Richard Voice-Over: Join us on a journey to a junction where time and place and eternity somehow meet, to a small, fierce, rugged land at the meridian of Europe. The Swiss regions of Basel and Lucerne link to one another, and to the world, like spokes in the wheels of commerce, enterprise, democracy and freedom.
R VO: Here is a landscape that could only have been created only by earth forces at their most energetic. The entire welt of mountains that defines the Alps are byproducts of the colliding of tectonic plates, spewing granites and dolerites into the sky, authoring a wild confusion of raw geology. Here is a landscape that fashioned the soul of a people and spurred them to heights as vertiginous as the Alps themselves.
R On Camera: What tectonic shift crunched the landscape of history and created freedom, democracy and prosperity here? How did this improbably steep land become the crossroads of Europe? Could the answer begin with this modest bridge high in the Alps?
R VO: In the 1200’s, a group of far-seeing villagers hung a wooden bridge across the cracked floor of their land, the Schollenen Gorge near the Gotthard Pass. They called it the Devil’s Bridge because the feat was so difficult the Devil had to help. In return he demanded to own the first soul to cross it. The workers drove a goat over, tricking the old fiend, who then in anger unleashed an avalanche of stone.
R VO: That goat marked the beginning of a new era. Romans had long trudged across this cardinal pass, but the sonic architecture of the Devil’s Bridge truly opened the way for travelers, smugglers and traders from the Mediterranean to the North Sea. And trade meant taxes. Suddenly this highland matrix of autonomous sleepy villages saw the flowers of wealth spring in its stony places.
R VO: What followed was the building of a bridge of faith, spanning to a place they could not see: democracy and nationhood. This is the story of a people both profiting from and defending their strategic location; a story of war and peace, and freedom cropping from the collision of the two. It’s the narrative of Switzerland in general, and Central Switzerland in particular. My quest takes me to the Lucerne and Basel regions of Switzerland.
R OC: Switzerland is the most mountainous country in Europe, an icy ring of teeth that bites off Italy from the rest of the continent.
R VO: So, how did this daunting and deadly barrier become the handshake to the opposite seas of Europe, the great link for goods, ideas, medicines and people? My goal is to find out by following the ancient trade route from the Gotthard Pass, down into Central Switzerland, along Lake Lucerne and to the port city of Basel.
R VO: The Devil’s bridge spawned centuries of trade and, in time, the bridge gave way to intensely engineered tunnels. Today, the Swiss are blasting the longest rail tunnel in the world here, changing once again how quickly goods and people can connect.
R OC: The new Gotthard tunnel and its super speed rail is an essay in freedom, making the transit over this age old route cleaner, faster and even wider.
R VO: Those who crossed the Devil’s Bridge in the centuries after it was built arrived weary and often frostbitten into Central Switzerland. They entered a rich, forested land perplexed by high peaks. Casting shadows behind them, they stepped into the light of a fertile and contented land, where Nature and Man corresponded in accord.
R VO: Arriving in the streets of the town of Schwyz, in the canton of the same name, these travelers might well have heard dissent murmured under the shadow of the Alps. The trade route that brought goods from Italy to the empires of Northern Europe caught the eye of dukedoms surrounding this rugged little crossroads. Villagers in the region were already plotting independence from the Hapsburg Dynasty, their overlords from the north, planning the foundation of an ideal that would become one of the world’s longest running and most direct democracies.
Valentin Kessler: Before the Gotthard Pass opened, there was a lot of self-sufficiency in this area here, and after the Gotthard Pass was opened, the self- sufficiency changed to export-oriented livestock business. On the north side of the Gotthard Pass, we had important markets of Lucerne or the markets of Zurich, and if you have a look at the map, you can watch this triangle—Gotthard Pass, Lucerne, and Zurich—and you find yourself in this inner part of Switzerland.
