The Place Nobody Wanted
Mayer, Milton
The Swiss fear the un-Swiss unless they're tourists The Place Nobody Wanted MILTON MAYER Wasserwendi/Hasliberg, Switzerland He found himself—he who was destined to be the first Swiss—on the top...
...An irrelevant land that reads us movers and shakers no lessons, neither of federalism nor of war and peace, nor of economics nor of ethnology, nor of topography...
...Now I had to say, "What office...
...We have 6,400,000 Swiss citizens, not quite enough to do our skilled work and none at all to do our really dirty work...
...And he prospered in a small, hard, and hardening way and never wasted and never wanted...
...Several years ago the Swiss satirical weekly, Nebelspalter, the Fog-Splitter, carried a full-page cartoon in color of an agonized Swiss on his mountaintop, the great peaks around him, the great stars above him, and the caption: "I've got a house and a car, life insurance and health insurance, a job and a pension, a radio and a television—I want for nothing...
...But they want that twenty centimes, Lord, The "gnomes of Zurich" fight a defensive fight and always win...
...I didn't ask him what it was about, because he would answer, not in German, which (like all Swiss) he had learned in school, but in Swiss-German, which is a spoken, not a written, language and which all Swiss use with one another but (except for Herr Steudler) not with foreigners...
...If I had a cow I'd have milk and I'd want for nothing...
...Where do you suppose they would like to live—among starving people in a sun-kissed dictatorship like Spain...
...Tank traps, operated electrically...
...Foreigners—"That will be twenty centimes, Lord"—bring great gouts of money to Switzerland and spend it on the precision products that, like the Swiss, the Japanese and the Germans once made...
...Or at the least of wanting permanent residence, of wanting to buy, and build, and live here and 'dilute' Switzerland...
...Instead of saying, "None of your business," like an American, I said, shaking like a would-be American, "I am a free man...
...He's a dull fellow, to be sure, producing no passion except his comical chauvinism, a dull materialist whose dullness alone enables him to live in the exaltation of his mountains without going to pieces like a Californian...
...Britain up to 19.6 per cent...
...Your civil service examinations...
...Not at all...
...The commandant, at a large desk with one dossier, and nothing else, on it, was thin and old with a long, lined, "sinister" face, French- Swiss or, likelier, Italian-Swiss...
...And the walls rose all around him in the place that nobody wanted, but he never looked up...
...on the Hasliberg there's a handsome chalet, still occupied, with the date 1492 (yes: 1492) burned into the lintel...
...To protect their jobs...
...Switzerland reduced its from 9.7 per cent to 2.4 per cent...
...If only I had a tree and an axe...
...The commandant did not smile (or frown...
...In the Ticino they got Italy with the Swiss franc Then rich foreigners like you started buying up pastureland all over the country, a building lot with a magnificent view for a couple of thousand dollars, for a summer or winter chalet or a place to hide from the next war...
...You can get your things here after t h a t ." So we came back at 2:03 and got our things there— including the two cigarettes—in a bag marked with the train, car, and seat numbers, and the time they were found, and the number of the cleaner who found them, and the time they had been delivered to the Lost and Found...
...And the Lord gave him a bushelbasket of black dirt and said, "Take good care of it...
...Hardly...
...But it will be on time by the time it reaches Biel., ,) There are, of course, foreigners—and foreigners...
...The Commandant of the Foreign Police," he said...
...Baby and I got off and went into the spotless station (which was being cleaned, even though it was spotless), and Ms...
...We can only be destroyed...
...That has nothing to do with it...
...But 1974's first quarter was fantastic—United States up to 14 per cent...
...Instead of saying, "None of your business" again and, "Who the devil are you...
...But we are also aware that the airplane has been invented...
...When I reminded Peter that I had been coming back to the Hasliberg for twenty years—"they ought to know me by now, they ought to trust me"—he said, "Oh, they do, they do...
...Walls all around him...
...And the Lord gave him a cow and told him to take good care of it because it was all he had...
...The sneer in "Professor" would be undetectable in a tape recording...
...Already we feel that 'the foreigners' are ruining the country, even its character...
...Is it all any of us have ever got a Chinaman's (or an American's) chance of getting...
