Coming Out Swiss Read online

  In Search of Heidi, Chocolate,

  and My Other Life

  Anne Herrmann

  The University of Wisconsin Press

  The University of Wisconsin Press

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  Copyright © 2014

  The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any format or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without written permission of the University of Wisconsin Press, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles and reviews.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Herrmann, Anne, author.

  Coming out Swiss: in search of Heidi, chocolate, and

  my other life / Anne Herrmann.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-0-299-29840-1 (cloth: alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-0-299-29843-2 (e-book)

  1. Herrmann, Anne. 2. Swiss American women—Biography.

  3. Swiss Americans—Biography. 4. Swiss—United States.

  5. Switzerland—Social life and customs.

  6. Switzerland—History. I. Title.

  E184.S9H47 2014

  305.893’5073—dc23

  2013033113

  In memory of

  Elisabeth (Bethli) Herrmann-Rütschi

  1921–1978

  and

  Juri/Georg/George/Georges [Ostroumoff] Herrmann

  1921–2007

  There are things so deeply personal that they can be revealed only to strangers.

  Richard Rodriguez, Hunger of Memory: The Education

  of Richard Rodriguez (1982)

  Given desire and purpose, I could make my home in any of them [French/English/Walloon]. I don’t have a house, only this succession of rented rooms. That sometimes makes me feel as though I have no language at all, but it also gives me the advantage of mobility. I can leave, anytime, and not be found.

  Luc Sante, The Factory of Facts (1998)

  Having taken citizenship in April 1869, Nietzsche may be considered Switzerland’s most famous philosopher. Even so, he on occasion succumbed to a sentiment with which few Swiss are unacquainted. “I am distressed to be Swiss!” he complained to his mother a year after taking citizenship.

  Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy (2000)

  When the history of the Revolution—or indeed of anything else—is written, Switzerland is unlikely to loom large.

  Tom Stoppard, Travesties (1975)

  In the course of her project, the Daughter must end up violating the values of her parents—themselves restless, westering—in favor of her own rootedness.

  Richard Rodriguez, Days of Obligation: An Argument

  with My Mexican Father (1992)

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue: Open Secrets

  Swissness: Keynotes

  Chocolate

  Gold

  Swissness: Keywords

  Heimweh, or Homesickness

  Fernweh, or “Farsickness”

  The Mountains

  The Alp(s)

  Davos, or “How the English Invented the Alps”

  The City: Public Histories

  “Athens on the Limmat”: “A True History That Never Happened”

  Dada in Zürich, Continued

  The City: Personal Histories

  Freiestrasse 103, Zürich

  Basel

  Swiss Colonies in America

  Nueva Helvetia, California (1839): “An Area as Vast as the Little Canton of Basle”

  New Glarus, Wisconsin (1845): “Switzerland’s Tiniest, Most Distant Canton”

  Americanizing Swiss Stories

  Swiss Family Robinson (1812); or, “The Most Famous Robinsonade”

  Heidi (1880): “Switzerland’s Most Famous Girl”

  Epilogue: “I’m Swiss”

  Bibliography

  Illustrations

  Swiss Girl Paper Doll, 1937

  Graubünden, family photo, 1950s

  Villa auf’m Egg, Rütistrasse 17, ca. 1890

  Neubau an der Freiestrasse von F. Righini, 1889

  Herbert Kubly, photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1956

  Aleksandra Mir, Insula Svizzera, 2006

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank those graduate students whose invaluable research assistance made parts of this book possible: Emily Lutenski, who began looking for things before I knew what the book was about; Monica Fagan, who learned things about the Swiss she wasn’t sure she needed to know; and Alexandra Kruse, who expressed more clearly than I could what it is that the book had finally become. I am grateful to James Mitchell for bringing me the Swiss Family Robinson via Disneyland, to Tomomi Yamaguchi and Hiroe Sanya for acquainting me with Heidi in Japan, and to Navaneetha Mokkil-Maruthur for pursuing with me Switzerland in Bollywood.

  I reminisce fondly about the hours I spent in the elegant building of the Stadtarchiv in the old part of Zürich, learning things about a family history that had remained untold, and in the Dokumentationsbibliothek Davos, where Timothy Nelson so kindly provided materials that made it possible for me to read all day, and even night, although I was in the Alps and expected to be out of doors.

  I thank two writers: Eileen Pollack, who has written about a woman she imagined had to be Swiss and encouraged me even before there was anything legible to read, and Christine Rinderknecht, the Swiss author I most admire, whose ability to write fiction highlights the limitations of my own writing, even as she tries to convince me that the material is all there, I just need to narrate it.

  Tricia Ortiz kindly drove with me around the Bay Area and joined the schoolchildren at Sutter’s Fort, and Bert Ortiz generously accompanied me to a barely remembered New Glarus. To him I owe the freedom to write, the conversation that interrupts the solitude and a companionship that encompasses travel, even if it means hiking up one more Heidi path.

