in the manner of Robinson Crusoe, Der Schweizerische Robinson oder der schiffbrüchige
Schweizer Prediger und seine Familie [The Swiss Robinson or the Shipwrecked Swiss
Pastor and his Family] (translated as The Swiss Family Robinson). The plot offered the
pastor unlimited opportunity to provide his children with scientific and technical
knowledge and at the same time to show them ‘how reason and unremitting toil conquer
all’. His son Johann Rudolf Wyss published the story, the first two volumes appearing in
1812 and 1813. As early as 1814, before publication of the third (1826) and fourth
(1827) volumes, the Vaud writer Isabelle de Montolieu (1751–1832) published a French
translation of the first two volumes together with a continuation by herself. She made
Wyss’s didactic tale into an adventure story, which proved a great success. Her version,
not that of J.R.Wyss, is the basis of most English translations and adaptations of the
book.
For a long time no other Swiss story approached the popularity of The Swiss Family
Robinson. The attempt of Jeremias Gotthelf, a great educator of the common people, to
create a ‘Swiss republican’ story for German-speaking Swiss youth in Der Knabe des Tell
[Tell’s Boy] (1845) failed because of its epic length and copious philosophical
digressions. The outstanding work of the painter-author August Corrodi (1826–1885)
failed to exude the desired seriousness and didactic purpose: Corrodi’s fantasies with
their leaning to absurd humour were apparently alien to the Swiss public. But with
Johanna Spyri’s Heidi’s Lehr- und Wanderjahre [Heidi’s Apprenticeship and
Journeyings] (1880) and Heidi kann brauchen, was es gelernt hat [Heidi Uses What She
has Learnt] (1881) we find a work that entered the canon of world children’s literature.
The image of the alpine pasture as a ‘pedagogic island’, where the little girl Heidi is given
a simple upbringing in harmony with nature, was certainly influenced by the renewed
interest in Rousseau in the late nineteenth century. But Johanna Spyri (1827–1901), as
a middle-class woman hedged about by conventions, also expressed in this story her
personal nostalgia for the lost freedom of childhood. This celebration of simplicity and
harmony with nature, with its evocative scenery, matched so completely the image of
Switzerland dear both to the Swiss themselves and to foreigners that Heidi became the
‘Swiss’ book par excellence. Spyri wrote sixteen books for ‘children and also for those
who like children’; only Heidi achieved world fame and continuing success.
Heidi is the beginning of a whole series of realistic portrayals of childhood which are
still read by German-speaking Swiss children but have never really travelled. Among
them are for example Die Turnachkinder im Sommer [The Turnach Children in Summer]
(1906) and Die Turnachkinder im Winter [The Turnach Children in Winter] (1909) by Ida
Bindschedler, Elisabeth Müller’s Vreneli [Little Verena] (1916) or Theresli [Little
Theresa], (1918), and Olga Meyer’s Anneli [Annie] (1918).
These stories also mark the onset of a consciously ‘Swiss’ children’s literature as
counterweight to the increasing nationalism of German writings. The authors, including
Fritz Brunner and Josef Reinhart as well as Elisabeth Müller and Olga Meyer, were
almost all teachers, which may explain the didactic nature of German-language Swiss
children’s literature well into the twentieth century. Education for citizenship remains
an important theme of this literature, as exemplified by Der Schmied von Göschenen [The
Smith of Göschenen] (1920) by the pastor Robert Schedler (1866–1930), a tale about the
THE WORLD OF CHILDREN’S LITERATURE 741