Author: Maarten Koning

The St. Gall Church in Ötlingen

Gallus was an Irish monk who accompanied his companions along the Rhine around 600 AD. He ended up in the area of today’s St. Gall. After he died in 640, his followers built the first church of the later abbey of St. Gall in 719.

In the 8th century, this abbey had possessions in the Markgräflerland (in the later Grand Duchy of Baden, Germany). It was culturally one of the most renowned abbeys north of the Alps.

The foundations of this church can be found under the floor of the present-day church in Ötlingen (Baden-Württemberg). The St. Gall Church (St. Gallus Kirche) was first mentioned in 1275.

The frescoes from the 13th and 14th centuries show scenes from the New Testament and the martyrdom of the Apostle Paul. The top row shows pictures of St. Gallus’s life and two deacons. St. Gall holds the bishop’s staff in his hand. A large image of the apostle is attached to the wall of the church tower.

A severe earthquake hit the area in 1356. It destroyed Ötlingen and the church. Renovation soon followed, and the choir was extended to the east, given its late Gothic architecture. The church also received a sizeable Gothic tabernacle.

The church converted to the Protestant faith in 1556. The House and Grand Duchy of Baden have always been closely connected to the church and the village. Baden’s yellow-red coat of arms is, for this reason, the keystone of the chancel arch.

(Bron: H. Saecker, Die St. Gallus. Kirche in Ötlingen, Ötlingen 2007).

The Oudolf Garden and the Tsuyoshi Tane Garden House of the Vitra Campus

The Vitra Campus in Weil am Rhein (Germany) near Basel is a complex of contemporary architecture that combines the Swiss furniture manufacturer Vitra’s cultural, commercial, production, research and design facilities in one location.

Since its opening in 1989, the site has been transformed by the addition of buildings by world-renowned architects into one of the world’s leading furniture design and research centres, featuring a unique permanent collection and temporary exhibitions at the Vitra Design Museum.

The Oudolf Garten (garden) completes the concept. The garden complements the architecture and decorates the museum, storage, production, and other buildings, giving them new perspectives.

Some 30,000 plants with different flowering periods and life cycles create a garden with constantly changing colours throughout the year. The Dutch garden architect Piet Oudolf (1944) calls his combination of plants a “community”, which fits in with the “furniture design community” of Vitra.

Winter 2024

Other Swiss companies and cultural institutions apply the same concept, for example, the Novartis Garden and its recently opened medical pavilion and the Merian Gärten (gardens) in Basel, the Paul Klee Zentrum in Bern, the Gletscher Garten in Lucerne, the Kirchner Museum in Davos, the Attisholz-Areal in Solothurn, the Pierre Gianidda Fondation in Martigny, the Hermitage and the new Museum Complex plateforme 10 in Lausanne and various other organisations, which combine nature, culture, art, industry and architecture.

The Swiss Spectator will feature some of these institutions in Switzerland and the surrounding regions, for example, the Rheingärten and the recently opened landscape park in Neuenburg am Rhein.

(Source and further information: Vitra Design Museum, www.design-museum.de).

Piet Oudolf, planting design.Vitra Design Museum

Tsuyoshi Tane, The Tane Garden House (2023)

The Iglingerhof and the Olsberg Monastery

Each Swiss village or country road has its beauty. The Iglingerhof comprises two houses with farms near Magden (Canton of Aargau).

The estate existed in the Middle Ages and was owned by Olsberg Monastery until 1790. This Cistercian monastery for women is the oldest of this order in Switzerland.
It was founded at the beginning of the 13th century.

Through bequests and purchases, it acquired more and more estates and vineyards in Alsace and the present-day cantons of Aargau and Basel-Landschaft. The monastery also owned properties in the towns of Rheinfelden and Basel.

The monastery was dissolved in 1803 when the canton of Aargau was created by the new Confederation (Act of Mediation of 1803). The properties were sold to private individuals. The Iglingerhof had already been sold in 1790.

The Christian Merian Foundation acquired the Iglingerhof and 67 ha of land and forest in 1918. The Foundation has been leasing the estate for farming since this time.

The Niklauskapelle already existed in the thirteenth century. It burned down in 1860, but its memory lives on in the Gothic choir, which has been restored and integrated into the complex.

In various other places, medieval churches are incorporated into farmhouses; examples are the Romanesque chapel in Donatyre (canton of Vaud) and the Romanesque church of San Niclà in Strada (canton of Graubünden).

(Source and further information: Kloster Hortus-Dei (kloster-olsberg.ch).

UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Switzerland

By adopting the convention in 1972, UNESCO tasked itself with preserving cultural and natural sites of exceptional universal value for future generations. More than 1,100 sites are now recognised as world heritage sites. Switzerland was one of the first signatories in 1975.