  I am grateful to have had the opportunity to present “Heidiland: What’s Heidi Got to Do With It?” at the “Homelands in Question: Re-locating ‘Europe’ in the Spaces of Cultural Negotiation” Conference at the Taubmann College of Architecture and Urban Planning in 2005 and “‘Naïve Cartography’: Aleksandra Mir’s Switzerland and Other Islands” at “The Cultural History of Cartography: A Symposium” in 2012, both at the University of Michigan.

  I remain indebted for institutional support from the College of Literature, Science and the Arts and Office of the Vice President for Research at the University of Michigan in the form of a Michigan Humanities Award. I thank the college for an additional term off, even if it meant signing an early retirement agreement, which has become its own kind of gift.

  I would also like to recognize those colleagues whose friendship cannot be acknowledged simply by conveying gratitude: Michael Awkward, who has shared the pleasures and pains of being an author, kept me from losing courage and read various manifestations of this project; Abby Stewart, who has been with me in all things having to do with women and gender and has kindly read chapters of this book; Helmut Puff, who keeps me abreast of all things Swiss and reminds me of how American I am because I am not foreign born; and Susan Najita, who, although in a field far afield from my own, encourages me to experiment. Martha Umphrey
remains an intellectual interlocutor par excellence.

  I thank the Southwest Review for publishing “Coming Out Swiss/ Living in the Fifth Switzerland” and the Yale Review for making public “Heimweh, or Homesickness.”

  Finally, I would like to thank Raphael Kadushin for being such a strong believer.

  Coming Out Swiss

  Swiss girl paper doll, Instructor Handbook Series: Handwork for all Grades (F. A. Owens Publishing Co., Dansville, NY, 1937)

  Prologue

  * * *

  Open Secrets

  Coming Out Swiss

  There are many kinds of secrets. Family secrets, bank secrets, skeletons in the closet. Sexual secrets are the ones we become most loquacious about, confessing them to priests, discussing them on cell phones. Sins cannot be forgiven, symptoms cannot be cured, until they’ve been exposed. Phone conversations, no longer confined to the privacy of the public phone booth, have made the public a space for private revelations.

  What about linguistic secrets? Speaking a foreign language native to a European country half the size of Maine, in which it is not the only language people speak. Passing, for most of one’s life, as monolingual.

  Disclosing the fact that one speaks a foreign language, but not in that foreign language: an open secret. Confessing that one speaks a foreign language few others speak, even fewer want to learn, to someone who might not be interested: a form of coming out.

  To come out Swiss is to come out speaking other languages—German, French, Italian, Romansch. I try to dismantle the myth that all Swiss speak all four languages. I point out that Romansch is like the Romance in Romance Languages. I explain that the Swiss understand German, but that Germans cannot understand Swiss-German. But will I be understood?

  Growing up Swiss means knowing that not all nations are monolingual. In spite of attempts to legislate a single national language, many citizens speak one language at home, one at school, and one as a member of the “imagined community” of the nation-state. In Kerala, India, people speak Malayalam at home and English with friends, and begin to grow rusty in the Hindi they learned at school. In the German-speaking part of Switzerland, people speak Swiss-German at home, learn to read and write German at school, and conduct much of their work in English. Dialects make people feel like foreigners in a city half an hour away. They make people feel like they’ve gone abroad in their own countries.

  Coming out a German speaker means coming out a member of the majority in Switzerland but a member of the minority in the German-speaking world of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Swiss-Bavarian is what a small town in north-central Washington calls itself. Bavaria is in southern Germany, Catholic, gregarious drinkers in Biergarten. The Sound of Music takes place not in the Swiss, but in the Austrian Alps. The Austrians, formerly known as Hapsburgs, were the oppressor from whom William Tell liberated Switzerland with his crossbow. Now the crossbow is the official trademark for Made in Switzerland. William Tell was invented by a German who never set foot on Swiss soil.

  The Swiss are not known for sharing their secrets.

  Coming out Swiss rarely leads to meeting other Swiss, although occasionally it leads to “one of my best friends is Swiss” or “I grew up in New Berne, Indiana.” It might lead to “what part of Switzerland?” The German-speaking part, which means learning a second language, German, in order to read and write. It means regressing to Swiss-German when one’s emotional life is at stake. It means always already being bilingual.

  Most Swiss anyone has ever heard of hail from Geneva: John Calvin; Jean-Jacques Rousseau; Madame de Staël; Henri Dunant, the founder of the Red Cross; Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, the botanist; Ferdinand de Saussure, the linguist; Tissot, the watchmaker. But is Geneva really Switzerland? It was the last canton to join the confederation and still calls itself a republic. It shares a hundred-mile border with France, but only six miles with Switzerland.

  Zürich and Basel pride themselves on being the largest and most modern, the oldest and most cultured Swiss cities. Those from Zürich consider people from Basel snobs, that is, elitist; those from Basel consider people from Zürich arrogant, as in “pushy.” My mother and father grew up in Zürich and Basel, respectively. Together they emigrated, first to Montreal, then to New York City, after what is still known as the War.

