Bernhard C. Schär

Switzerland and the Holocaust: Teaching Contested History.

This study is about a history textbook which introduces the new transnational master‐narrative of Holocaust memory into the classrooms of the German‐speaking part of Switzerland. The script of the book entails a replacement of the formerly dominant view of Switzerland as a neutral nation resisting evil in favour of an image that aligns Switzerland with other nations that accept the Holocaust as part of their national history, and combine their efforts to prevent such crimes in the future. However, this process cannot be seen as hegemonic or total since it is fragmented at various levels. On the level of state power, there is no uniform vision of the nation’s history. Therefore, the book needed to accommodate its critics to a certain extent. Furthermore, there are institutional rules of history education that restrict a direct transmission of knowledge and promote teaching youths to develop their own views. And then there are the teachers, who have their part in shaping history.

On the Tropical Origins of the Alps

A remarkable colonial encounter took place on 26 February 1896 on the south-eastern peninsula of Celebes — one of the many so-called outer islands in the far-flung Dutch Asian Empire. Two wealthy Swiss naturalists, Paul and Fritz Sarasin, the first Europeans to explore this large hitherto ‘unknown’ island, reached the summit of one of the mountains in the highlands. At 1000 metres above sea level they were rewarded with a surprising view. A large lake ‘gleaming in magnificent blue’ lay before them. ‘Delighted by this discovery we hurried down to the lakeside where yet another surprise awaited us. A real, inhabited village with houses built on piles arose from the water, a village named Matanna.’1 The Sarasins’ excitement grew even further as they found out that the lake dwellers on Celebes ‘practised a curious form of pottery with products reminding us of identical objects from Swiss lake dwellers’.2 It is important to note the asymmetry of this comparison. The Sarasins were not referring to contemporary Swiss lake dwellers. In fact there were no people living in lakes in Switzerland around 1900. The reference was to prehistoric lake dwellers, whose poles and material remains Swiss archaeologists had started digging up from the mud of the lakeshores a few decades earlier. What the Sarasins thought they had discovered on the shores of Lake Matanna was thus a piece of living prehistory on a tropical island which, to them, in many ways resembled Switzerland.

'The Swiss of All People!’ Politics of Embarrassment and Dutch Imperialism around 1900

This case study of Swiss scientists in the Dutch East Indies offers a new approach to Dutch imperialism in Southeast Asia around 1900. It argues that one of the reasons for the Dutch to ‘round off’ their Empire was a fear of embarrassment in front of ‘foreign’ European countries. Adopting a Bourdieuean view on the role of emotions for collective action, I argue that fear of embarrassment was part of the Dutch imperial habitus, given the rather weak position of this relatively small country in the ‘imperial game’. On the level of concrete historical actors, fear of embarrassment is simultaneously seen as a resource that journalists, scientists, missionaries, colonial officers and local rulers could exploit in the pursuit of competing agendas within the Dutch Empire.