Volume 34, Number 11 · June 25, 1987
A Swiss Passion
By Gordon A. Craig
Green Henry
by Gottfried Keller, translated by A.M. Holt
John Calder/Riverrun, 706 pp., $14.95 (paper)
In a brilliant essay called 'Unbehagen im Kleinstaat' ('Petty-State Malaise'), the Swiss writer Karl Schmid has described the difficulty that many of his country's leading writers have had in identifying with the land of their birth. Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Amiel, Jakob Burckhardt, Jakob Schaffner, and Max Frisch have been among those who were oppressed by the feeling that Switzerland was, in a sense, excluded from history, that it has a peripheral and insubstantial existence among other states and cultures; and, as a nation, was incapable even of making its own decisions, which were preordained by its policy of neutrality. All of them, in varying degrees, yearned after the 'greatness' that they could not find at home.
Review, 3089 words
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