“O Switzerland!”: Travelers’ Accounts, 57 BCE to the Present

By Ashley Curtis

The most incisive writing about Switzerland from the world’s most
creative minds: from Tolkien to Tolstoy, Petrarch to Prince, Julius
Caesar to George Sand. They wrote of wars and money, poverty and peaks,
dances and prisons, wolves and fleas. “O Switzerland!” deftly weaves
together over 450 first-hand accounts to paint a dazzling and disturbing
portrait of an enigmatic land.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bergli
• Release date: Oct 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9783038690337

Book preview

  1  

Switzerland

In which we consider praise and damnation, liberty and tyranny, war and peace, beginnings and ends.

MARK TWAIN, 1878

O Switzerland! The further it recedes into the enriching haze of time, the more intolerably delicious the charm of it and the cheer of it and the glory and majesty and solemnity and pathos of it grow . . . There are mountains and mountains and mountains in this world, but only these take you by the heartstrings. I wonder what the secret of it is. Well, time and again it has seemed to me that I must drop everything and flee to Switzerland once more. It is a longing—a deep, strong, tugging longing—that is the word.

AUGUST STRINDBERG, 1884

A European country without a king, without a royal theater, without holy orders, academies, postal newspapers and broods of vipers, a land in the middle of Europe without an upper class! Isn’t that something? Come and have a look at it, and you will see many aspects of your dreams realized. This country is uplifting, it heals wounds, and I always become a better person when I cross its border.

MARY SHELLEY, 1840

There was no horror; but there was grandeur. There was a majestic simplicity that inspired awe; the naked bones of a gigantic world were here: the elemental substance of fair mother Earth, an abode for mighty spirits . . . whose vast shapes could only find, in these giant crags, a home proportionate to their power.

AUGUST VON KOTZEBUE, 1804

A person ought to see Switzerland with his own eyes, just as he ought to hear a concert with his own ears. He who paints countries with words does still less than the person who hums a symphony: therefore I neither can nor will say anything of Switzerland, but that I have here and there seen spots, where the Almighty may perhaps have stood when he surveyed the world, after the creation, and said: It is good.

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH, 1790

I have looked upon, and as it were conversed with, the objects which this country has presented to my view so long, and with such increasing pleasure, that the idea of parting from them oppresses me with a sadness similar to what I have always felt in quitting a beloved friend.

Leslie Stephen summed it up in a letter to Oliver Wendell Holmes.

LESLIE STEPHEN, 1871

You poor Yankees are to be pitied in many things, but for nothing as much as your distance from Switzerland.

Visitors in the 18th century cast their eyes on an unfamiliar country.

THOMAS HOLLIS, 1748

This tour which we made highly entertained and indeed surprised us. For instead of seeing (as we expected) a country generally wild, barren, and uncultivated, and a people generally poor, we observed lands, although by nature not fertile, yet made so with much art, even in many places to the tops of precipices; and a people, although none of them possessing vast riches, yet, as a body, wealthy, and without any that are absolutely poor.

Johann Jakob Wetzel, Kaiserstuhl with Lake Lungern, 1820

WILLIAM COXE, 1789

Perhaps there is not a similar instance in ancient or modern history, of a warlike people, divided into little independent republics, closely bordering upon each other, and occasionally interfering in their respective interests, having continued, during so long a period, in an almost uninterrupted state of tranquillity.

[But] the happiness of a long peace has neither broken the spirit, nor enervated the arm of the Swiss. The youth are diligently trained to martial exercises, such as running, wrestling, and shooting both with the cross-bow and the musket; a considerable number of well-disciplined troops are always employed in foreign service, and the whole people are enrolled, and regularly exercised in their respective militia.

The effect of having "a considerable number of troops always employed in foreign service" had been noted earlier by Joseph Addison.

JOSEPH ADDISON, 1702

The inhabitants of the country are as great curiosities as the country itself. They generally hire themselves out [as mercenaries] in their youth, and if they are musket-proof till about fifty, they bring home the money they have got and the limbs they have left to pass the rest of their time among their native mountains. One of the gentlemen of the place, that is come off with the loss of an eye only, told me by way of boast that there were now seven wooden legs in his family, and that for these four generations there had not been one in his line that carried a whole body with him to the grave.