...A very tidy police state, a very neutral police state (especially against the Communists), but a very thorough police s t a t e . " " B u t , " I said, "one never sees a policeman on the Hasliberg—or anywhere else...
...I called the number in Bern immediately and was connected with a man whose first words were, "What language do you speak...
...The commandant's office—and everything in it, including the two men, one at the desk, one on a chair in the corner—was strictly type-cast...
...The other was in Zug, in Switzerland, when an elderly woman, expensively dressed, caught up with me after I'd crossed the street against a red light to inform me angrily that what I had done was forbidden...
...As dull as that other rich materialist, the Swede—that other, and only other, neutralist...
...Almost three years ago the Lucerne railroad station was gutted by fire (from the stationrestaurant kitchen, where "foreigners" were working...
...France up to 18.2 per cent...
...They are exported by their countries, which have no work for them...
...A few years back, my friend Luethi, the innkeeper, doubled the size of his inn and replaced all his beautiful old tile stoves with central oil heating...
...Japan up to 39.8 per cent...
...And all that was before my friend Peter explained it to me...
...1) You don't need policemen to have a police state, and policemen can't keep a state policed...
...The Swiss fight off foreign industrial and commercial takeover with their own capital and their rigid controls...
...Pure chauvinism," says Peter...
...But that little sop didn't satisfy the xenophobes...
...Oh, y e s , " said Peter, "more all the time...
...Would you mind telling me your politics...
...his child...
...It took me a couple of years to educate Luethi on the probable character of "another war," and when he was finally persuaded that it would involve something more catastrophic than oil rationing, he let me have one of the stoves (for $35...
...Why do you think you see the Swiss flag flying everywhere here...
...But I am a rich foreigner...
...Look at even our new highways—and the circular insets you see across them, wherever there is a steep rise on one side and a steep fall on the other...
...And a couple of years ago, first in the Ticino, and now everywhere, foreigners were forbidden to buy land...
...Why not the village clerk...
...So the Lord gave him a tree and an axe and said, "Take care of them...
...During that quarter Germany managed to get its rate'down from 7.2 per cent to 7.1 per cent...
...The representatives of the Shell companies of the countries now at war today established a world clearing house in Geneva...
...Here, on this mountaintop, is the man who has what the singers of the Brotherhood of Man and the Parliament of the World would all of them have (and many of them trade the Brotherhood of Man and the Parliament of the World for...
...to discharge his aggressions on—is he happy...
...I wanted one of the old stoves, which were now in the barn, but Luethi hemmed and hawed and finally said, "In the last war we had oil rationing in Switzerland...
...I t ' s all you've got, my child...
...And the Lord said, "And how is the milk from your cow, my child...
...They know how to manage an economy: In the year preceding March 31,1974, the annual inflation rate was stupendous everywhere—United States, 10.2 per cent...
...All that was before Herr Steudler, the village clerk of the Hasliberg, phoned me one afternoon and told me to call a number in Bern, the national capital, immediately...
...I dove—hopelessly—into my briefcase and pulled out the official extension notice (which I had never opened), went sliding down the snow to the postoffice, got it into the mail as the postmaster.was closing the door, and never heard another word from the commandant...
...What else...
...He who was destined to be the first Swiss found himself (and all the Swiss after him) dour...
...Yes, sir," I said...
...Why, then...
...So I asked him about the Swiss Senate Committee that controls the Swiss National Railroad...
...You yourself once told me of a representative social gathering in Prague where you asked what country the people there would like to have been born in, and most said Czechoslovakia, of course, but a few said Switzerland, and none said America or any place else...
...Foreigners—and foreigners...
...Instead of saying, "None of your business, and who the devil are you...
...on or off a tape recording, nothing...
...W e ' r e afraid of the Germans," said my friend Peter...
...Corruption—in Switzerland...
...I informed everyone else , " I said, " t h e postmaster, the innkeeper, the baker...
...it's all they've got...
...An old farmer will refuse to sell his land...
...Such a small country of nothing but mountains and passes...
...Xenophobia and chauvinism are more than obversereverse sides of the coin...
...He was young and fleshy with (so help me) a trenchcoat with the collar turned up and a hat with the brim turned down...
...In your application for a residence permit a year ago, you said that you had to be back at your university post in America in January...
