Literature of Switzerland

“In Switzerland, writing is only possible as an export business,” Friedrich Dürrenmatt, one of the few internationally known Swiss authors, once remarked. The country’s small population and four official languages have worked to make it difficult for any single writer to enjoy widespread success or, perhaps more important, significant income, and most Swiss writers are little recognized elsewhere in Europe. Even though Switzerland today publishes thousands of books each year, many of the country’s literary successes date to previous centuries with such figures as the Swiss-born French Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the French-born memoirist and hostess Germaine de Staël, whose home at Coppet became a centre of European literary life, and the noted 19th-century historian of art and culture Jacob Burckhardt, whose Civilization of the Renaissance (1860) remains influential.

Other writers to enjoy international success include Johann Rudolf Wyss, who completed and edited his father’s novel Swiss Family Robinson (1812–27); Johanna Spyri, author of Heidi (1880–81); Dürrenmatt, whose play Der Besuch der Alten Dame (1956; The Visit) was made into a film (1964); and Max Frisch, author of Homo Faber.

Prominent among other Swiss nationals who wrote in German were the German-born Hermann Hesse, whose novel Siddartha (1922) was a classic carried by many travelers to India, and poet Carl Spitteler, whose epics were inventive and powerful; both won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Spitteler in 1919 and Hesse in 1946. Other leading figures include narrative writer Gottfried Keller, poet Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, and novelist Robert Walser, and many exemplify the literary critic Karl Schmid’s remark that the leitmotiv of 20th-century Swiss literature is “the malaise of a small nation.”

Contemporary German-Swiss writers include Erika Burkhart, Helen Meier, Thomas Hürlimann, and Peter Stamm. The leading figure in modern French-Swiss literature is Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz. Other writers in French include Guy de Pourtalès, Blaise Cendrars, Denis de Rougemont, Anne Perrier, and Yves Laplace. Italian-Swiss writers enjoy close connections with neighbouring Italy. Among them are Francesco Chiesa, whose work depicts rural life in the Ticino, poets Giorgio Orelli and Alberto Nessi, and novelists Anna Felder and Fleur Jaeggy. Some writers, such as Alina Borioli and Ugo Canonica, write in dialect.

Romansh literature stretches from its origins in medieval ecclesiastical writing to the late modern contributions of anthropologist Caspar Decurtins, poets Peider Lansel, Jon Guidon, and Artur Caflisch, and fiction writer Giachen Michel Nay.

Switzerland was also among the leading centres of the Protestant Reformation during the 16th century and was home to such influential theologians as Huldrych Zwingli, Johannes Stumpf, and the French-born John Calvin. Karl Barth was one of the most important theologians of the 20th century.

Music

Church music dominated Switzerland until the 17th century, and in Protestant areas music was strictly controlled during the Reformation. In the 19th century a vibrant music scene developed. A conservatory was established in Geneva in 1835, and choral music was performed at various festivals, such as the Winegrowers Festival (Fête des Vignerons), which is still held in Vevey approximately every 25 years. Although Switzerland has not been at the forefront in music, it has produced several composers of international renown, such as the 20th-century figures Arthur Honegger, Othmar Schoeck, and Frank Martin. Under the direction of Ernest Ansermet, the Swiss French Orchestra (Orchestre de la Suisse Romande) was at the forefront of bringing modern musical culture to Swiss audiences, and today major orchestras serve Zürich, Geneva, Lausanne, Biel, Bern, Basel, Lucerne, Lugano, Winterthur, and Sankt Gallen.

Switzerland is home to a number of international music festivals. The International Festival of Music, held in late summer in Lucerne, is a leading classical event, and the annual Montreux Jazz Festival attracts a large international audience. There are also numerous American country and western, jazz, and pop events throughout the year, and rock music—including a thriving scene in the national languages—is served by numerous nightclubs and performance spaces. Each summer, hundreds of thousands of electronic dance music fans converge on Zürich for Street Parade, one of the largest techno festivals in the world.

Theatre

Swiss theatre historically has been dominated by religious themes, such as in the Baroque Lucerne Easter Play. During the 18th century the government suppressed the performing arts, but in the 19th century patriotic plays emerged, such as those glorifying Swiss legendary hero William Tell (Tellspiele), and led to the construction of large municipal theatres throughout the country. During the Nazi period in Germany (1933–45), Zürich’s Schauspielhaus (German: “Playhouse”) was an important centre for theatre, where many refugee writers, directors, and actors performed or staged productions. The country’s two most successful postwar dramatists, Max Frisch and Friedrich Dürrenmatt, staged their debut works at the Schauspielhaus, and contemporary playwrights such as Maja Beutler, Thomas Hürlimann, and Matthias Zschokke have worked there and at other theatres throughout Switzerland.

In French-speaking Switzerland, theatrical works are often performed in schools and other “offstage” settings. Similarly, there are several independent theatrical troupes in the country’s Italian- and Romansh-speaking cities and towns, which have no major municipal theatres. Zürich, Geneva, and Lausanne have opera houses. There are professional ballet ensembles in these cities and Basel, as well as several modern dance troupes.

Science

Swiss scientists have included Paracelsus (Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim), who in the 16th century brought chemistry into the field of medicine; Daniel, Jakob, and Johann Bernoulli of Basel, who made significant contributions to mathematics; the innovative mathematician Leonhard Euler; the naturalist and pioneer Alpine scholar Horace Bénédict de Saussure; and the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Alfred Werner. Zürich’s Federal Institute of Technology has produced many Nobel Prize winners, among them physicists Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Pauli, and Heinrich Rohrer. The Geneva-based CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) is one of the largest and most-versatile research facilities in the world. English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee developed the structure of the World Wide Web while at CERN, and in 2012 CERN’s Large Hadron Collider confirmed the existence of the Higgs boson. Switzerland has also nurtured some of the leading social scientists of the modern age, including economist Jean-Charles-Léonard Simonde de Sismondi, linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, and psychologists Jean Piaget and Carl Jung.