A Tale of Two Disparate Cities in Switzerland

In Carol Reed’s 1949 film noir The Third Man, Harry Lime, played by Orson Welles, made a cynical comment for the ages: “In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

According to Graham Greene, who wrote The Third Man, that line of dialogue was actually added by Welles (who was in the habit of doing that sort of thing when performing in other people’s movies). Even though, as critics were swift to point out, the Swiss don’t make cuckoo clocks, Welles’ line certainly does capture something about Switzerland, which, while famous for its chocolates, watches, and pharmaceuticals, has no equivalents to Michelangelo or da Vinci. (RELATED: Weekend in Munich)

Welles’ line came to mind last week while I was on my first-ever visit to Switzerland. Now, I wasn’t looking for brotherly love, but I did expect, at the very least, a degree of cleanliness and order. After all, what do you think of when you hear the word “Switzerland”? 

Before making the trip, I picked up a guidebook. Old habit. These things are useless. Sample passage: “Small in size but big on experiences, Switzerland is awash with fascinating sights, exhilarating activities and intriguing traditions, presented in a remarkably beautiful package.” 

This sentence may not have been AI-generated, but the machines will be churning out such material soon enough, taking jobs from hacks who, to suit the requirements of travel glossies, in-flight magazines, and the New York Times travel section, are under pressure to make every place on the planet seem terrific — reality be damned. 

My first port of call was Zürich. As expected, the airport was ultramodern, the walls covered with huge, shiny ads for private banks, investment firms, and sundry financial services. Well, that made sense. But the supposedly nice neighborhood around my downtown hotel (described in my guidebook as “a trendy, if not chic, area … the most vibrant area of town at night) was downright shabby, the buildings in desperate need of paint jobs and covered in political graffiti, from anarchist symbols to hammers and sickles. 

My hotel was on Zwinglistrasse, named, of course, for the Reformation cleric who criticized monastic sloth, clerical celibacy, and the veneration of the saints and ended up hacked to death by Catholics. Well, that’s one thing Switzerland gave the world more than its share of: blue-chip theologians. 

After checking into my room — a fifth-floor walk-up — I wandered far and wide in search of something grand, or at least charming. No luck. Most of what I saw reminded me of the run-down part of central Oslo, Norway, full of strip joints and dive bars, that master developer Olav Thon (who, as it happens, turns 100 on June 29) has been wanting to tear down for decades. It also brought to mind the mosque-packed Hamburg neighborhood where I stayed a few years ago.

Yes, Zürich did turn out to have its share of big squares and wide boulevards lined with high-end glass-and-steel emporia. But all in all, it left me cold. 

Nor did it feel entirely safe. Zürich’s big rap is that it’s low on crime. But boy, were there some shady types out and about, manifestly not of Swiss extraction. Strolling around on my first day, I passed a park where several severe-looking cops were hovering around, and barking at, three or four of these dicey characters. Next day, same exact thing — different cops, different characters, but identical scenario. 

From Zürich, I took a train to Lausanne. I looked forward to leaving the graffiti behind and luxuriating in the mountain views. Unfortunately, I couldn’t look outside: The train windows were covered with graffiti. 

Nor was my first encounter with a Lausanne local exactly a textbook example of Switzerland-style brotherly love. This guy was loading a mail truck, and I asked him, in passable enough French, if he knew the way to Rue Pré-du-Marché. (Google Maps wasn’t working on my phone.) No answer. I repeated the question. Without giving me a glance, he slammed his truck door shut and walked away. 

I tried again with another guy who was pushing his toddler in a stroller. Smiling, he whipped out his phone, found the street, then walked me halfway to my hotel and pointed it out at a distance. Talk about brotherly love!

Banal but true: Everywhere you go, there are bad folks and good folks. 

And charm? Lausanne was overflowing with it. Cobbled pedestrian streets — lined with picturesque old buildings, inviting cafes, and the occasional imposing church — wind up the hillside from Lake Geneva in a vaguely northerly direction. It immediately reminded me of Cannes, where I spent a week at a point in my life when Europe was a mystery just beginning to unfold to me.

I soon realized that the best way to experience Lausanne was to leave my hotel and make my way slowly downward, pausing occasionally to have a coffee or check out the book stalls (are any two words in English more sensual than “book stalls”?) or just sit on a bench and soak in the passing parade. 

And once you get to the bottom, take the metro back up — unless you’re into mountain climbing. (Lausanne’s metro, the only one in Switzerland, has two lines — one east to west, the other north to south.)

A woman on the Lausanne metro wore a T-shirt that read: “You will bloom if you take the time to water yourself.” Well, I guess that’s what we’re doing when we take trips like this: We’re out to water ourselves. (And not in the way I almost watered myself in Zürich when I neglected to make a pit stop after leaving a bar.) 

Decades ago, on my first European trip, I walked 10 miles a day in London for more than a week — enthralled, tireless, glorying in everything. The adrenalin never ran out. I’m not like that anymore. Time has its say. But sitting in the sun in a Lausanne square, I felt deeply blessed to have this brief sojourn in a formerly unfamiliar corner of the world, and to be capable of responding to it with pure joy. 

I’ve mentioned Swiss watches and chocolates. One of the other things for which Switzerland is noted, alas, is euthanasia. Last August, my friend Norah Vincent — brilliant, beautiful, healthy, looking far younger than her 53 years, and, by all reports, cheery up to her last moments (which she spent tapping her fingers to a Nina Simone song) — traveled to Switzerland not to enhance her life but to end it. Some demon, some poison of the spirit, impelled her to book a ticket to Basel with the goal of ending up in a body bag. It was as if she’d seen and done it all and was ready to check out. And here I was — a year later, a good deal older than she was — happily making another new place part of the expanding tapestry of my life. (READ MORE from Bruce Bawer: Losing Norah Vincent)

On my first full day in Lausanne, having put behind me the hectic journey from home, the antic meanderings in Zurich, and the train trip, I was sitting on a bench in a beautiful tree-covered square — feeding French fries to pigeons and sparrows, experiencing what (for an incurably neurotic native New Yorker) amounted to maximum serenity, reflecting upon how God’s eyes are on the sparrow, and thinking about how blessed all of us are, man and bird, to share this brief flash of existence in the endless mystery of eternity, and to have a chance to explore a bit of God’s magnificent world while we’re here, and, as much as we enjoy the change of scenery, to begin soon enough to look forward to returning to our homes and to the people we love — when it suddenly hit me, for the first time, with the force of revelation: Had I come to Switzerland because of Norah?          

The post A Tale of Two Disparate Cities in Switzerland appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.