Swiss German Quotes

In this world . . . It's Heaven when: The French are chefs The British are police The Germans are engineers The Swiss are bankers And the Italians are lovers It's Hell when: The English are chefs The Germans are police The French are engineers The Swiss are lovers And the Italians are bankers.

As German-Swiss author Hermann Hesse said, the more we mature, the younger we grow. What a beautiful sentiment!

Gun control zealots compare the United States and England to show that murder rates are lower where restrictions on ownership of firearms are more severe. But you could just as easily compare Switzerland and Germany, the Swiss having lower murder rates than the Germans, even though gun ownership is three times higher in Switzerland. Other countries with high rates of gun ownership and low murder rates include Israel, New Zealand, and Finland.

She can speak German, Italian, Spanish, Swiss, but French is different, French is bread baking in her mother’s oven, French is her father’s hands carving wood, French is Estele murmuring to her garden.

The Swiss are the only nation to make the Germans appear inefficient, the French undiplomatic and the Texans poor.

Cal: "I'm really sorry, Professor, but how do you explain these ? Swiss Cake Rolls. That doesn't rhyme; it's not cute; it's not childlike. And this is one of our most-respected snack foods, is it not? How is that, Professor? Hmmm?" Eliot: "Well, isn't it obvious? We trust the Swiss for their ability to engineer things, to build with precision." Cal: "We do?" Eliot: "Do I even have to mention Swiss watches? Swiss Army knives? Swiss cheese? If anyone can build a non-threatening, non-lethal snack cake, it's the Swiss. They're neutral, we can trust them not to attack us with trans-fatty acids and sugar. I think you would feel differently if they were German Cake Rolls. North Korean Cake Rolls. I bet you wouldn't eat them." Cal: "I bet I would.

Thou shalt make no image, no abstraction, including none of THE American, THE Swiss, THE German.

William Gerbers” was a German-Swiss businessman living in Liverpool who had been conjured into being by Garbo before he even arrived in Britain.

and I still have to quell an impulse to go up to strangers in pubs and restaurants and say, “Excuse me, can I give you a tip that’ll help stop those peas bouncing all over the table?” Germans are flummoxed by humor, the Swiss have no concept of fun,

What would be revealed if American corporations were examined through the same sharp lens of historical confrontation as the one then being trained on German corporations that relied on Jewish slave labor during World War II and the Swiss banks that robbed victims of the Holocaust of their fortunes?

Balzampleu!” said the Swiss, who, despite the fine collection of oaths boasted by the German language, had taken to swearing in French.

Du bisch au ohni Schminki hübsch gnug. 2007

His Andy Warhol flop of bleached hair is stylistic self-immolation, but a Swiss-German drug-dealer in his fifties does not welcome fashion advice from an Englishman.

the colonists best suited to the Georgia experiment were not English but Swiss, German, French Huguenot, and Scottish Highlander, all of whom seemed prepared for lives of hardship, arriving as whole communities of farming families.

the police are British, the chefs Italian, the mechanics German, the lovers French, and it’s all organized by the Swiss. Hell is where the police are German, the chefs are British, the mechanics French, and it is all organized by the Italians.

The Greek word “nostalgia” derives from the root nostros, meaning “return home,” and algia, meaning “longing.” Doctors in seventeenth-century Europe considered nostalgia an illness, like the flu, mainly suffered by displaced migrant servants, soldiers, and job seekers, and curable through opium, leeches, or, for the affluent, a journey to the Swiss Alps. Throughout time, such feeling has been widely acknowledged. The Portuguese have the term saudade. The Russians have toska. The Czechs have litost. Others too name the feeling: for Romanians, it’s dor, for Germans, it’s heimweh. The Welsh have hiraeth, the Spanish mal de corazon. Many

The world is broken up by tribalism—the British, the German, the Swiss, the Hindu, the Buddhist, are tribes. See the fact that they are tribes, glorified as nations, and that this tribalism is creating havoc in the world, bringing wars in the world. Each tribe thinks in its own culture opposed to other cultures. But tribalism is the root, not the culture. Observing the fact of that is the action that frees the brain from the condition of tribalism. You see actually, not theoretically or ideationally, the fact that tribalism glorified as nations is one of the causes of war. That is a fact. There are other causes of war, economics and so on, but one of the causes is tribalism. When you see that, perceive that, and see that cannot bring about peace, the very perception frees the brain from its conditioning of tribalism. One of the factors of contention throughout the world is religion. You are a Catholic, I am a Muslim, based on ideas, propaganda of hundreds or thousands of years; the Hindu and the Buddhist ideas are of thousands of years. We have been programmed like a computer. That programming has brought about great architecture, great paintings, great music, but it has not brought peace to mankind. When you see the fact of that, you do not belong to any religion. When there are half a dozen gurus in the same place, they bring about misery, contradiction, conflict: “My guru is better than yours; my group is more sanctified than yours; I have been initiated, you have not.” You know all the nonsense that goes on. So when you see all this around you as an actual fact, then you do not belong to any group, to any guru, to any religion, to any political commitment of ideas. In the serious urgency to live peacefully there must be freedom from all this because they are the causes of dissension, division. Truth is not yours or mine. It does not belong to any church, to any group, to any religion. The brain must be free to discover it. And peace can exist only when there is freedom from fallacy. You know, for most of us, to be so drastic about things is very difficult, because we have taken security in things of illusion, in things that are not facts, and it is very difficult to let them go. It is not a matter of exercising will, or taking a decision: “I will not belong to anything” is another fallacy. We commit ourselves to some group, to an idea, to religious quackery, because we think it is some kind of security for us. In all these things there is no security, and therefore there is no peace. The brain must be secure; but the brain, with its thought, has sought security in things that are illusory.