  Swiss-German has no potential transnationally. It is not like Spanish, to which the manufacturer has devoted half the instruction booklet. It is not like Japanese, included in all the tourist information about Heidi, provided by the local visitor’s bureau of Maienfeld. And yet the Swiss cross, whose colors the Red Cross inverted, has gone global. Swiss army blankets are cut up and resewn as backpacks. “Swiss Army” appears not just on pocketknives but on luggage.

  Linguistic secrets are not written on the body, allowing for the entrance into a subculture. One who reveals them does not run the risk of being disowned or fired or excommunicated. Such revelation leads not to stigma but to scrutiny:

  Does she have an accent?

  Can she ski?

  How many languages does she speak?

  Are they all so reserved?

  Americans assume I was born in Switzerland, because otherwise, how would I be Swiss? The United States tolerates dual citizenship, while Switzerland embraces it. The Swiss, who never disown one of their own, wonder when I will be returning home from the diaspora. Every summer I disappeared to a place where no one spoke English. Every fall I returned to the United States, where I continued to speak Swiss-German. No one knew where I went or what I did. We never used the telephone, in either direction. In Switzerland, the United States ceased to exist; in the United States, Switzerland was regularly invoked as superior.

  The one secret my parents could not keep was their foreignness. Their accents gave them away. When someone asked my mother where she was from, she said, “From here.” She had lived in this country for twenty-five years.

  No, where was she really from?

  Why do they need to know?

  “Switzerland.”

  “Sweden is such a beautiful country.”

  My mother taught me to read and write German. I began with children’s books, including my namesake, Anneli (1919). I still read slowly and remember little. The language on the printed page is too unlike the language I speak. The language I speak has no written form, which makes it, when written, even more difficult to read. Every Swiss-German dialect has its own phonetic script, only one of which is recognizable, and only when read aloud.

  I learned to write, initially by writing thank-you notes to relatives, dictated by my mother. Although German is highly phonetic—its orthography governed by completely reliable rules—I remained a poor speller. I didn’t know what words looked like. Instead, I knew where to place their sounds by recognizing the location of the speaker. I knew what they meant when they were sounded out. I knew nouns had to be capitalized, but could I recognize a noun?

  I had nothing to say.

  I had no audience in German interested in America.

  I had no audience in America who could locate Switzerland on a map.

  Things seemed so simple in English. Sentences are short. Nouns are not inflected. Who cares if spelling remains a nightmare? And the number of lexical items exceeds those of all other languages? Conjugations are simple. Idiomatic expressions are everything.

  My mother never felt confident writing in English, even though she was trained as a lawyer in Zürich (at the Uni), worked as a journalist for Swiss newspapers, and, by the time she was twenty, had mastered four languages, including Latin. My father, trained at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich (the Poly), relied on mathematical symbols to do what he did in applied mechanics, considered himself a citizen of the world, and, in his seventies, began to learn Spanish.

  What kind of secret is my Swissness?

  It resides in a glass closet.

  I display a CH on my car because only those in the know will know it means Switzerland. SW has already been take
n, by Sweden, of course. CH means Confoederatio Helvetica, or Helvetic Confederation. Helvetia, the alpine provinces of the Roman Empire. I spied a car with a CH and stalked the driver, who told me his wife was Swiss, nothing more. A different driver pulls up next to me: “Does CH stand for Switzerland or Cape Hatteras?” “Where the heck is Cape Hatteras?” I ask an American friend.

  English is cool, and often no longer translated into Swiss-German. Thirty percent of all magazine ads advertising Swiss products to Swiss use English. English recently appeared on the cover of the Swiss passport, along with the four national languages. Switzerland has four national but three official languages, meaning all government documents appear in all official languages. English has replaced the Latin of Confoederatio Helvetica as the lingua franca of a multilingual country. The canton of Zürich has gone so far as to defy a federal mandate that requires the first foreign language taught in schools to be another Swiss national language. English, not French, now comes first. What will happen to Italian? The Ticino—the Florida, the Riviera of Switzerland—has always sent its university students to Zürich or Geneva. And Romansch, spoken only in Graubünden, has fewer speakers than ever.

  My name was Anneli. Any German speaker will know that “li” is the Swiss diminutive, as opposed to the Austrian “erl” (Annerl), or the German “chen” or “lein.” Annachen was the nickname my brother bestowed on me. By pursuing a linguistic logic that produced a nonstandard form, he ridiculed his older sister and disavowed our subordinate relationship to High German. A friend of my parents pronounced it Anna Lee, thereby shifting my geographical allegiances within the United States toward Dixie. In late adolescence, I announced I was changing my name, unlike my mother, who remained Bethli, the Swiss form of Elisabeth, for the rest of her life. I wanted to grow up, to outgrow the diminutive. But what were my options? In German I could be only Anna, which in English sounded spinsterish. I could reclaim Anne in English, and locate myself outside of continental Europe. I could hope that others might resort to the French pronunciation, thus making it sound less foreign. In the end, my uncle would greet me, know my name was no longer Anneli, not remember what it was, and eventually say my name in a language he had learned in school, of which he remembered only “That’s the way the cookie crumbles.”