Swiss History

Während mit Zwingli im Abendmahl der Zürcher das historische Gedenken an die Stelle der Realpräsenz getreten war, manifestierte sich im Umgang mit Schriftgut eine Verehrung der Dinglichkeit, die schon Zeitgenossen katholisch anmutete. Die im Buch behandelten Selbstzeugnisse verdanken ihre Niederschrift ebenso wie ihre Überlieferung in amtlichen und familiären Archiven weitgehend ebendiesem Kult. Dieser beruhte auch auf einem frühneuzeitlichen Ehrbegriff, der ohne Gegenständlichkeit nicht auskam. Der neue Zugriff auf Selbstzeugnisse als Dinge mit quasi-sakralem Charakter eröffnet einen neuen Blick auf Zürich im konfessionellen Zeitalter. Mitten in der reformierten Stadt an der Limmat wird eine ins Kultische hineinspielende Wertschätzung der Leiblichkeit handgreiflich.

L'adaptation au cinéma de L'Opéra Je pual'soMs est le plus souvent citée comme l'exemple même de la trahison d'une œuvre littéraire. Les vicissitudes qui ont amené l'auteur de la pièce, Bertolt Brecht, à citer la maison de production devant un tribunal sont à l'origine de cette renommée. Ce film, produit dans ces conditions conflictuelles, a connu un accueil vaudois particulièrement intéressant, car son interdiction et les polémiques déclenchées ont laissé de nombreuses traces dans les articles de presse, les archives de la censure et les procès- verbaux des discussions parlementaires de l'époque. En Allemagne, la réalisation du film sous la direction de Pabst a été comprise par certains comme une défaite de l'art au service de la classe ouvrière devant les intérêts du capital. Dans le canton de Vaud, par contre, son interdiction trahit une défaite de la gauche.

Zum Aufeinandertreffen von Sklaverei und Liberalismus im Yverdon um 1800, zum Einbürgerungsversuch von Samuel Buisson, Sohn der versklavten Pauline, und drei postkoloniale Thesen dazu, wie citizenship über Rassisierung, Geschlecht und Klasse reguliert wurde.

Se nourrir est une nécessité biologique qui se double au Moyen Age de valeurs symboliques particulières dans la culture chrétienne. Le christianisme a, en effet, placé au cœur de ses pratiques rituelles la commémoration d’un repas, la Cène. L’Eglise a également élaboré des normes de comportement alimentaire très précises, allant de l’invention du péché de gourmandise à la mise en place d’un calendrier établissant de façon rigoureuse les périodes de jeûne. Quels aliments peuvent être consommés pendant ces jours de restriction ?
Toute la création divine est même rassemblée par les philosophes médiévaux dans une «grande chaîne de l’être» qui ordonne hiérarchiquement les plantes et les animaux. Existe-t-il une correspondance entre l’échelle sociale des hommes et les aliments qu’ils consomment ?
Le XIIIe siècle marque un tournant dans les pratiques alimentaires médiévales. Le qualitatif prend le pas sur le quantitatif à la table des seigneurs. Comment s’exprime ce nouveau raffinement de la table noble ?
A cette même époque, les recettes de cuisine sont mises par écrit. Parmi ces ouvrages, le Du fait de cuisine – commandé en 1420 par le duc Amédée VIII de Savoie à son cuisinier Maître Chiquart – est tout à fait original parce qu’il présente la manière de réaliser un banquet. Quels sont les moyens mis en œuvre pour éblouir les convives et comment se décline un festin médiéval ?
Amédée VIII séjourne au château de Chillon en 1436 et 1442. Au-delà d’être une demeure seigneuriale, la place forte est, dès 1150, le siège d’un péage par lequel transitent de nombreuses denrées. Le châtelain savoyard y réside également. A ce titre, il perçoit des redevances en nature pour son seigneur. Il veille également aux vignes domaniales de la région.
Autant de raisons qui font du château de Chillon un écrin de choix pour accueillir l’exposition temporaire L’eau à la bouche-Boire et manger au Moyen Age du 14 septembre 2018 au 28 avril 2019.