The valor of the Helvetian (Swiss) fighters had been attested to many centuries before by Julius Caesar.

JULIUS CAESAR, 57 BC

The Helvetii also surpass the rest of the Gauls in valor, as they contend with the Germans in almost daily battles, when they either repel them from their own territories, or themselves wage war on their frontiers.

Not everyone, however, was so impressed with Switzerland.

LORD HENRY BROUGHAM, 1816

It is a country to be in for two hours, or two and a half, if the weather is fine, and no longer. Ennui comes on the third hour, and suicide attacks you before night. There is no resource whatever for passing the time, except looking at the lakes and hills which is over immediately.

LEO TOLSTOY, 1857

Switzerland is shopkeepers and charging you to see the sights. A [poor] contrast with the Russian peasants.

OSCAR WILDE, 1899

Mont Blanc: who at sunset flushes like a rose: with shame perhaps at the prevalence of tourists . . . but I don’t like Switzerland: it has produced nothing but theologians and waiters.

RAINER MARIA RILKE, 1920

In spite of this, how happy I am to have broken out of Switzerland, which, more and more, I really can take only for a waiting-room on the four walls of which a few Swiss views have been hung up.

Some travelers were openly hostile.

FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY, 1860s

Oh if you only knew, what a stupid, dull, insignificant, savage people it is! It is not enough to travel through as a tourist. No, try to live there for some time! But I cannot describe to you now even briefly my impressions: I have accumulated too many. Bourgeois life in this vile republic has reached the ne plus ultra [ultimate]. In the administration, and all through the whole of Switzerland—there are parties and continuous squabbles, pauperism, terrible mediocrity in everything. A workman here is not worth the little finger of a workman of ours. It is ridiculous to see and to hear it all. The customs are savage; oh, if you only knew what they consider good and bad here. Their inferiority of development: the drunkenness, the thieving, the paltry swindling that have become the rule in their commerce!

D.H. LAWRENCE, 1916

There is something very dead about this country. I remember I picked apples from the grass by the roadside, and some were very sweet. But for the rest, there was mile after mile of dead, uninspired country—uninspired, so neutral and ordinary that it was almost destructive.

One gets this feeling always in Switzerland, except high up: this feeling of average, of utter soulless ordinariness, something intolerable. Mile after mile, to Zurich, it was just the same. It was just the same in the tram-car going into Zurich; it was just the same in the town, in the shops, in the restaurant. All was the utmost level of ordinariness and well-being, but so ordinary that it was like a blight. All the picturesqueness of the town is nothing, it is like a most ordinary, average, usual person in an old costume. The place was soul-killing.

So after two hours’ rest, eating in a restaurant, wandering by the quay and through the market, and sitting on a seat by the lake, I found a steamer that would take me away. That is how I always feel in Switzerland: the only possible living sensation is the sensation of relief in going away, always going away. The horrible average ordinariness of it all, something utterly without flower or soul or transcendence, the horrible vigorous ordinariness, is too much.

I landed somewhere on the right bank, about three-quarters of the way down the lake . . . But it was eight o’clock, and I had had enough. One might as well sleep. I found the Gasthaus zur Post.

It was a small, very rough inn, having only one common room, with bare tables, and a short, stout, grim, rather surly landlady, and a landlord whose hair stood up on end, and who was trembling on the edge of delirium tremens.

They could only give me boiled ham: so I ate boiled ham and drank beer, and tried to digest the utter cold materialism of Switzerland.

Chateaubriand condemned Switzerland’s politics.

FRANCOIS RENÉ DE CHATEAUBRIAND, 1797

Neutral in the grand revolutions of the states which surround them, they enrich themselves by the misfortunes of others and found a bank on human calamities.

F. Scott Fitzgerald leveled the field.

F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, 1930

All the world seems to end up in this flat and antiseptic smelling land—with an overlay of flowers.

He saw Switzerland, literally, as a dead end.

Switzerland is a country where very few things begin, but many things end.

That Switzerland regularly tops (by far) the world per capita patents ranking renders Fitzgerald’s statement about "few things beginning" somewhat suspect. We might also mention a rather significant thing that began in Geneva in 1989. Notice the ch in the very first web address.