...Yes, s i r . " "I want a copy of that writing tomorrow morning...
...Unless somebody invents the airplane...
...The university extended my leave...
...They're a threat to our Swissness— which we're selling out ourselves, of course...
...they have been there for a thousand years, and for five hundred "melted" into their trilingual, tricultural melting pot...
...We won't miss you...
...But—a Swiss postbus ran off the road a few years ago, and an American with a residence permit took some pictures of it and was called on by two Swiss gentlemen who wanted to know if he would be so kind as to give them the negatives and all the prints and sign a paper saying he had done so...
...There is a non-chauvinist xenophobia in Switzerland, directed, now as ever, against the Germans...
...it wasn't the cities, where most of them live, that voted for deportation...
...The foreigners—these foreigners—don't care about interest at a time like this...
...it is coming from Italy...
...Why wouldn't everybody want to be...
...I got a lift down the mountain and rapped at the commandant's door—FREMDENPOLIZEI—at ten...
...T h a t , " said un-Swiss Peter, "is because we have a very democratic police state...
...This winter the Swiss will have to cut their electricity consumption 10 to 20 per cent because their energy-squeezed neighbors will not sell them all the current they need...
...Here and there, in the distance, a pass through the walls, open three months a year, maybe four, but no way to cross it...
...You are one who has gone often to P r a g u e . " "On religious b u s i n e s s , " I said...
...Four hundred years of Swiss democracy have produced the cuckoo-clock"—and in our time a total of a half dozen names in the arts (Duerrenmatt, Max Frisch...
...I said , " said Peter, "that we can never be invaded...
...In Switzerland primary building materials have to be guaranteed for 200 years...
...Irrelevant to the bourgeois dream of a currency that always floats and never fluctuates, never collapses, never rockets and plummets...
...But you're a foreigner, and you've been accumulating residence permits...
...There are no wastelands, no scrublands, no swamplands, no badlands...
...Why, then...
...They can all be exploded to seal us off, for ten years or a hundred...
...This must seem strange to an American, where the only people who keep order are people hired to...
...The Swiss fly the flag all the time...
...We can never be invaded...
...Of last year's 31,000 immigrants, 26,000 were doctors, teachers, and artists...
...The commandant looked through it and handed it back...
...They're 17 per cent now...
...his toilet is on the porch . . . but his land is 'all he has' and 'all his children will have.' Then the speculators offer him, or his children, first ten, and then twenty-five, thousand dollars for a corner of his land that grazes a couple of cows and brings him in a couple of hundred dollars a year...
...Baby Mayer and I took the 10:56 from Lucerne to Zurich one morning...
...More what...
...Is it good milk...
...Instability abroad—and there has never been any like the present—sends the speculators, the wideboys, into the Deutschmark...
...who else...
...What is it like to be a Swiss, who has what the capitalist openly and the proletarian secretly, both of them forever called (or calling themselves) to the barricades, dream of, what my father and your father, and his, her, and their father dreamed of on Sunday afternoon after Sunday dinner—a little peace and quiet, neutrality...
...I don't know whether I'm for it or against it , " said my friend Luethi, the innkeeper...
...Most of the farmers and villagers and some of the workers...
...The man said, "That will be one franc [Lord]," and I said, "How much would it be if it were a string of pearls...
...And out of it, when Volkswagen shuts down...
...on the south, snows that came roaring down as avalanches and floods...
...They came up with the most barbaric proposition since Nazism, to deport half the country's foreigners in the next three years...
...At 10:55:50, precisely, the bell rang, and at 10:56 the stationmaster raised his green wand, and with never a jerk or a squeak or a rattle the train slipped ingeniously out of the station, propelled by electricity purchased (at the cheap night rate) from Germany and even from Sweden because the Swiss had learned to put bits and pieces together so marvelously that all their waterfalls did not generate enough power to power their precision industries...
...Because I cannot communicate with h i m , " I said...
...When you left Switzerland," said the commandant, who did not introduce himself to me, "you did not inform the village clerk that you were going—or that you were coming back...
...But such a small country...
...But more Swiss citizens would mean more...
...They live in hidden bunkhouses...
...I dove, unhopefully, into my briefcase...
