by Jan Morris
Who can really take Statehood seriously, in such a place? It is fashionable in late-twentieth-century Europe, as it struggles towards (or against) unity, to talk about Nation-States, as though nations and States were synonymous. They seldom are really. One of the very States which was squabbling about Trieste fifty years ago is a State no longer, and turns out to have been no more than a jumble of nations forcibly fused – Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croatians, Muslim Bosnians, Kosovo Albanians, Slovenes, Montenegrins, Macedonians, all given the same passport and called Yugoslavs. Trieste attracts mavericks and outsiders because here they can feel (speciously, I fear) beyond the constraints of the Nation-State. Karl Marx once reported that the place had been built up by ‘a motley crew of … Italians, Germans, English, French, Greeks, Armenians and Jews’. ‘In Trieste, ah Trieste, ate I my liver,’ wrote Joyce of his residence in the city; the phrase is really a translation of a local idiom – eating one’s liver means eating one’s heart out – but somehow it does seem to express the seaport’s sense of esoteric enclave.
There are not many places in Europe that give me this feeling. The continent has generally been dominated by a few self-important States that diplomacy and history call Powers, and over the years, as I have become more and more loyal to Wales, which is not even a State, let alone a Power, I have found myself increasingly exasperated by their childish arrogances. Powers come and go, rise and fall, but in their fortunately transient climactic days they lord it over nations and States alike, and the war memorials of Trieste tragically and nonsensically illustrate the effects. The memorials mostly date from the First World War, when the Italian Kingdom was fighting the Austro-Hungarian Empire (both undeniable Powers in those days), and their names are nationally meaningless – Borgello side by side with Brunner, Silvestro with Liebmann, Zanetti with Zottig and Blotz, so that it is hard to know which side any of them died for. As for the figure of the naval officer outside the Marine Terminal, it represents an Italian Triestino who fought for Italy, was captured by the Austrians who then ruled the place, and was accordingly shot for treason (a class of crime I myself decline to recognize).
‘And so it goes on for ages and aeons,’ wrote Ogden Nash, ‘between these neighboring Europeans …’ What a farce it has all been! The prejudices of nations have been bad enough, and the ambitions of States, but the bloody Powers have been the curse of Europe.
1 The small Swiss coin
I was on a troop train on my way from the English Channel to Italy. The Second World War having been won, the Swiss Government now allowed the victorious Western Powers to pass their armies through its neutral territory, and a marvel of the journey was to emerge briefly from the blighted and dingy landscapes of the warring States into a Switzerland that still looked creamy. Nothing could be more glamorous than the neon advertising signs, in reds and blues and yellows, that I was seeing almost for the first time in my life, and I remember how shamelessly, when the train passed through the lakeside suburbs of Lausanne, I peered through the windows of apartments to catch glimpses of the well-lit padded comforts within. When we drew into Lausanne station smiling Swiss ladies were waiting for us with cisterns of hot coffee, buns and sandwiches – miraculous sandwiches of white Swiss bread, light and crusty, like manna after several years of our brownish wartime kind.
Just as the train began to move on, while I hung out of the window absorbing these novel scenes, I caught the eye of a small well-dressed man standing indecisively on the platform. Shyly smiling, he hastened towards me. The train gathered speed. The man burst into a trot. The train went faster. The man lost his smile and ran. He held out his hand to me. I held mine out in return. The train got into its swing. The man panted anxiously. I stretched as far as I could out of my window. Our hands touched, just in time, and there passed from one to the other a small Swiss silver coin. It was not a valuable coin, but as a token it was priceless. Surely he meant it as a token? I clasped it sentimentally anyway, and waved my thanks as long as the man was still in sight – standing there motionless now, unsmiling, indistinctly raising his small white hand in response.
2 State of nations
He might have spoken French, German, Italian or Romansh, but he certainly thought of himself as Swiss – as Swiss as the coin itself, which appeared to be new-minted. The Swiss are the one people who have given dignity to the idea of the Nation-State by turning it into a State of Nations, to my mind a model for us all. They have not compromised either their Statehood or their nationhoods. Their four languages remain more or less inviolate, but in all their autonomous cantons the Swiss are the Swiss are the Swiss.
Yet they are not universally admired in the rest of Europe. In the nineteenth century the world seems to have regarded the Helvetic Confederation with almost fulsome respect. Its citizens were sturdy mountaineers and farmers, nature’s gentlemen. They could teach even Victorian Britain something when it came to mighty works of engineering, and they were a nation of soldiers too, every man with his own gun above the mantelpiece. However, they preferred not to fight in either of the two world wars, and this rather altered their reputation. Neutrality enabled the Swiss not only to evade the tragedies which had befallen the rest of Europe, but even to profit from them, and by the time I came to Europe the notion of Swissness had come to seem a less noble abstraction. The English in particular now scornfully resented it. Few phrases have more exactly expressed a historical resentment than the famous remark in Carol Reed’s film The Third Man (1949), about the creativity of the Swiss: ‘They had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.’