R VO: The story goes that on August 1, 1291, a sort of Three Musketeers pledge took place in Rütli Meadow on the shores of this lake. Peasants from the adjoining cantons of Schwyz, Uri, and Unterwalden affirmed the Everlasting League, swearing never again to be ruled by a foreign power, crafting the Swiss equivalent of America’s Declaration of Independence.
R VO: In a small museum here in Schwyz the founding document is displayed—a few words on a scrap of paper. But what words! The cantons pledged to aid and defend each other with their lives against every enemy to attack them singly or collectively.
VK: This is the Swiss charter of confederation of the year 1291 and is the most important historical document of Switzerland.
R VO: Now, it has, it looks like, it would've been 3 seals, but one is missing.
VK: Yes, the Schwyz seal is lost.
R OC: It took guts to toss out the overlords. It took cooperation to keep the neighboring powers at bay, and it took both to create a new nation out of this puzzle of isolated alpine valleys.
R VO: In the years following the 1291 handshake, Lucerne, Zurich and Bern joined the confederacy, among others. United but fiercely independent, these cantons weathered wars, the bloody division of Protestant and Catholic in the Reformation, the invasion of Napoleon, and world wars. Today any Swiss will say their first allegiance is to the canton, the second to Switzerland.
R OC: This is also the birthplace of democracy in Switzerland. What conditions conspired to make that possible?
Claudia Zgraggen: You have a special situation here. You have a narrow valley with many smooth valleys and villages and towns, and it was important to, on one hand, to stick together, but on the other hand, to stay to your own and to combine this. So it was important that everybody had the possibility to say what he wanted and what he didn't want.
R OC: Direct democracy, I guess. And today, 720-some years later, do you think that the cantons are also--continue to be independent, very independent, but also fiercely united as a single nation?
CZ: Time is changing here as well as everywhere, but still, you have many different things in all the cantons. You can see it in public life, in different systems where every canton still can decide liberally, but you can also see it in the people themselves, in the strong dialects you still find in the different parts, or as well in the mentality itself, but still, you have one country with all the general conditions.
R VO: Our early traders found a verdant, rolling landscape at their feet—a landscape that today is ready made for two wheels. As a nation that celebrates eco-smart, it paves the way for the cycle. The bike is even more efficient than a Swiss watch: converting calories into gas, a bicycle gets the equivalent of 900 miles per gallon
R VO: My little foray takes me to the village of Einsiedeln, and the monastery that made this tidy hamlet a promise for pilgrims for a thousand years. They came to worship at the feet of the celebrated Black Madonna, a miracle working statue brought here by a Benedictine monk in the 9th century. There are so many benefits to being the drawbridge to travelers and traders, the drawbacks are sometimes slighted, such as the temptations to pinch or pirate. Napoleon tried to steal the Madonna when he invaded Switzerland. Ah, but like the devil before him, he was fooled. The monks had already moved it to Austria for safe keeping.
R VO: Wheeling along through the gentle, sinuous landscape, one encounters sprawling lakeside vistas, cloud-dipped peaks and little towns whose quaint appearance belies a thorough modernity.
R VO: Little Zug was content with its cherry trees until after World War II when the town opted to stimulate the economy by cutting corporate taxes to lure business. A handsome town—a hop and skip from Zurich—and now, wildly wealthy, Zug attracts corporations by the score. A little ingenuity, and ancient crossroads become a modern crossroads. This is a tapestry of wealth woven from a pastoral past….this is the stitch that is the story of Switzerland
R VO: History pops all over this pasture land. In 1315, the powerful Hapsburg counts sent an army of more than two thousand knights to defeat the upstart cantons. The Swiss peasants, armed with only picks and axes, routed their foes – an unthinkable David versus Goliath rout. It was a battle that forever branded the Swiss as fierce fighters.
VK: Battle of Morgarten is regarded as the first big battle against the House of Hapsburg, and at Morgarten, the name of the place where this battle took place, and there Schwyz people together with people of Uri and Unterwalden, they fought against this highly armed army of the Hapsburgian Duke Leopold, and they won.
