by Jan Morris
The wine was divine, of course. It seemed to me the essence of everything Burgundian: accomplished, fastidious, exquisitely polite, perhaps a bit Range Rovery, a little lofty in the aftertaste. But then, wouldn’t you be snooty, to find yourself drunk from a plastic mug with a ham sandwich, there in the very vineyard that had made your name revered among connoisseurs for 400 years?
*
Four hundred years? That’s nothing. My last vineyard was in the Rheingau, the greatest of the German wine-growing areas, and had been in the hands of the same patrician family since the fourteenth century. And the Rhine wine I drank, a 1993 Auslese, was from Schloss Johannisberg, which was granted to Prince Metternich by the Hapsburg emperor after the Congress of Vienna, and is still partly the property of his descendants.
If gentlemanly elegance is the hallmark of Burgundy, power seems to impregnate the soil of the Rheingau: constant, immutable power, impervious to history, sometimes latent, sometimes brazen. I stayed at the spa of Bad Kreuznach, on the west side of the river, which is where the spike-helmeted German General Staff had its headquarters in 1917, and where, thirty years later, Konrad Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle met to lay the first foundations of the European Union. Just over the hill to the north is the awful memorial by which the Germans commemorated their victory over France in 1870, and the foundation of the Second Reich. The vineyards around have always been the fiefs of mighty magnates – Prince Frederick of Prussia, the Landgraf of Hessen, Prince Löwenstein, sundry counts and barons, descendants of Metternich.
Where else to drink my wine this time, then, but on the terrace of Schloss Johannisberg itself, which stands on its proud hill, rather like another triumphant memorial, surveying the Rhine below? The landscape is majestic. The scattered towns lie there like so many tenancies. The Rhine itself is power liquefied, marching down past the Lorelei to Koblenz and away to Rotterdam and the sea, alive with its constant stream of barges – whose chugging reaches me, like a hum of bees, above the calm of the vineyards. And look! There goes as telling a symbol of German continuity as you could ask for – the venerable paddle-steamer Goethe, 522 tons, streaming flags and foam, which has been sailing the Rhine in the service of the same owners since before the First World War.
I am looking at one of the Continent’s most fateful frontiers, and one of its most profitable conduits. It is the energy of all Europe that is streaming past down there. Beneath the flowering chestnuts on the belvedere of Schloss Johannisberg I pick up my bottle (with its elegant label of the Schloss itself, and its inscription Fürst von Metternich) as if I am about to pour an oblation. I have never in my life before tasted a top-class Rhine wine, and it precisely suits this high balcony of history. Rich and golden it flows into the glass, and it is a mighty wine, a noble wine, sweet but not sickly, complicated, a wine of elaborate consequence, such as bishops and margrave might toast Holy Roman Emperors in, or field marshals with big moustaches order to celebrate victories.
*
A blossom or two floats past me on to the trestle table. The Goethe is disappearing round the bend towards Rudesheim. Time to go home. Temporarily reassured by my European certainties, with the beauty of the organic, the elegance of self-esteem, the perverse grace of arrogance all blended in a profound continental aftertaste, I head for Wales, tea and game pie.
Switzerland
I saw Switzerland, although it had not joined what was then the European Community, as epitomizing a profounder constancy of Europe. During the 1990s its reputation was tarnished rather by financial scandals and revelations of wartime misbehaviour, but I wrote this piece in reaction to what I saw as unfair and curmudgeonly foreign attitudes to the republic.
Weggis, said the road sign as I was driving south from Austria towards Geneva, and thinking the name had something amiably Dickensian about it, I turned off the highway and went down there to seek a bed for the night. I found myself in a flawlessly efficient family hotel on the shore of Lake Lucerne. Elderly paddle-steamers eased themselves past its gardens. A convention of insurance agents was taking time off in its lounges. Ladies in greyish cardigans strolled along the neighbouring promenade while waltzes sounded from a bandstand. Swans and ducks loitered, waiting to be fed by plump infants in pushchairs. A sense of sexless charm, kind but condescending, hung on the air like a hygienic perfume.
