257 – Switzerland’s ‘Röstigraben’, a Curious Culinary and Cultural Divide

Switzerland is predominantly German-speaking, but far from completely so. The alpine confederation is officially quadrilingual: German (64%), French (20%), Italian (7%) and Romansh (0.5%). As the latter two languages are very minoritary, linguistic tension does tend to be a binary thing, between Deutschschweiz – a word only a germanophone could pronounce – and la Romandie, signifying the Swiss French west of the country.

The Romands call the ‘other’ side la Suisse alémannique and the Schweizerdeutsche call the francophone part of their country Welschschweiz (the root word being a Germanic term for ‘stranger’, identical to the one in ‘Wales’ and ‘Wallonia’).

The language border dividing these two areas is known jestingly as the Röstigraben (in German) or the rideau de rösti (in French). A Graben is a ditch and a rideau is a curtain, so you get the idea of separation – but what a Rösti is and why it is significant, requires a bit more explanation.

This dish is made mainly by frying grated potatoes in a pan. It was formerly eaten as breakfast by farmers in the (German-speaking) Bern canton. The original conceit of the Röstigraben was that it constituted the western limit of the German Swiss culture, beyond which people spoke (and ate) differently.

The Rösti has gained popularity as a side dish all over Switzerland, but the language and cultural differences persist. The French Swiss voters have traditionally been less averse of the international community (including potential EU membership) and more prone to support a more active role for the federal government. Recently, voting trends in French and German Switzerland have tended to converge more.

The Röstigraben isn’t the only gastronomically defined cultural border in central Europe. The northern and southern halves of germany are separated by what is called the Weisswurstäquator – the white sausage equator, after a favourite dish in Bavaria that’s rarely eaten in the north.

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a map of this particular equator around. The book cover used here (and found here) shows a picture of a very literal Röstigraben – a Switzerland-shaped Rösti broken in two exactly where the language border runs. That the ditch wasn’t too hard to cross, is apparent by the name of the author, Laurent Flütsch: his French forename and German surname suggest his parents had a quite intimate knowledge of the ‘other’… 

256 – The Surrealist Map of the World (1929)

Just as light is not supposed to bend, so the Equator should not waver from its rectitude. The fact that it snakes across this map like a hose through a garden indicates that this is a very weird world indeed.

How weird? A first indication is the size of Alaska – way too big even if you allow for the distortion of the Mercator projection, which is also ballooning Russia to a size much bigger than its already huge actual surface, but this super-sized Russia is not out of line with accepted mercatorial deviance.

Closer inspection of the American continent reveals a gigantic Labrador, bordering on Mexico, to which is appended an atrophied version of South America. Not just atrophied, but completely missing are the United States and Canada (not to mention all other Central and South American countries, save Peru, which takes up all of its subcontinent).

Two para-American islands are affected by gigantism: Easter Island, which looks like a teddy bear pointing towards Peru, and Tierra del Fuego, at the southern tip of the Americas, looking like a lizard running west… the low resolution of this image leaves much to the imagination.

Asia and Oceania are similarly blighted by gigantism (Hebrides, New Guinea and an illegible archipel, China and Afghanistan) dwarfism (Australia, India) and not-there-ism (Japan, Sri Lanka, much of the Middle East).

Africa is tiny, Europe is almost entirely covered by Germany, Ireland is looking straight at Europe across the Britain-less North Sea. Only two cities are marked on the map: Paris and Constantinople…What’s the point of this map? Well – its point is that it hasn’t any, except to bewilder and shock bourgeois viewers by presenting a bizarre alternative to the stale normality of their expectations.

Which is a neat summary of the surrealist world view – not co-incidentally, the title of this work is Surrealist Map of the World. It first appeared in 1929 in a special issue of ‘Variétés’, a Belgian magazine, dedicated to surrealism – an art form remembered for its absurdity, but less for its political views.

In discussing this map in her excellent book You Are Here, Katharine Harmon quotes a Surrealist manifesto from 1925:

“Even more than patriotism – which is a quite commonplace sort of hysteria, though emptier and shorter-lived than most – we are disgusted by the idea of belonging to a country at all, which is the most bestial and least philosophic of the concepts to which we are all subjected.. Wherever Western civilization is dominant, all human contact has disappeared, except contact from which money can be made – payment in hard cash.”

This map was found here.