...The world hates the Swiss for this dirty form of banking, but the Swiss don't mind being hated...
...An irrelevant society which, if it had not been born organically, would have had to be invented, to be what it is and serve what it serves...
...irrelevant to the proletarian dream of a tree and an axe and bushelbasket of black dirt and a cow...
...From dawn until dark—and after dark—he took care of his property because it was all he had...
...One occasion was in Tbilisi, or Tiflis, in the U.S.S.R., when I knocked my pipe-dottle out into the gutter, and an elderly man told me I shouldn't have done that and handed me an empty matchbox (which he put back into his pocket) to accommodate the dottle I scraped up from the gutter...
...The room was large and dark and heavily doored and furnished...
...You will be in this office at ten o'clock tomorrow morning," he said...
...The man who was destined to be the first Swiss—did he get to be happy after the Lord gave him twenty centimes for a quarter-liter of the best milk in the world...
...The man in the chair in the corner never spoke...
...the "foreigners...
...Relevant only (and only perhaps) to the ultimate critique of utopianism, Marxist utopianism in particular...
...It is impossible to get there from here by t e n , " I said...
...Tenements?—Not in Switzerland...
...You are suspected of wanting to be a Swiss citizen...
...The workmen are the world's best—but t h e r e ' s no hurry...
...We have the world's best fighter force in the air...
...It read, in full, "Don't ever come back...
...There are all kinds of free men...
...They earn almost nothing and spend nothing and go home " r i c h " to the families they leave fatherless for months, even years, at a time...
...you'd have had to be present to catch it...
...They lost two-to-one, carrying the rural areas where there are few or no 'guest laborers.' " "Who supports the xenophobe movement...
...Why wouldn't you want to be...
...Now the Japanese and the Germans make American junk, but "Made in Switzerland" still means precision...
...In America they, like everyone else, ride around in cars—and between cars there is always time to mug, slug, slash, slit, and run...
...An Italian tour bus ran into Lake Lucerne a few years ago...
...They do not need to be watched or guarded, only herded...
...Prussianism?'—Pooh...
...The despicable "guest laborers" from the impoverished Mediterranean world are Switzerland's (and Germany's, and Scandinavia's) niggers...
...The passes are all mined electrically...
...No part of the European Economic Community or NATO or the Grand Alliance...
...It simply wouldn't happen, not in Switzerland...
...Crime?—Not in Switzerland...
...On Sunday the European finance ministers will gather for a crucial meeting in Zurich...
...The behavior of some of the northern cantons to German refugees from Hitler was a great disgrace, which we don't like to talk about...
...The construction is still going on, and nobody knows when it will be finished...
...2) Don't kid yourself in Switzerland...
...It was the place that everybody wanted to cross (to get at the kingdoms beyond) and nobody wanted...
...Here on the Hasliberg...
...On the north walls, glaciers that never got the sun...
...The Swiss have been asked to handle American interests in Cuba...
...He wouldn't get it the way he got Austria and the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia...
...There was a bank robbery in Zurich a few years ago, and the press at once ascribed it to "foreigners, thought to be English," and a bank robbery in Geneva a few months ago, at once ascribed, and, in the event, correctly, to "foreigners, thought to be French...
...Now they keep talking about another war, and we may have oil rationing again...
...Take very good care of them...
...Not at all...
...the next war...
...The foreigners make the Swiss richer and richer and heat up the economy and, in every way possible, muscle into it: Swiss workers are the world's best and most " s t a b l e , " i.e., least communist, least ideological...
...If it's built, I'll get rich—but the Hasliberg will be ruined...
...Or the ultimate critique of capitalism: Here, on this mountaintop, is the Man Who Has Everything the bourgeois heart should (if not could) desire: Here, in a world where most (and more all the time) are hungry and the few fight them off (more furiously all the time) is the truly rich man...
...In Switzerland people still build to build Switzerland because, building Switzerland, they build for themselves...
...And they had no trouble getting the 50,000 signatures requiring a referendum...
...The train is eleven minutes late in Brig [Lord...
...Britain, 13.5 per cent...
...And we get all the skilled people we want from abroad on the same basis...
...You will be here atten , " said the commandant, "or be out of Switzerland by five...