Von Salman Rushdie stammt das Bonmot, Britannien sei ahnunglos, was die eigene Geschichte angehe, denn der wichtigste Teil davon habe in den Kolonien stattgefunden. Die Aussage lässt sich grosso modo auch auf Teile Kontinentaleuropas und die Schweiz übertragen...

The understanding of “Swiss design” as perhaps the purest form of modernism places Switzerland at the epicentre of twentieth century graphic design history. Post modern vehicles of thought as well as challenges to Western-centred design history, have left the success story of Swiss graphic design in tact. This paper examines the work and career of Swiss poster designer Paul Brühwiler, and through this critiques this concept of “Swissness”. It proposes that even where a positive national design stereotype is established, this is detrimental to design historical knowledge.

Vom Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts bis 1917 war die Schweiz eine Hochburg des russischen Exilschrifttums. Vor allem in Genf waren mehrere russische Druckereien aktiv. Der Artikel gibt einen kurzen Überblick über verschiedene Aspekte dieser Publikationen.

This book argues that from the moment that skiers took to the Alps of Central Europe around 1880, the interaction between skiers and the Alps proved transformative: the Alps modernized skiing, and skiing modernized the Alps. The unique terrain of the Alps demanded that skiers alter their equipment and their practice of the sport. In the process, skiers elaborated an ideology called Alpine modernism that synthesized the Romantic devotion to nature with the modernist celebration of speed, technology, and spectacle. As a result, Alpine skiing was uniquely attuned to the twentieth-century age of mass culture, and the sport of skiing both formed and reflected that era’s democratization, commercialization, and obsession with leisure. Alpine modernism was so enticing and skiing was so lucrative that businesses and governments transformed the Alps to appeal to skiers. Alpine skiing became the basis for a burgeoning leisure economy, and tourism interests developed transportation and accommodations infrastructure across the Alps to render the tourism industry profitable and reliable. This economic modernization affected the environment in important ways while paradoxically undermining the sport’s Romantic appeal. Before they came into contact, both skiing and the Alps were backwards and peripheral; as a result of their interaction in the twentieth century, each became at once modern in material and ideological terms and central to European concerns, to the delight and chagrin of Alpine skiers.

Although Switzerland was never formally a colonial power, it was attached to many quasi-colonies such as settlements of Swiss missionary societies, which were financed and managed with money, personnel, and ideas from Switzerland. Including these settlements into Swiss social history narratives holds a lot of innovative analytical potential, as this article seeks to illuminate. It highlights the connections between 19th century philanthropic struggles against poverty in Switzerland and efforts to proselytise 'hindu heathens' in India. These historical connections did, however, not result in shared historical experiences and forms of consciousness among Swiss 'proletarians' and 'Christian Hindus' in India. Although people on both sides of the 'imperial divide' were subjected to similar forms of bourgeois 'civilizing missions', they were also divided according to social, gender, and racial hierarchies.

Collection of digitized public domain works on numismatics of Austria, Swiss, Lichtenstein and lands of Habsburg dinasty
Sammlung von digitalisierten gemeinfreien Werke über Numismatik Österreich, Schweiz, Liechtenstein und Länder der Habsburger-Dynastie