Switzerland is home to 13 sites on the World Heritage List, including nine cultural sites:

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Art Basel 2022

The 2022 edition of Art Basel (16-19 June) will feature 289 leading galleries from across the globe presenting the highest quality of works across all media, from rare and historical masterpieces to new works by today’s emerging artistic voices.

In addition, the fair will present 70 large-scale artworks in Unlimited; 20 site-specific projects in Parcours; a large-scale floor installation titled ‘Out of Sight’ in homage to American conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner; a Film program; as well as Conversations and the fair’s talks series.

‘This year, the fair returns thus to its traditional June dates with full-scale programming across the city.

(Source and further information: www.artbasel.com)

The Hebel Hiking Trail

The Hebel hiking trail (Hebel-Wanderweg) is about 60 km long and runs between Basel and the spring on the Feldberg (Baden-Württemberg). The trail is based on Hebel’s Alemannic poem “Die Wiese” and runs from the spring to the Schifflände in Basel. Numerous information boards provide information about Hebel and his work.

Johann Peter Hebel (1760-1826) wrote the “Alemannische Gedichten” in 1803. He wrote these poems out of homesickness (from heimweh. a word of Swiss origin) of his homeland/Heimat (the city of Basel and the Wiesental). He is the pioneer of the Alemannic dialect literature.

Memorial for Hermann Daur (1870-1925) and Johann Peter Hebel. Ötlingen, near the St. Gallus-Kirche. 

Johann Peter Hebel (1760-1826) schrieb aus Sehnsucht nach der Heimat (Basel) die

Homesickness (Heimweh) was already a diagnosis of an illness among Swiss mercenaries in the seventeenth century, derived from the concept of Heimat.

Hebel often walked along the Wiese near Riehen and Basel on the path along a brook that flows into the Wiese. The Wiese flows into the Rhine at Kleinhüningen (a former municipality merged with Basel).

In addition to his work as a writer, he was active as a pastor and teacher in Lörrach and Karlsruhe. In 1819, he was appointed the first prelate of the Protestant regional church of the Grand Duchy of Baden.

Except for the two Swiss communities of Riehen and Basel (canton of Basel-Landschaft) at the mouth of the Wiese, the Wiesental belongs to the district of Lörrach.

The valley stretches along the nearly 60-kilometre-long course of the Wiese in a south-westerly direction from the Feldberg at an altitude of around 1,200 metres to the Rhine near Basel.

The route begins at the source and runs through the picturesque villages of Todtnau, Utzenfeld, Schönau, Wembach, Fröhnd, Zell, Hausen, Schopfheim, Maulburg, Steinen, Hauingen, Brombach, Lörrach and Riehen to Basel.

(Source and further information: www.riehen-tourismus.ch).

The Sumatra-Swiss

Switzerland is one of the world’s most innovative, globalised and cosmopolitan countries. The image of an island in the middle of Europe or the European Union is untrue today or yesterday. However, it is a monetary, democratic and social oasis in various ways.

For centuries, Switzerland and its entrepreneurs have provided services, exporting, importing and producing between the world and European metropolises with raw materials, knowledge, services, capital and labour.

Colonialism

It is no coincidence that the Dutch multinational DSM (De Staats Mijnen) continues to operate in conjunction with the much smaller Swiss company Firmenich as the joint venture DSM-Firmenich. In 1907, the Dutch petroleum company B.P.M. (Bataafse Petroleum Maatschappij), later to become Shell, employed many Swiss geologists, surveyors, engineers, and chemists.

Switzerland was involved in trade relations and business during colonialism, even without colonies (except in Algeria (Swiss Spectator 19 October 2021, The only and first Swiss colony) not only in Asia but also in Africa and South America (in Surinam, for example, the DuPeyrou family from Neuchâtel is worth mentioning).

Since the 17th century, the Swiss have travelled overseas as mercenaries in colonial armies, employed in international (trading) companies, or worked as merchants, missionaries, or consultants.

The Dutch East Indies

When the Netherlands opened up territory in Sumatra to foreign investors (the former Dutch East Indies, Indonesia since December 1949) in 1870, the Swiss were the first to take advantage of the opportunity.

Between 500 and 700 Swiss and their families worked on the plantations in Sumatra as estate owners, plantation managers, or assistants between 1870 and 1940, during the period leading up to the Second World War. The plantation owners cultivated tobacco, coffee, tea and palm oil.

Thousands of contract workers laboured under precarious conditions on the plantations, clearing the forest and constructing roads, or serving as security guards. The region’s sultans were absolute rulers in the small sultanates, ruling over the population, often with more cruelty than the plantation owners.

