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  Praise for

  SWISS WATCHING

  A FINANCIAL TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR

  “We all know that Switzerland gave us the world cuckoo clocks, triangular chocolate and penknives, but how about the Toilet Duck, Velcro and LSD? Europe’s ‘landlocked island’ is a great subject for a cultural anthropologist and Bewes, manager of an English language bookshop in Bern, is a perfect guide.”

  Financial Times

  “A journalist who now lives in Switzerland, Bewes is a well-qualified guide to a country that, although familiar, requires expertise to understand... Bewes reveals how Switzerland is riddled with contradictions... Informative and entertaining.”

  Harry Ritchie, Mail on Sunday

  “Bewes has an engagingly light and comic touch. The narrative moves between subjects as diverse as graffiti and recycling with ease, and as the book is divided into sections, it’s easy to dip in and out of. This isn’t a read to change your life, but it will make you smile and perhaps think a little more deeply about cultural stereotypes.”

  Clover Stroud, Sunday Telegraph

  “It’s a real page turner, a treasure trove. Absolutely jam-packed with fascinating facts that really got me thinking.”

  Margaret Oertig-Davidson, author of Beyond Chocolate

  “This book is excellently researched and reads wonderfully well. As well as being packed with material, it contains a heart-warming sense of irony… [It] is in a league of its own.”

  Jürg Müller, Swiss Review

  “Everything you wanted to know about Switzerland. Not just a travel book, Swiss Watching is a no-stone-left-unturned exploration of what makes (and has made) this enigmatic country tick.”

  Peter Kerr, author of Snowball Oranges

  “Diccon Bewes has written the ideal book for Swiss national day. As an Englishman he has the necessary ironic distance, but he knows the object of his enquiry, perhaps better than many a Swiss patriot... Diccon Bewes’ background as a travel writer gives the book a special flair: the author’s observations are insightful, with a sure eye for comic or exotic detail, and described with typically English humour.”

  Artur K. Vogel, Der Bund

  “He is one of those Anglo-Saxon authors who describe foreign countries with a mix of loving irony and a well-trained eye for eccentricity.”

  Ralph Poehner, Die Zeit

  “At last! A book about Switzerland that cuts through the stereotypes in an honest and entertaining exploration of this unique corner of Europe. Swiss Watching manages to combine impeccable research with humour and wry observation.”

  Matthew Beattie, Swiss News

  “With Swiss Watching Diccon Bewes has achieved a book that holds surprising insights about the Swiss, and not just for foreigners.”

  Jonathan Spirig, Berner Zeitung

  “A fascinating book, teeming with facts and figures, and anecdotes which even the Swiss don’t know. A journalist, anthropologist and satirist, Diccon Bewes gives us a book that is serious without being academic and funny without ever falling into caricature.”

  Michel Guillaume, L’Hebdo

  SWISS WATCHING

  For Gregor

  SWISS WATCHING

  INSIDE THE LAND OF MILK AND MONEY

  DICCON BEWES

  This second revised edition first published by

  Nicholas Brealey Publishing in 2012

  First edition published in 2010

  Reprinted 2010 (three times), 2011 (twice)

  Carmelite House

  Hachette Book Group

  50 Victoria Embankment

  53 State Street

  London EC4Y ODZ

  Boston, MA 02109, USA

  Tel: 020 3122 6000

  Tel: (617) 523-3801

  www.nicholasbrealey.com

  www.dicconbewes.com

  © Diccon Bewes 2010, 2012

  The right of Diccon Bewes to be identified as the author of this work

  has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and

  Patents Act 1988.

  ISBN 978-1-85788-587-3

  eISBN 978-1-47364-494-6

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the

  British Library.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording and/or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publishers. This book may not be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise disposed of by way of trade in any form, binding or cover other than that in which it is published, without the prior consent of the publishers.

  Printed in the UK by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc.

  CONTENTS

  A word about names

  Author’s note

  Introduction

  One: The landlocked island

  How some mountains made a country

  Two: Stepping back through time

  How 700 years of history shaped the nation

  Three: In the land of cocks and crosses

  How religion still divides the Swiss

  Four: Ask the audience

  How the people control the politicians

  Five: Wealthy, healthy and wise?

  How money makes the Swiss tick

  Six: War and peace

  How neutrality and militarism can co-exist

  Seven: Made in Switzerland

  How Swiss products have conquered the world

  Eight: The hole truth

  How the cheese is really made

  Nine: Where the chocolate comes from

  How there’s more to Swiss food than fondue

  Ten: Climb every mountain

  How trains and tourism go hand in hand

  Eleven: Seeking Heidi

  How one little girl is a national icon

  Conclusion

  Epilogue

  Appendix

  Notes

  Further Reading

  Acknowledgements

  Credits

  List of Maps

  Switzerland

  Glacier Express

  Lake Lucerne

  Romandie

  Berner Oberland & Emmental

  Eastern Switzerland

  Cantons

  A WORD ABOUT NAMES

  In a quadrilingual country, there’s bound to be some confusion over place names. For example, the city called Geneva in English is known as Genève, Genf, Ginevra and Genevra in the different languages of Switzerland. Luckily, Geneva is an extreme case of multilingualism; other places in Switzerland make do with two or three variations rather than five.