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking." by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) German-Swiss philosopher and writer. Elizabeth Bennet: I'm very fond of walking. Mr. Darcy: Yes... yes I know. (from Pride & Prejudice) A man’s mind plans his way [as he journeys through life], But the Lord directs his steps and establishes them. (from the Bible, Proverbs 16:9 AMP) This is how we know what love is, Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters. (from the Bible, 1 John 3:16 NIV)

I had tracked down a little cafe in the next village, with a television set that was going to show the World Cup Final on the Saturday. I arrived there mid-morning when it was still deserted, had a couple of beers, ordered a sensational conejo au Franco, and then sat, drinking coffee, and watching the room fill up. With Germans. I was expecting plenty of locals and a sprinkling of tourists, even in an obscure little outpost like this, but not half the population of Dortmund. In fact, I came to the slow realisation as they poured in and sat around me . . . that I was the only Englishman there. They were very friendly, but there were many of them, and all my exits were cut off. What strategy could I employ? It was too late to pretend that I was German. I’d greeted the early arrivals with ‘Guten Tag! Ich liebe Deutschland’, but within a few seconds found myself conversing in English, in which they were all fluent. Perhaps, I hoped, they would think that I was an English-speaker but not actually English. A Rhodesian, possibly, or a Canadian, there just out of curiosity, to try to pick up the rules of this so-called ‘Beautiful Game’. But I knew that I lacked the self-control to fake an attitude of benevolent detachment while watching what was arguably the most important event since the Crucifixion, so I plumped for the role of the ultra-sporting, frightfully decent Upper-Class Twit, and consequently found myself shouting ‘Oh, well played, Germany!’ when Helmut Haller opened the scoring in the twelfth minute, and managing to restrain myself, when Geoff Hurst equalised, to ‘Good show! Bit lucky though!’ My fixed grin and easy manner did not betray the writhing contortions of my hands and legs beneath the table, however, and when Martin Peters put us ahead twelve minutes from the end, I clapped a little too violently; I tried to compensate with ‘Come on Germany! Give us a game!’ but that seemed to strike the wrong note. The most testing moment, though, came in the last minute of normal time when Uwe Seeler fouled Jackie Charlton, and the pig-dog dolt of a Swiss referee, finally revealing his Nazi credentials, had the gall to penalise England, and then ignored Schnellinger’s blatant handball, allowing a Prussian swine named Weber to draw the game. I sat there applauding warmly, as a horde of fat, arrogant, sausage-eating Krauts capered around me, spilling beer and celebrating their racial superiority.

To say that my German friends were nonpolitical, and to say no more, is to libel them. As in nearly all European countries, a very much larger proportion of Germans than Americans turns out for political meetings, political discussions, and local and general elections. Where the German was (in contrast with the American) nonpolitical was at a deeper level. He was habitually deficient in the sense of political power that the American possesses (and the Englishman, the Frenchman, the Scandinavian, and the Swiss). He saw the State in such majesty and magnificence, and himself in such insignificance, that he could not relate himself to the actual operation of the State. One

While the Austrian crown was dissolving like jelly in your fingers, everyone wanted Swiss francs and American dollars, and large numbers of foreigners exploited the economic situation to feed on the twitching corpse of the old Austrian currency. Austria was ‘discovered’, and became disastrously popular with foreign visitors in a parody of the society season. All the hotels in Vienna were crammed full with these vultures; they would buy anything, from toothbrushes to country estates; they cleared out private collections of antiquities and the antique dealers’ shops before the owners realised how badly they had been robbed and cheated in their time of need. Hotel receptionists from Switzerland and Dutch shorthand typists stayed in the princely apartments of the Ringstrasse hotels. Incredible as it may seem, I can vouch for it that for a long time the famous, de luxe Hotel de l’Europe in Salzburg was entirely booked by unemployed members of the English proletariat, who could live here more cheaply than in their slums at home, thanks to the generous unemployment benefit they received. Anything that was not nailed down disappeared. Word gradually spread of the cheap living and low prices in Austria. Greedy visitors came from further and further afield, from Sweden, from France, and you heard more Italian, French, Turkish and Romanian than German spoken in the streets of the city centre of Vienna.

WHAT SHOULD BE CLEAR NOW is that lone individuals can’t define social identities as they see fit. Communities give social identities their power. But these communities can also create pain because individual freedom is, by definition, constrained by social identity. Being left out of—or, maybe worse, being cast out by—a community is an incredibly painful experience. But the need for structure, to exist in relation to other people, requires limits. Without inclusion and exclusion there is no social structure. To be a woman or man, White, Asian American, or Black, German, or Swiss or any other social identity requires acceptance of a shared view of these identities, not a freely chosen construction of self.

Heisenberg repeated his story about the German bomb program to anyone who would listen for the rest of his life. Goudsmit, who had access to the Farm Hall reports and had seen the pathetic remnants of the Nazi nuclear program firsthand, knew Heisenberg’s story was a fabrication. But, with the existence of the Farm Hall transcripts itself classified, Goudsmit could state only that Heisenberg was lying, without explaining how he knew. The first popular account of the Manhattan Project, Brighter Than a Thousand Suns, written by the Swiss journalist Robert Jungk in 1958, repeated Heisenberg’s story almost verbatim. So did The Virus House, the first book dedicated solely to the history of the German bomb program, which relied heavily on interviews from Heisenberg and his fellow former Farm Hall detainees. (The author, David Irving, was later revealed to be a Holocaust denier.)

The research is still in its infancy, as we have seen, but, in early March 2020, Nature Communications published a model study that followed the link all the way from shelf to sickbed in one case: malaria, one of those beneath-the-radar diseases, affecting some 230 million and killing 400,000 per year, the vast majority in rainforest biomes. Deforestation is a boost for the mosquito vectors. More sunlight reaches the soil where the larvae develop; when biodiversity retreats, fewer animals prey on them. Nigeria suffers most from malaria due to deforestation. It is largely caused by the export of timber and cocoa. Such commodities end up in the north: consumers with the greatest malaria footprint are the cocoa-guzzling Dutch and Belgians, Swiss and Germans. 'In this unequal value chain, ecosystem degradation and malaria risk are borne by low-income producers' - or, in plainer terms: the Europeans get the chocolate and the profits, the Africans the mosquitos.