...Clifford Irving discovered, hidden from the Swiss...
...And he who was destined to be the first Swiss was proud, very proud, of what he had done, and said, " I ' v e been very careful, Lord, and wasted nothing and saved every scrap and learned how to put bits and pieces together with marvelous ingenuity and precision...
...In England it is not to be seen unless a king is being crowned or buried...
...Ten years ago some developers from Zurich—purest Swiss—made their way up to the Hasliberg and proposed to build a ski-lift funicular...
...Oh, no, nothing like that...
...Chronologically the last segment of Hitler's Greater Germany was to be the 'German' two-thirds of Switzerland...
...Let him be dull, so long as h e ' s happy, and what else does a man want for happiness...
...No—in the whole of Switzerland...
...People who hate their own country (or themselves) may be xenophobes...
...If you had asked how many would want to leave their country—under the circumstances you wouldn't ask such a question—a few more would have said,*Switzerland.' It is true of every country, truer all the time, in the 'free' world or the 'slave.' Almost 10 per cent of the Americans have said in a poll that they would like to emigrate, almost 15 per cent of the English...
...Is this what the mover and shaker, the hurler of missiles and paving stones, has to hope for...
...Not in Switzerland...
...Why would I want to be a Swiss...
...So we went to the Lost and Found and the man took a chart of the train from under the counter and said, "Which car were you in, and which seats ? " And we showed him on the chart (as best we could) and he said, "How many cigarettes were t h e r e ? " And Ms...
...The only other words I heard (that I could understand) were from the village clerk when he extended my residence permit: "Feef-ee-zwahnsk Frahnkeh" for fuenf-und-zwanzig Franken, or twentyfive francs [Lord...
...I a m , " he said, "steinreicn, rich in rocks," and he was desolate, and he prayed...
...If, say, a nephew of a member of the Senate Committee applied for a job on the Railroad, would he stand a better chance than another applicant...
...Pure xenophobia...
...Its passage would have wrecked our economy and shattered our country's image, but these considerations didn't touch them...
...He always speaks Swiss- German instead of German, and I do not understand Swiss-German...
...So you didn't know," said Peter, an un-Swiss Activities type, "that we have a police state here...
...I ought to be happy...
...And he said proudly, " I t ' s the best in the world, Lord...
...no part of the "Europe" that fights America or itself, no part of the ruinous swaggejr that overtakes and, in their time, overcomes all the empires...
...He seems to be glum, close, tight, safe, sure, small, like Switzerland...
...Duller than the Swede (whose climate drives him to drink and, via drink, arouses some passion in him...
...Baby said, "Only t w o . " And the man said (without looking it up), "That car has gone back to Lucerne and Basel...
...Zurich, Bern, Geneva, Basel, Lucerne, Lausanne, and every town and village, are the only cities left that aren't hideous, that are beautiful cities right out to the rind...
...Why, indeed...
...This year we have a total of seventy-four persons unemployed...
...In Germany they turn the traffic signs from green to red, fiercely...
...Two years ago, to cool the economy and fight foreign control, the Swiss put an end to interest on foreigners' deposits...
...Would you like to try i t ? " And the Lord said, "Don't mind if I d o . " And he measured out a quarter-liter of milk, precisely, and the Lord drank it and smacked His lips and said, "Thank you, my c h i l d / ' And the first Swiss said, "That will be twenty centimes, Lord...
...and the man said, "One franc...
...That stopped it, but not all of it: For a price you can get a Swiss intermediary to buy and 'own' it...
...Of course not...
...the Swiss know better than to make cars, which are not precision products and are made by everyone else...
...The heart of it is xenophobia...
...he doesn't own a car or want one...
...his house needs restoration...
...His name, which I did not get from him, was something like Modriani...
...If they were penniless, they were turned back or expelled...
...In it by accident (like everything else in it) was a German theological journal, Junge Kirche, with an article of mine on the state of the church in Czechoslovakia...
...In France, a shaky police state, they are everywhere in overwhelming numbers, clubbing, gassing and shooting...
...Spies...
...In the ceremonial Mediterranean countries (all of them police states) they walk in pairs, sometimes with swords intended, unsuccessfully, to intimidate the crafty populace...
...Every Swiss is a Swiss...