R VO: Geography is destiny, and Switzerland’s lent itself to isolation. Armies hoping to conquer here had to face harsh conditions, tough topography, and resolute people acclimatized to the untidy terrain. Long before they were neutral, Swiss soldiers hired themselves out to others to fight.
R VO: For most of us, Swiss Army means two things—the guards that protect the Pope, and red and white multi-tasking knives, the weapon of choice for the MacGyver’s of the world.
R OC: And how long has this particular design been in effect?
Urs Wyss: This design has not changed since the 12th June in 1897.
R OC: Wow.
UW: This here is, by the way, the only production place in the world, so we produce every day 60,000 pocket knives and army knives, and additionally, also, 60,000 household and professional kitchen knives. So 120,000 knives a day.
R OC: Hey, that's phenomenal, and that's truly a Swiss product.
UW: It's--we can say 100 Swiss-made product.
R VO: I’m about to mess up that average by attempting to assemble one myself.
R OC: So this goes—hopefully this fits here. Like that? Like that? That went closest. Look at that. It started to look like a knife. And this goes back in here. Ok. No, here. Here, like this, ok. Oh, I see. So you've got the original design that hasn't changed, but you also have a lot of other designs.
UW: We have different other designs because we have knives for many different kind of sports, professions. Give you some samples, we have a knife for golf players. Has a unique design. There is a knife for hikers and alpineers, say, which has integrated a small display where they can read the altitude, the barometer, the temperature, time. Then they--a knife for a cigar smoker with a cigar cutter. There is a knife for rescue people with a glass broker and a glass saw. So we developed rapport for each--many professions or sports, different knives.
R VO: Our travelers of old en route from Italy north would, at length, arrive at the seam of a lake shaped like a starfish, and there board a boat for Lucerne. They would sail a beveled pane of mirrored glass, reflecting the surrounding Alps, but most likely they were indifferent to the beauty of the passage, fixed instead on lodging, trade and the transformations ahead.
R OC: Lucerne evolved into a different kind of crossroads. In the 19th century Romantic notions about the inhabitants of Swiss mountain towns fueled pilgrimages by artists, poets and eccentrics.
R VO: They had been inspired by the Romantic concept of the noble savage, and believed that dynamic archetype was manifesting itself among the farmers and herders of Switzerland.
R VO: Lucerne, benefiting from Switzerland’s steadfast neutrality, escaped bombing in World War II and so today showcases its tireless veracity of old cobbled streets, medieval guild houses, elaborate fortifications and baroque churches and cathedrals. The name Lucerne may come from the Latin word for lamp. The story goes that an angel illuminated the site for the city to the Benedictine monks who built a chapel here. Now the dwelling light shines with an eye of authenticity on the fountains, shops, hotels, and trade stores of the present.
R VO: Today’s visitor still enjoys the Belle Epoque charm of Lucerne in steamer boats and grand old hotels. But this crossroads city brings contemporary culinary flair from points around the globe. At the restaurant Jasper, at the famed Hotel Palace Luzern, the chef reinvents Swiss traditions.
R OC: I think for a long time, when people think about Swiss food, they think about sort of the mountain, traditional food, which is lots of cheese, it's fondue, it's raclette. But this is truly something different.
Ina Bauspiess: Yes, definitely. We try to also provide Swiss cuisine but in a more refined way, in a more five-star way, definitely. For example, what Kerstin Rischmeyer cooked today, the rusti, that is something that is very well known all over the world, but people always think of very big and heavy dish, a lot of calories and a lot of fat, and she presented us the dish today in a very fine way, in a very five-star way that is not heavy and that is very surprising from the design. Jasper's even going one step further. We combine Swiss local products with herbs and spices from all over the world. Kerstin Rischmeyer, our chef, really likes to surprise the guest. So here in Lucerne, definitely the world comes together taste-wise.