TIM BERNERS-LEE, 1989

http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

Berners -Lee’s supervisor at CERN described the origins of the World Wide Web.

PEGGIE RIMMER, 2014

Gestation was rather like that of an elephant, difficult to know it had started and taking almost two years to complete.

When CERN announced on April 30, 1993, that it relinquished all intellectual property rights to this code, a revolution began for the rest of us.

Vladimir Iljitsch Lenin prepared his own revolution as an exile in Switzerland. Sitting on a bench in Zurich, he shocked the Swiss politician Ernst Nobs with the following statement.

VLADIMIR ILJITSCH LENIN, 1916

Switzerland is the most revolutionary country in the world.

Nobs had to explain to Lenin why the Swiss militia system—under which every adult male kept a weapon and live ammunition in his closet—would not lead to a workers’ revolt. Edward Gibbon made a similar point at the time of the French Revolution.

Johann Ludwig Aberli, Ouchy, 1700s

EDWARD GIBBON, 1789

While the Aristocracy of Bern protects the happiness, it is superfluous to enquire whether it is founded on the rights of man . . . the magistrates must reign with prudence and equity, since they are unarmed in the midst of an armed nation

Seventeenth century travelers to Switzerland marveled not at its revolutionary character but rather at its peace and ease.

FYNES MORYSON, 1617

The Commonwealth is administered with great equity, yet with no less severity of Justice, than the Germans use: And howsoever all the country lies within mountains and woods, yet the high way for passengers is no where more safe from thieves, so as it is there proverbially said, that you may carry gold in the palms of your hands.

GILBERT BURNET, 1685

Switzerland lies between France and Italy, that are both of them countries incomparably more rich, and better furnished with all the pleasures and conveniences of life; and yet Italy is almost quite dispeopled, and the people in it are reduced to a misery that can scarce be imagined by those who have not seen it; and France is in a great measure dispeopled, and the inhabitants are reduced to a poverty that appears in all the manners in which it can show itself, both in their houses, furniture, clothes, and looks.

On the contrary, Switzerland is extreme full of people, and in several places, in the villages as well as in their towns, one sees all the marks he can look for of plenty and wealth: their houses and windows are in good case, the highways are well maintained, all people are well clothed, and every one lives at his ease.

Charlotte von Lengefeld, who later married the poet Friedrich Schiller, agreed.

CHARLOTTE VON LENGEFELD, 1783

Tyranny does not darken the hearts of the inhabitants of this blessed land. They are free, which gives a special significance to their existence; they are so kind and hospitable and wish well to all men.

Four years earlier, Goethe had a different take on the matter.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, 1779

Were, then, these Switzers free?—free, these opulent burghers in their little pent-up towns?—free, those poor devils on their rocks and crags? What is it that man cannot be made to believe, especially when he cherishes in his heart the memory of some old tale of marvel? Once, forsooth, they did break a tyrant’s yoke, and might, for the moment, fancy themselves free; but out of the carcass of the single oppressor the good sun, by a strange new birth, has hatched a swarm of petty tyrants. And so, now, they are ever telling that old tale of marvel: one hears it till one is sick of it. They formerly made themselves free, and have ever since remained free; and now they sit behind their walls, hugging themselves with their customs and laws—their philandering and philistering. And there, too, on the rocks, it is surely fine to talk of liberty, when for six months of the year they, like the marmot, are bound hand and foot by the snow. Alas! how wretched must any work of man look in the midst of this great and glorious Nature, but especially such sorry, poverty-stricken works as these black and dirty little towns, such mean heaps of stones and rubbish! Large rubble and other rocks on the roofs, too, that the miserable thatch may not be carried off from the top of them; and then the filth, the dung, and the gaping idiots! When here you meet with man and the wretched work of his hands, you are glad to run away immediately from both.

What is the "old tale of marvel" disparaged here by Goethe? Thomas Coryat retold it engagingly in 1608. He was visiting the armory in Zurich.

THOMAS CORYAT, 1608

Also there is shown another most worthy monument in the same room [of the armory], even the sword of William Tell, an Helvetian of the town of Swice [Schwyz], who about some three hundred years since was the first author of the Helvetical confederation . . . by reason of a certain notable exploit that he achieved. Therefore I will tell a most memorable history of Will Tell before I proceed any further.

