Fishel Rabinowicz (*1924) is one of the last living eye-witnesses of the Holocaust. Switzerland’s acceptance and assimilation of him and other Holocaust survivors was by no means a certainty.
99 years ago, the ‘Champ-de-l’Air’ aircraft radio station in Lausanne broadcast a vocal performance live from the studio. It was Switzerland’s first radio broadcast. Listening to the radio was an exciting adventure in the 1920s. A look back at the pioneering age of radio.
Fleeing his conservative family, Friedrich Wilhelm Wagner was searching for freedom. This search led the poet to Zurich and into the circles of Dadaism.
In 1531, two years after the legendary Milchsuppe (milk soup) incident, a battle took place at Kappel after all. The Protestants suffered a crushing defeat, and were forced to abandon their dreams of an exclusively Protestant Switzerland.
Between 1815 and 1914 around 7,600 Swiss mercenaries served in the Dutch colonial army. In search of work and adventure, they aided the violent expansion of the Dutch colonial empire in what is now Indonesia.
The Foreign Legion was established in 1831. Since then the French elite troop has lured thousands of Swiss, including figures from the arenas of culture and politics.
Concordance is a model of democracy that promotes consensus and ensures internal peace, and it is a hallmark of Switzerland’s political system. The system came into being at the beginning of the 20th century.