As one of our Swiss friends put it: “Now every German tailor living in Japan, China, or Moscow feels that he has the German navy and all of Germany’s power behind him. This proud consciousness sends him into an insane rapture: the German has finally lived to see the day when he can say with pride, relying on his own state, like an Englishman or an American, ‘I am a German.’ True, when the Englishman or American says ‘I am an Englishman,’ or ‘I am an American,’ he is saying ‘I am a free man.’ The German, however, is saying ‘I am a slave, but my emperor is stronger than all other princes, and the German soldier who is strangling me will strangle all of you.’ “ Will the German people content themselves with this feeling of pride for long? Who can say? They have thirsted so long for the grace of a unified state, a single cudgel, that has now descended upon them that one must assume they will want to enjoy it for quite some time yet. Every nation has its own tastes, and the German nation has a particular taste for a strong cudgel in the form of the state.

I always had trouble with the feet of Jón the First, or Pre-Jón, as I called him later. He would frequently put them in front of me in the evening and tell me to take off his socks and rub his toes, soles, heels and calves. It was quite impossible for me to love these Icelandic men's feet that were shaped like birch stumps, hard and chunky, and screaming white as the wood when the bark is stripped from it. Yes, and as cold and damp, too. The toes had horny nails that resembled dead buds in a frosty spring. Nor can I forget the smell, for malodorous feet were very common in the post-war years when men wore nylon socks and practically slept in their shoes. How was it possible to love these Icelandic men? Who belched at the meal table and farted constantly. After four Icelandic husbands and a whole load of casual lovers I had become a vrai connaisseur of flatulence, could describe its species and varieties in the way that a wine-taster knows his wines. The howling backfire, the load, the gas bomb and the Luftwaffe were names I used most. The coffee belch and the silencer were also well-known quantities, but the worst were the date farts, a speciality of Bæring of Westfjord. Icelandic men don’t know how to behave: they never have and never will, but they are generally good fun. At least, Icelandic women think so. They seem to come with this inner emergency box, filled with humour and irony, which they always carry around with them and can open for useful items if things get too rough, and it must be a hereditary gift of the generations. Anyone who loses their way in the mountains and gets snowed in or spends the whole weekend stuck in a lift can always open this special Icelandic emergency box and get out of the situation with a good story. After wandering the world and living on the Continent I had long tired of well-behaved, fart-free gentlemen who opened the door and paid the bills but never had a story to tell and were either completely asexual or demanded skin-burning action until the morning light. Swiss watch salesmen who only knew of “sechs” as their wake-up hour, or hairy French apes who always required their twelve rounds of screwing after the six-course meal. I suppose I liked German men the best. They were a suitable mixture of belching northerner and cultivated southerner, of orderly westerner and crazy easterner, but in the post-war years they were of course broken men. There was little you could do with them except try to put them right first. And who had the time for that? Londoners are positive and jolly, but their famous irony struck me as mechanical and wearisome in the long run. As if that irony machine had eaten away their real essence. The French machine, on the other hand, is fuelled by seriousness alone, and the Frogs can drive you beyond the limit when they get going with their philosophical noun-dropping. The Italian worships every woman like a queen until he gets her home, when she suddenly turns into a slut. The Yank is one hell of a guy who thinks big: he always wants to take you the moon. At the same time, however, he is as smug and petty as the meanest seamstress, and has a fit if someone eats his peanut butter sandwich aboard the space shuttle. I found Russians interesting. In fact they were the most Icelandic of all: drank every glass to the bottom and threw themselves into any jollity, knew countless stories and never talked seriously unless at the bottom of the bottle, when they began to wail for their mother who lived a thousand miles away but came on foot to bring them their clean laundry once a month. They were completely crazy and were better athletes in bed than my dear countrymen, but in the end I had enough of all their pommel-horse routines. Nordic men are all as tactless as Icelanders. They get drunk over dinner, laugh loudly and fart, eventually start “singing” even in public restaurants where people have paid to escape the tumult of

But every once in a great while, the pull of her heritage would hit her, and Grand-mere would cook something real. I could never figure out what it was that triggered her, but I would come home from school to a glorious aroma. An Apfel-strudel, with paper-thin pastry wrapped around chunks of apples and nuts and raisins. The thick smoked pork chops called Kasseler ribs, braised in apple cider and served with caraway-laced sauerkraut. A rich baked dish with sausages, duck, and white beans. And hoppel poppel. A traditional German recipe handed down from her mother. I haven't even thought of it in years. But when my mom left, it was the only thing I could think to do for Joe, who was confused and heartbroken, and it was my best way to try to get something in him that didn't come in a cardboard container. I never got to learn at her knee the way many granddaughters learn to cook; she never shared the few recipes that were part of my ancestry. But hoppel poppel is fly by the seat of your pants, it doesn't need a recipe; it's a mess, just like me. It's just what the soul needs. I grab an onion, and chop half of it. I cut up the cold cooked potatoes into chunks. I pull one of my giant hot dogs out, and cut it into thick coins. Grand-mere used ham, but Joe loved it with hot dogs, and I do too. Plus I don't have ham. I whisk six eggs in a bowl, and put some butter on to melt. The onions and potatoes go in, and while they are cooking, I grate a pile of Swiss cheese, nicking my knuckle, but catching myself before I bleed into my breakfast. By the time I get a Band-Aid on it, the onions have begun to burn a little, but I don't care. I dump in the hot dogs and hear them sizzle, turning down the heat so that I don't continue to char the onions. When the hot dogs are spitting and getting a little browned, I add the eggs and stir up the whole mess like a scramble. When the eggs are pretty much set, I sprinkle the cheese over the top and take it off the heat, letting the cheese melt while I pop three slices of bread in the toaster. When the toast is done, I butter it, and eat the whole mess on the counter, using the crispy buttered toast to scoop chunk of egg, potato, and hot dog into my mouth, strings of cheese hanging down my chin. Even with the burnt onions, and having overcooked the eggs to rubbery bits, it is exactly what I need.