When . . . the German Emperors, being the Lords of the principal Cities of Helvetia, constituted foreign prefects and rulers, it happened that the prefect of the town of Swice behaved himself very insolently, abusing his authority by immoderate tyrannizing over the people. For amongst other enormous outrages that he committed, this was one: he commanded one of his servants to compel all travellers that passed to do reverence to his hat that was hanged upon a staff in the high way. The people, unwilling to offend the magistrate, did their obeisance unto the hat. But one amongst the rest, even this foresaid William Tell, being a man of stout courage, refused to do as the rest did. Whereupon he was brought before the magistrate, who being grievously incensed against him for his contumacy, enjoined him this penance: that he should shoot an arrow out of a crossbow at an apple set upon his son’s head that was a little child, whom he caused to be tied to a tree for the same purpose, so that if he had failed to strike the apple, he must needs have shot through his son. This he commanded him because this Tell was esteemed a cunning archer.

At the first he refused to do it, but at last because he saw there was an inevitable necessity imposed upon him, he performed the matter greatly against his will, and that with most happy success. For God himself directing the arrow, he shot so cunningly, that he struck off the apple from the child’s head without any hurt at all to the child. And whereas he had another arrow left besides that which he shot at his son, the prefect asked him what he meant to do with that arrow, and he made him this bold and resolute answer: If I had slain my child with the first, I would have shot thee through with the second. The magistrate hearing that, commanded him to be apprehended, and carried away in a bark. And when he was come betwixt the town of Urania, and a certain village called Brun, having by good fortune escaped out of the boat, he ran away with all possible expedition over the difficult places of the mountains, where there was no common way, and so came to a place near to the which he knew the tyrant would pass, where he lay in ambush in a secret corner of the wood till he came that way, and then shot him through with his other arrow.

This noble exploit was the first original of the Helvetical confederation.

Goethe later came to think more highly of the old tale of marvel. He wrote the following in a letter to his friend and fellow poet Friedrich Schiller.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, 1797

I feel almost sure that the story of Tell could be treated epically; and if I should succeed in what I contemplate, we shall have a curious instance of a story first attaining its full truth through poetry, in place of history being made a fable, as is the general rule.

In the end it was Schiller (who had never been to Switzerland), not Goethe, who wrote the epic poem, Rossini who turned it into an opera, and the Lone Ranger who made the overture ring, as his musical theme, in the ears of a generation of Americans.

However much Tell’s old tale vaunts Swiss liberty, Joseph Addison pointed out, at the beginning of the 18th century, that some Swiss were not free at all.

JOSEPH ADDISON, 1702

Before I leave Switzerland, I cannot but observe, that the notion of witchcraft reigns very much in this country. I have often been tired with accounts of this nature from very sensible men that are most of them furnished with matters of fact: which have happened, as they pretend, within the compass of their own knowledge. It is certain there have been many executions on this account, as in the Canton of Bern there were some put to death during my stay at Geneva. The people are so universally infatuated with the notion, that, if a cow falls sick, it is ten to one but an old woman is clapped up in prison for it; and if the poor creature chance to think herself a witch, the whole country is for hanging her up without mercy.

Whether Switzerland represents liberty or witch-hunts, God’s country or materialistic hell, end or beginning, valiant warriors or mercenaries for hire, travelers have been visiting it for centuries. In the first excerpt in this chapter, Mark Twain wondered what the secret of it is? In this last excerpt, he thinks he might have found it.

MARK TWAIN, 1878

While I was feeling these things, I was groping, without knowing it, toward an understanding of what the spell is which people find in the Alps, and in no other mountains—that strange, deep, nameless influence, which, once felt, cannot be forgotten—once felt, leaves always behind it a restless longing to feel it again—a longing which is like homesickness; a grieving, haunting yearning which will plead, implore, and persecute till it has its will. I met dozens of people, imaginative and unimaginative, cultivated and uncultivated, who had come from far countries and roamed through the Swiss Alps year after year—they could not explain why. They had come first, they said, out of idle curiosity, because everybody talked about it; they had come since because they could not help it; and they should keep on coming, while they lived, for the same reason; they had tried to break their chains and stay away, but it was futile; now, they had no desire to break them. Others came nearer formulating what they felt; they said they could find perfect rest and peace nowhere else when they were troubled: all frets and worries and chafings sank to sleep in the presence of the benignant serenity of the Alps; the Great Spirit of the Mountain breathed his own peace upon their hurt minds and sore hearts, and healed them; they could not think base thoughts or do mean and sordid things here, before the visible throne of God.