Pollutants are able to cross national frontiers and consequently push several nation states to redefine the sovereinty of their health policy in the afterwar period. This study questions the transboundary management of the pollution of the Lake Geneva situated between France and Switzerland. In 1962, the International Commission for the Protection of the Water of Lake Geneva (CIPEL in French) was created. The CIPEL provides an insightful case study to explore the way through which a new technocratic environmentalism dealt with the damages of «progress». This article shows that official discourses on the necessity to go beyond borders for managing the pollution of the Lake contrasted with nationally oriented practices that remained confined to the expert sphere, as shown by controversies over phosphate and mercury management.
***********************************
Capables de transgresser les frontières nationales, les polluants poussent plusieurs Etats à redéfinir la souveraineté de leur politique sanitaire dans le second après-guerre. Cette étude interroge la mise à l’agenda public de la gestion transfrontalière de la pollution du lac Léman entre la France et la Suisse. En 1962 est créée la Commission internationale pour la protection des eaux du Léman contre la pollution (CIPEL). Celle-ci illustre le nouvel environnementalisme technocratique mis en place pour faire face aux dégâts du «progrès». L’article montre que les discours officiels concernant le nécessaire dépassement des frontières contrastent avec des pratiques orientées avant tout à l’échelle nationale et qui restent confinées aux sphères expertes, comme le montrent les controverses autour de la gestion des phosphates et du mercure.

This article examines the history of the Swiss merchant house Volkart Bros., which was one of the most important exporters of Indian raw cotton and one of the biggest trading firms in South Asia during the colonial period. The study allows for a fresh look at Indian economic history by putting forth two main arguments. First, it charts the history of a continental European firm that was active in South Asia to offer a better understanding of the economic entanglements of the subcontinent with the wider world, which often had a reach beyond the empire. This ties in with recent research initiatives that aim to examine the history of imperialism from a transnational perspective. Second, the history of a private company helps in developing a micro-perspective on the often ambiguous relation between the business goals of individual enterprises and colonial rule. The article argues that this may be evidence of the fact that capitalism and imperialism were two different, although sometimes converging, spatial structures, each with a distinct logic of its own. What is more, the positive interactions between European and Indian businessmen, fostered by a cosmopolitan attitude among business elites, point to the fact that even in the age of empire, the class background of actors could be more important for the establishing of cooperative ventures than the colour of their skin or their geographical origin. It is argued that this offers the possibility of examining the history of world trade in terms of global social history. * I would like to thank Margret Frenz, Moritz von Brescius, and the two anonymous readers of Modern Asian Studies for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. The article relies mostly on those unpublished records from the Volkart Archives in Winterthur that could be accessed for the first time for scholarly study. They have only recently been transferred to the Winterthur Municipal Archives and made accessible to the public.

"Aporias of democracy" investigates into the thorny question of how a "communitarian" society with highly developed democratic rights like the Swiss society copes with the political integration of immigrants. By analyzing sources and discources by government bodies, political parties, trade unions and the "new right" anti-migrant movements from the 1950s to the 2000s, it can be shown that an increase in political citizenship rights (Marshall) for the already-citizens often came at the cost of restricting the access and participation rights for immigrants.

This paper offers a new interpretation of the so-called “watch crisis” of 1975-1985. Until now, historiography has attached great importance to the growth of quartz watch production in Japan as the main factor of the crisis, thus reproducing the discourse of contemporary actors. The comparative analysis of the Swiss and Japanese watch industries since World War II highlights another factor as the basis for the lost competitiveness of Swiss watchmakers: the organization of the
production system. Mass production of high-quality mechanical watches made it possible for Japan to establish herself on the world market in competition to Swiss rivals in the early 1960s. The quartz watch (a technology that Swiss watchmakers had mastered as soon as the Japanese had) strengthened the commercial expansion of Japanese watch producers, as is emphasized by the cases of the United
States and Hong Kong. Finally, the end of the Bretton Woods financial system led to a strong appreciation of the Swiss franc against the US dollar, compared with the yen, and this also appears to have helped Seiko.

Il volume si propone quale strumento di lavoro e supporto all’attività didattica nella scuola del Cantone Ticino.
Si tratta di una presentazione sintetica delle informazioni essenziali all’esercizio di una cittadinanza attiva, di una guida per allievi e adulti affinché possano orientarsi nella complessità dell’esercizio della cittadinanza e del funzionamento delle istituzioni.
In una fase storica in cui sempre più apertamente si parla di “crisi della democrazia”, di “postdemocrazia” di “paradossi della democrazia” o di “democrazia recitativa”, si è ritenuto importante offrire un agile compendio delle istituzioni politiche comunali, cantonali, federali e internazionali, evidenziando la posizione della Confederazione in un contesto mediatico, economico e geopolitico sempre più globale e in rapida evoluzione.