The radial patterning of Protestantism allows us to use a county’s proximity to Wittenberg to isolate—in a statistical sense—that part of the variation in Protestantism that we know is due to a county’s proximity to Wittenberg and not to greater literacy or other factors. In a sense, we can think of this as an experiment in which different counties were experimentally assigned different dosages of Protestantism to test for its effects. Distance from Wittenberg allows us to figure out how big that experimental dosage was. Then, we can see if this “assigned” dosage of Protestantism is still associated with greater literacy and more schools. If it is, we can infer from this natural experiment that Protestantism did indeed cause greater literacy.16 The results of this statistical razzle-dazzle are striking. Not only do Prussian counties closer to Wittenberg have higher shares of Protestants, but those additional Protestants are associated with greater literacy and more schools. This indicates that the wave of Protestantism created by the Reformation raised literacy and schooling rates in its wake. Despite Prussia’s having a high average literacy rate in 1871, counties made up entirely of Protestants had literacy rates nearly 20 percentile points higher than those that were all Catholic.18 FIGURE P.2. The percentage of Protestants in Prussian counties in 1871.17 The map highlights some German cities, including the epicenter of the Reformation, Wittenberg, and Mainz, the charter town where Johannes Gutenberg produced his eponymous printing press. These same patterns can be spotted elsewhere in 19th-century Europe—and today—in missionized regions around the globe. In 19th-century Switzerland, other aftershocks of the Reformation have been detected in a battery of cognitive tests given to Swiss army recruits. Young men from all-Protestant districts were not only 11 percentile points more likely to be “high performers” on reading tests compared to those from all-Catholic districts, but this advantage bled over into their scores in math, history, and writing. These relationships hold even when a district’s population density, fertility, and economic complexity are kept constant. As in Prussia, the closer a community was to one of the two epicenters of the Swiss Reformation—Zurich or Geneva—the more Protestants it had in the 19th century. Notably, proximity to other Swiss cities, such as Bern and Basel, doesn’t reveal this relationship. As is the case in Prussia, this setup allows us to finger Protestantism as driving the spread of greater literacy as well as the smaller improvements in writing and math abilities.

I remember once, on a family skiing trip to the Alps, Dad’s practical joking got all of us into a particularly tight spot. I must have been about age ten at the time, and was quietly excited when Dad spotted a gag that was begging to be played out on the very serious-looking Swiss-German family in the room next door to us. Each morning their whole family would come downstairs, the mother dressed head to toe in furs, the father in a tight-fitting ski suit and white neck scarf, and their slightly overweight, rather snooty-looking thirteen-year-old son behind, often pulling faces at me. The hotel had the customary practice of having a breakfast form that you could hang on your door handle the night before if you wanted to eat in your room. Dad thought it would be fun to fill out our form, order 35 boiled eggs, 65 German sausages, and 17 kippers, then hang it on the Swiss-German family’s door. It was too good a gag to pass up. We didn’t tell Mum, who would have gone mad, but instead filled out the form with great hilarity, and sneaked out last thing before bed and hung it on their door handle. At 7:00 A.M. we heard the father angrily sending the order back. So we repeated the gag the next day. And the next. Each morning the father got more and more irate, until eventually Mum got wind of what we had been doing and made me go around to apologize. (I don’t know why I had to do the apologizing when the whole thing had been Dad’s idea, but I guess Mum thought I would be less likely to get in trouble, being so small.) Anyway, I sensed it was a bad idea to go and own up, and sure enough it was. From that moment onward, despite my apology, I was a marked man as far as their son was concerned. It all came to a head when I was walking down the corridor on the last evening, after a day’s skiing, and I was just wearing my ski thermal leggings and a T-shirt. The spotty, overweight teenager came out of his room and saw me walking past him in what were effectively ladies’ tights. He pointed at me, called me a sissy, started to laugh sarcastically, and put his hands on his hips in a very camp fashion. Despite the age and size gap between us, I leapt on him, knocked him to the ground, and hit him as hard as I could. His father heard the commotion and raced out of his room to find his son with a bloody nose and crying hysterically (and overdramatically). That really was the straw that broke the camel’s back, and I was hauled to my parents’ room by the boy’s father and made to explain my behavior to Mum and Dad. Dad was hiding a wry grin, but Mum was truly horrified, and I was grounded. So ended another cracking family holiday!