  Unlike countless examples in Italy, most Swiss cities escaped the English habit of anglicising the names. In general the British preferred French to German, so it’s Neuchâtel not Neuenburg (and certainly never Newcastle), Valais not Wallis, and Lucerne not Luzern. I have stuck to that rule throughout the book, except where the German version has always been used, such as Zug, or where it’s become old-fashioned to use French for somewhere in the German-speaking part of Switzerland.

  The Swiss tourist board and most English guidebooks now use the German spellings for Bern and Basel, possibly because it’s the majority language in both cities. Similarly, Aargau, Thurgau, Graubünden and St Gallen have replaced the hopelessly antiquated Argovia, Thurgovia, Grisons and Saint Gall, all of which are rarely seen in modern publications. It’s not a Bombay/Mumbai bout of political correctness, more trying to make it easier for everyone to understand where they are. In English, the most daring thing we do now is leave the umlaut off Zürich; not that any British ear would hear the difference anyway.

  For other official names, such as t
he houses of parliament, I have given only the German version, as it’s the one used most often. For the German words in the book there are usually French and Italian equivalents, which I have omitted to list, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Every book has to begin somewhere, but this book had more than one beginning, each of them needed to reach the end.

  Its first beginning was getting a job at Holiday Which? magazine. They took a chance on me and helped me become a travel writer. Everything that has gone into this book I learned there; without that, these pages would be blank.

  Its second beginning was when I met Gregor and became a regular on easyJet flights between London and Switzerland. A long-distance relationship did nothing to improve my bank balance or my dislike of airports, but it gave me the chance to fall in love with another country.

  Its third beginning was endless illness and my doctor telling me to leave work, leave London, get some fresh air and get better. Goodbye Britain, hello Switzerland! No lakeside sanatorium or exclusive clinic for me; instead I moved to Bern and never looked back.

  Its fourth beginning was after arriving in Switzerland. Armed with both free time and a railcard, I explored the parts I’d never even heard of before. And I began to realise there was more to the country than I’d thought. An awful lot more.

  Its last beginning was in a writers’ workshop in Geneva. I wrote down a sentence that had been swimming around in my head, and it became a paragraph. Months later the paragraph had turned into a chapter, which secured me an agent, who found me a publisher, who signed me up to write a whole book. So I guess this all began with a girl named Heidi and a man called Ronald.

  Now, here’s the real beginning.

  INTRODUCTION

  Close your eyes and tell me the first thing you associate with Switzerland. Chances are you’ll say cheese. Or chocolate. Or mountains. Or banking, cuckoo clocks, skiing, watches, the Red Cross, snow or Toblerone. Those were the top ten answers when I asked 100 non-Swiss people to do just that, and every single person said something. No don’t knows or passes. What was clear is that everyone has something in mind when they think of Switzerland. This small mountainous country at the centre of Europe has captured a place in the imaginations of millions of people.

  It’s not as if the Swiss themselves are so famous. Let’s do that test again, but this time try to name a famous Swiss person. Much harder, isn’t it? Of the same 100 people, a quarter couldn’t think of a single celebrity from Switzerland; they obviously weren’t tennis fans. How odd it is that the Alpine republic has managed to make its products famous the world over but hasn’t produced many well-known citizens. Are the Swiss so busy making things and being inventive that they have no time to be famous? Or do they just stay out of the limelight? It seems that while we all have our preconceptions of what Switzerland is like, we don’t know much about the people who live there.

  Then again, what do we know about the real Switzerland, the enigmatic one behind those clichéd images? The truth might surprise you. Its clean and polite reputation hides a country where graffiti and cigarette ends are commonplace, where queueing is an alien concept, and where recycling is forbidden on Sundays. As for the Swiss themselves, they can be conservative (and yes, even dull), but they have an unexpectedly liberal attitude to drug use and assisted suicide, and are amazingly creative when it comes to technology and innovation. In fact, the Swiss are a nation of contradictions held together by a capacity and the desire to overcome them. How else could they conquer their mountains, repel their enemies and survive for over seven centuries?

  This book won’t tell you where to eat in Zurich, what to see in Basel or how to use the trains. What it will do is take you behind the scenes and beyond the stereotypes on a journey into the heart of Switzerland and the minds of its sometimes quirky people. I’ll show you how the breathtaking scenery helped shape a nation not just a tour itinerary, and why tradition is as important as technology. We’ll see that the Swiss have more power than their politicians, but can’t speak to one other in the same language. You’ll meet some famous Swiss people, even if two are fictional, as well as discover what makes the rest of them tick.