I found myself, in short, in a very nest, hive or cliché of the Swiss. I decided to give myself a few days there, and sort out the mixed feelings with which, as a member of the Welsh minority nation, I contemplate the matter of Swissness.
*
In British minds the very word is liable to raise emotions somewhere between sneer and mockery. It was not always so. In the Middle Ages the Swiss were respected as the fiercest and staunchest of soldiers, and in the nineteenth century Britons seem to have regarded the Helvetic Confederation with almost fulsome admiration. There was nothing sneerable about the Swiss then. They had achieved, it seemed, an ideal state. They were sturdy mountaineers and farmers, nature’s gentlemen. They could teach even Victorian Britain something when it came to mighty works of engineering, and the idea of an entire nation of citizen-soldiers powerfully appealed to the empire builders.
It was doubtless the two world wars that changed this reputation. To many Englishmen the principle of neutrality has always seemed cowardly, escapist or simply wet, and twice in this century it enabled the Swiss not only to avoid the tragedies that had befallen the rest of Europe, but even to profit from them. To the British, Swissness came to seem a less noble abstraction, and few phrases have more exactly expressed a national resentment than the famous remark about the creativity of the Swiss made in Carol Reed’s film The Third Man: ‘They had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.’ Our great-grandfathers would have been astonished to hear it said, but Britons quote it even now, and I remembered it often as I walked along the impeccable Weggis waterfront – the sour judgement of a battle-scarred, impoverished imperial kingdom of epic suffering and performance, about a comfortable, well-ordered, chocolaty republic which had not done a damned thing to help save civilization as we know it.
When those ancient tall-funnelled paddle-steamers docked at the Weggis pier, they were navigated by an officer standing all alone on a flying bridge, with a couple of levers and a long, highly polished speaking tube. He may never have sailed with an Arctic convoy, or taken a destroyer into Malta, but there was certainly nothing laughable about him, so coolly bringing his vessel to the quay. He looked proud, fit, competent and stylish. Style is not a word often associated with the Swiss, but for my tastes there is plenty of it around. The Swiss plutocracy does not flaunt its wealth with much flair – you will see more honest swank in half an hour on Sydney harbour than in a week beside Lake Lucerne – and the Swiss bourgeoisie seems determined never to break out of the ordinary. But Swissness in general does have aspects of true splendour.
Consider the Swiss chalet. Nowadays it is linked indissolubly with that miserable cuckoo clock, and it has been so trivialized by developers and speculative builders that it often has about as much dignity as a mullion-windowed executive residence on a housing estate in Dorking. All over Switzerland, though, examples of the real thing remain, and they are not just beautiful, but magnificent: they are stately homes par excellence, heroic homes, built for men of stature by master craftsmen, as strong as they are hospitable, given individuality by endless variations of detail and decoration, and sometimes inhabited by the same family as long as any dukely house in England.
Or consider any of the high passes which link Switzerland with the cisalpine world. If they were marvels in Victorian times, they are prodigies today: with their superb roads and brilliantly lit tunnels, their railway lines circling in the hearts of mountains, their crowning forts, their tremendous sense of scale, purpose and infallible calculation, they suggest the constructions of a superpower, not a small land-locked republic of 6.5 million souls.
Even the Swiss are begi
nning to have doubts about their army, which has been so long the badge of their confederate unity – more than a third of them said in a recent referendum that it ought to be abolished. But I still find something grand and moving in it, especially at the weekend when the citizen soldiery turns out in the mountains, polishing its saddles at cavalry depots among the trees, clambering up hill tracks in pairs with walkie-talkies or reverberating the thunder of its artillery in impossibly inaccessible valleys. It has scarcely fired a shot in anger for 150 years, but then that is what is grand about it.
The Swiss flag is very stylish: clear, simple and distinctive – what a temptation to clutter it up with cantonal devices – and so, to outsiders at least, is the clarity of the Swiss identity. Like it or not, we all know what Swissness is. Although the Swiss speak four languages, their national idioms are far less blurred than most. Franglais, Breutsch and Ameritalian have made relatively few inroads here, Romansch, so far as I know, remains inviolate, and the Swiss postures, manners, apparent outlooks and evident hang-ups are unmistakable still.
