In Search of Swiss Culture

June 20, 2006

At dinner with Deborah’s family, I asked her mother, Vreni, whether there were many cuckoo clocks in her part of Switzerland (my imagination, you see, is sadly limited). “No,” she replied, “we have very few colours here.”

The response gave rise to more questions than it answered. Was Vreni saying that the land was too drab and monotone to offer the necessary inspiration to the tortured artistic geniuses who poured their souls into making the clocks? That hardly seemed likely; Appenzell bursts with more country-fresh colour than an entire family pack of Fruit Loops. Or could it be that she meant there was a shortage of paints in the region with which to decorate the jaunty little timepieces? This seemed more plausible, insofar as it could form a semi-workable plotline for a Swiss-flavoured children’s cartoon. Herr Müller, the kindly old clockmaker, is in a fit of hand-wringing grandfatherly panic the night before the county fair, with a shopfull of unpainted cuckoo clocks. Will the deficiency be made good at the last minute by a plucky paint-carrying chipmunk named Brushstroke?

I was ready to accept this comforting explanation and move to discussions of fondue and Swiss Army knives when Vreni dropped me another clue. “Lots of Yugoslavians,” she offered, “but few colours.”

This detail made the plot more complicated. Were the Yugoslavians trying to manufacture paint and not succeeding? Or, on a more sinister note, were they trying to stop Brushstroke from making his delivery, perhaps because they wanted the first prize in the county fair clock-making contest for themselves? Impossible to tell, but I feigned understanding. “Not as many colours as Yugoslavians,” I agreed thoughtfully.

“Not like the United States,” Vreni added. “Lots of colours there.” This was true, I realized as soon as she said it. All other attributes aside, the US really was a land of paint plenty. In the sequel, I reasoned, Herr Müller and Brushstroke would probably move there.

“It’s still a big problem in the United States, no?” she pursued, leaving me more puzzled than ever. What was the big problem? Surely not a bountiful supply of paint? Was there yet another challenge in store for dear old Herr Müller? “Which problem do you mean?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant.

“The Ku-Klu Klan,” she responded simply. And suddenly the clockmaker’s shop, the paints, fretful Herr Müller and his bright-eyed woodland brethren vanished like a puff of smoke from a burning cross.

I brought Deborah’s mom up-to-date on English racial terminology, and tried to persuade that I was not, contrary to how it may have seemed, scoping out the possibility of joining a local white-supremacist chapter.

If you’re still wondering about cuckoo clocks (enunciate carefully now!), it turns out there aren’t any of those in Appenzell either. As I learned, they’re actually an invention of Southern Germany, not Switzerland, and only irritating tourists ever ask about them.