R VO: Travelers now and then have trekked to Lucerne for trade and commerce, repose and sightseeing. The Kapellbrücke (or Chapel Bridge, named after nearby St. Peter's Chapel), was built around 1300. It claimed the title “oldest covered wooden bridge in Europe” until a fire in 1993. Reconstructed, the bridge displays the history of the city in colorful roof panels. Now the flower-festooned footbridge, with its gabled roof, is a camera-phone favorite, along with the Wasserturm, the octagonal stone water tower, which in its time was a defense post, an archive, the city treasury, a prison, and a torture chamber. This is a bridge worth double-crossing.
R VO: Another celebrated Lucerne landmark testifies to the fierceness and courage of the Swiss army. The Mount Rushmore of Switzerland, this carving of a dying lion commemorates more than 600 Swiss Guards killed in a single day during the French Revolution. The hollow in which the lion rests was rendered in the shape of a pig – some say because the disgruntled artist hadn’t been paid properly.
R VO: The composer Wagner exclaimed of Lucerne: “I do not know of a more beautiful spot in this world. Nobody will get me out of here again.” Queen Victoria, when still in mourning for Prince Albert, was persuaded by her doctors to visit. She traveled incognito, pretending to be the “Countess of Kent,” settled into a small hotel in Lucerne and admired the vistas. She wrote in her diary: “What am I to say of the glorious scenery of Switzerland; the view from this House which is very high is most wonderfully beautiful with the lake … I can hardly believe my eyes when I look at it.” The Swiss—ever a step ahead, always cleverly profiting from their crossroad position—recognized the potential for tourism and swung the doors open wide.
R VO: Where once tourism was the privilege of the elite, the rail to the Swiss Alps ushered out the old ideas of rank and inherited aristocracy. Social pretensions were subsumed in the new democratic tourism. Hotels for every purse sprang up where still waters met the shore. The Swiss began to devise new ways to bring tourists into its mosaic of mountains, and a new age dawned.
R VO: Lucerne’s Transportation Museum tells the tales of the first trains whose tracks across the landscape marked new access to the Swiss mountains – access that brought visitors face to face with impossibly high peaks. With the introduction of trains, for the first time in history travelers could move faster than a galloping horse. New features appeared on the land, such as great spans, viaducts, bridges, tunnels, and switchbacks. Early passengers of these first trains were overcome with vertigo; some even feared the movement could cause brain disorders.
Martin Bütikofer: The idea of having a lot of nice foreign people called as tourists today was invented by building train stations up to the mountains.
R OC: Why did they want to come here?
MB: Really nice landscape, the mountains, the cows, not built up like in modern cities, actually, so have freedom, fresh air, and nice ways of travel. We really invented the small train systems up to the mountains as well. It's quite an easy way to go up to a mountain. You have not to walk up. You have an opportunity to sit in a comfortable seat in a train, and the steam engine is--give you the energy to go up easily and have a nice lunch up there.
R VO: It is the most-visited museum in Switzerland, the most comprehensive museum of mobility in Europe, a distinction that makes a difference when tackling transportation over, around, and through the Alps. The whole place rumbles and strums with cars, planes, bikes, and trains from the steamy past.
R OC: Throughout the centuries, imagination that flies with innovation creates new worlds, and nowhere is that more manifest than at the global hub, the Zurich Airport.
R VO: If travelers of old traversed the icy Gotthard Pass to enter Switzerland, the contemporary visitor arrives at the dazzling Zurich airport. And again, the crossroads here is so far ahead of its time as to be from the future. Thomas Friedman wrote in The New York Times that flying from the Zurich Airport to La Guardia “is like flying from the Jetsons to the Flintstones.”
Andrea Jörger: The Zurich Airport will become a destination. A destination where you're able to stay 24 or 48 hours, where you are able to have different service providers-- hotels, different type of hotels, Congress Center, house of beauty, education, offices, etc.
R VO: Everything.
AJ: Everything. The beauty of Switzerland itself is a reason to visit after being here at the airport.