After wandering the world and living on the Continent I had long tired of well-behaved, fart-free gentlemen who opened the door and paid the bills but never had a story to tell and were either completely asexual or demanded skin-burning action until the morning light. Swiss watch salesmen who only knew of “sechs” as their wake-up hour, or hairy French apes who always required their twelve rounds of screwing after the six-course meal. I suppose I liked German men the best. They were a suitable mixture of belching northerner and cultivated southerner, of orderly westerner and crazy easterner, but in the post-war years they were of course broken men. There was little you could do with them except try to put them right first. And who had the time for that? Londoners are positive and jolly, but their famous irony struck me as mechanical and wearisome in the long run. As if that irony machine had eaten away their real essence. The French machine, on the other hand, is fuelled by seriousness alone, and the Frogs can drive you beyond the limit when they get going with their philosophical noun-dropping. The Italian worships every woman like a queen until he gets her home, when she suddenly turns into a slut. The Yank is one hell of a guy who thinks big: he always wants to take you the moon. At the same time, however, he is as smug and petty as the meanest seamstress, and has a fit if someone eats his peanut butter sandwich aboard the space shuttle. I found Russians interesting. In fact they were the most Icelandic of all: drank every glass to the bottom and threw themselves into any jollity, knew countless stories and never talked seriously unless at the bottom of the bottle, when they began to wail for their mother who lived a thousand miles away but came on foot to bring them their clean laundry once a month. They were completely crazy and were better athletes in bed than my dear countrymen, but in the end I had enough of all their pommel-horse routines. Nordic men are all as tactless as Icelanders. They get drunk over dinner, laugh loudly and fart, eventually start “singing” even in public restaurants where people have paid to escape the tumult of the world. But their wallets always waited cold sober in the cloakroom while the Icelandic purse lay open for all in the middle of the table. Our men were the greater Vikings in this regard. “Reputation is king, the rest is crap!” my Bæring from Bolungarvík used to say. Every evening had to be legendary, anything else was a defeat. But the morning after they turned into weak-willed doughboys. But all the same I did succeed in loving them, those Icelandic clodhoppers, at least down as far as their knees. Below there, things did not go as well. And when the feet of Jón Pre-Jón popped out of me in the maternity ward, it was enough. The resemblances were small and exact: Jón’s feet in bonsai form. I instantly acquired a physical intolerance for the father, and forbade him to come in and see the baby. All I heard was the note of surprise in the bass voice out in the corridor when the midwife told him she had ordered him a taxi. From that day on I made it a rule: I sacked my men by calling a car. ‘The taxi is here,’ became my favourite sentence.

Even in some industrialized nations, time is viewed more as an estimate than an exact science. Brazilians, Spaniards, and Southeast Indians, for instance, don’t value punctuality as highly as the Swiss, Germans or North Americans and have a pretty flexible idea of what’s considered “on time.

Public opinion has so far not been averse to the blackmailing of Swiss bankers and German industrialists, but it might look less kindly on the blackmailing of starving Polish peasants. Jews who lost family members during the Nazi holocaust might also take a jaundiced view of the WJRO’s machinations. Claiming to be the legitimate heir of those who perished in order to appropriate their assets could easily be mistaken for grave-robbery.

At Joncherey, near the German-Swiss border, a French soldier, Corporal André Peugeot, was killed, the first French victim of a war that was to claim more than a million French lives.

Like many Swiss-Germans, Wisner was rugged man of nature who had a gift for machinery and engineering. His grandfather was Johannes Wiesner, a Swiss mercenary from the Canton of Zürich. The German surname “Wiesner” means “of the meadows.

I find it difficult to remember all of the details of our journey after leaving Mannheim. At the time I was depressed and extremely tired. The children must have felt the same way since they were just there. The unflappable joy they always demonstrated and the sparkle in their eyes was missing. An unspeakable sadness had settled in. Being children they were being denied the right to be happy, to be able to celebrate their youth and look forward to a promising future. Now they hardly ever complained or cried. They sometimes said that they were hungry and asked if we had food, but accepted the fact that we were all hungry most of the time. My only vivid recollection is that we were headed towards the Bodensee, or what is called Lake Constance, near the Swiss border. The only reason we were going there was that it seemed rural, and more distant from the advancing front and active war zone. Perhaps I felt that neutral Switzerland was close by and if need be we could appeal to someone’s compassion and escape. Of course this was only a fleeting thought and could never happen…. It also never occurred to me that our train could become an inviting target for an Allied airplane.

I find it difficult to remember all of the details of our journey after leaving Mannheim. At the time I was depressed and extremely tired. The children must have felt the same way since they were just there. The unflappable joy they always demonstrated and the sparkle in their eyes was missing. An unspeakable sadness had settled in. Being children they were being denied the right to be happy, to be able to celebrate their youth and look forward to a promising future. Now they hardly ever complained or cried. They sometimes said that they were hungry and asked if we had food, but accepted the fact that we were all hungry most of the time. My only vivid recollection is that we were headed by train towards the Bodensee, or what is called Lake Constance, near the Swiss border. The only reason we were going there was that it seemed rural, and more distant from the advancing front and active war zone. Perhaps I felt that neutral Switzerland was close by and if need be we could appeal to someone’s compassion and escape. Of course this was only a fleeting thought and could never happen….

Of the two dozen spies or so deployed to Britain between September and November 1940, five were German, while the others were variously Dutch, Scandinavian, Cuban, Swiss, Belgian, Spanish, and Czechoslovak. These were far removed from the superspies imagined by a nervous British public. Most were poorly trained and petrified; some spoke no English at all and had only a sketchy notion of the country they were supposed to blend into. They did not look like your next-door neighbor—they looked like spies. Only a few were genuine Nazis. The rest were variously motivated by greed, adventure, fear, stupidity, and blackmail. Their number included several criminals, degenerates, and alcoholics. According to one MI5 report, “a high proportion suffered from venereal disease.” Some had opportunistically volunteered to spy against Britain, with the intention of defecting. Some were anti-Nazi from the outset. This motley collection of invasion spies had only this in common: not a single one escaped detection.

My Dear Benjamin Zander, You have just completed a presentation to the leadership of the North Shore–Long Island Jewish Health System. I “should” be immediately returning to my job as one of the System’s Vice Presidents (such a fancy title, no?), but not without first sitting down and briefly telling you of how your words, energy, and humour affected me this day. I am the man who approached you and told you of my emotional “reunion” with my father through your presentation. He was Swiss-German, and throughout my adult life I have struggled to explain to myself why, in the 25 years that he was with me, he could never, even once, say to me “I love you.” Oh, we did many things as a family, and I suppose his “teachings” in the form of admonishments have always remained with me, though softened, as I had the joy of becoming a father myself to 5 beautiful children. You told us, as you were about to play Chopin, to use the time to reflect on someone no longer in our lives. I thought about my father and again about that nagging question which I could never answer—why couldn’t he say “I love you”?

