Switzerland Memories Quotes

TO MY COLLABORATOR who buys the ink and paper laughs and, in fact, does all the really difficult part of the business this book is gratefully dedicated in memory of a winter’s morning in Switzerland

On the basis of decades of experiments, plants are starting to be regarded as beings capable of calculation and choice, learning and memory. A few years ago, Switzerland, amid much less rational polemics, became the first country in the world to affirm the rights of plants with a special declaration. But

We rented a furnished room in the center of town, in an old house. The landlady had furniture that she had brought from Russia before the Revolution (1917); she boasted about the fact that she had studied medicine in Switzerland and had met Lenin and Weitzman, who were temporarily living there, too. Looking at antiques is one thing, but using 30 to 40 year old, rickety furniture was a different story. Soon, I found people who wanted to take English lessons and that tided us over the first few months. In June, when Yuda graduated, he started working and I found a position in an evening language school.

I feel as my whole childhood, teenager hood and adulthood was stolen only in order to be allowed to stay in Switzerland.

The skepticism with which too many Germans regarded the Weimar Republic wasn’t primarily the result of its questionable efficacy. By August 1928, less than ten years after it had come into existence, it had gone through no fewer than ten chancellors, yes. But over the past two to three years it had undoubtedly made economic advances. The resentment of the great nations defeated in the First World War lay not in the realm of finance but in cultural memory: the republic itself, with its democratic form of government, was held in the dominant narrative to be foreign, imported from the histories of the victorious nations of the United States (Declaration of Independence, Bill of Rights), France (French Revolution), and, with a great deal of historical benevolence, England (Magna Carta). Even Switzerland had its Pledge of Allegiance to the Confederation, but in terms of democratic creation myths, on the other hand, Germany pretty much drew a blank. From this point of view the Weimar Constitution was not a gift but an accident of the country’s own history, a kind of permanent collateral damage from the outcome of the war, along with the reparations imposed at Versailles, and not much easier to bear. For this reason a truly self-defined Germany would—on the basis of its own history—be many

The thought of even more permanent separation of children through boarding schools or foster homes is even more troublesome, and Roms in countries such as Norway, Sweden, Hungary and Switzerland are still haunted by the memory of periods in the history of their communities during which the practice of separating Romani children from their families was encouraged by authorities as a means of forcibly integrating the young generations of Roms into mainstream society.

65An overview is Joachim Remak, A Very Civil War. The Swiss Sonderbund War of 1847. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1993. The ideological issues are explored by Oliver Zimmer, A Contested Nation. History, Memory and Nationalism in Switzerland, 1761–1891. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

But here’s where it gets really important: The way we remember yesterday profoundly shapes the choices we make today. We are not impartial decision makers, interpreting each new moment of choice from a position of neutrality. We are not like Switzerland. In fact, the way our memories drive us is more like a frenzied South American dictator. Our memories are dramatic and often lead us to make sweeping generalizations about our past, present, and future.