at its base. I park and climb. The forecourt has a large star-shaped omphalos (Greek for belly button) embedded in the cobbles, telling the distances to the far-flung corners of empire, most of them to the southeast. And a legend in three languages: The empire on which the sun never sets. It’s hard to resist an Ozymandian moment: nothing beside remains round the decay of that colossal wreck. Well, perhaps the bank accounts remain, and an attractive property portfolio, and a sense of achievement.
Quite soon after building this family pile in 1020, the Habsburgs outgrew it. They moved into more spacious digs, commensurate with their holdings. In Muri, half an hour away, the hearts of the last Emperor, Charles I (1887–1922), and his wife, Zita of Parma-Bourbon (1892–1989), are buried in a family crypt in the monastery. Their son, Otto von Habsburg (1912–2011), was the last crown prince of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and pretender to the throne. We might think of him as an elegant old duffer who wanted to restore his illustrious line, but in fact he was an anti-Nazi of note (not all Austrians were) and a member of the European Parliament. He famously came to fisticuffs with his fellow MEP Ian Paisley in 1988 when Pope John Paul II visited the parliament. The Catholic Archduke landed a punch on the Free Presbyterian Doctor when Paisley publicly called Pope John Paul II ‘the antichrist’. Here’s Paisley in full flow before history swallows him up:
That vast Assembly erupted, and the books started to fly and the punches started to be thrown, and the kicking started, but I held my ground and maintained my testimony. There is no difference between Europe today and Europe in Reformation times. This afternoon I read again the story of Luther, at the Diet of Worms. Who presided over the Diet of Worms? The Emperor Charles, Head of the Holy Roman Empire. Who was he? He was a Habsburg. It is interesting to note that
one of the men who attacked me is the last of the Habsburgs – Otto Habsburg, the Pretender to the Crown of Austria and Hungary. I said to myself, ‘The Habsburgs are still lusting for Protestant blood. They are still the same as they were in the days of Luther.’1
Switzerland’s founding myth of William Tell is a revolt against the Habsburgs. The legend’s plucky folk hero refuses to accept the dictates of Gessler, the Habsburg representative. The crossbow-wielding Tell is the good guy and Gessler the axis of evil, to use our contemporary parlance. The emergence of a confederation – one for all and all for one – is the story of the central cantons of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden carving out a destiny for themselves. ‘We grew by resisting the Habsburgs’ is the official story.2 Max Frisch’s essay ‘Wilhelm Tell: A School Text’ (1970) confronts this myth at a time when deconstruction was in the air and young radicals were in the streets.
Guillaume Tell absinthe label
Dürrenmatt and Frisch were witnesses to Switzerland’s vexed neutrality during the Second World War. They viewed with scepticism the story that Switzerland told itself and bridled under too close an identification with the notion of the plucky little Homeland. Both make a plea for écrivains sans frontières:
Friedrich Dürrenmatt, when asked by a Swiss critic how he deals with Switzerland as a problem, answered quite simply: ‘You are mistaken, Herr Doktor. Switzerland is no problem for me. Sorry. It’s just a pleasant place to work, that’s all.’3
The Swiss reading public were used to its two bêtes noires castigating their history and cherished myths. Dürrenmatt alluded to wartime compromises:
We all but held to our ideals, without definitely putting them into practice. Tell stretched his crossbow to be sure, but he tipped a finger to the hat a little – almost but not quite – and we were spared heroism.4
Gessler, the Habsburg man, wears the imperial hat that William Tell slights or refuses to acknowledge. The hat was supposed to have been set on a pole as a sign of the Habsburg presence.
Max Frisch (left) and Friedrich Dürrenmatt (right) at the Kronenhalle Restaurant in Zürich, 1963
he was a free man, he said, and didn’t salute any Habsburg hat! The plump knight was still stroking his horse, even smiled, for what hung on the pole was no Habsburg hat but the imperial hat to which reverence was due even in a valley like Uri with its imperial freedom.5
Frisch insinuates that the Tell story is a set of wartime and post-war blinkers: it allowed the Swiss to see what they wanted to see and turn a blind eye to uncomfortable truths. When Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell was performed at the Schauspielhaus in Zürich during the Second World War, audiences spontaneously burst out singing the Swiss national anthem.
Footnote number sixty-two in Frisch’s essay about William Tell concerns Palestinian marksmen who shot at El-Al flight 432 as it was taking off from Zürich airport on 18 February 1969, en route to Tel Aviv. The four affiliates of the PLO opened fire with AK-47s, injuring crew members, one of whom later died. An Israeli security agent on the plane retaliated, killing one of the attackers. The terrorists had leaflets comparing their actions to those of William Tell, drawing parallels between Hapsburg heavy-handedness and Israeli appropriation. At their trial in Winterthur, the terrorists were sentenced to twelve years of hard labour and the Israeli security agent was acquitted.