The present work deals with the origin and development of the EMK Switzerland from its beginnings in the 18th and 19th centuries until today. The three branches Wesleyan Methodism (GB), Methodist Episcopal Church (BMK; USA) and "Evangelische Gemeinschaft" (EG; USA), which led to the unification of BMK and EG in Switzerland in 1971 to the present-day EMC, are presented.
In the second part, the focus is on the region of Schaffhausen and, through extensive source material, the emergence of the church in Schaffhausen in 1861 to its present form is traced.
Both on a national and regional level, the development of the membership figures is problematized and an attempt is made to classify them.
Finally, with a view to history and development, the question arises as to the raison d'être of the EMK on a national and regional level. The question is discussed on the basis of a fundamental paper by the first bishop in Switzerland (Nuelsen, 1931) in relation to the theology of the missio Dei and concretized by practical considerations with regard to the region of Schaffhausen.

Vorliegende Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit Entstehung und Entwicklung der EMK Schweiz von ihren Anfängen im 18. und 19. Jh. bis heute. Die drei Zweige Wesleyanischer Methodismus (GB), Bischöfliche Methodistenkirche (BMK; USA) und Evangelische Gemeinschaft (EG; USA), die durch Vereinigung von BMK und EG 1971 in der Schweiz zur heutigen EMK führten,  werden dargestellt.
Im zweiten Teil wird auf die Region Schaffhausen fokussiert und durch umfangreiches Quellenmaterial die Entstehung der Kirche in Schaffhausen 1861 bis zu ihrer heutigen Gestalt nachgezeichnet.
Sowohl auf nationaler wie auch regionaler Ebene wird die Entwicklung der Mitgliederzahlen problematisiert und es erfolgt ein Versuch der Einordnung.
Mit Blick auf Geschichte und Entwicklung stellt sich schliesslich die Frage nach der Daseinsberechtigung der EMK auf nationaler und regionaler Ebene. Die Frage wird ausgehend von einem grundlegenden Referat des ersten Bischofs in der Schweiz (Nuelsen, 1931) in Bezug zur Theologie der missio Dei erörtert und durch praktische Überlegungen mit Blick auf die Region Schaffhausen konkretisiert.

«Nel Mondiale giocato in Brasile nel 2014, la Svizzera è stata la nazionale più cosmopolita. Paradossalmente, la nazionale elvetica è diventata la più internazionale del mondo, proprio qualche mese dopo il 9 febbraio del 2014. Quando, per una manciata di voti, passò, per la prima volta nella sua lunga e travagliata storia di impulsi anti-stranieri, l’iniziativa contro l’immigrazione di massa che fece tremare le cancellerie di mezza Europa e funse da modello per i fautori della Brexit».