  But we’ll begin with the basics: what has made the Switzerland we know today. The first five chapters show how the country is the product of its geography, history, religion, politics and wealth. Then we move on to what Switzerland has created. A journey around and across the country reveals the real Switzerland behind the Red Cross, watches, cheese, chocolate, trains and Heidi.

  By the end, you’ll be able to go behind the stereotypes and will have a complete insight into the Swiss identity, and you’ll possibly know more about the Swiss and their country than the Swiss do themselves.

  ONE

  THE LANDLOCKED ISLAND

  Switzerland is a country with nine names, and that’s not including the English one at the start of this sentence. While it’s logical for somewhere with four national languages to have four names, two very Swiss traits make this more complicated: their love of formality and their need for consensus. The former means that there are two levels of politeness in Swiss society, with people using either first or last names; so of course the country also has its own equivalents of formal and informal names. The latter resulted in the ninth, the name that’s reduced to the letters CH on the back of Swiss cars.

  Let’s start, just as the Swiss would, with formal introductions. The Swiss love nothing more than the formality of surnames. People can live in the same building or work together for years and never get past using them. This is changing slowly with the younger generations, but even they write and say their last name first and first name last; a quick look on Facebook or a Swiss credit card will show that. Or a phone call. Ring a Swiss person1 and the phone will be answered with one word: a surname, possibly in case you’ve forgotten who you’re calling. But it’s not just the names, it’s the pronouns that go with them. Whereas English now only has one word for you,2 German, French and Italian have two levels of formality. With strangers and people older or more important, you stick to surnames and use the formal Sie, vous or lei to mean ‘you’; with family, close friends and children, you can switch to first names and the more familiar du, tu or tu.

  It’s the same with the country itself. Any country worth its salt has to have a formal name, and since in Switzerland salt is worth a lot (it’s a state-controlled monopoly so there’s no free market, only two producers and it’s subject to tax3), the country has four. In German, the language of the majority,4 it is Schweizerische Eidgenossenschaft, which is as hard to translate as it is to say. The closest in English is Swiss Confederation, the phraseology also used by French, Italian and Romansh, the other three national languages: Confédération suisse, Confederazione svizzera and confederaziun svizra. In reality Eidgenossenschaft means something more like ‘the brotherhood of men who stood in a field and swore an oath of eternal cooperation and friendship’; confederation is a lot simpler. Eidgenosse is still used by the German-speaking population to refer to the real Swiss, the ones from the original heart of the country.

  These formal names are all a bit of a mouthful, so it’s no surprise that the Swiss use a much more informal version in everyday life: Schweiz, Suisse, Svizzera and Svizra, all of which are the equivalent of being on first-name terms. However, with eight different names floating around, half of them far too long to be used in Eurovision Song Contests or football matches, it’s no wonder that the Swiss decided to have one official one – not just to make things easier but to have a name acceptable to all the national languages, so that no one could argue that one was being favoured over another. Finding a solution acceptable to all is the Swiss way of doing things, and is perhaps the biggest reason they have managed to overcome their historic divisions. It’s all about consensus, but the challenge was reaching one. The solution? Use a long-dead language.

  Drive along almost any motorway in Europe and you’ll soon see a car
with a CH sticker on the back. If you watched too many episodes of It’s a Knockout or take part in too many pub quizzes, you might know that CH is the international registration code for Switzerland. But what if you were asked what those two letters actually stand for? You mentally glide over a map of Europe, searching for a logical answer. There’s a flicker of hope when you realise that the codes are abbreviations of a country’s name in its own language or in English, so D is for Deutschland and E for España, but FIN is for Finland and GR for Greece. Nevertheless, CH doesn’t fit into either; it’s in a class of its own.

  The answer is not cheese or chocolate, though you’d be surprised how many people could believe that, but Confœderatio Helvetica, Switzerland’s ninth, and official, name. There can’t be many modern countries that have a Latin name, but then again there aren’t many countries like Switzerland. The name is derived from the Helvetii, one of the local pre-Roman tribes, and the literal English translation is the Helvetic Confederation. But for a country that prides itself on accuracy – and not just in its train timetables – it’s ironic that its official name is technically incorrect.

  Until a rather civil civil war in 1847, Switzerland was indeed a confederation, or a loose alliance of autonomous states who more or less cooperated with each other. It was barely a country, in the modern sense of the word, but was definitely more than the sum of its parts. The new state created in 1848 was a federation in everything but name. Despite having a shiny new federal government, the Swiss decided to keep their old title. It might have been inaccurate but it made them feel better about the new-fangled structure, which seemed so centralised and therefore very un-Swiss. And, more significantly for the Swiss, using the old name gives them an unbroken link to their past, something which is fundamental to every Swiss person.