In a speech on being awarded the George Büchner Prize in 1958, Frisch considered his own Swissness: ‘Do I believe in a new Switzerland? I am Swiss and desire to be nothing else, but my commitment as a writer is not to Switzerland, nor to any other country.’6
Later Swiss writers share this view to varying degrees. Indeed, we could make the larger point that nationalism in art ended some time ago, if it ever existed. Writers on the right – where the money is – have a vested interest in a squeaky-clean national image, a pristine Heimat with its folksy sense of nationhood in part derived from 1930s Nazi gleanings. Writers of a liberal or left tendency confront a euphemistic history. Foreign views often shine a different light. A number of scandals in the last decades of the twentieth century contributed to public debate about Swiss identity. In 1970, members of the Swiss Writers’ Association resigned in protest at toadying to government defence hysteria, forming the Gruppe Olten as an alternative. In 1989, the Swiss public discovered that federal police had kept secret files on many of them. Outcry followed the revelation that the Bührle arms company had profited from the illegal export of arms during the 1968 Nigerian Civil War (Biafran War). The Swiss government formed the Bergier Commission in 1996 to throw light on the country’s Second World War activities. Looted assets, gold, ‘Aryanisation policy’, arms production and refugees all came under its remit. It presented a final report in 2002. In 1998, the German writer W.G. Sebald alluded to Switzerland’s wartime profiteering: ‘the gold, purchased at the expense of the immeasurable suffering of the Jews, which was to serve as a christening present for the generation of Swiss children born after the Second World War’.7
Fritz Zorn (1944–76) was one such writer born with a silver spoon in his mouth. His posthumously published Mars (1976) reckons with a privileged upbringing on Zürich’s ‘golden coast’, inviting the reader to consider Zorn’s malaise as rottenness in the state. He equates cancer with the inability to confront uncomfortable truths about material wellbeing. This illness as metaphor turned real: he died of cancer at age thirty-two.
Zorn, meaning ‘anger’, was a pseudonym chosen days before his death when the author knew his book would be published. His real name was Fritz or Federico Angst – Angst meaning ‘anxiety’. Zürich’s gold coast is a bejewelled world unto itself, a string of wealthy communities along the eastern shore of the lake, catching the setting sun. Zorn’s was a typical gold coast upbringing:
Fritz Zorn (Federico Angst): Born with a silver spoon in his mouth
I am young and rich and educated, and I’m unhappy, neurotic, and alone. I come from one of the very best families on the east shore of Lake Zürich, the shore that people call the Gold Coast. My upbringing has been middle-class, and I have been a model of good behaviour all my life. My family is somewhat degenerate, and I assume that I am suffering not only from the influences of my environment but also from some genetic damage. And of course I have cancer.8
The writer Adolf Muschg – another gold coast boy – championed the book and wrote the preface. It became a surprising international bestseller.
Zorn’s Zürich is a world unto itself, one that Daniel de Roulet sees as atypical of the time. Zorn was a dandy, poncing around town in a red cloak, while de Roulet is a Lefty. Like Dürrenmatt, he is the son of a pastor, from the Jura region. In Un dimanche à la montagne (2006) he revisits his firebrand youth. In 1975, de Roulet burned the Gstaad chalet of publishing magnate Axel César Springer to the ground. He wrongly thought that the press baron was a Nazi sympathiser. The récit dramatises the polarised politics of post-war materialist Switzerland: ‘There are two types of foreigners here. Those who die digging our tunnels and building our Alpine dams, and those who buy up our mountains.’9 In Double (1998), a novel about the author’s own identity as much as Switzerland’s, de Roulet follows the paper trail of Swiss police files on his own life at a time when East German Stasi files were being opened up. Fritz Zorn makes a fictionalised appearance, as a foil to de Roulet’s more engagée Switzerland.
The identity question is especially acute in a country proud of independence from its bellicose neighbours. Swiss writers also have dialect to contend with: the language of the valley is not high German or literary French. Anglosphere publishing likes homogenised language and ideas. What sells in the airports is globlish. So a certain amount of hybridity – between languages, cultures, dialects – is characteristic of Swiss literature, as it is of contemporary English literature.
The younger among Max Frisch’s contemporaries, especially if they write literary German, are not certain any longer whether they want to belong to a Swiss literature; and although they certainly feel at home in t
heir villages and in their local dialects, they rightly suspect that too many demands would be made on them by the Establishment, who liked to see Swiss writers ossify in provincial sets of attitudes as predictable as the qualities of Emmental cheese or Sprüngli milk chocolate.10
It is a false assumption that Zürich is a narrower world than New York or that Seattle has better coffee than a valley in Winterthur. The cosmopolitan shifts. Multilingual, multicultural Swiss cities are at the heart of Europe in a way that renders the Anglo world provincial, with its Costa coffee and easyJet swagger.
Perhaps the Swiss writer who has made the biggest splash internationally in recent years is Peter Stamm. Seven Years (2012) and All Days Are Night (2014) have garnered accolades both at home and abroad. Lauded as a quiet writer, a writer’s writer, Stamm’s cool style owes something to Ernest Hemingway and Raymond Carver, as well as to fellow Swiss Robert Walser.
Seven Years follows the fortunes of a group of Munich architecture students. The Wall falls, unification beckons, careers and marriages get underway. First house, first child, first affair, first root canal: a flat-pack world meticulously assembled from instructions. Alex’s relationships with two different women – Sonia, beautiful and sophisticated, and Ivona, a religious frump from Poland – express the inadequacy of modernity. Alex marries Sonia and keeps the frump on the side. Sonia likes le Corbusier, while Alex is more drawn to the wild: ‘Ivona wasn’t domesticated, under the quiet, long-suffering manner there was still something wild, a resolve I’d rarely come across in a human being.’11
The Gilded Chalet Page 26