Unlike the top-down American, British, Chinese, and French, German, the Swiss are a bottom-up society.

through any structure without detection by his prey. He was a flawless assassin. It was just before five local time when Steven settled into the plush leather seating of the first-class compartment. The Deutsche Bahn Intercity Express, or ICE, was a high-speed train connecting major cities across Germany with other major European destinations. The trip to Frankfurt would take about four hours, giving him time to spend some rare personal time with his team. Slash was the first to find him. The men shook hands and sat down. Typically, these two longtime friends would chest bump in a hearty bro-mance sort of way, but it would be out of place for Europe. “Hey, buddy,” said Steven. “Switzerland is our new home away from home.” “It appears so, although the terrain isn’t that different from our place in Tennessee,” said Slash. “I see lots of fishin’ and huntin’ opportunities out there.” Slash grew up on his parents’ farm atop the Cumberland Plateau of Tennessee about halfway between Nashville and Knoxville. His parents were retired and spent their days farming while raising ducks, rabbits and some livestock. While other kids spent their free time on PlayStation, Slash grew up in the woods, learning survival skills. During his time with the SEAL Teams, he earned a reputation as an expert in close-quarters combat, especially using a variety of knives—hence the nickname Slash. “Beats the heck out of the desert, doesn’t it?” asked Steven. After his service ended, Slash tried a few different security outfits like Blackwater, protecting the Saudi royal family or standing guard outside some safe house in Oman. “I’m not saying the desert won’t call us back someday, but I’ll take the Swiss cheese and German chocolate over shawarma and falafel every friggin’ day!” “Hell yeah,” said Slash. “When are you comin’ down for some ham and beans, along with some butter-soaked cornbread? My folks really wanna meet you.” “I need to, buddy,” replied Steven. “This summer will be nuts for me. Hey, when does deer hunting season open?” “Late September for crossbow and around Thanksgiving otherwise,” replied Slash. Before the guys could set a date, their partners Paul Hittle and Raymond Bower approached their seats. Hittle, code name Bugs, was a former medic with Army Special Forces who left the Green Berets for a well-paying job with DynCorp. DynCorp was a private

Jews were thus being reclaimed as fellow Germans, while their previously asserted racial or ethnic “difference” was disavowed on the grounds that, after all, they had been born in Germany, spoke German as a mother tongue, or at any rate wrote for a German readership. Those exiles whom the Nazis had deprived of their German citizenship on political and racial grounds were now entitled to renaturalization according to Article 116, Paragraph 2 of the German constitution, the Grundgesetz.29 Yet with the exception of Adorno, who renewed his German citizenship in 1955, the public speakers considered here did not seek to repatriate: Arendt, a secular German Jew, never reapplied for German citizenship, even though she took her German readers seriously enough to personally produce German versions of books she had originally written in English. In a similar vein, Weiss, son of a Jewish-Hungarian father and a Swiss mother, acquired Swedish citizenship

It was not always possible to take that war seriously. In the first place I could not understand why we, the French, and the English were fighting the Germans and the Austrians. Being in vaudeville all of my life had made me international-minded. I had met too many kindly German performers—singers and acrobats and musicians—to believe they could be as evil as they were being portrayed in our newspapers. Having known Germans, Japanese jugglers, Chinese magicians, Italian tenors, Swiss yodelers and bell-ringers, Irish, Jewish, and Dutch comedians, British dancers, and whirling dervishes from India, I believed people from everywhere in the world were about the same. Not as individuals, of course, but taken as a group.

You are a Toto – a Nobody!” Toto was the designated word to mockingly refer to those who spoke French with a Swiss-German accent.

In Orselina little Margrit was considered a Zücchin, as Swiss-Germans were teasingly called in the Ticino, although

The Hindenburg Disaster During World War I the Germans tried to invade Switzerland using military blimps like the Hindenburg. The invasion was a total disaster because of the handy fork in the Swiss Army knives.

The Swiss current of Reformed theology of Francis Turretin and Johann Heinrich Heidegger differed from the French approach exemplified by the Academy of Saumur. The northern German Reformed line of Bremen or of the Middle-European Herborn Academy differed from that of the Franeker theologians in the tradition of William Ames. At Leiden, the Cocceian or federalist approach was not identical with the Voetian project at Utrecht. Likewise, the British variety of Reformed theology (John Owen, Richard Baxter), with all its diversity, and the several types of Reformed teaching on the Continent each had an emphasis of their own. Methodologically, this means that we no longer can canonize Geneva, or contrast a non-scholastic Calvin with the later scholastic Calvinists as if they represented a uniform movement.

Vincent Harding, an African American Mennonite, who in 1959 called on white Mennonites to “break down the wall of German-Swiss-Dutch backgrounds … [and] lose the cultural stereotype of Mennonitism … for there are some baptized here who are my color, whose parents or grandparents never came near Germany or Switzerland or Holland or Russia.

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the Swiss-German Mission

All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking." by Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) German-Swiss philosopher and writer.

All sorts of efforts were made to populate the Floridas—with anyone: Huguenots, Bermudians, Irish, Germans, Swiss, Scottish Highlanders, even some of the prostitutes being rehabilitated in London’s Magdalen House. Sir Alexander Grant, who dreamed up the idea of transporting the prostitutes to Florida, confessed, with not exactly stunning insight, “Tis true they are not virgins”; nevertheless, he said, they would surely make splendid wives and mothers for such as were likely to live in a place like Florida.5

Hitler scheduled joint plebiscites in Austria and Germany for April 10, 1938. Both populations voted on whether to incorporate the two countries into a single state. The people of Austria cast 99.73 percent of their ballots in favor of Anschluss with Germany. The Germans voted 99.08 percent for unification. ... On March 18. 1938, the German government notified the League of Nations that Austria had cancelled its affiliation. This international body, which had never manifest concern for the plight of the distressed little nation, now debated whether Germany was responsible for paying Austria's delinquent membership dues of 50,000 Swiss francs from January 1 to March 13. This ended the chain of circumstances leading to the unification of Hitler's homeland with the German Reich, an event known to history as "the rape of Austria.

