Switzerland is one of those countries more written about by visitors than by locals, who are already used to the views. It makes an impression, is what I'm saying. I went for a walk with my daughter yesterday and it looked like this:

https://imgur.com/ms8imgb.jpg

Of course, if you tap a local villager on the shoulder and point, open-mouthed, at the vista behind them, they are apt to shrug and puff their pipe impassively, before turning back to their game of jass with perhaps a grumbled reflection on the impressionability of foreigners.

This is the only country I know that looks like its calendars. Yet things were not always this way. Before the beauty of the mountains became a cliché, reactions to the scenery here could be unpredictable. CCL Hirschfeld, passing through in the 1760s, commented:

What struck me most in Switzerland among the curiosities of nature were those horrid structures the Alps.

And even a century later, tourism was not to everyone's taste. Tolstoy was pleasingly irritable about the whole thing:

2 July. Got up at 3. A filthy bed with bugs. The same stupid view of nature and of people. Englishmen in blankets, with Murrays and maps. “Ah!” they exclaimed, when the sun appeared.

(Guilty!) Those that enjoyed it, though, certainly got a lot out of it, especially the writers and artists. ‘This Engadine is the birthplace of my Zarathustra,’ Nietzsche declaimed. Wagner wrote many of his masterpieces here, and later said: ‘nowhere else could I have composed them.’ Rilke hammered out most of the Duino Elegies here, and all of the Sonnets to Orpheus. Gibbon finished the Decline and Fall in Lausanne, and Tolkien used his travels in Switzerland as a model for Bilbo's journey from Rivendell to the far side of the Misty Mountains. Mary Shelley went as far as to invent the horror genre after a dirty weekend on Lake Geneva. And on, and on, and on.

So this collection of letters, diaries and other comments from people travelling through Switzerland, arranged thematically, has a large pool to draw on and gives you a pretty good summary of how the country's image has shifted – and, in other ways, remained the same – over the years.

As you can see from the above, it doesn't just concentrate on the positive reviews. Which is important. The Swiss, though neutral during the Second World War, did not exactly cover themselves with glory back then – the yellow star that Jews had to wear was a Swiss invention, and Switzerland turned away huge numbers of Jewish refugees at the border, with justifications that have become horribly familiar again in recent years:

When you are in command of a small lifeboat with limited carrying capacity and supplies, that is already very full, while thousands of victims of a shipping disaster are crying for help, you must seem cold-hearted when you can't take everyone.
—Eduard von Steiger, Federal Council Member, 1942

The government eventually apologised for this in 1996.

Switzerland is a hard country to understand: neutral in conflicts, but thoroughly militarised; at the heart of Europe, but politically detached from it; functionally multilingual, but speaking by preference their own incomprehensible local dialects. A lot of those quoted in here have a puzzled tone, as if struggling to get a handle on the place; many, indeed, write it off out of sheer misunderstanding. (When Frédéric Dard settled here, he wrote to his friends: Je me suis suissidé, ‘I've committed Swisside’, which is probably the wittiest thing anyone has ever said about Switzerland. It isn't in this book though.)

If you really want to understand Switzerland, the best first step is to be born here. But failing that, this compilation is a fun way to sympathise with others who have done their best to figure it out. ( )