R VO: The airport is no longer a place to bide time, or a port for planes to land but an aerotropolis: airport as city. Every human need and desire is found here, from sustenance to comfort to glittering distraction. The main runway is adjacent to a green reserve with a bike trail, and the solar-powered terminal is so clean it could double as an atom smasher. Riding from the gate to the baggage hall, the tram is filled with the sounds of cowbells, moos, and yodels. The Zurich Airport is a crossroads for travelers set to explore the limits of world.
R VO: Innovation, engineering, dreams… Inventing the future has long been a Swiss specialty. The first cog train in the 19th century lured tourists to new heights. In Lucerne, one sight always draws the eyes upwards, beyond even the toothpick steeples: …the snowy tonsure of Pilatus. Queen Victoria made the climb up on a mule, while I ratchet up on the cog wheel train.
R VO: So, Colette, where are we?
Colette Richter: We are really in the heart of Switzerland, the crossroad of Switzerland. If we look behind us, over there, you see that road? That's the road which is going to the Gotthard Pass, which is about 60 kilometer from here. You see that in the end as well. And behind there, you come to the Italian part of Switzerland, Ticino, and a bit further is Milano. Wow. If you would look that direction, where the clouds, unfortunately, coming in right now, you going to the Bernese Oberland, which is more the south side, where the Jungfrau region is. If you would look that direction, you would go direction Zurich, and up north there, where the Black Forest is and all that, in Germany, and if you would look that direction, so, like, north- northwest, it would be direction Basel, so you're really crossroad of Switzerland-- crossroad of Europe. Yeah.
R VO: There are tops of mountains on the soles of my shoes here. But others clanged their way up these vertical meadows long before me. Every summer cows and goats are driven from the lowlands to graze in the high pastures. Grazing rights to European pastures caused conflict throughout the centuries, but unlike many places, the farmers of Switzerland enjoyed more control of their land simply because it was so remote and precipitous. This led to the semi-autonomy of the cantons in the Middle Ages at a time when other more accessible territories were overtaken and run by land hungry dukes.
R VO: Nineteenth century geologist James Forbes, walked across the Alps, the hills with their heads in the heavens. Of the farmers he encountered he wrote: “They count their wealth by cheese … utterly careless of the fate of empires.” Cheese making remains a vibrant part of Swiss life, and nearly every valley claims a cheese of its own.
R VO: So how much cheese do you make in a year?
Toni Hug: [speaking native language]
Colette Richter: One ton of cheese, about 80 of these big, round—
R VO: Wheels.
CR: Wheels. Exactly.
R VO: And how old is this farm here?
CR & TH: [speaking native language]
CR: He thinks it's around 1850, around 200 years old.
R VO: 200 years old.
CR: Close to 200 years. Yeah.
R VO: Now, you have to be close to the cows to make cheese. When the cows move up the hill, do you go with them?
CR & TH: [speaking native language]
CR: The cows, they go with him. He does not go with the cows.
R VO: Ha ha! That's good.
CR: Yeah.
R VO: Every day is Earth Day on Pilatus. Always uplifting, always improving their tourism infrastructure, the Swiss have fashioned eco- friendly lodges in high places. Near the mountain top, we are embraced in the Hotel Pilatus, a worthy refuge of elegance and hearty Swiss food. Outside, an ibex clatters across the steep slope. These horned beauties were reintroduced in the Alps after hunting wiped them extinct in the 17th century. Male and female wear their horns for life, each year adding notches to the rack so that their age can be determined even from afar.
R VO: A sharp wind moans. The guides, with a wink, say the sound is the ghost of Pontius Pilate wandering the slopes searching for a route to heaven. But the sensations of sound and wind do not dominate here; …instead, it is sight. Some 73 alpine summits and six lakes can be viewed from this vantage. Looking across a sea of clouds, I am seized by the sight of this parade of peaks in the Bernese Oberland: the Eiger to the left, then the Mönch in the middle, and the Jungfrau on the right. At sunrise the peaks emerge like phantoms then glow with the first kiss of the sun.
R OC: Trains transcend the limitations of geography and history, and connect communities in a world wide web. Trains are the virtuosity of movement.