In fatto di migrazione, la Svizzera rappresenta un caso emblematico e, insieme, un modello ricco di paradossi. Nel 2014, quando per una manciata di voti passò l’iniziativa contro l’immigrazione di massa, la Svizzera espresse anche la nazionale più cosmopolita del Mondiale in Brasile. È il paese europeo che nel secolo scorso ha conosciuto il tasso d’immigrazione più alto del continente, assorbendo quasi la metà dell’emigrazione italiana del secondo dopoguerra. In settant’anni ha raddoppiato la sua popolazione, passando da quattro milioni agli oltre otto odierni, e la migrazione è al centro del dibattito da sempre. Nel 1948, per la prima volta nella sua storia, la Svizzera firmò un accordo di reclutamento di manodopera straniera, che divenne un modello per i successivi e cambiò per sempre la sua storia e quella del suo principale fornitore di donne e uomini, l’Italia. Paese dal quale, a partire dai trafori dell’Ottocento e per un secolo, sono giunti oltre cinque milioni di persone, la metà solo nel secondo dopoguerra. Ancora oggi, quella in Svizzera è la terza comunità italiana nel mondo. Concepita come temporanea, dopo qualche decennio divenne stanziale e rappresentò il carburante per la crescita e l’espansione dell’economia elvetica. Nessun paese europeo registrò performance così favorevoli e allo stesso tempo un così alto numero di morti bianche, che raggiunsero l’apice con la tragedia di Mattmark. Assopitosi il decennio delle tensioni xenofobe, all’inizio degli anni ottanta venne accantonata una possibile soluzione per migliorare le condizioni di chi contribuiva al progresso e al benessere del paese. Sono ormai lontani gli anni delle baracche, del «non si fitta agli italiani» o dei trentamila bambini clandestini. A tutt’oggi, la Svizzera è l’unico paese al mondo, oltre all’Italia, in cui l’italiano è lingua ufficiale. E l’italianità, pur tra alti e bassi, è riconosciuta, ricercata, apprezzata. Da un decennio si registra la ripresa di una nuova mobilità italiana: alle professioni specializzate si è unito il crescente numero di frontalieri e di chi è alla ricerca di un lavoro qualsiasi. Il rischio è che si ripropongano le questioni di un passato ricco di suggestioni e contraddizioni, che fanno della migrazione italiana in Svizzera un unicum senza precedenti.

Zürich feiert 2019 das 200-Jahr Jubiläum von Alfred Escher und Gottfried Keller, 2 Pionierfiguren der modernen Schweiz. Im Interview argumentiere ich, dass Jubiläen nicht im Dienst der 'grossen weissen Männer' der Vergangenheit, sondern unserer Fragen und Konflikte der Gegenwart stehen sollten. Diese sind globalgeschichtlicher Art.

This article critically examines some of the recent works in Swiss  national history. It argues that many of these works suffer, albeit in different ways, from a too narrowly construed, Eurocentric perspective. Consequently, they fail to offer an understanding of how Switzerland both shaped and was shaped by  processes  of  imperial  globalisation since  the 1500s.  The  article  goes  on  to  argue  for  a  ‘post-patriotic’  conception  of  Swiss  national  history  that seeks to uncover how Swiss global entanglements fed into various hierarchies between gender groups, social classes, races and religious communities. The article ends with a historical example from 16th century Basel and Geneva, where book printers published books on the Spanish conquests of the Americas. The example illustrates how the historical  beginnings  of  a  Swiss  nation  and  the  beginnings of imperial globalisation in the 1500s were closely intertwined processes – and how the trajectories of Swiss history and the history of the world have remained intertwined ever since.

Die Universitätsbibliothek Basel besitzt ein prachtvolles Fotoalbum mit dem Titel "Vues de Brousse", das eine hohe Staatsauszeichnung von Sultan Abdülhamid II. erhielt. Es entstand um 1888 im berühmten osmanischen Fotostudio Sébah & Joaillier und enthält knapp einhundert Stadtansichten der ersten osmanischen Hauptstadt Bursa. Die Stadt, in der Nähe von Istanbul gelegen, war seit byzantinischer Zeit ein wichtiger Produzent von Rohseide. Es ist die Seide, die den Faden der Verflechtungsgeschichte zwischen Basel als Zentrum der Seidenbandindustrie und dem osmanischen Bursa aufnehmen lässt. Der vorliegende Band enthält sämtliche Fotos des Albums und beleuchtet seine Geschichte sowie die ökonomischen und kulturellen Austauschbeziehungen zwischen beiden Städten rund um die Seidenproduktion.

The reasons for France's aim to annex Switzerland was
a) to establish a buffer against the hostile monarchies of Prussia and Austria
b) to gain control of the key Alpine passes, and most importantly
c) to loot the country and to confiscate the gold reserves of the many prosperous
    Swiss towns and religious institutions