The Victorians would have been astonished by this calumny, but Britons have been quoting it ever since. Nobody had yet heard it when our troop train passed through, but many of the officers on board would certainly have relished it, even as they accepted their coffee from those courteous volunteers: it perfectly expressed the sour judgement of a battle-scarred, impoverished imperial kingdom of epic suffering and performance upon a comfortable, well-heeled, chocolatey republic which hadn’t done a damned thing to help save civilization as we knew it.
3 Style and the Swiss
The more elegant would doubtless have sneered at the Swiss as unstylish, too, and it is true that for years after the war the Swiss bourgeoisie seemed resolutely determined never to break out of the ordinary. (Mussolini, who despised the ordinary, had called theirs ‘a sausage-making democracy’.) But actually Swissness can be truly splendid. Swiss bridges are wonderful, especially the lovely spans with which the engineer Robert Maillart gave an unprecedented beauty to concrete. Swiss chalets, though relentlessly trivialized by developers and speculative builders, and made the architectural equivalent of the cuckoo clock, can be magnificent objects – stately homes par excellence, built for men of stature by master craftsmen, heroic homes, as strong as they are hospitable, and sometimes inhabited by the same family for centuries. The high mountain passes of Switzerland, with their superb roads and brilliantly lit tunnels, their railway lines circling and recircling in the hearts of mountains, their crowning forts, their tremendous sense of scale, purpose and infallible calculation, are like the constructions of a super-Power, not of a petty land-locked republic. A tall-funnelled steamer of the Swiss lakes may look quaint at a distance, but when it comes into port it is an ensemble of grandeur, swanky as can be, and the very image of competence. I find something grand in the Swiss Army too, with all its half-hidden bunkers and hangars: especially at weekends 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 radio aerials flopping, 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.
4 New Model Swiss
By the 1990s the Swiss were much more stylish, anyway. In some Swiss ski-resorts there is a Kinderland, and on the slopes around it New Model Children, raised to modern perfect
ion from the start, are daily on display. Dressed as they are in apparently brand-new baby ski-suits, generally with brightly coloured helmets on their heads like infinitesimal astronauts, they seem incapable of getting wet, muddy or even untidy, and are congenitally immune to hazard. Sometimes with ski-sticks, sometimes without, often hardly big enough to be out of their carry-cots, they hurtle with terrific insouciance down the slopes and out of sight, to reappear a few moments later returning imperturbably up ski-lifts. They hardly ever fall over, and if they do they pick themselves up in a trice with a magical disentanglement of their skis. They never cry or grumble. They never hurt themselves. When the time comes for them to go home, and they are led away to their always spotless family cars, their rosy little faces express no resentment at all, but only a healthy satisfaction with their day’s sport, and a proper gratitude to their parents.
Who themselves look, when they are in the mountains, preternaturally young and vigorous. High up the mountainside, when I have been taking my leisurely morning exercise, I have come across stalwart groups of great-grandparents, I swear it, sticks in their hands, smiles on their faces, striding sun-flushed and companionable towards their hearty luncheons: and once I observed far above my head, riding all alone on a chair-lift on his way to the highest ski-runs, a white-bearded ancient of such majestic splendour and vivid gear that he was like a Zeus of the snows. It is as though in some clinic of unimaginable hygiene, reachable only by funicular, these people have on the one hand had all their confusions smoothed by fatherly Jungians, while on the other hand they have been administered tremendously effective virility pills.
5 Old Model Swiss
I made a pilgrimage once to the field of Rütli, the lakeside meadow where, at least according to pious legend, in 1291 the Swiss highland rebels met to defy the authority of the Holy Roman Empire and bring into being a Swiss Republic. On the Sunday I walked down the track from the heights above, thousands of Swiss country patriots were making their way to and from the hallowed site, swarming through the woods and arranging picnics on the sward. I offered a cheerful good morning to everyone I met, and could not help admiring the utter lack of ingratiation, the courtesy tinged with decidedly suspended and unsmiling judgement, with which most of them responded.
This seems to me a peasant-like characteristic, and in many ways Switzerland is still a nation of bucolics. There may be New Model Swiss in the ski-resorts, but they are mostly Old Model in the rural lowlands. I am often struck by the number of twisted, stooped or withered old people I see there – people of a kind that have almost vanished from the rest of western Europe. They are one generation removed from the goitre, that talismanic ailment of mountain folk: and though the Swiss have a longer life expectancy than any other Europeans, and the remotest Alpine farm is likely to possess every last gadget of domestic convenience, still the faces of those crooked ancients, hard-hewn, bashed-about, gaunt, seem to speak of centuries of earthy hardship, isolation and suspicion. It was in Switzerland, in 1782, that the last European witch was publicly burnt.
6 Two pretty children
In the mountain resort of Flims, one afternoon in the early 1990s, I saw three small Swiss girls on their way home from school. They were standard graduates of Kinderland, not in the slightest goitrous or bucolic. They looked like modernistic elves, with bright-coloured rucksacks on their backs, and they were burbling brightly to each other as they climbed the hill to their homes above the town. They paused for a bit of a gossip and leg-swinging at a bench beside the road, and when they got up to go one of them, meandering off by herself, chanced to leave her sun-glasses on the bench. In a trice the other two, laughing and giggling, threw them on the ground and stamped them into pieces before my eyes, alternating kicks in the prettiest way.
