“Where is our country headed?”

by Moritz Nestor

Paul Hauswirth is a mountain farmer on Mutthöchi in the Canton of Berne. Running his farm takes a lot out of him and his family. They lead a modest but content life. Suddenly, their existence is threatened from the outside: A popular initiative demands to close down remote areas of the canton for cost cutting reasons and wants to displace its population. Hauswirth fights this with all the means at his disposal, but his battle cannot thwart his unjust fate.
Initially, Mutthöchi’s farmers cannot believe that such inhumanity could win the majority’s vote. Paul Hauswirth and his wife fight their displacement until the end. His wife dies – full of sorrow – of a heart attack and Paul Hauswirth is in need of psychiatric treatment. Several of these harrowingly heavy fates of those displaced from their farms are woven into the novel.
Superficially, the issue at stake is the Swiss fiscal equalisation scheme and the cantonal equalisation of burdens. However, during the course of the story, the underlying ideologies that led to the breakdown of solidarity between the Swiss are revealed: on the one hand, a purely economically focused, cost cutting approach to the detriment of the mountain farmers who are alleged to be cost-intensive and to not accrue a lot of revenue in taxes and who are “advised” by unworldly “development planners” and “environmental engineers”. Though hidden in the background and unexpressed, the rejection of agricultural self-sufficiency and the support of foreign industrial agricultural products by certain circles is markedly showing through.
On the other hand, deep ecological environmental conservationists revel in “winning back nature” and gaining habitat for wolves and lynxes from ten supposedly unprofitable agricultural areas while displacing mountain farmers. They dream about “wilderness” and a “wildlife park” – without humans. Others who are looking to profit as well are not lagging far behind: Enterprising students of Lucerne University who have studied tourism and event management and who plan trekkings and survival trainings within those overgrown areas. One company seeks to have those old, abandoned farmhouses reconfigured to fit a more luxurious standard and to rent them out to potential clients: private reserves with a unique, intimate atmosphere in a remote wilderness for national as well as international show business, business and finance clients who are equipped with the corresponding cash flow. They displaced the original population and let in “a couple of rich bastards” instead, as a giveaway newspaper angrily puts it.