Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin The Changes in Europe: 1939-1960 SILS-MARIA, SWITZERLAND IT WAS IN August 1939 that I discovered Sils-Maria, the Swiss mountain village where the...
...Still another impression is that there are far more people taking summer holidays in this fairly remote corner of Switzerland than one would have found before the war, or even a few years ago...
...Another sign of the times is the appearance of new power installations in what were once secluded glens...
...And as European society takes on more American features, as the second decade after the end of the war speeds on with no sign of crisis or depression, such old-fashioned ideas as inevitable class war look more and more obsolete...
...The walker is not as rare a sight on the European mountain landscape as on the American, but more and more Europeans are inclined to take their ease on wheels...
...The shoe is now on the other foot, with gold flowing out of America, mostly in the direction of Europe...
...At the time of my first visit, one of the first and most obvious walks I discovered was over the Maloja Pass and down to the Swiss-Italian border town of Castasegna...
...The cool, brisk, bracing air (Sils is about 6,000 feet above sea level) is a tremendous tonic, especially now when it is so apt to be hot and sticky at lower levels...
...The conception of the affluent society is taking hold in Europe, as in America...
...The hotel concierge remarks with a touch of nostalgic regret for older, simpler days: "This canton really belongs to the rich city of Zurich...
...advertisements for Esso, Caltex and other oil firms and service stations can be found in the most remote passes of the Swiss-Italian Alps, where the roads often seem carved directly out of the solid rock...
...WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin The Changes in Europe: 1939-1960 SILS-MARIA, SWITZERLAND IT WAS IN August 1939 that I discovered Sils-Maria, the Swiss mountain village where the poet-philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in the 1880s conceived some of his most brilliant and iconoclastic ideas...
...Europe is very far from being just a big museum for the instruction and entertainment of sightseeing American tourists...
...Zurich firms buy up the land and put in their dams and wires without thinking much how it affects the landscape...
...I regretfully crossed off this walk for the future and decided to stick to trails...
...And, if one strolls about the lovely little wooded peninsula of Chaste one comes across a plaque inscribed with some of the most burning lines from Thus Spake Zarathustra...
...The only uncertain element, as in European mountains generally, is the weather, which often inclines to the rainy side...
...Apart from this, Nietzsche's summer retreat is perfectly adapted either for the mountain walker, like myself, or for the more adventurous mountain climber...
...The essentials that give Sils such a high place among mountain resorts are still here, including the pastoral tinkle of cowbells in the early morning and evening...
...The road ran through a most beautiful secluded valley, in which the Italian names of the old towns sound like caresses: Casaccia, Vicosoprano, Promontog-no, Soglio, Castasegna...
...There is not an important country in Western Europe where the number of cars does not far exceed the prewar figure...
...The house where Nietzsche lived and worked is preserved as a museum...
...Jazz may create an uproar in Hamburg or Paris as easily as in Newport, and Coca-Cola is becoming an accepted European drink...
...Sils is one of the two most beautiful mountain centers I have found in a good deal of searching for this kind of beauty...
...The other, Pontresina, is not far away, in an adjacent valley...
...For better or for worse, European tastes and habits are being modified along American lines...
...But now, in 1960, that highway might well have been in the United States—there is an unending stream of automobiles, buses, trucks, motorcycles, motor-scooters and mechanized farm implements pouring in both directions and making the lot of the pedestrian— especially in the narrow cobbled streets of the old villages—not only harassed but positively dangerous...
...Camping" (the American word has come very much into use) is extremely popular and one can find little tent colonies, very neat and orderly, in many localities...
...But even in this remote little mirror one can see reflected some of the big changes that Europe outside the Iron Curtain has experienced during the bustling '50s...
...But this, in a way more convincing than any number of statistical abstracts, showed me how Europe has been put on wheels during the last few years...
...Everywhere prewar standards of industrial output have been left far behind...
...In 1939, and also on a later visit in 1954, there was not enough traffic to inconvenience a walker...
...No longer are European countries worried about their balance of payment figures or afraid they cannot earn enough dollars to meet their import needs...
...Sils offers every element of high mountain fascination: towering peaks and glaciers, a beautiful chain of lakes, in which the turbulent and swift-flowing Inn River finds its source, pine forests, whole slopes covered with multi-colored Alpine flowers and the invariably well-kept and well-marked Swiss mountain paths...
Vol. 43 • September 1960 • No. 35
