Switzerland
I left my lovely hometown ten years ago this month and never looked back (or, indeed, went back for more than a few days at a time). And for good reason. Yesterday’s FAZ ran a mildly interesting piece (not available online AFAICT) on the absence of a vibrant scene of young writers in Switzerland, prompted by the fact that not a single Swiss writer made the shortlist of twenty candidates for a literary award. But one passage caught my attention — it sums up pretty well what I always found so stifling about the place.
Die Trägheit der politischen Prozesse, die Ereignislosigkeit des saturierten Alltags, die Absenz einer Debattenkultur und das Fehlen einer bedeutenden Gruppe streitbarer Intellektueller von Format scheinen auch die Literatur zu infizieren. Dispute werden hierzulande, wo jeder jeden kennt, entweder sofort unterdrückt oder vertraulich in Hinterzimmern durch eine föderalistische Lösung entschärft.
The inertia of political processes, the uneventfulness of a saturated everyday life, the absence of a culture of debate and the lack of a sizeable group of combative intellectuals of stature seem to be infecting literature as well. Here, where everyone knows everyone, conflicts get either immediately suppressed or defused behind closed doors through a federalist solution. (Translation courtesy of MMV and exposing, as translations tend to do, that many adjectives that make perfect sense to the casual reader — or writer — are not all that necessary once you take a closer look.)
