Des Schweizers Schweiz

I am Swiss. When I tell my mother, "I am going to Germany" or "I am going to France" or "I am going to Sweden," she says, "So you are going abroad." For the Swiss, there are two worlds: the domestic and the foreign.

Alongside his poetic texts, Peter Bichsel has always taken the opportunity to comment on Swiss conditions and themes. His 1967 text "The Swiss's Switzerland" is famous and remains ever relevant. For this paperback edition, it has been supplemented with the speeches and essays "Sitting as a Duty," "Making Difficulties for the Existing," "The Virus of Wealth," "The Army is Deadly," and notes on misery. Peter Bichsel loves constructive conflict and despises any intellectual and social stagnation.

The motto of the combative intellectual Peter Bichsel, who remains a poet in every sense, could be the concluding sentence of the title essay: "A democracy without discussion would be museum-like. The internal enemy of Switzerland is called perverted civic spirit. The hedgehog position—curled up with its spines facing outward—has become a symbol of our independence. But even a hedgehog must unroll itself to feed.".