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A weekend scaling the vertiginous inclines of Lausanne – a historic lakeside town along the Swiss Riviera – prompts a search for the essence of Swissness.

Text by Matthew JanneyPhotography by Nicolas Haeni 

During his first guided tour of Switzerland in 1863, Thomas Cook led a group of intrepid and heavily frocked Victorian travellers by foot, train and steamboat to the glaciers of the Alps, the lakes of Interlaken and the rolling fields in between. At the time, Switzerland was not the developed, deep-pocketed country it is today; factory and farm workers in Britain earned three times as much as their Swiss counterparts. Today, Switzerland is considered a place of rejuvenation and recovery – see, for example, Paolo Sorrentino’s 2016 film Youth – but guidebooks at the time made a journey to Switzerland sound more like a confrontation with disease and despair: “Most travellers in the upper regions lose the skin from every exposed part of the face and neck … Swiss wine is generally condemned … The luggage arrangements on the Swiss railways are if possible more inconvenient than on the French or German railways” warned the 1861 Murray’s Handbook to Switzerland. One might have asked, why bother?

Despite these misgivings, Thomas Cook’s inaugural trip was a great success and Switzerland soon became one of the unofficial birthplaces of mass tourism. Thanks, in part, to those Swiss tours, foreign holidays to Europe and beyond became not just a luxury for the few, but gradually the basis for an affordable tourism sector that now contributes to around 8% of global greenhouse-gas emissions, making it a bigger polluter than the construction sector. Thomas therefore, enjoys a mixed legacy. Switzerland, less so. The capital Bern was named the most liveable city in Europe in 2019.

The chocolatey confederation beckoned! My trip was not a pioneering voyage à la Thomas Cook but a homecoming, of sorts. My grandmother was born in Thun, a picturesque lakeside town in the German-speaking canton of Bern watched over by the Alpine peaks of Stockhorn, Niesen and Niderhorn. Her maiden name was Müller, as common as Jones is in Wales or Smith in England. My dad spent summers there and I have a hazy memory of learning to ski in nearby Wengen as a three-year-old, my goggles fogged by tears, outraged at being left alone in ski school. Accompanying me on the trip was a Baedeker guide to Switzerland from 1913 – the German equivalent to Murray’s Handbook – a cherished heirloom from my uncharted Swiss past. A handsome red object with fold-out maps, it is almost impossible to read as it is structured by routes, not by places, and printed in size-four font. As I descended into Geneva airport, the Swiss plane’s wings juddering up and down as if sketching the Alpine skyline, I noted we were in fact entering French-speaking Switzerland, not German; I was not returning to my Müller clan at all. I was heading for Lausanne.

While my so-called homecoming was nothing of the sort, l still felt I understood what Switzerland meant: chocolate, expensive watches, punctual trains, wartime neutrality, political parochialism, Roger Federer. There is a familiarity with this landlocked island that makes you feel you know it like an old friend. As Jan Morris noted, “Like it or not, we all know what Swissness is.” True, but what might we be missing? All clichés contain as much non-truth as truth. I wanted to know what Swissness was, if anything at all, beyond this neatly packaged version we all so unquestioningly consume.

On the train from Geneva airport to Lausanne, the carriage was quiet, spacious and populated by obedient, mask-wearing citizens. As the train wrapped around Lac Léman (it is not, in fact, called “Lake Geneva”) my eyes were transfixed on the water, slate-grey under the overcast sky. In his poem “The Third Thing”, D.H. Lawrence writes: “Water is H20, hydrogen two parts, oxygen one, / But there is also a third thing, that makes it water / And nobody knows what that is,” which describes something similar to how I felt looking at the lake. Staring into its aliveness, it appeared semi-conscious. I don’t think Lawrence – who walked across Switzerland in 1913, possibly with his own Baedeker – means there is some hidden mystery to water, but rather a visible question to it that humankind is compelled to answer. The shoreline, from Geneva to Lausanne, was peppered with small settlements and marinas, evidence, I thought, of this human desire to be near water, this unconscious problem-solving.

After a delicious savoury galette at Java restaurant – nothing says, “Welcome to Switzerland!” like a 25-franc (or £20) pancake – I was once again staring into the lake, this time from my room at the Hôtel de la Paix. The view was magnificent, with strips of sunlight slicing their way through the clouds and landing on the pastel-coloured buildings of Lausanne below. It was all very quaint, like peering inside a postcard. Propping myself up against the bed’s generous spread of pillows, I amused myself reading about tips on Swiss hotel stays from my Baedeker: “Opinions regarding hotels often differ: but travellers will rarely have much cause to complain if they try to comply with the customs of the country, restrict their luggage to a moderate quantity, and learn enough of the language to make themselves intelligible.”

Clued up and masked up, I wandered the red-carpeted hallways of the hotel, imagining how it looked when James Joyce stayed here in the 1930s. There was a cosy timelessness to the striped wallpaper and hanging chandeliers, a mid-19th-century aesthetic that – like so much of Switzerland – appeared glad to be stuck in a bygone era. Complying with customs and making myself intelligible to the friendly hotel staff, all of whom spoke perfect English, I wandered into the brisk evening air.

