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Switzerland
Verena Rutschmann
Switzerland is a country with four national languages: German (spoken by 63.6 per cent
of the population), French (19.2 per cent), Italian (7.6 per cent) and Rhaeto-Romanic (0.6
per cent). The three larger linguistic areas look culturally to the neighbouring countries
with the same language, so that the main reading matter of children and young people
in Switzerland consists of what is available in these countries: Germany and Austria,
France, and Italy. Native Swiss writing of children’s books is found only in Francophone
and German-speaking Switzerland, and most particularly when foreign texts do not
meet the expectations of the Swiss public or cover subjects in demand.
The Italian-speaking population was so small as not to develop a children’s literature
of its own. The same is true of the Rhaeto-Romanic area, except that here no recourse to
foreign works was possible, and religious books and school textbooks were occasionally
produced. In French-speaking Switzerland, on the other hand, there has been since the
nineteenth century a children’s literature of strongly protestant tone, not only for
religious education but also for leisure reading. And in German-speaking areas the
appearance of a true national children’s literature, proud to diverge (politically or
linguistically) from German writings, underlined Switzerland’s separateness.
Swiss children’s literature developed in line with trends across Europe. Here as
elsewhere, the second half of the eighteenth century saw a children’s and youth
literature which, in the spirit of late enlightenment educational theories, set out to
mediate bourgeois virtue and useful facts of the era of industrialisation to the young in
an entertaining and concrete manner. But unlike the children’s writers of the
neighbouring countries, Swiss authors also stressed the development of attitudes of
responsible citizenship and republicanism among their readership. Prominent men in
public life addressed themselves to young people, for instance Isaak Iselin (1728–1782),
Joseph Anton Felix Balthasar (1737–1810), Johann Caspar Lavater (1741–1801), and
later Frédéric César de Laharpe (1754–1838) in Lausanne. Swiss history was one of
their favourite subjects. The forces working for a renewal of the old confederation at the
end of the eighteenth century—the ambitious bourgeoisie, politicians, writers—not only
created schools and educational associations, but also formulated their ideas of popular
improvement in educational writings for the young. In Lienhard und Gertrud [Lienhard
and Gertrud] (1781) Heinrich Pestalozzi had presented a model of economic and social
improvements to the people at large.
The Bernese pastor Johann David Wyss (1743–1818) presumably also saw himself as
primarily an educator rather than an author, when with his four sons he wrote his tale