Episode 2.6: the throes of history

During last week’s class our trip through church and Western history was broad and sweeping, with brief pauses at random points (“You’ve all heard of Caligula, right?”) and a slightly longer stop to consider the Reformation, as it’s pretty darned important to the history of Switzerland, and Zurich, and the Church. “Do you think the reformers were justified in their complaints against the church?” We all sort of stared. Is this some sort of a trick question? Um. Yes?

So my giant educational hole is still far from being filled. I am attempting to work on it from another front, reading a book I found in London, “The Shortest History of Europe” by John Hirst, which so far has been great. History was just never my subject – all those names and dates and details... (in Meyers-Briggs land I am most definitely an iNtuitive) but this book frames things in a way my brain can grasp.

In the class readings for last week, the question for discussion was, “when have you encountered church history?” This seems like kind of a strange question to me as an American…I went to Rome once? But here it’s just all over. Our section of Zurich is called “Altstetten” because it was the site of a Roman settlement. The reformer Huldrych Zwingli preached in the Grossmünster. But it’s not just buildings. I thought of the time Daniel and I went to visit his Austrian friend in Salzburg. We went into the cathedral and he got very agitated, angry about the Pope and the Catholic church and its abuses before the Reformation. I thought, really? Wasn’t that kind of a while ago now? But for him, it was a story with very real present-day implications. I’d certainly been exposed at that point to the fact that history was far more real and present in the life of the average European than in the life of the average [white] American – we who enjoy the benefits of European civilization but can drive for days without tripping over a single Gothic cathedral or a Roman road. But that was the first time I’d been aware of my very American privilege of ignorance, of thinking that history was something for the history books.

In my stints in Europe I’ve come around to the view that our great American optimism, for all the good it brings, is also a symptom of a lack of maturity, an exuberance of youth that hasn’t yet had to bear the weight of history. I wonder if what is happening politically now is really just another swing of the pendulum from left to right…could it also be that we are in the throes of national puberty? (A certain member of our household has exhibited certain SCREAMING signs of the throes of puberty recently, so maybe this is just on my mind.)

Right in the middle of Switzerland is the Ballenberg open-air museum. According to its website, “We are a foundation whose purpose it is to preserve historical rural edifices from all parts of Switzerland by taking them apart piece by piece and reassembling them on our grounds for everyone to visit and as a basis for scientific enquiry.” When I first heard about this place, I was pretty skeptical. Reconstructing rural edifices piece by piece? For a country with a total land area smaller than 41 of the 50 states…how much variety could there be?? Of course, it turns out that it’s an amazing place. There are “over 110 rural houses and farm buildings” and they are indeed painstakingly reconstructed, in a beautiful 160-acre natural setting, with typically Swiss care to closely match the local microclimate and fauna to each house. Some of them are like typical history museums, with carefully arranged period furniture in roped-off rooms, but lots are just open for exploration – you can be the nosy neighbor you’ve always wanted to be. Many have displays or demonstrations of a typical craft or industry from their town of origin – there’s pottery, weaving, a forge, a working sawmill, farms of course – and the museum sells local handicrafts, meat, cheese and chocolate. One time we went, it was Bernese Mountain dog day. There were puppies.

Vinter's House from Richterswil, with gorgeous pear vines.
We did not get any good puppy pictures, I have no idea how that happened. 

There are places like this in the US of course. Thanks to my father the history buff, we visited Sturbridge Village and Mystic Seaport quite thoroughly during the Newport years of my childhood. But they always felt like, well, history. “This is how we did things 200 years ago” was the message I got. But Ballenberg is somehow different, it’s much more “this is how we’ve been doing things for 200 years.” To generalize wildly, in the U.S. there’s a sense of pride in how much progress we’ve made and what we could yet achieve. In Switzerland, there’s a sense of pride in how they’ve been doing everything (from farming mountainsides by hand to taking good care of everyone’s money) The Right Way for as long as anyone can remember.

The Right Way, incidentally, involves a lot of meetings. And does not progress particularly quickly. (An actual newspaper headline today read something like: “There were many men among the 10,000 who participated the Women’s March in Zurich yesterday: why?”) I’m not saying we should all be Swiss. I just wonder if we, as a country, can move towards a more mature self-image: one that is appropriately confident about our strengths, but acknowledges that we, too, have a history to carry – and that the rest of the world might help us figure out how to do that.

The goat has an opinion about this post and it is: meh.