  2  

The Swiss

In which we consider truth and napkins, women and men, avarice and sterility, prejudice and virtue.

TADHG O CIANAIN, 1608

It is said of the people of this country that they are the truest, most honest and untreacherous in the world, and the least given to breaking their word. They allow no robbery or homicide to be done in their country without punishing it at once. Because of the perfection of their truth they alone are guards to the Catholic kings and princes of Christendom.

GILBERT BURNET, 1685

The men are robust and strong, and capable of great hardship, and of good discipline, and have generally an extreme sense of liberty, and a great love to their country.

RAINER MARIA RILKE, 1919

Switzerland’s history is full of natural force; the people, wherever they came together here as a mass, had something of the consistency and hardness of the mountains, and their impetuous will has in the most decisive moments been a continuation of that irresistibility with which her torrents arrive in the valleys . . . One readily decides to explain the Swiss himself as a part of this security: that is the easiest way of understanding his outline and his structure, the ground material of which seems indeed to have been kneaded from the most homogeneous mass and cut from the whole: so that in each individual the nation is present.

MICHEL DE MONTAIGNE, 1580

As a nation they have an excellent disposition, even towards those who [do not] agree with them. M. de Montaigne, in order to make full trial of diverse manners and customs of the countries he visited, always conformed to local usage, however greatly such a usage may have irked him. Nevertheless, in Switzerland he said that he suffered no inconvenience except that he had at table, by way of napkin, only a piece of linen half a foot long: moreover, the Swiss themselves only unfold this napkin at dinner when many sauces and divers sorts of soup are served; but, on the other hand, they always provide as many wooden spoons with silver handles as there are guests. And a Swiss will always be provided with a knife with which he will eat everything, and never put his fingers in his plate.

The fashions of the Swiss set them apart.

THOMAS CORYAT, 1608

The habits of the Citizens [of Zurich] do in some things differ from the attire of any nation that ever I saw before. For all the men do wear round breeches with codpieces. So that you shall not find one man in all Zurich from a boy of ten years old to an old man of the age of a hundred years, but he weareth a codpiece. Also all their men do wear flat caps and ruff bands. For I could not see one man or boy in the whole city wear a falling band [kind of neckwear] . . .

Many of their women, especially maids, do use a very strange and fantastical fashion with their hair that I never saw before, but the like I observed afterward in many other places of Switzerland, especially in Basel. For they plait it in two very long locks that hang down over their shoulders half a yard long. And many of them do twist it together with pretty silk ribbands or fillets of sundry colours.

Three and a half centuries later, Swiss fashion could still astonish people from distant lands. The Tibetan refugee Pema Meier looked back on her first months in her new home.

PEMA MEIER, 1963

When I arrived in Switzerland I lived at first briefly in the Tibetan Hause in Trogen, then moved to a housekeeping school in Fribourg, where I learned to clean and cook. The whole time I couldn’t believe my eyes. How the people looked! Like aliens from Mars! The women in stilettos and miniskirts, and with their teased hair!

Salomon Gessner, Meiringen, 1781

Leo Tolstoy noted the women as well.

LEO TOLSTOY, 1857

Two girls from Stans flirted with me, one of them with wonderful eyes. I had bad thoughts and was immediately punished—by shyness. A wonderful church with an organ, full of pretty women.

Having arrived in Meiringen, Tolstoy added

Beautiful women everywhere, with their white breasts. My feet hurt terribly.

Goethe distinguished between the people of the cities and of the mountains.

JOHANN WOLFGANG VON GOETHE, 1779

One thing I think I have observed everywhere: the farther one moves from the high-road and the busy marts of men; the more people are shut in by the mountains, isolated and confined to the simplest wants of life; the more they draw their maintenance from simple, humble, and unchangeable pursuits—the better, the more obliging, the more friendly, unselfish, and hospitable they are.

