The Secret Empire, The Success Story of Switzerland

The Secret Empire, The Success Story of Switzerland, by Lorenz Stucki (Herder and Herder, 339 pp., $9.95).

Visitors to Switzerland smell the good air, marvel at the scenery, enjoy the chocolate, buy the watches, sleep well under downy quilts, admire the picturesque villages and return home having thought no more about Switzerland than that it is a nice place to visit, and that one could very easily live there. Few wonder how a country with more vertical than horizontal land, situated in the heart of a most bellicose continent, with nothing going for it but its clean air, scenery and water power got that way. Lorenz Stucki tells you. The Secret Empire is a most fascinating rundown of how a people with no outside resources made it through industry, ingenuity and the hardest of hard work. In the Middle Ages, the Swiss exported their only marketable surplus—strong young men hired out to the armies of French kings, Italian condottieri, German princelings. Later those same young men became merchants: the money men, managers and technicians for industrialists abroad. Remember the gold strike at Sutter’s Mill? Sutter was Swiss. Slept in a Ritz Hotel? Charles Ritz was Swiss. They learned to weave from the British, to make steel from the Germans, to pasteurize their chocolate and cheese, to adapt, to improve, to streamline. And always, whether working in Switzerland or abroad they poured their accumulated capital and their honed skills back into the country. Stucki (who is described as the Swiss Walter Cronkite, by the way) points out one fascinating aspect of it all: that even when the Swiss merchant princes had made it in the late nineteenth century, they built no luxurious mansions, acquired no great libraries or art collections; never went the playboy route. They maintained the Calvinist ethic, and do to this day. Good reading for Swissophiles.

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Priscilla L. Buckley

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The Secret Empire, The Success Story of Switzerland, by Lorenz Stucki (Herder and Herder, 339 pp., $9.95).

Visitors to Switzerland smell the good air, marvel at the scenery, enjoy the chocolate, buy the watches, sleep well under downy quilts, admire the picturesque villages and return home having thought no more about Switzerland than that it is a nice place to visit, and that one could very easily live there. Few wonder how a country with more vertical than horizontal land, situated in the heart of a most bellicose continent, with nothing going for it but its clean air, scenery and water power got that way. Lorenz Stucki tells you. The Secret Empire is a most fascinating rundown of how a people with no outside resources made it through industry, ingenuity and the hardest of hard work. In the Middle Ages, the Swiss exported their only marketable surplus—strong young men hired out to the armies of French kings, Italian condottieri, German princelings. Later those same young men became merchants: the money men, managers and technicians for industrialists abroad. Remember the gold strike at Sutter’s Mill? Sutter was Swiss. Slept in a Ritz Hotel? Charles Ritz was Swiss. They learned to weave from the British, to make steel from the Germans, to pasteurize their chocolate and cheese, to adapt, to improve, to streamline. And always, whether working in Switzerland or abroad they poured their accumulated capital and their honed skills back into the country. Stucki (who is described as the Swiss Walter Cronkite, by the way) points out one fascinating aspect of it all: that even when the Swiss merchant princes had made it in the late nineteenth century, they built no luxurious mansions, acquired no great libraries or art collections; never went the playboy route. They maintained the Calvinist ethic, and do to this day. Good reading for Swissophiles.