Let's get out of here!

The idea for the anthology "Kuhschweizer und Sauschwaben", which I published together with Roger de Weck around a decade ago, germinated during a football World Cup. In Switzerland, all the migrant minorities celebrated the victories of their mother countries with horns and flags. Only the Germans remained silent. And the cliché of the Swiss celebrating every victory against the Germans in the pubs as if they had killed Hitler with their own hands was by no means out of the air. But finding an author who would have made the rampant German hatred his own proved to be an impossibility. For everything primary, primitive and populist that is allowed to characterize our relationship with the Swabians, gopferdammi nocheinmal, we had to fall back on the famous Weltwoche article from 1986, which made press history. Title: "World champion is, thank God, Argentina", subtitle: "Why the Swiss so warmly begrudge their neighbors their defeat in the World Cup final." And of course there was talk of the Nazis. Schweizer Illustrierte ran a cover story: "Do we really hate the Germans?". Yes. And they love us. At least they loved us for a long time.

For these two reasons, I really liked Christoph Plate's article in the NZZ am Sonntag: It was plain language, German and clear, above all German. The title: "Nichts wie weg". Plate had worked in the newspaper's foreign policy editorial department for ten years, and "gladly". But as soon as he returned to his native Swabia after a successful escape and became deputy editor-in-chief of the Schwäbische Zeitung, the accusations came. The second German without complexes after Steinbrück.

Remarkably, even the SVP had long spared the Germans during its 25 years of hegemony - even though they are at the heart of its ideology and its image of Switzerland, which goes back to the World War. As if it were a taboo. After the triumph of the minaret initiative, the SVP relied on anti-German sentiment and used it to campaign in Zurich. The "German felt" at universities and in hospitals was attacked, "Berlin conditions" had to be avoided. Two or three years ago, the German professors fought back with an ad in the NZZ. Now they are going home. Even before it addressed the turnaround in German immigration, the NZZ had already published a dossier on the state of relations in Germany on Sunday to coincide with the elections and proclaimed: Normalization prevails. The exodus of Germans is already being lamented and the NZZ am Sonntag asked its former editor for a statement. Plate was now able to get rid of everything he hadn't said before in his own newspaper. The Swiss as Bünzli&Blocher drove him out of Zurich. Narrow-mindedness, anti-Semitism and anti-German clichés characterize us. He accuses an entire nation of a lack of controversy and self-irony.

And many of the reactions have confirmed all of this. But also the other way around: pure misjudgment, Mr. Plate! The neighbors' pity, "where our children would have made friends" (the next generation as a beacon of hope), was pure irony, which overtaxed Teutonic self-irony. In fact, the compassionate neighbors were genuinely and honestly pleased in advance about the departure of the foreign nest-polluter in spe.

Jürg Altwegg is correspondent of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in Geneva.