R VO: Trains that defy gravity, trains that miss no excuse to shoot through a tunnel, trains that fly over glaciated gorges … there is something primally attractive about trains and their tracks. They sweep away the hindrances of geography, and open the acreage of the mind. They make us indivisible from the landscapes we traverse.
R VO: These train tracks are the slope down which the sky flows into Basel, the crossroads of the stars. A center for learning and printing in the Renaissance, the town is now a multicultural cusp of groundbreaking pharmaceutical companies, finance and international trade fairs and exhibitions.
R OC: Where there’s trade, there’s water. The goods the ancient travelers hauled up over the lofty Gotthard Pass were destined for the waters here in Basel.
R VO: The Rhine defines this crossroads town. The port at Basel offers landlocked Switzerland access to the North Sea at Rotterdam. The raw goods of Europe’s basket spill to the cornucopia points from this hub where three countries meet – Switzerland, Germany and France.
R VO: Long before the Renaissance, long before the Devil’s Bridge at the Gotthard Pass, the Romans chose a spot along the Rhine to settle.
R OC: This city conveniently located halfway between Rome and London, Gaul and Vienna was founded in the first century BC by the Romans here along the Rhine.
R VO: Believed to have been founded by an officer in Julius Caesar’s army, Augusta Raurica emerged as a vital trading center. At its height, the city was home to 20,000 people.
R OC: So long before Jesus Christ, the Romans came here and decided to settle. Why did they choose this spot?
Barbara Fiedler: Because this here is a natural crossroad. Especially you have the main axis coming from the south over there, over the Alps. Here towards north, over the Rhine. This was a really good place where you could cross the Rhine, and Romans knew where to settle their towns, where it was ideal. And the other section was coming from Gaul, from the west, and going over to--in the direction of the Danube and to the eastern countries.
R OC: So this was a true crossroads in all points of the compass. So what kind of goods did they trade back and forth?
BF: Well, since the Rhine was the--an easy way for transport, they would, for example, bring here oysters from the North Sea, but they would also bring from very south, far away, African countries, they would have dates. They would import wine in this amphora, this double-handles container, and what else, for example, garum, which was a fish sauce, which the Romans used in their cuisine to spice everything. But people here adopted very quickly the Roman cuisine.
R VO: Remnants of the city’s shops, taverns, temples and public baths have been excavated, and the museum showcases the silver treasures discovered here. A stunning highlight of the small museum, this silver collection dates from the 2nd or 3rd century AD.
R VO: On a stormy day in December 1961, a bulldozer leveling a playing field near a school, unearthed muddy metal objects. Some townspeople carried the objects off; others threw them in a rubbish pit. It wasn’t until two months later that archeologists visited the site and understood the enormity of the discovery. Some thirty years later, an anonymous bequest donated 18 more pieces of silver. Some of the treasure has never been recovered. The exquisitely decorated objects are believed to have belonged to high ranking officials, perhaps gifts from the Emperor.
R VO: Cultures can’t keep secrets when there is an open road, and when there is a crossroads. Hued like a sunset, old Basel clings to the south side of the coiling Rhine. Education builds bridges and Basel’s university did so by drawing scholars from all over the world, tapping into layers of accumulated wisdom, and inviting new and subversive discourse. Basel became a center for humanism in the Renaissance. And in 1516, the humanist Erasmus boldly published a new edition of the New Testament based on the original Greek text. Martin Luther translated that text into German, igniting the Protestant Reformation.
R OC: This is the last link in the chain, was connecting the Mediterranean to the North Sea.
Daniel Egloff: Yeah, correct, and the Rhine [indistinct] so you can see that with this curve of the Rhine, the water slows down, and that was possible to build a bridge over the Rhine. So for all the traffic, north-south, south-north, was very important to build here this bridge.
R OC: And this is the bridge here?
DE: Yeah.
R OC: That's the very first bridge across the Rhine.