I ventured down to Ouchy, where the city meets the water’s edge. On clear days, the Alps to the south tower over the lake on the French side of the shore; it’s easy to forget that half of Lac Léman, an essential feature in Switzerland’s psychogeography, actually belongs to France with a shared border running through the middle. Behind the waterfront sat a line of trees quietly changing into autumn dress, and behind them, hotels, from the heavily branded Mövenpick to the regal Beau-Rivage with its ice-lolly-yellow canopies. Cyclists in expensive Lycra raced along the embankment, their bikes leaving a metallic perfume in the air. But it was the lake I kept returning to, as if my eyes were magnetised to its emptiness. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Carl Jung describes the “incomparable splendour” of a lake in Switzerland he would visit as a child. “At that time,” he writes, “the idea became fixed in my mind that I must live near a lake. Without water, I thought, nobody could live at all.” Standing on the shores of Lac Léman, I too felt that I needed to live by a lake; I began frantically calculating how many nights I could afford at the Beau-Rivage if I sold everything I had with me.

Many writers have found artistic inspiration in Lausanne’s lapping shores: Byron wrote his famous poem “The Prisoner of Chillon” while staying in Ouchy; Dickens wrote Dombey and Son during a six-month visit; T.S. Eliot composed the majority of The Waste Land during a stay in one of the city’s sanatoriums while recovering from a nervous breakdown. Lausanne’s most famous literary inhabitant, I later found out, was Edward Gibbon who completed his six-volume epic The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire while living at La Grotte in Lausanne, which became a “Mecca for Romantic writers in the 19th century”, according to the New York Times. (I regret to say I haven’t read one of the 1.5 million words that make up his unrivalled work.) Other notable visitors include Vladimir Nabokov who, after 16 years spent at the Montreux Palace Hotel to the east, died at Lausanne University Hospital in 1977. (His vast collection of butterflies caught during his time in Switzerland now sit, perfectly pinned, in Lausanne’s Zoological Museum in the Renaissance-style Palais de Rumine on Place de la Riponne.) When the BBC interviewed Nabokov at his Montreux residence, he told them: “I have toyed on and off with the idea of buying a villa. I can imagine the comfortable furniture, the efficient burglar alarms, but I am unable to visualise an adequate staff.” It struck me that this might be what these writers were all seeking here, a cushy, staffed existence that allowed them to focus on their art and nothing else. You don’t come to Switzerland to struggle, you come for the remorseless pursuit of living well. I took one final look at the lake and spotted two paddleboarders gliding effortlessly over the lake’s rippling surface.

After my first day pondering the poetics of the lake, it was back down to earth with a dinner of a cheeseburger and pint of Cardinal Blonde at the snazzy Café Saint Pierre, surrounded by smartly dressed Lausannois.

Next morning, I set out to explore the steep, irregular, muscle-burning topography of Lausanne’s city centre. Stood at the Kiosque Saint-François, an early 20th-century tramway shelter that now sells flat whites and puffy croissants, I searched, in vain, for flat land. The up-and-down nature of Lausanne’s streets is due to its unique position at the intersection of three hills and two rivers, all of which lay under ice until the last great thaw. It is an urban trekker’s paradise. Everywhere I turned there was an above and a below, hidden staircases and cloistered courtyards, an infinite assortment of altitudes to discover. With a self-satisfied grin, my guide for the day told me the Lausannois all have one thing in common: big calves.

The day’s excursion began at the top of this urban millefeuille, with the impressive Cathedral of Notre-Dame, built between 1235 and 1275. My Baedeker informed me that the Gothic giant houses an ancient form of pilaster from the Burgundian-Romanesque period and that it was the site in 1536 where the canton of Vaud separated from the Romish church. Next, it was a pleasant stop at La Fondation de l’Hermitage, constructed between 1851 and 1853 by CharlesJuste Bugnion, a prominent banker. Privately owned until 1976, the dusty-pink villa now functions as an art gallery, boasting unbeatable views of the lake and cathedral framed by manicured gardens. A comforting autumnal lunch – accompanied by all-you-could-eat spätzli – followed at the domed Brasserie de Montbenon, a former casino from 1908. Flat land and a rest for my weary, English-sized calves was finally discovered in Flon, a blocky, Lego-like neighbourhood of cafés, art galleries and pop-up spaces on the site of the city’s former train station. Even here, though, the staircases and raised platforms of the old warehouses provided a variety of elevations. I began to see Lausanne’s topography as a microcosm of Switzerland itself, all peaks and valleys and impossible angles.