The seventeen-year-old Mary Godwin noted a change since the time of William Tell.

MARY GODWIN (LATER MARY SHELLEY), 1816

The high mountains encompassed us, darkening the waters; at a distance on the shores of Uri we could perceive the chapel of Tell, and this was the village where he matured the conspiracy which was to overthrow the tyrant of his country; and indeed this lovely lake, these sublime mountains, and wild forests, seemed a fit cradle for a mind aspiring to high adventure and heroic deeds. Yet we saw no glimpse of his spirit in his present countrymen. The Swiss appeared to us then, and experience has confirmed our opinion, a people slow of comprehension and of action; but habit has made them unfit for slavery, and they would, I have little doubt, make a brave defence against any invader of their freedom.

John Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Switzerland took a strong editorial stance.

JOHN MURRAY, 1861

On the subject of the moral condition of the Swiss, and their character as a nation, there is much variety of opinion. The Swiss with whom the traveller comes into contact, especially the German portion of them, are often sullen, obstinate, and disagreeable, and he is annoyed by the constant mendicancy [begging] of the women and children, even in remote districts, and on the part of those who are not, apparently, worse off than their neighbours. This disposes the traveller to dislike and to take very little interest in the people amongst whom he is travelling; he has also heard much of their timeserving, their love of money, and their readiness to fight for any paymaster in former times.

Johann Jakob Rietmann, St. Gallen, Market Gate, 1834

Hans Christian Andersen presented an instance of their love of money.

HANS CHRISTIAN ANDERSEN, 1852

On one occasion Are you a Swiss? I asked the driver. He answered Yes. That cannot be true, said I. I come from a long way off, from far up in the North, and there we have read of Switzerland and heard of William Tell, and the noble, brave Swiss people stand in high honor with us; and now! I come down here, so that I may tell people at home truly about these brave people, and then I take my seat in a carriage over there on the other side of the square, show the address where I want to go—it is only a few steps to drive—and I am carried all over the town on a half-hour tour. It is a cheat, and no Swiss will cheat. You are not a Swiss! The man at this was quite abashed: he was a young fellow, and burst out, You shall not pay at all, or only what you please. The Swiss are brave folks.

Lord Byron, Alexander Herzen, Ian Fleming and Rainer Maria Rilke were more straightforwardly negative.

GEORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON, 1821

Switzerland is a curst, selfish, swinish country of brutes, placed in the most romantic region of the world. I never could bear the inhabitants.

ALEXANDER HERZEN,1850

But I ask you, What is their cause, where lie their higher interests? They do not have any.

IAN FLEMING, 1960

In Austria and Bavaria, yodelling is light and airy and gay and mixed up with romance. In Switzerland, the yodel has deep undertones of melancholy that sometimes descend into an almost primeval ululation akin to the braying moan of the Alpenhorn—an echoing plaint against the strait-jacket of Swiss morals, respectability and symmetry. For the solidity of Switzerland is based on a giant conspiracy to keep chaos at bay and, where it blows in from neighbouring countries, or pollinates within the frontiers, to sweep it tidily under the carpet.

RAINER MARIA RILKE, 1919

Singular, by the way: psychoanalysis takes on the most pervasive forms here: almost all these perfectly clean and angular young people get analyzed—now think that out for yourself: one of those sterilized Swiss, in whom all corners are swept and scoured, what sort of an inner life can take place in his mind, which is germ-free and shadowlessly lighted like an operating room!

Charles Dickens had little patience with such complaints.

CHARLES DICKENS, 1846

It is extraordinary what nonsense English people talk, write, and believe, about foreign countries. The Swiss (so much decried) will do anything for you, if you are frank and civil; they are attentive and punctual in all their dealings; and may be relied upon as steadily as the English.

If you had a different skin color, the Swiss could be relied upon to stare. The African-American writer Vincent Carter lived in Bern in the 1950s.

VINCENT CARTER, 1953

EVERYBODY, Men, Women, Children, Dogs, Cats and other Animals, Wild and Domestic, looked at me—ALL the time!

Ten years later, Mark Morrison-Reed experienced Swiss