Switzerland Today
Hello from Bern,
Germany has a new Chancellor; and Switzerland has a new president-in-waiting. Parliament gave its rubber stamp for Ignazio Cassis to take over the rotating Swiss presidency on January 1. I imagine he’s hoping the presidency will be easier than his job as foreign minister, which hasn’t exactly been a breeze with all the tensions with the EU. I guess we could all use a fresh start in the new year.
In the News: Switzerland plans to resume human rights dialogue with China; and more Covid, Covid, Covid.
- Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis said today that the country will resume human rights discussions with China in 2022 after a 3-year gap. The talks, run on an annual basis since 1991, stalled in 2019 after Beijing objected to a letter Switzerland co-signed at the United Nations, calling for the closure of controversial Uighur camps in China’s Xinjiang region. Cassis made the announcement on Wednesday during a Senate debate on another parliamentary motion calling for more human rights promotion in China. The motion was rejected.
- The Swiss data protection commissioner has opened an investigation into allegations that a Swiss text messaging service, used by the likes of Google and TikTok, was secretly used to snoop on people through their smartphones. The company, Mitto AG, told Bloomberg it was unaware that its technology was being used to spy on people. This reminded many here in Switzerland of another Zug-based company, Crypto AG, which was at the centre of an international spying scandal last year.
- Football fans were disappointed today with news from the Swiss Football League. With Covid-19 cases surging, away fans will not be allowed to attend matches from now until the winter break. New coronavirus cases reached over 12,000 today and Switzerland has the lowest booster shot rateExternal link in western Europe, according to the Tages-Anzeiger.
Kunsthaus controversy prompts calls for panel to assess Nazi-looted art
The controversy surrounding the Bührle Foundation collection at the Kunsthaus museum in Zurich doesn’t seem to be going away anytime soon.
As we and many other media reported in October, the museum opened its new extension featuring 200 works from the Bührle Foundation. Emil Georg Bührle, who made his fortune selling arms to Germany during World War II, also bought Nazi-looted art and profited from slave labour. The Bührle Foundation says none of the works on display were looted from Jews but the decision to display the works is still seen as an affront to victims of the Holocaust.
With the barrage of criticism from all over the world, there are mounting calls for an independent commission to investigate the provenance of cultural property lost as a result of Nazi persecution and to issue recommendations. While France, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and the UK all set up panels to assess claims for Nazi-looted art in museum collections, Switzerland has so far not done so. With more museums, including in Switzerland, examining colonial era collections, such a panel could go far beyond the Nazi era.
The whole controversy is prompting a lot of reflection in Switzerland and the art world around the ethical standards which museums set for themselves. In an interviewExternal link in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung last week, Raphael Gross, the director of the German National Museum, said that “every museum has to decide for itself whether it can reconcile such a loan [of artwork] with its self-image”. When asked about whether he was surprised by the controversy, Gross said, “it [the extension] was planned for over a decade and there must have been a lot of thought about sensitive issues. But apparently not enough”.
What’s your word of the year? Pandemic fatigue anyone?
The pandemic has been horrible in so many ways. But there is one silver lining in it – we all have a much bigger vocabulary. This much is clear from the 2021 Swiss Words of the Year announced today by the Department of Applied Linguistics at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW). The word Impfdurchbruch (vaccination breakthrough) is the word of the year in German-speaking Switzerland.
“There’s a lot in that word. Vaccination should bring about a breakthrough, restore normality,” jury president Marlies Whitehouse told Swiss public television, SRF. At the same time, the virus can’t simply be vaccinated away. “It breaks through again and again – be it with new variants or so-called vaccination breakthroughs,” ZHAW said in a statementExternal link. The choice of the word also captures how hotly debated vaccination has been in the country, particularly in German-speaking Switzerland.
The tensions are also reflected in entfreunden (to unfriend someone), the third word to make the list. “Friendships were put to the test by the vaccination debate,” ZHAW said. “Suddenly, insurmountable rifts opened up between those who wanted to be vaccinated and those who refused.”
But as a country with four official languages, the words don’t stop there. And the selection is perhaps a good reflection of the mood in the linguistic regions. In the French-speaking part of the country, the pronoun iel (third-person pronoun used to refer to a person, regardless of gender) was the word of the year while certificato (certificate) topped the Italian language list. In Romansh, a Swiss national language spoken by about 60,000 people, the jury selected respect (respect), pazienza (patience) and tgira (care) as the three top words of the year.
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