Along the lake from Weggis, to be reached only by boat or by precipitous paths from the hills above, is the field of Rutli, the Swiss Runnymede, where (according to pious legend) in 1291 the mountain rebels met to defy the authority of the Habsburgs and bring into being the Swiss Republic. It is a place of pilgrimage still, and on the Sunday I walked there thousands of Swiss patriots were making their way to and from the hallowed site and swarming through the woods. I offered a cheerful good morning to everyone I met, and could not help admiring the utter lack of ingratiation, the courtesy tinged with distinctly suspended judgement, with which most of them responded. That’s style, too.
It was scarcely a generous or easy-going response. It was essentially a response de haut en bas, and for most of us the most annoying thing about the Swiss is perhaps their unspoken sense of superiority – all the more maddening, of course, to those who feel historically superior themselves. That Third Man quip would have no effect on the Swiss at all: they would probably take it as a compliment, so attached do they seem to be to the cuckoo-clock ethos, as it were, and so confident that they are essentially, fundamentally, irrevocably in the right.
*
This strikes me as a peasant-like characteristic, and in many ways Switzerland is still like a nation of bucolics. I was repeatedly impressed, during my days on Lake Lucerne, by the number of twisted, stooped or withered old people I saw – people of a kind we seldom see nowadays in western Europe. They were one generation removed, I thought, from the goitre, that talismanic ailment of mountain peasantry: and although nowadays the Swiss have a longer life expectancy than any other people in Europe, and the remotest Alpine farm is likely to possess every domestic convenience, still the faces of those crooked ancients, hard-hewn and gaunt, seem to speak of centuries of earthy hardship and isolation.
It is a truism, constantly reiterated by Britons, that Swissness is no recipe for tolerance. It is defensive and inward-looking, and makes for narrow judgements. The parochial is married here to the suburban, and clearly Switzerland is not an easy place for the oddball, the anarchist, the Asian or perhaps even the person who says good morning to strangers too freely. Even Swiss humour seems laboriously contrived, as though it has to force itself out of conformity. So conservative is Switzerland in matters of public liberty, I am told, and so intrusive is authority, that if the republic ever joined the European Community it would probably be in permanent dispute before the Court of Human Rights.
The Swiss know all this. Heaven knows they have been told often enough, and the city radicals are vociferous in their criticisms – one powerful group of intellectuals declined to take part in the anniversary celebrations at all, on the grounds that 700 years were more than enough. Experts say that the Swiss idea is getting out of date. But if you live richly and at peace in a beautifully maintained country, if you have progressed in a few generations from mule-sledge to Mercedes, if your children are extremely well educated and your pension is enough to afford you a spacious balconied hotel room overlooking the lake at Weggis, with a four-course dinner on half-board terms, you are likely to think that on the whole your system is on the right track.
Half-way through my stay at Weggis I cracked my head open entering the lake for a swim, and had to have it stitched up. How glad I was of Swissness then! Calmly and steadily the Herr Doktor worked, assisted by Frau Doktor and by their son, the computer specialist, and delicate was his technique, and state-of-the-art his equipment, and whenever I opened my eyes I saw through the spotless windows of his surgery the glistening lake, streaked with leisurely waves and ringed with green hills, like a visual tranquillizer.
*
The more I pondered all this, the more I wondered what the British had to sneer about. Are they any freer than the Swiss? I doubt it. Are they any less racist? One wonders. Are their security services any less intrusive? Probably not. Is their power structure more open? Don’t make me laugh. Are their schools as good? Is their income as high? Is their unemployment less? Is their production greater? Are their streets as clean? Is their public morality any better? Is their crime rate lower? And are they any happier in their lot? Well, polls seem to show a swing in opinion, but it is still quite likely that when the Swiss come to decide by referendum whether to join the European Community, and thus put an end to the neutral isolation which has made them what they are, the majority will say no – as they said no in 1986 to joining the United Nations. The pundits assure us that this will prove a mistake, and that before long Switzerland will find itself outmoded and dismayed. Want to take a bet?
