The Alps are an integral part of the Swiss script. If the tale the Swiss tell of the origins of their confederation is true, then the Alps were there on Day One. Just for the record that was 1 August 1291, when representatives of three communities (Uri, Unterwalden and Schwyz) gathered in a field at Rütli and swore allegiance to one another. Those early pioneers of Swiss solidarity would surely never have chosen Rütli for their famous oath had it not been for the lovely lakeside setting and the magnificent backdrop of the snow-covered Alps.
Seven centuries after Rütli, the Alps are still as essential an element as ever of the Swiss psyche, even if more Swiss now live in Zürich apartment blocks than on farms in remote Alpine valleys. The myth of the Dörfli under the shadow of an alp is a very powerful image, and many Swiss folk who live in cities still claim that their hearts lie in a small village in the hills. Many of these townies have little idea of course how benighted a spot the mountain village can be in mid-winter when for months the sun never rises over the alp that casts a great shadow over the valley.
Switzerland is a country of extraordinary variety, complexity and uncertainty. Only a territory so worried about its identity could have produced Carl Gustav Jung. Indeed Jung once asserted that the real secret of Swiss stability lay in the delicate tensions that dominated relations between the various cantons.
Switzerland is surely the only country in the world where the President gives a ‘state of the nation’ address in a field with great mountains dominating the horizon. Go to Rütli on the first day of August, and you can catch the peculiar essence of Swiss-ness as dedicated citizens converge on Rütli from every canton.
Yet is there more to Switzerland than the Alps? The mountains are clearly a Swiss icon, but they are — like cuckoo clocks, watches and Toblerone — also a classic Swiss cliché. As a symbol for national unification, that meadow at Rütli has worked wonders, but it has its limits. So do the Alps. Even the Swiss themselves worry about these matters and more than a few wondered deep down whether the French artist Ben Vautier might have been right when he proclaimed “La Suisse n’existe pas.” Vautier hit the Swiss headlines during the Seville EXPO in 1992, when he proclaimed his nihilist message. The notion that Switzerland is purely a figment of the Swiss imagination was not one that citizens of the confederation wanted to hear.
Swiss reality is more than Rütli. More than cowbells and the Alps. It is the chemical and pharmaceutical factories in Basel. It is the villages that look north over Lake Constance with not an alp in sight. Or the film festival at Locarno. It is the cars that cruise the gridiron streets of La Chauxde- Fonds, the extraordinary town high in the Jura that seems so very different from so much of Switzerland. Switzerland is Böcklin and Giacometti, Le Corbusier and Paul Klee. And it is the struggle of Swiss women to break into the discourses of political life, civil society and creative culture — too often still regarded in Switzerland as Männersache (men’s business).
Switzerland is a country of extraordinary variety, complexity and uncertainty. Only a territory so worried about its identity could have produced Carl Gustav Jung. Indeed Jung once asserted that the real secret of Swiss stability lay in the delicate tensions that dominated relations between the various cantons. This “chronic state of mitigated civil war,” as Jung nicely put it, had effectively kept Switzerland so utterly wrapped up in its own affairs as to preclude any engagement with wider European conflicts.
So take another look at Switzerland. This most fascinating, and most varied, of European countries is so very much more than merely the Alps.
