On Switzerland – Tony Judt in NY Books (in 2010):

‘One is not supposed to love Switzerland. Expressing affection for the Swiss or their country is akin to confessing nostalgia for cigarette smoking or The Brady Bunch. It immediately brands you as someone at once unforgivably ignorant of the developments of the past thirty years and incurably conventional in the worst way. Whenever I blurt out my weakness for the place the young yawn politely, liberal colleagues look askance (“Don’t you know about the War?”), my family smiles indulgently: Oh, that again! I don’t care. I love Switzerland.
What are the objections? Well, Switzerland means mountains. But if it is Alps you want, the French have higher, you eat better in Italy, and snow comes cheaper in Austria. Most damning of all, people are friendlier in Germany. As for the Swiss themselves, “Brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.” It gets worse. Switzerland did remarkably well out of World War II—trading with Berlin and laundering looted assets. It was the Swiss who urged Hitler to mark Jewish passports with a “J”—and who, in an embarrassing exercise in recidivist chauvinism, have just voted to ban minaret construction (in a country that has only four and where almost all resident Muslims are secular Bosnian refugees). Then there are the tax evaders, although it has never been clear to me just why what Swiss banks do in servicing a handful of wealthy foreign criminals is significantly worse than what Goldman Sachs has done with the proceeds of millions of honest US tax dollars.’

(…)
‘During the 1950s, my parents and I took a number of trips to Switzerland. This was their brief parenthetical moment of prosperity, but in any case Switzerland then was not so very expensive. I think what struck me as a child was the uncluttered regularity of everything. We usually arrived via France, in those days a poor and run-down country. French village houses were still pockmarked with shell damage, their Dubonnet ads torn and crumbling. The food was good (even a London schoolboy could tell that) but the restaurants and hotels had a damp, tumble-down air to them: cheap and cheerless.’

(…)

‘My happiest memories are of Mürren. We first went there when I was eight years old: an unspoiled village halfway up the Schilthorn massif attainable only by rack railway or cable car. It takes forever—and a minimum of four trains—to reach the place, and there is little to do once you arrive. There is no particularly good food and the shopping is unexciting, to say the least.
The skiing, I am told, is good; the walking certainly is. The views—across a deep valley to the Jungfrau chain—are spectacular. The nearest thing to entertainment is the clockwork-like arrival and departure of the little single-carriage train that wends its way around the mountainside to the head of the funiculaire. The electric whoosh as it starts out of the tiny station and the reassuring clunk of the rails are the nearest thing to noise pollution in the village. With the last engine safely in its shed, the plateau falls silent.
In 2002, in the wake of an operation for cancer and a month of heavy radiation, I took my family back to Mürren. My sons, aged eight and six, seemed to me to experience the place just as I had, even though we stayed in a distinctly better class of hotel. They drank hot chocolate, clambered across open fields of mountain flowers and tiny waterfalls, stared moonstruck at the great Eiger—and reveled in the little railway. Unless I was very much mistaken, Mürren itself had not changed at all, and there was still nothing to do. Paradise.’

Read the article here.

Tomorrow I will go to Mürren with my son, age three, almost four.

There are many good things to say about Switzerland, it’s still the olace where I like to die. And that’s exactly the reason why I don’t want to live there, but vacation yes. And more than that.