Besides, as a Welsh republican, and a European federalist, I still find in Switzerland a model and a hope. Citizens of the European nation-states tend to dismiss its example now, but to those of us who see in the new Europe a fresh chance for the minority peoples – the Catalonians, the Corsicans, the Basques, the Bretons, the Scots and the Welsh and all the rest – the Swiss Confederation is by no means an obsolete ideal. Now and then, as I pottered around the lake, I noticed small and unobtrusive boundary markers. Four cantons surround Lake Lucerne, which is indeed called by the indigenes the Lake of the Four Cantons – Lucerne, Uri, Unterwalden and Schwyz (all the names of paddle-steamers, too). To a large degree each canton regulates its own affairs, yet only those modest stones, sometimes far from roads, mark their boundaries.
Switzerland may be backward on human rights, but it is certainly strong on political democracy; not only are the twenty-three cantons of the republic largely autonomous, but the affairs of the federal government, too, are constantly subject to national referendums, on the most profound and essential subjects. Imagine a referendum in Britain about whether to have an army or not! Here the will of the people counts, consulted as fundamentally as it can be, down to the last mountain valley; and it is the will of the Swiss people that has decreed all that we dislike, all that we admire, all that we deplore and envy, all that amuses or rubs us up the wrong way in Switzerland today.
Not for centuries has one of the cantons gone to war with another, or tried to impose itself upon a neighbour. Those simple stones of boundary represent a gentle apotheosis of the nationalist idea, in most other places anything but gentle. I would not at all mind a Europe similarly demarcated, so that only a block marked ‘France’ (perhaps with a concrete cock on top) will tell travellers that they have left Germany or Italy, and must swap dictionaries for another language. Hot patriot that I am, I would be perfectly content if the people of Wales, like the people of Unterwalden, governed their domestic affairs under the sovereignty of a multinational, multilingual confederation, with the views of the Rhymney Valley or the Dwyfor District Council having their statutory if infinitesimal influence upon policies at the centre, and everybody having a direct say in the greatest decisions of state.
Marx wrongly thought communism would prove conclusive: after a week in Weggis I still half-cherish the hope that the end of history is Swissness.
In 19
92 the Swiss did hold a referendum to decide whether or not to join the European Union. They decided against, and so far appear to be prospering.
France
The 1990s, before the Channel Tunnel was completed, was the last decade in which Britain was genuinely an island, so that even the 25-mile journey from Dover to Calais still seemed a definitive transition. When I went to France for this tour d’horizon I went by hovercraft, the most truly dramatic vehicle ever to make the crossing.
No mode of transport is more unmistakably engineered for ultimate journeys. This is how we shall cross the Styx at last, with a swoosh of spray and a rattle of bulkhead doors, looming ungainly and amphibious through the night with Charon high in his pilot-house above us. Irrevocable seems the landing upon the soil of France, if one is deposited there by this momentous device, and irrevocable it very often is, for a slight chop in the sea out there, a gusty wind up the Narrows, and Charon is immobilized in the Port d’Aéroglisseur for hours at a time, and is to be seen morosely reminiscing on a high bar stool in the panoramic restaurant.
I like this utterness of landfall, for I am everybody’s patriot, responding with almost equal sympathy to lachrymose Welshmen at rugby matches, Americans with hats on their hearts as parades pass by, inexplicable ceremonials of Swaziland or those sad silent sentries who stand, heads bowed and rifles reversed, so still upon the steps of the Vittorio Emanuele memorial in Rome. And most of all, since one associates the emotion of patriotism most expressly with the fact of France, do I respond to the proud Frenchness of the French. I do not wish them to be nice to me. Nor do I want them to adapt in any way to the influences of the world outside, however reasonable or enlightened. I want only to feel, now as always, that when I drive away from the port into those melancholy landscapes of Pas-de-Calais, I am entering a world not merely separate and different from my own, but perfectly convinced of its superiority to all others, inviting one simply to take or leave it.
