A Swiss lakeside

The Swiss burnish their past, market it to the present, and ensure their future.

They are proud of the fact that they are a Confederation with four independent languages: French, which gives grace and elegance; German for precision and hard work; Italian for warmth and expressiveness; and the little-known but historic Romansch, derived from the Latin spoken by Roman soldiers. As one of our Swiss guides, who had visited India, put it: “It is in the same way that Hindi has been derived from the Sanskrit of the Aryans. Yes?” She smiled and added, “Also, like India, we are made of many states: 26 Cantons, each with its own crest, like your diverse states. But we are all under the flag of the Swiss Confederation: a white cross on a red background. Henri Dunant reversed our flag when he founded his Red Cross.”

The clever Swiss know how to promote themselves effectively, without being obsessed with tradition. They also know how to use their myths and legends to garnish their tales without evoking 21st century ridicule by believing in them. We were standing with our guide on the terrace of Castle Gutsch, high above the glacial basin of Lake Lucerne. Rising on the northern horizon was Mount Pilatus. “Imagine,” our guide said, “as our ancestors had, that a dragon had flown from there...” Her voice trailed a comet tail of legend, scattering a stardust of stories that she spangled over the past, romanticising wars and intrigues, bloody religious conflicts and religious strife, binding it all together the way Lucerne is by its sapphire-blue lake.

Historical memories

On one side of the lake rises the interesting Jesuit Church. The priest who took us around claimed that it had been started by St Francis Xavier before he voyaged to the east. “A visiting Indian couple once told me that this church, and indeed most of the mission churches built by the Spanish and Portuguese in Central and South America, were patterned on the church established by St Xavier in Cochin.” We didn’t want to tell the frail white-haired priest that we were the couple on an earlier tour, years ago. We walked across to Lucerne’s iconic bridge. It’s a wondrous, zigzag bridge, with beautiful old paintings and a tower-prison for cantankerous couples. It was bright with cascading flowers. It is still the most intriguingly beautiful bridge we have seen anywhere. Even here, however, Switzerland’s vexatious past had been preserved. The profusion of flowers concealed the higher parapet of the bridge. In the bad old days, it had been a battlement for the town’s defenders to repel their attackers.

Lucerne’s brilliantly diverse heritage has also been captured on the other side of the lake. The facades of houses were painted like a gallery of folk beliefs. There was an unusual ‘First Supper’ in which a reluctant Christ performed his first miracle, changing water into wine at the Marriage Feast in Cana. Then, on the face of a hotel, painted like an illuminated manuscript, was a fantasy of animals, vegetables and humans.

“What’s the monkey doing there?” we asked.

“Ah!” explained our guide. “In those days before central heating, many women had dogs sleep on their beds to keep them warm. The very rich had monkeys because they have more body heat!” That begged an intimate question, but we didn’t ask it.

After that, the images flickered swiftly. In a cobbled square, a military band in grey and green played the Beatles, Souza and Strauss. Very musical, very festive, but behind it lay a secret: every Swiss citizen has to do a stipulated amount of National Service. Discipline is the key to the nation’s determined neutrality and dogged independence, but status will always assert itself regardless of how egalitarian a society might appear on the surface. We noticed another group, in a different uniform, who was standing around, and asked a drummer and a trombone player who they were. They were dismissive. “They don’t belong to the unit,” they said. “They must be paramedics.” Presumably, paramedics are drawn from conscientious objectors, are non-combatants and, therefore, belong to a lower stratum of military society!
We left them and boarded a twin-deck ferry from a jetty under a twin-spire cathedral, streamed across the crystal-blue waters of Lake Lucerne with the white-on-red cross of Helvetia fluttering over our wake, tied up under the fin-backed dragon mountain. In the red cars of the Pilatus Bahn, the world’s steepest cogwheel railway, recollections rewound as we clickety-clacked from the lake through dark conifers, green meadows and up-frowning cliffs to dock in the 2,432-metre-high Pilatus. Paragliders floated on the wings of the wind, fat ibex chomped on precipitous escarpments, and from breaches in the walls of the dragon-dens, the troubled crests of the Eurozone rimmed the horizon. Briefly, we were above it all, but would the Swiss Franc remain untouched by the turmoil below?

Festive crowds in the cable cars and gondolas taking us down to earth seemed to think so.
Later, we learnt that another age ago, a kilometre-thick glacier had covered Lucerne and ice-melt whirlpools had carved great wells in the hard rock, still preserved in the Glacier Museum. An audio-visual captured that age of mastodons and woolly mammoths and offered the multiple illusions of a Hall of Mirrors with the unlikely effigy of a medieval Turk and his hookah in the midst of it all. Carved on a cliff outside, another illusion had been entombed. The great Lion of Lucerne lay stabbed and dead but still protecting the shield of the last king of France. The famed Swiss Guards had died to the last man, defending the cosseted Louis XVI against the wrath of his own people. The only Swiss Guards now left protect the Pope, and they still wear magnificent medieval uniforms.

What’s in a name?

We delighted in other illusions, and perspectives of a separate reality, in the Rosengart Collection. The late Siegfried Rosengart had been an art dealer and a great friend of Pablo Picasso. The great painter’s surname was really Ruiz, as we had learnt in his home town of Malaga in Spain. Legend has it that, when he had moved to the avant-garde capital of the world, Paris, he had been influenced by Matisse, taken his own mother’s name and added another ‘s’ to it.

That evening, the past and the present melded seamlessly again. In the Stadthauskeller we let our hair down yodelling, dancing and dining at a Swiss folklore evening. Everything was truly rural oriented. Yodelling is a way to make your voice carry across valleys: we were called upon to yodel. We learnt the technique of a new tympanic instrument which involved rotating marbles in a steel bowl. We thought of West Indian steel drum bands. We did not have much success with alphorns but they reminded us of the long Tibetan horns with similar deep valley-spanning tones. There were also musical saws played with bows, a tympanic broom and other adapted village equipments transformed into melodious instruments. The conga line, however, was easy and great fun. All amplified by a high-tech stereo system.

Here too, the mythical, the medieval, and the very modern have been effortlessly integrated.