Patumbah lies in Sumatra

The exhibition “Patumbah lies in Sumatra” at the Swiss Heritage Centre (Heimatschutzzentrum) in Zurich is devoted to this history, using the (life) stories of several families.

Carl F. Grob and Hermann Näher first worked on Albert Breker’s Helvetia plantation in 1869, one of the first plantations in the region of the Sultanate of Deli in East Sumatra. In 1871, they leased the Sultan of Serdang land and opened a plantation.

They expanded and eventually managed six plantations in the following years, including the Patumbah plantation. With its four thousand employees (or coolies), the firm of Näher & Grob was one of the most important in Sumatra. Grob returned to Zurich in 1879 and built the Villa Patumbah in 1885.

Karl Krüsi from Appenzell travelled to Sumatra in 1873 and opened his plantation in 1881. In 1893, he returned to Switzerland and purchased a villa in Zurich, known as Villa Sumatra. Zurich has a Sumatra street named after this villa.

Zurich, Villa Patumbah. Photo TES

These “ex-pats” were also skilled and talented entrepreneurs, not just (called anachronistically) exploiters. Krüsi later wrote in his biography: “from early morning to late at night, I worked as a pack mule, but I also saw that the harvest developed more splendidly from day to day”.

Ferdinand Tritschler, a native of Zurich, lived in Sumatra from 1881 to 1892. He married Lina Beck in 1889. Their letters provide a valuable insight into the lives of Europeans and women in particular, of whom there were only a few in Sumatra until 1900.

The brothers Fritz and Carl Alphons Meyer are two other Sumatran-Swiss. They were among the pioneers in tobacco production in Sumatra. After their return, they bought and lived in a villa in Zurich.

Conclusion

In 1886, the Swiss in East Sumatra founded the “Schweizer Verein Deli-Sumatra“. The association existed for 50 years, reaching its peak in 1920 with 150 members.
The letters, photo albums, diaries, archives and this association are essential testimonies of the colonial past of Swiss citizens.

The exhibition illustrates this history without moralising. But Swiss people have also shaped colonialism and profited from it. This awareness is part of the current post-colonial discourse in Switzerland.

Source and further information: www.heimatschutzzentrum.ch; Heimatschutzzentrum, Patumbah liegt auf Sumatra, Zürich,2022).

The Villa Patumbah and Sumatra

Carl Fürchtegott Grob (1830-1893) constructed the Villa Patumbah and a coach house in the historicist style between 1883 and 1885. In 1890, the landscape architect Evariste Mertens (1846-1907) extended the park in an English landscape garden style.

A fountain, flower beds, sculptures and a garden pavilion adorn the area near the villa. From 1911 to 1976, the building was a home for the elderly.

The villa now houses the Swiss Heritage Centre (Heimatschutzzentrum). It presents exhibitions and the history of the villa. The permanent exhibition highlights the building culture from three different angles. It deals with the changes in the landscape, architecture and architectural monuments.

The temporary exhibition deals with the history of Villa Patumbah. It focuses on the colonial connections of the builder Carl F. Grob and other Swiss in Southeast Asia.

It shows the exhibition “Patumbah lies on Sumatra”. The texts are available in German and French, accompanied by English handouts.

(Source and further information: www.heimatschutzzentrum.ch).

The largest Cloister of Switzerland

The monastery of All Saints in Schaffhausen was founded in 1049. It was dedicated to the Saviour, the Holy Cross, the Mother of God, Mary and all saints.

The largest cloister in Switzerland was built in the 12th century. The cloister was originally entirely Romanesque. However, the southern side was rebuilt in the Gothic style in the 15th century; the western side, which has not been preserved, also underwent a Gothic renovation.

The cloister was extensively renovated in the Romanesque style in 1902. The cloister garden served as a burial place for the regimental families of Schaffhausen from 1582 to 1874. More than fifty epitaphs are a reminder of this. Today, the cloister is part of the All Saints Museum.

(Source and further information:  Museum zu Allerheiligen Schaffhausen)

The Chinese Garden of Zurich

The Chinese Garden (Chinagarten) is a gift from the Chinese twin city of Kunming to the citizens of Zurich. The garden was opened in 1994.

It belongs to the group of temple gardens and is one of the most highly regarded gardens outside China. The garden explores one of the main themes of Chinese culture, the “Three Friends in Winter”: the pine, the bamboo and the winter plum, who defy the cold season.

Located in the middle of the beautiful promenade along Lake Zurich, there is a takeaway restaurant for Chinese specialities and an event venue.

(Source and further information: China Garten (chinagarten-zuerich.ch).