Captain Hank Bracker, author of the multi-award winning book, “The Exciting Story of Cuba” presents “Suppressed I Rise.” This is the true story of Adeline Perry’s struggle to protect and raise her two daughters in foreign, war-torn, Nazi Germany. With her husband stationed in Paris, she is left to fend for herself in a hostile environment that she hardly understands but bravely faces. It recounts the harrowing story of the devastating daily bombings of Mannheim and her experiences confined in a crowded air-raid shelter with a dying woman and four children. Being abused by ruthless Nazis, she fled. This graphic book takes you from the Alsace region on the French border through Germany to Überlingen on the Bodensee near the Swiss frontier. It is a “riveting read” for anyone interested in a personal account of World War II, as seen from the perspective of a refugee caught inside the Third Reich.

This is a global thing going on now, which does have very different, very decentralized cultural attitudes of Swiss, German, Italian hackers—and that is good. Italian hackers behave totally differently than German hackers—wherever they are, they need to make good food; with German hackers, they need to have everything well-structured. I’m not saying the one is better than the other, I’m just saying that each of these decentralized cultures has its very beautiful parts. At the Italian hacker conference you can go to the kitchen and you will see a wonderful place; at the German hacker camp you will see a wonderful internet, but you better not look at the kitchen. Still, the heart of it is we are creating. And I think we find ourselves in some kind of a common consciousness which is totally away from our national identity—from being Germans or from being Italians or from being Americans or whatever—we just see that we want to solve problems, we want to work together. We see this internet censorship, this fight by governments against new technology, as some kind of evolutionary

because the comrades in Berlin think it’s unsuitable for East German children to attend a Swiss school, Anne is taught at home by her mother.

When Germans or Swiss refuse to pay compensation, the heavens cannot contain the righteous indignation of organized American Jewry. But when Jewish elites rob Jewish survivors, no ethical issues arise: it’s just about money.

Union Bank of Switzerland in 1999 by which the bank agreed to pay $1.25 billion into a fund administered by a U.S. District Court: $800 million for restitution of dormant bank accounts; $100 million for compensation for looted assets; and $325 million for payments to former slave laborers at Swiss-owned companies in occupied Europe or at German firms that had put their revenue in Swiss banks and for refugees mistreated by the Swiss.

Violence in the twentieth century has had a lurid, but characteristic, shape. Located in the heart of Europe, Germany and Switzerland share a border. From 1941 to 1945, extreme state violence was common in Germany, but not in Switzerland. Is there a measure adequate to both countries? To have assigned to Switzerland Germany’s rate would have afforded the Swiss an unrealistic sense of their danger, and to have assigned to Germany Switzerland’s rate would have afforded the Germans an unrealistic sense of their safety. To have assigned to both Germany and Switzerland an average of their rates would have astonished the Germans while alarming the Swiss.

Let us begin with the German expression aus dem Amerikanischen, which graces virtually every book or article translated from texts penned by authors that are perceived as “American.”24 What exactly is going on here? “Is ‘American’”—according to Josef Joffe, the American-educated editor of the German weekly Die Zeit—“pronounced differently from ‘English’? That also applies to ‘Austrian’ and ‘Swiss.’”25 But it would never occur to anybody in America, Canada, or Britain to label “a Gottfried Keller translation ‘Translated from the Swiss’ or Wittgenstein’s Tractatus as having been ‘translated from the Austrian.’”26 “Why do the Germans want to force a language on Americans that they don’t even speak?

Because PERLS were complex foreign exchange bets packaged to look like simple and safe bonds, they were subject to abuse by the cheater clients. Although many PERLS looked like bonds issued by a AAA-rated federal agency or company, they actually were an optionlike bet on Japanese yen, German marks, and Swiss or French francs. Because of this appearance, PERLS were especially attractive to devious managers at insurance companies, many of whom wanted to place foreign currency bets without the knowledge of the regulators or their bosses.

European perfumery started in earnest around the turn of the twentieth century, and developed apace with the discovery of aroma chemicals: coumarin, vanillin, cyclamen aldehyde, the great nitro musks. The Great War left industry and cities largely intact and killed countless males. Many factors then conspired to make the period 1918-1939 the golden age of mass perfumery: working women vying for the remaining men, cheap aroma chemicals, cheap labor to harvest the naturals, flourishing visual arts and music, the obsolescence of prewar bourgeois dignity, replaced by irreverence and optimism. The WWII destroyed the great engine of European chemistry (Germany). The tail end of German chemistry on the Rhine lay in the neutral Switzerland and was untouched, which is wy today two of the biggest perfumery houses in the world (Firmenich and Givaudan) are Swiss. Postwar France stank. In 1951, six years after the Liberation, only one household in fifteen had an internal bathroom. The Paris Metro at rush hour was famous for its unwashed stench. Given cost constraints, French perfumes in those years ('50) had an air de famille, a perfumey feel based on then-cheap drydown materials like sandalwood oil and salicylate esters. Being able to smell someone's fragrance was a sign of intimacy. When a perfume left a trail (called sillage) it was remarked upon, usually unfavourably. It is a strange coincidence, or perhaps a hint of the existence of God, that skin melanin is a polymer spontaneously formed from phenols, and that the perfumery materials that defined American perfumery were also in good part phenols.