What has stayed with me most vividly is the Collection de l’Art Brut. A term coined by French artist Jean Dubuffet, art brut refers to works by self-taught artists – many of them patients of psychiatric hospitals, prisoners and others marginalised by society – afforded little attention by traditional institutions. The museum, the first of its kind in the world, opened in 1976 after Dubuffet donated his 5,000-strong collection to Lausanne in 1971. Today, the museum has over 70,000 works. Before I went, people spoke about it as if it were some kind of mythical planet. On arrival, however, after being refused entry for not dropping my coat and bag in the specially designated lockers, I realised we were still very much on planet Earth, specifically, Switzerland. Once authorised to enter, I was immediately taken in by the brightly coloured, dancing paintings of Chaïbia, which stood out against the all-black interiors of the modestly sized museum. Born into an impoverished Moroccan family in 1929, Chaïbia was married off at 13, widowed at 15 and was called in a dream to dedicate her life to painting. Her works, often depicting bodies transformed, disfigured, elongated or compressed are full of movement and intrigue and most prominently, joy. Elsewhere, I paused over Swiss-born Hans Krüsi’s disquieting Alpine vignettes, drawn from his childhood. Looking at them, and their uncanny dimensions, I felt as though I was watching him dream. “Art does not come to lie down in the beds that have been made for it,” said Dubuffet. “It runs away as soon as anyone utters its name: it likes being incognito. Its best moments are when it forgets what it’s called.” After an hour’s spent at the Collection de l’Art Brut, I was convinced he was right. 

The chaser to the day’s activities came in the form of a completely unreasonable amount of cheese. The Café du Grütli is clearly a Lausannois institution and impossibly Swiss, all warm wood-panelling, glowing, spherical ceiling lamps and a balding, delightfully hospitable head chef with sloping eyebrows. Pause for a moment on that name, “Grütli”. Does a more intrinsically Swiss six-letter word exist? I ate early, Swiss style, at 18:30 and already the place had come to life. The fondue – with countless accompanying cheese-dipped potatoes and gherkins – had almost finished me off when a special meringue dessert arrived accompanied by a jug filled with double cream de Gruyère. Reader, I ate it all. After a sharp, refreshing apricot eau de vie to soothe my gut – “You’ll be sorry if you don’t!” I was warned – I left a few kilos heavier, warmed and sated. I left feeling a little Swiss.

On Sunday morning, nothing appeared open. Not a thing, until I spotted a Starbucks where I purchased one of those enormous, roof-of-the-mouth-burning coffees while pining for my reasonably sized cappuccino from the Kiosque the day before. My millennial self was infuriated. But I was also charmed by this stubborn refusal to conform to the 24/7 consumerism of Western society. It’s the Swiss way or the highway, and there is no better illustration of this than a Sunday in Lausanne. Luckily and to my delight, I discovered museums were open, too, and I had a brief window before my train to visit the Musée Cantonal des Beaux Arts. I was glad that there was barely anyone about town to hear my wheelie suitcase rudely shatter the Sunday silence. I hauled it along the paved slopes in sunlight that emitted a sharp, Alpine glare that felt good on my skin.

The Musée Cantonal des Beaux Arts (MCBA), designed by Barcelona-based Studio Barozzi Veiga, is the centrepiece of Platforme 10, Lausanne’s new arts district situated next to the station. In 2022, the Musée de l’Élysée (a photography museum) and mudac (Museum of Contemporary Design and Applied Arts), will join MCBA there. A huge, grey block with thin protruding brick walls, MCBA would look almost like a giant radiator had it not preserved the arched window of the train hall that was erected in the 19th century.

Upon arrival I’m distracted by the gallery shop, drawn in by the siren call of the weighty art books and pristine white Folio novels. I delay actually seeing the art further with brunch at Le Nabi, the museum’s restaurant, a zen, minimalist space with a futuristic edge. Floor to ceiling windows beautifully light the perfectly square portion of scrambled eggs with carrot hummus and focaccia I’m served. A normal-sized cappuccino also teleports itself onto my table, in an ergonomic, terracotta mug. For a moment, I felt as though I was in fact in Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth and that, soon, a softly-spoken, white-coated clinician would fetch me for my late-morning mud bath. I spent far too long there and only had time to catch a glimpse of the permanent collection at the museum. 

In Switzerland, on time is late; trains arrive early. And true to form, when I arrived at Lausanne station, my train to Geneva airport was there waiting. I took my time climbing aboard, lacking any real will to return home. What awaited were fuel shortages and arguments over the Northern Ireland protocol – further reminders of Britain’s post-Brexit mess.

As we contoured the shores of Lac Léman, I scrolled through photos on my iPhone, negotiating the uncomfortable feeling that I was leaving having only peeled back the surface on Lausanne’s stratified past. Had I unearthed the essence of Swissness? No. But I left feeling the loose associations I had of Switzerland were now joined by a more embodied understanding, something I could touch and feel. It was about material wealth, yes. Punctilious observation of the rules, certainly. Smugness, perhaps. But I found these characteristics to be symptomatic of deeper preoccupations: enthusiastic measuredness, an intuition for limits, the thrill of restraint – all noble pursuits in my eyes. As I arrived at Geneva airport, insultingly punctual, I felt my body reaching back for the lake’s embrace. ◉