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Coming Out Swiss
In Search of Heidi, Chocolate, and My Other Life
Anne Herrmann
“Many a reader will be inspired by Herrmann’s wide-ranging journey, in geography as well as in language, in the trivial as well as in the remarkable. Coming Out Swiss is marvelous, mischievous, delightful, serious—a challenge.”
—Leo Schelbert, University of Illinois at Chicago
Anne Herrmann, a dual citizen born in New York to Swiss parents, offers in Coming Out Swiss a witty, profound, and ultimately universal exploration of identity and community. “Swissness”—even on its native soil a loose confederacy, divided by multiple languages, nationalities, religion, and alpen geography—becomes in the diaspora both nowhere (except in the minds of immigrants and their children) and everywhere, reflected in pervasive clichés.
In a work that is part memoir, part history and travelogue, Herrmann explores all our Swiss clichés (chocolate, secret bank accounts, Heidi, Nazi gold, neutrality, mountains, Swiss Family Robinson) and also scrutinizes topics that may surprise (the “invention” of the Alps, the English Colony in Davos, Switzerland’s role during World War II, women students at the University of Zurich in the 1870s). She ponders, as well, marks of Swissness that have lost their identity in the diaspora (Sutter Home, Helvetica, Dadaism) and the enduring Swiss American community of New Glarus, Wisconsin. Coming Out Swiss will appeal not just to the Swiss diaspora but also to those drawn to multi-genre writing that blurs boundaries between the personal and the historical.
 Anne Herrmann is professor emerita of English and women’s studies at the University of Michigan. She is the author of four books, including The Dialogic and Difference: An/Other Woman in Virginia Woolf and Christa Wolf and Queering the Moderns: Poses/Portraits/Performances.
Praise
“Anne Herrmann . . . has written a witty, profound, and ultimately universal exploration of identity and community.”
—Choice
“Curious travelers, linguists, history buffs, and lovers of genre-defying literature will all find provocative clues to the puzzle of ‘Swissness’ in Anne Herrmann’s good-humored, insight-infused exploration of identity.”
—Passport Magazine
“Herrmann writes beautifully in this merging of history, travelogue, and memoir that explores the meaning of identity.”
—Booklist
“A unique treasure trove of cultural knowledge containing thought-provoking insights on transnationalism, multilingualism, migration and identity.”
—Forum for Modern Language Studies
“Herrmann writes with verve, passion, insight, and wisdom as she explores what it means to be Swiss in both a personal and national sense. Coming Out Swiss is at once a splendid and provocative feast of facts and a stunning personal revelation.”
—Lisa Knopp, author of What the River Carries
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