...They're all you've g o t . " So he took very good care of them and became a careful man (and all the Swiss after him) and got firewood from the branches, boards and pegs from the limbs, and a bed from the leaves...
...Every year we have a 'xenophobe referendum' proposed in Parliament to limit foreigners in the country, even on a temporary basis, to 12 or even 10 per cent of the population...
...In France the flag means a public building, nothing else...
...I once asked my friend Dr...
...And the 10:56 train from Lucerne slipped noiselessly into Zurich at precisely 11:46 and Ms...
...He said, "You have been in Prague several times, Professor...
...Then I'd want to put my tile stoves back...
...I found the extension of my leave, scrawled in pencil on a half sheet of scratch paper by my department head...
...They care about capital...
...In the mid-1960s rich Germans bought up much of the best land in our Italian canton, the Ticino...
...And he said, "All I want is to survive, Lord...
...This is March...
...and when the economies of Switzerland, Germany, Scandinavia slow, they are sent back home and, unemployed, live on their " r i c h e s . " They make no trouble in Switzerland, Germany, or elsewhere, apart from their being "noisy," " d i r t y , " and "disorderly...
...It was a handsome building, like all the buildings in beautiful, slumless little Bern...
...Schild about " t h e politic i a n s , " and when he realized that by "politicians" I meant public officeholders, he said that a public office was a public trust...
...Twice in my adult life—that I can remember—a mere citizen policed me...
...Neutralist.—Neuter...
...Love, Buzzy...
...All the sheiks of all the teetering Arabies, including America, keep their money hidden in Switzerland—but not, as Bernie Cornfeld, Robert Vesco, and Mr...
...There is no land anything like it, a land wholly of mountains and rivers and waterfalls and lakes...
...What is it like to be this man...
...But the investors and the depositors— the sound men—flock to the Swiss franc, and stay there, with their numbered accounts that defy identification back home...
...and Mrs...
...We Swiss are very—very proprietary about our country...
...This master of the masters of precision, ingenuity, survival, conquest, stability, neutrality, with no one (except his wife...
...Everywhere else, even in Germany, once a planned country with planned cities, now an arrant imitation of planless America, people build for themselves however they want to, or build to make a profit for themselves...
...And he who was destined to be the first Swiss took good care of his cow (and all the Swiss after him) and fertilized his bushelbasket of black dirt and sharpened his axe and dried his boards and built his chalet with a fence around it and saved and scraped and made do and learned (as he had to, and all the Swiss after him) to put bits and pieces together with a marvelous degree of ingenuity and precision, because they were all he had...
...Now there ' s a network of ski lifts on the Hasliberg, and Luethi and the rest of the Hasliberger are rich...
...And he prayed...
...And one day the Lord appeared before him and said, "My child, you have actually survived in this God-forsaken place...
...We are the people who really conquered Switzerland, conquered this land, created this country...
...And the Lord appeared and said, "What can I do for you, my child...
...Informers...
...Hannibal tried it with elephants...
...France, 12.2 per cent...
...The commandant said, "On religious business"— tonelessly, not a question, or a contradiction, or a do-you-expect-me-to-believe-that: on a tape recording a mere repetition of my words...
...Here, on this mountaintop and between these walls, is the man who has what the proletarian wants, and in spades: a piece of the inaction...
...Do you want to ride the train punctually...
...We have the world's longest military service...
...and, besides, who knows better than the Swiss that all banking is dirty...
...It will be back here at 1:52 and be cleaned by 2:02...
...We are a completely militarized police state, completely nationalist, completely chauvinist...
...But Switzerland is the most open-hearted country on e a r t h . " "Yes—to people who stay where they are or who (as in the Hungarian affair in 1956) can go back...
...But the kind of corruption that 'Watergate' suggests . . . No . . . not yet...
...Such a small country, yes...
...Do you want to fly safely?— Swissair...
...We import more than a million workers—most of them dirty-workers from around the Mediterranean...
...And " . . . the mercy of the intermediary...
...Accidents?—Not in Switzerland...
...his neighbor...
...But a foreigner, and therefore suspected of wanting to be a Swiss...
...M e ? " "You and every other foreigner...
...I explained that I'd left Switzerland the day my residence permit expired and returned to stay less than ninety days as an ordinary tourist...