DE: 13th century was built, and that was the beginning, also, of this medieval town Basel, which was one of the most important town in Europe during this time.
R OC: So the bend in the river made it possible to become a major trade center.
DE: Correct. First they stopped with the boats on this side of the river, and then they said, "Okay, we need to have a bridge." and with the bridge, they could ask for taxes and by these taxes, the whole industry started to build up here by, I would say, textile and the colored textiles and the whole humanism started, and yeah, there was just--a lot of the city was founded.
R OC: So Basel is a crossroads not just for Europe and not for the north and southern parts of the continent, but also for your neighbors.
DE: Yeah. I think that makes us so unique, that all the French friends and the German friends, they come for work but also for leisure. At the weekends, they come to the city. But it's true, just 100 meter in my back and 200 meters on my left side is Germany and France, but it makes it interesting for them to come to Switzerland, but also for us, when we live here, I can go in the morning to buy food for my house to France. Have to have breakfast with French croissant, and lunch I have in Germany, and dinner in Switzerland. Where else can you do that?
[Church bells chiming]
R VO: Basel’s grand cathedral, the Münster, began as a Catholic church and then became a Reformed Protestant church. While the Reformation tore apart the rest of Europe, the Swiss managed to avoid wholesale bloodshed. One reason may be that the Confederation of Cantons was already cooperating as a diverse group with different customs and four different languages. The advantages of bonding together despite differences created Swiss independence. Now they could profit from the ideas that trade and interaction brought to their doorstep. It was the crossroads milieu that nurtured identity and led to the evolution of thought, and the breaking down of walls within minds.
R VO: Basel loves its river. On any sunny day, people take to the river for a swim or a kayak or simply soak in the rays on the riverside promenade. At lunchtime or after work, people flock to bath houses or exchange their bikes for water skis. Flying down the Rhine, past the Münster and the old bridges, is an adventure that only accelerates Basel’s charm.
R OC: What does a wealthy hub of interchange do with its money? Art!
R VO: Basel is a prisoner of art. It detains the eye everywhere--on the buildings, in the squares, in gallery after gallery. With its spate of international firms and its diverse populace, Basel’s open mindedness and daring expresses a common language in its architecture and art collections. Art Basel, the highest profile art fair in the world, takes place here --- tens of thousands of dealers, curators and wealthy collectors come in search of treasures to light up their walls.
R OC: “Give me a museum and I'll fill it,” said Pablo Picasso. In 1967, the voters of Basel decided to spend 6 million Swiss francs to buy two Picassos. The artist was so overwhelmed he donated four more.
R VO: Works by Picasso animate the white walls of the Fondation Beyeler. “Art is the elimination of the unnecessary,” so said Picasso, and this airy bleached dream of a building, concocted by Renzo Piano, would suit such sensibilities. Ernest Beyeler, son of a Swiss Railway worker, was born in Basel in 1921. He worked in an antiquarian book and print shop and over time, transformed it into a gallery. His collection grew and he attracted the attention of Picasso who allowed him to exhibit or buy any pieces he chose.
R VO: Another artist to whom Beyeler devotes a room is the Swiss sculptor and painter, Alberto Giacometti. His surreal elongated figures seem stretched to the breaking point. Set against the white walls they ache with tension. Giacometti once described his forms as not human forms but rather the shadows that people cast.
R VO: Basel hums and buzzes with high voltage. In addition to banking, Basel is home to a mall of major pharmaceutical companies – a fitting affair for a global nerve center, dispatching cures for the world from the sky-diamond buildings along the banks of the Rhine. Basel is a trip, with a psychotropic past. In 1943, Albert Hoffman, a pharmaceutical worker, was experimenting with molds and while biking home experienced an “extremely stimulated imagination.” Dr. Hoffman had stumbled upon LSD.
[Church bells chiming]
Annelis Bächle: There were three periods of prosperity. The first was when foundation of the university in the 15th century with the book printing. The second was the silk ribbon textile manufacturing, and the third now is the chemical industry.