7 The end of history?
I sometimes stay at a place called Weggis on Lake Lucerne, as Swiss a place as one can imagine, where ladies in hats stroll talkatively along promenades, where bands play in bandstands and swans and ducks are fed by plump infants in pushchairs. It is a place of sexless charm, kind but condescending, hanging on the air like lavender. It is a hive, nest or cliché of Swissness. Sometimes as I potter around the lake, however, I come across small and unobtrusive boundary markers. Four cantons surround Lake Lucerne – Lac des Quatres Cantons – and each to a large degree governs its own affairs: yet only those modest stones, sometimes far from roads, mark the frontiers between them. I find them very moving. Not for centuries has one of those cantons gone to war with another, or tried to impose itself upon a neighbour. The stones represent a gentle apotheosis of the nationalist idea. I would not at all mind a Europe similarly demarcated, so that only a block marked ‘France’, say, with a concrete cock on top, will tell travellers that they have left Germany or Italy, and must swop dictionaries for another language. Marx wrongly thought that Communism offered the complete solution to the insanities of the Nation-State: when I am in Weggis I half-cherish the hope that the end of history will be Swissness.
8 Or Yugoslavity?
It is sad to think that I once thought it might be Yugoslavity. Absolutely my favourite road in all Europe used to be the coastal highway which ran down the coast of Dalmatia from Trieste to Montenegro, because I saw it as a proclamation of unity, and hoped that, when cohesion was finally achieved, Yugoslavia’s brutal postwar Communism would mature into libertarian socialism. The road was fast and usually empty, and passing motorists would cheerfully warn you, with flashing lamps and hooting horns, if there was a speed trap around the corner. The glorious Dalmatian shoreline swept by panoramically, all creeks and inlets and islands and ships. Every now and then one came across a marvellous old Venetian town, with a gnarled cathedral in the centre, winged lions of St Mark all over it and snub-nosed Adriatic fishing-boats nestling each other in the harbour. Sometimes I made a detour up the road to Mostar, where a lovely old Turkish bridge spanned the Neretva river in a high and graceful span. Sometimes I stopped off for a night or two under the golden walls of Dubrovnik, or in Split, whose inhabitants seemed to me to be the handsomest people in all Europe. The light, in my memory at least, was always brilliant. My BMW of the time always went beautifully. I played Bach, Mozart and Sinatra on my cassette-player. Once I saw Marshal Tito, the dictatorial President of the Yugoslav federation, in a white uniform, speeding by in his limousine towards his retreat in the Brioni islands.
The road started in the Istrian peninsula, which had once been Austrian, and then Italian, and was now part of the Slovene People’s Republic. A little lower down it entered the Croatian Republic. For a few miles it passed through the Bosnian Republic. It skirted Dubrovnik, which had been for several centuries the independent Republic of Ragusa, then ran through a coastal strip of the Montenegrin People’s Republic, until at last it stopped short at the frontier of Albania, in those days as frowardly unwelcoming as Tibet (the few travellers permitted to cross the border had to walk through a tank of disinfectant). Most of these territories had once been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Some had been Roman. Some had been ruled by the Turks. Bits of them had been, until the Second World War, Italian. Some were chiefly Catholic, some Orthodox, some Muslim. Now, thanks very largely to that portly white-jacketed grandee I saw in the back of his Mercedes (who had himself started life as a corporal in the Austro-Hungarian Army), they were all within the bounds of a single Federal State, and long before the emergence of the European Union one could drive from one end of Yugoslavia to the other without producing a passport or changing currency.
I used to be happy and hopeful driving down the Dalmatia highway, supposing that all the tumultuous history of the country was reaching some well-surfaced serenity. More recently a magazine commissioned me to drive a new Alfa Romeo down it, picking up the car in Venice and returning it there at the end of the journey; but it could find nobody to insure such a venture, in the Yugoslavia of 1994.
9 A different country
Next time I did make a journey through what we had by then lear
nt to call The Former Yugoslavia there was no such abstraction as Yugoslavity. Perhaps there never had been. It seems extraordinary, in retrospect, that when we foreigners used to travel so blithely through the Yugoslav federation we were seldom aware which constituent republic we were in. I generally did not think of the Yugoslavs who lived in the very outskirts of Trieste as anything but Yugoslavs, or just Slavs – it seldom occurred to me to call them Slovenes. It is true that now and then my reporter’s instinct warned me that something dangerous was brewing over there, but I never dreamt that in the 1990s the country would collapse in a struggle horribly reminiscent not so much of the Second World War but of those indiscriminate, almost indefinable ethnic-religious-hereditary conflicts of the Middle Ages. Next time I went to Dubrovnik it was scarred with shell-fire, and in the balconies of hotels there forlornly fluttered the washing of refugees. Next time I went to Split convoys of armoured trucks were lumbering out of the docks. The bridge at Mostar had been blown up. The frontier with Montenegro was closed. My next Yugoslav motor-journey was not down that happy coastline but across the cruel mountains of Bosnia in the aftermath of the fighting, and it aroused in me sensations not of hope but of despair or even self-reproach.