Every sensitive person carries in himself old cities enclosed by ancient walls —Robert Walser. A German-speaking Swiss writer, Walser is understood to be the missing link between Kleist and Kafka. Confined to a sanatorium in Herisau, Switzerland, he used to write ‘micrograms’, (undecipherable short texts handwritten in a nano text-size) and take long walks. On the 25th of December 1956 he was found, dead of a heart attack, in a field of snow.

The Guggenheims, of German-speaking Swiss ancestry, suppressed any sympathy they might have had for Germany as munitions contracts rolled in.

Of the historic fault lines in Swiss society, the religious one is the least obvious today, mainly because it's the least clear-cut. There are French-speaking Protestants and German-speaking Catholics, and vice versa. [...] For most Swiss people, where you live, how you vote and what you speak are all more important. Having helped create the Switzerland of today, Christianity has moved from conflict to consensus. A Catholic nun walking through Bern as the Protestant cathedral's bells ring would have once been unthinkable; today it's normal. [... It's] a moment to cherish [...] because it shows what a society can achieve if it tries.

The Case of the Swiss Franc. If a giant money supply was the cause of rising prices, you’d think Switzerland would be overwhelmed by hyperinflation. With a population of just less than nine million, that country has eight times more base money per capita than Canada, whose population is nearly four times the size at thirty-eight million. Instead, the Swiss franc has been one of the world’s most reliable currencies over the past hundred years, with less inflation than the US dollar, British pound, euro, or the preceding German mark. As a result of this track record, many people outside Switzerland are eager to hold assets denominated in Swiss francs. In other words, demand for the Swiss franc is high. To meet this expanding demand, and keep the currency from rising uncomfortably, the Swiss central bank has had to increase supply aggressively.

A 'front-line position' was, in fact, a complex, painfully constructed and carefully integrated defensive zone, largely composed of trenches dug in a zigzag pattern. For example, although the Western Front only extended for something over 400 miles, from the coast to the Swiss frontier, the Germans dug some 1,400 miles of trenches to defend it, in the first front line alone.

The individualistic Spaniards consider the Swiss stuffy and excessively law-abiding. Lively Italians find Norwegians gloomy. French-influenced Vietnamese find Japanese impassive. Most South Americans find Argentineans conceited. Germans think Australians are undisciplined. Japanese see straight-talking Americans as rude.

Linear-active people, like Swedes, Swiss, Dutch and Germans, do one thing at a time, concentrate hard on that thing and do it within a scheduled time period. These people think that in this way they are more efficient and get more done. Multi-active people think they get more done their way. Let us look again at Sven and Antonio.

Anne Fausto-Sterling, a Brown University anthropologist—who had written about gender and prompted Bo Laurent to start the Intersex Society—rekindled the testosterone conversation in her 2000 book Sexing the Body. She suggested that the term “sex hormones” be changed to “growth hormones,” because that’s what they do. Testosterone and estrogen affect the development not only of the ovaries, testicles, vagina, and penis, but also of the liver, muscles, and bones. Indeed, they influence nearly every cell in the body. “So to think of them as growth hormones,” Fausto-Sterling once told the New York Times, “which they are, is to stop worrying that men have a lot of testosterone and women, estrogen.” Back in 1935, the same year testosterone was named, two scientists working independently figured out how to make the hormone from scratch—the key to mass production. Butenandt, the testosterone-from-pee researcher, was funded by the German company Schering. His competitor Leopold Ruzicka was sponsored by Swiss company Ciba. They both accomplished in the laboratory what the body does on its own: they tweaked a few molecules of cholesterol and turned it into testosterone. Cholesterol (in addition to its notorious reputation as an artery-clogger) also serves as the raw material from which the body makes a variety of hormones. The

He suddenly appeared on the world's doorstep, inspiring pan-national awe and reconciliation--a liberal German Jew who clung to his Swiss citizenship and renounced violence.

Raging inwardly I go on climbing, dragging my brute after me, punctuating my 'Khaidas' --come on-- with every curse I have ever known, in every language. Not yet being acquainted with Arabic, exceedingly helpful in such cases I am told, German-Swiss seems at the moment endowed with remarkable properties.

Funds from a Swiss-German bank were made available for him through Jewish and Gentile entrepreneur-partners to build model (in the other sense) dwellings for impoverished Jews, without any obligation, though the evangelical side of the money naturally hoped for the admission of Gospel Light along with the natural kind. The district which filled with the Orthodox became known as Mea Shearim which, were it known to be the work of ardently Christian hands, might surprise its present-day residents.

The German city of Konstanz, which sits on the Swiss border, survived World War 2 without being bombed by leaving all house and streetlights lit at night, making Allied bombers raiding nearby Dornier and Zeppelin aircraft factories think it was part of Switzerland.

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The pyramid in Germany was eventually some six stories high, and only a fraction of the original investment found its way into the securities it was meant to buy. The rest went into all those commissions. One would have difficulty imagining a fiscally more improbable enterprise for the investor. IOS was forbidden by the Securities and Exchange Commission to sell securities in the United States and in later times to American citizens wherever they lived. Thus its offshore designation. It was extruded from Brazil, normally considered a financially tolerant venue. It had recurrent problems with the Swiss and, in the end, was forced to move many of its operations to a closely adjacent site in France. Nonetheless, IOS extracted some billions of dollars from bemused investors, not excluding the salesmen of the firm itself, who were extensively captured by their own sales oratory. James Roosevelt, a son of F.D.R., formerly a distinguished member of Congress and an ambassador to the United Nations; Sir Eric Wyndham White, a highly regarded international civil servant and longtime secretary-general of GATT (the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade); and Dr. Erich Mende, a former vice-chancellor of the German Federal Republic, all lent their names in evident good faith to the enterprise. They and thousands of others responded happily to the compelling Cornfeld appeal, “Do you sincerely want to be rich?