R VO: Uh-huh. The pharmaceuticals.
AB: Pharmaceutical grew out of the chemical industry. Prominent scientists, people who really work hard and find out things, like--Basel has seven Nobel winners.
R VO: Seven Nobel prize—
AB: Yes. In this little town. Ha ha!
R VO: A crossroads town is more often than not a wealthy town. Basel has attracted many international companies to the shores of the wandering Rhine. And the wealth manifests in glittering edifices, both grand and modest, simple and extravagant. The world-renowned architecture firm Herzog & de Meuron hails from Basel, their work characterized by a love of diverse materials and the concept of architecture as a social sculpture. Architects Frank Gehry, Mario Botta and Renzo Piano are but a few of the many to make leave their bold mark in Basel.
R OC: The early travelers and traders through here were in a way like bees pollinating gardens far from where they started, bringing with them new ideas, culture, art and food.
R VO: Little vegetable markets and cheese stalls bejewel these vibrant streets. The Swiss have the highest consumption of organic foods of any country in Europe. But still, they love their beer, schnitzel and cheese.
R OC: Hello, hello, hello.
Cheese seller: That's our special house cheese.
R OC: Aha.
Cheese seller: The mild one, not too strong, not too mild.
R OC: It's very mild.
Cheese seller: You like stronger?
R OC: I do like stronger. I do like stronger, so—
Cheese seller: This here is a little bit stronger but not too strong.
R OC: Mm, that has some bite to it. That's good.
R VO: If food is a window to the soul, then Basel’s gastronomy reveals a distinctively Swiss soul. It melts the best of its neighbors into one big fondue. The exquisiteness of Swiss patriotism is that it starts with difference—the cantons—and ends with inclusion—the country.
R VO: The melting pot of ideas in this crossroads city forged an artist who pushed the boundaries of form and function. The sculptor Jean Tinguely grew up in Basel. He was obsessed with detail, with precision, timing and machinations—all very Swiss. But it’s precision with a kink. Tinguely enjoyed publicly destroying his art as much as creating it. “Playing is art,” he wrote. “So I am playing.” The curators at the Tinguely Museum have to stagger playing his sculptures because if all of them were to run at once the din would be overwhelming. It’s the Yellowstone of art galleries with little eruptions happening all the time in different parts of the museum.
Roland Wetzel: Basel was a center of art from the areas surrounding this. France, there's Germany, there's Switzerland, and a lot of artists come together here, not only since Art Basel exists but also before, and it was always a city of culture. The beautiful museums. The oldest public museum is in Basel. It was a place where it was good to be and to make art and to be noticed. When you asked him, "Are you a mechanic?" he said, "I am a poet, and the mechanic is only what I use to make this poetry."
R OC: Uh-huh. And so this is poetry in motion.
RW: This is poetry in motion, yeah. Yeah. [chuckles]
R VO: It’s contrary to logic that this place would become such a handshake to the world. But both because of and in spite of its barriers, it defied reason and opened up paths to all points of the compass.
R VO: A gift of geography, perhaps? For one thing, fertile mountain valleys create economies in which small farms thrive. In turn, the trading of crops helps build up financial and educational capital, a key foundation to democracy. And as opposed to coastal flatlands that can be easily occupied by armies, the Swiss terrain created opportunity for freedom.
R VO: But beyond the land, it took determination, a solemn vow of loyalty and a fierce dedication to freedom for this sublime slice of Europe to be born Switzerland. This little stronghold launched itself from a precipitous backwater to the epicenter of trade. And to sustain their hard-earned independence, the people became masterful architects of neutrality.
R OC: The Swiss developed a world view through centuries of movement, the results of prophets and pilgrims, saints and spies, traders and thieves, lifting through their alpine gates.
R VO: Yet while the Swiss opened wide their doors, they did so with great foresight and care. This paramount nation first and foremost discerned itself, and then it radiated the world.
R VO: For more information and links, go to our website Adventures WithPurpose.TV.
back