The Construction of Idyll

This Essay on Eighteenth-Century Switzerland analyzes a period in which Switzerland played a more prominent role in the history of European literature and culture than it had in earlier or later centuries. Within the context of the Enlightenment, which ascribed great importance to happiness attained through virtue and self-determination, the myth of Switzerland as a virtuous land of freedom arose, epitomized most famously in Friedrich Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell. Moreover, Zurich as a Protestant city figured prominently in the formation of the literature of Enlightenment. From 1725 to 1750, Zurich became one of the leading centers of Germanlanguage literature, alongside Halle and Leipzig. Zurich was then said to harbor twenty to thirty men of genius within its borders, while Berlin was host to merely three or four.

It is no mere coincidence that Switzerland entered the literary history of the Enlightenment — and not only German but world literature, if we consider such authors as Salomon Gessner (1730–1788), Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778), and Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi (1746–1827) — because the Enlightenment was a bourgeois movement. In contrast to the baroque period, the Enlightenment no longer relied on the existence of a court as a cultural center, a fact that enabled the bourgeoisie to develop its own literature. Switzerland in the seventeenth century was considered an uncivilized country inhabited by peasants and unrefined people since there existed practically no feudal culture in Switzerland, and certainly no courtly literary culture. But the reevaluation of non-courtly lifestyles allowed for a positive view of peasants and shepherds and thus a stylization of Switzerland into a kind of Arcadia. This essay will discuss Zurich’s contribution to the literary theory of Enlightenment and the formation of the Swiss myth and its aesthetic representations.

Zurich Enters Literary History

It is surprising that Zurich should become a center for literary theory and that modern literary developments would arise there, since the Protestant clergy strictly regulated all cultural activities in that city. There was, for example, not a single permanent theater in Zurich.