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Book Review
| Am Tag danach. Zur Bewältigung von Naturkatastrophen in der Schweiz 1500–2000. [The Day After: Overcoming Natural Disasters in Switzerland, 1500–2000.] Edited by Christian Pfister. Bern/Stuttgart/ Vienna: Haupt, 2002. 263 pp. Illustrations, notes, maps, graphs, bibliographies, index. Cloth 58.00, paper 36.00 (Euro). Simultaneously published in French as Le jour d'après. Surmonter les catastrophes naturelles: le cas de la Suisse entre 1500 et 2000.
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| In 1881, when the citizens of Tell City, Indiana, and New Elm, Wisconsin, heard the news of a landslide killing 114 people in Elm, Switzerland, their response was immediate and impressive: They collected money to help the victims and to rebuild Elm. More than one out of every four Swiss francs donated to Elm's survivors came from abroad, and most of this share came from emigrants to North America. The massive monetary solidarity covered exactly 74 percent of the damage, as calculated by local authorities; so one could write a success story of international aid to a grief-stricken community. And yet, as Hans Peter Bläuer points out in his contribution to this volume, the narrative is a bit more complex. The contemporaneous attribution of the catastrophe to the "blind forces of nature" was a rhetorical device to raise funds, since the landslide was a direct result of improperly conducted slate mining in the mountains of Elm. Some mining engineers had warned against the continuation of the exploitative practices, but to no avail. In the press coverage, however, these controversies were glossed over in favor of a unified portrayal of Elm's citizens as helpless victims deserving of support. |
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The Elm story highlights some of the themes of this remarkable collection of essays on natural catastrophes in Switzerland in the last five hundred years. The fourteen individual essays address different types of catastrophes, different strategies of dealing with them, and the different meanings of these catastrophes for Switzerland. These chapters are framed by a very useful introduction and conclusion by the editor, Christian Pfister, who is one of the most prolific and renowned Swiss environmental historians and vice-president of the European Society for Environmental History. Pfister correctly points out that historians rarely have analyzed natural catastrophes in Switzerland, and have instead left the academic angle to scientists. Overcoming this unsatisfactory divide and making fellow historians aware of the historical aspects of natural disasters are the two main goals of this volume, which it achieves well. The book chapters written by historians demonstrate that catastrophes did not happen outside of history, but were indeed integral to it. Some of the authors place the fund-raising campaigns squarely within the history of a politically loose federation and linguistically heterogeneous society, which only developed a nationwide sense of a particular Swiss identity by the late nineteenth century, and, concomitantly, a more powerful federal government. Collecting money for fellow citizens in other parts of the country, sharing in their grief, and even traveling to the sites of disaster served as bonds to tie the country together. With only a slight exaggeration, one could say that financial generosity in the face of natural adversity came to be seen as a genuinely Swiss attitude by the early twentieth century. In this respect, disaster relief acted as "pacemakers of modernization," as Pfister puts it (p. 240). Locally organized solidarity gave way to a well-coordinated national machinery of coping. Even more: After World War II, spreading Swiss generosity to other European nations and finally to the world became a substitute for the lack of a foreign policy based on military might, as Sascha Katja Dubach points out in her contribution. |
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But the Swiss method of dealing with disaster allows for more general conclusions as well. Rosemarie Zeller and Martin Stuber discuss how different causes were assigned to disasters in the early modern era. While the churches tried to hold on to religiously based explanations, citing God's power and understanding catastrophes as warning signs, scientific reasoning became increasingly prominent. However, no conception of catastrophe completely overcame the previous one, as Pfister remarks in this conclusion. Religious, scientific, and magical explanations continued to exist side by side even during the twentieth century. The second general point made by many authors in the volume is how nineteenth- and twentieth-century realities of insurance are tightly coupled with disastrous experiences. In Switzerland, some cantons have introduced mandatory insurance for every homeowner, a move that helped spread the costs of coverage; they even engage in a system of reinsurance among the cantons. Also, the private insurance companies that profit by quantifying and assessing risk have been thriving in Switzerland. This link between natural catastrophes and the human response of creating insurance companies deserves further consideration by environmental historians of Europe. |
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As a whole, the individual papers and the editor's framework convincingly demonstrate the importance, if not centrality, of natural catastrophes for the environmental history of Europe, with its relatively high population density and diverse practices of state management of nature. They invite transnational comparisons, which can yield further insights into the relationship between catastrophes, nation-building, environmental control, and prevention. It is worth asking, for example, whether catastrophes always have served as nationally integrative forces or whether other countries experienced them in disintegrative ways. Also, it seems that environmentally sensitive historians of technology would be well positioned to contribute to this discussion of disasters. The volume at hand mentions that nineteenth-century catastrophes contributed to the rise of federal engineering schemes to prevent further catastrophes, yet does not explicate these developments sufficiently. Another quibble with the book is the sometimes too casual tendency to use contemporaneous paintings or photographs as evidence almost at face value, when in fact they were highly charged aesthetic interpretations of the events themselves, often produced in order to impress and raise funds. But these minor points should not take away from the considerable merit of this publication. It opens up a new avenue of thought that, one hopes, will continue to enrich the scholarship on the environmental history of Europe. |
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Thomas Zeller is assistant professor in the department of history, University of Maryland, College Park. During the 2002–2003 academic year, he is working as a research fellow at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C. His current research includes a comparative history of the driving experience in twentieth-century Germany and the United States. |
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