This August, the Swiss film director, Rolf Lyssy was given the year’s Career Achievement Award at the Zurich Film Festival. Die Schweizermacher, released in 1978, was judged the most successful Swiss film of all time.
I was in my second year at the University of Reading when The Swissmakers was released in the UK. Astonished to learn that a Swiss film had made it to England, I immediately gathered a group of friends and arranged a weeknight visit to the Granby cinema. The film was shown in Swiss-German with English subtitles. I laughed a lot. My English friends not so much.
The Swissmakers is a comedy about a pair of Zurich policemen snooping on resident immigrants who have applied for Swiss citizenship. Sergeant Bodmer instructs his rookie sidekick, Herr Fischer, to pay close attention to any deviation from the Helvetian modus operandi. Fraulein Vakulic, for example, insists on using brown bin liners instead of the standard black ones. When his co-workers at the bakery describe Signor Grimolli as “always happy”, Bodmer is quick to respond “Being happy is irrelevant. He needs to be adaptable. He needs to fit in”.
I lived in Switzerland for 10 years in the 1990s and even though I speak Swiss German fluently and, apparently, without a trace of a foreign accent, I often felt like a foreigner, someone who didn’t quite belong. I tended to make mistakes, some were relatively harmless and reflected my recent arrival in the country and others were more serious social gaffes. On one occasion, I asked my neighbour what he paid for his house, which is considered shockingly impolite in Switzerland.
One morning, the village postman stopped me in the street and scolded me for putting out my rubbish on the wrong day and in the wrong place. I was curious to know how he had identified me as the culprit. He was very matter of fact and explained that he’d opened the offending bag in order to look for evidence. I imagined him rooting around amongst the Earl Grey tea bags and the spaghetti sauce and I felt both repelled and impressed by his dedication on behalf of the community. Eventually he found an envelope with my name on it. He could probably have saved himself the effort and the mess because he must have known, even before he smothered his fingers in tannin and tomatoes, that no law-abiding, thoroughbred Swiss would have behaved so irresponsibly.
I also, however, experienced delightful customs that indicated a close-knit and trusting society. When I purchased our first household appliance, I discovered that I had 30 days to pay the invoice. “……but, you don’t know me”, I stammered, “you don’t know my address or my telephone number. How can you be sure that I’m honest?”
After our second daughter was born, I took a teaching position at the local Steiner school. I hired a cleaner and made sure to carefully follow the example of the few Swiss women I knew who had household help: I ran the hoover, splashed the bleach and had a jolly good tidy up before Frau Probst arrived. She was magnificent. She even used cotton swabs to remove dust particles from the keyholes. When her three hours were up, however, she told me that she would not be returning. My house, she explained, was too dirty. I felt ashamed but also furious. I wanted to tell Frau Probst that I had other gifts, other skills – a university degree and a bunch of students who liked me and worked hard in my English classes. But I didn’t tell her these things. Instead, I apologised for my unsightly home and waved her forever goodbye.
A few months later, I discovered that our neighbour had been coming into our garage while I was at work in order to top up the guinea pigs’ food bowls. She showed no shame about her trespassing habits, insisting that we were starving the poor creatures. I called the local vet for advice and he was clear – guinea pigs should be fed twice a day and no more. Over-feeding would result in obesity and early death. I thanked him and relayed this information to my fussbudget neighbour. She ‘tsked’ audibly and then shouted across the fence: “This is not England. We do things differently here.”
Last night I suggested to my husband, who is American, that we watch The Swissmakers. He reacted to the film exactly as my English friends had done 42 years ago. The humour, he thought, ranged from plodding to slapstick. The film struck him as two-dimensional. I laughed, although perhaps not quite as heartily as I had done when I was nineteen because, in the meantime, I had known the shame of feeling inadequate and wanting in some way.
In an interview in 2016, Rolf Lyssy spoke about the comic intersection between the two policemen: Sergeant Bodmer is simplistic and narrow-minded while his young assistant, Herr Fischer is engaging and open to new ideas. Lyssy made the observation that in the 1970s, immigrants to Switzerland were mainly Italians and they spoke a language that Swiss people spoke too. Similarly, Catholicism was a religion with which the Swiss could identify. Today, those applying for naturalisation come from much further away and from traditions, religions and cultures that the Swiss do not understand.
“This isn’t good or bad” Lyssy reflected. “It’s simply different but the difference is much greater now than it was forty years ago and some Swiss feel overwhelmed by it. The question is how does a civilised society deal with this situation?”
I waited to hear what he would say next.
“I have no answer”, Lyssy admitted.
He’s right. It’s a tricky one.