...It's all you've g o t . " So he took good care of it and had some hay, and he put the hay in the barn in the evening, and he prayed, and the Lord appeared and asked him what he wanted, and he said, "I've got this hay, Lord...
...Baby remembered that she had left her cigarette lighter and cigarettes in the second-class car...
...They don't need their jobs protected...
...The Swiss fear the un-Swiss unless they're tourists The Place Nobody Wanted MILTON MAYER Wasserwendi/Hasliberg, Switzerland He found himself—he who was destined to be the first Swiss—on the top of a world of walls...
...It is just that all Swiss, or maybe I should say most Swiss, for this, too, is changing, take it upon themselves to keep order in Switzerland...
...To prove that they're Swiss—or more Swiss than the man next door—the way the Americans do...
...I do not count the ostentatiously threadbare civilian, a party block captain, who, with the power of arrest, chewed me out for driving the wrong way in a one-way street in Budapest...
...Once you have twelve years of permitted residence you can apply for Swiss citizenship—first to the village, then, if you're accepted, to the canton, and finally to the Helvetian Confederation of Switzerland...
...And the Lord appeared before him and said, "What can I do for you, my child...
...The foreign laborers, most of them Italians, are 'noisy,' 'dirty,' 'disorderly.' [And by Swiss standards a majority of them certainly are.] But t h a t ' s not the heart of it...
...the schweizerische Bundesbahn...
...People who, like the Swiss, love their country, may also be xenophobes...
...Germany's was an alarming 7.2 per cent, and Switzerland's an alarming 9.7 per cent...
...I came here because there was no place else to go, famine in Sweden, plague in Italy, war in Germany and France, and this was the only place that nobody wanted...
...In writing...
...He ought to be put in a bottle, this lineal descendant of him who was destined to be the first Swiss, and sent to Harvard for analysis and the answer to the ancient question, "What is man, O Lord, that thou art mindful of h i m ? " Soon, though, for Switzerland, too, is going to go the way of the world which, tearing itself to pieces, laughs at Swiss locksmiths and Swiss watchmakers and Swiss tank traps and Swiss passes ready to be blown sky-high...
...No part of any alliance—and the meticulous broker to them all...
...And all that was before Ms...
...In England you see individual policemen, unarmed, sauntering everywhere, answering tourists' questions, helping old ladies across the street, stepping out to untie traffic knots, or breaking up a fight by saying, "Now, now, gentlemen...
...he'd have to fight for it, and he never figured out how...
...Four years ago it went to the people, and 46 per cent voted for it in spite of its denunciation by the politicians, the press, the church, the unions, and the intellectuals...
...Back up the mountain lickety-split by late afternoon, I dove, unhopefully, into my "files...
...It's all we've got...
...I told him, and he said, "You claim to be a professor, but you leave Switzerland and return without notifying the village clerk...
...Every Swiss is as much a policeman as every other...
...And every night he carefully sharpened his axe (and all the Swiss after him...
...This year the Federal Council yielded partially to the xenophobists and abolished the unlimited immigration privilege of doctors and teachers and set next year's overall immigration quota at 20,500...
...No part of the League of Nations, no part of the xJnited Nations...
...Then you're at the mercy of the intermediary— you have no t i t l e . " " . . . hide from the next war...
...It took a year or more to make the award in the architectural competition for the new interior, to be built behind the restored facade...
...We spend nothing for bombers, nothing for a navy, and almost nothing for a citizen army always at home...
...Corruption?—Not in Switzerland (except as "foreigners" induce it...
...Germans are all crazy about Italy, but not about the lira...
...In the U.S.S.R., forgetting for the moment the ostentatiously threadbare civilian, you don't see a policeman except en masse at government-organized demonstrations or singly, in the crowd, and apparently off duty, listening to two truckdrivers arguing (non-pugilistically) the right of way...
...We are afraid of foreigners—all foreigners, except tourists...
...And he said, "If I had a little black dirt between the rocks, I could have something to eat besides acorns...
...the conscript has to train (at the end, a week ayear)until he is forty-five, and then keep his gear in readiness all his life...
...Japan, 24 per cemt...
Vol. 38 • December 1974 • No. 12
