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.
The new building of the Estonian National Museum, opened in 2016, is spectacular in every way. The building reveals a lot about the eventful history and the present day self-image of the smallest of the Baltic countries.
In Switzerland, as elsewhere, climate change is forcing a rapid switch to renewable energies. The trend is called ‘electric’ and its advent harks back to the age of electrification, which in Switzerland occurred very early on, at the end of 19th century. Are there parallels to that era? Are we currently experiencing Electrification 2.0?
Peter Viktor von Besenval was born 300 years ago. A Swiss baron and a mercenary officer in the service of the French crown, Besenval was a passionate collector of objets d’art and plants, and a notorious ladies’ man.
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.
