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The scene for these ideas was set by Markus Kutter, Lucius Burkhard and Max Frisch in 1955. In their short book “Achtung: die Schweiz” (Danger: Switzerland), they proposed presenting the country not in pavillions, but as it would conduct itself in an emergency. The action was to take place in a real, yet model small town that would be built by the water somewhere in French-speaking Switzerland. There was wide-ranging public debate about the project, but the decision ultimately fell in favour of a conventional national exhibition that opened its doors in Lausanne on 30 April 1964. The Lac Leman event attracted more than ten million visitors.
Another project that hit the headlines was “Gulliver”, designed as a sociological study to demonstrate the multi-faceted nature of reality in Switzerland. The picture was to be a precise one, with respondents asked to answer 310 questions. A preliminary study surveyed 1240 people in 344 municipalities. Some of the responses were so brutal in their honesty that Hans Georg Giger, Delegate of the Federal Council, felt moved to intervene. The result was a considerably softer study just 80 questions long. The organizers were banned from asking the population for their views on property speculation, the media monopoly, refusal to do military service, the 40-hour week, abortion, permanent residence rights, nuclear weapons, Swiss involvement in European integration, and communism.
Flags from every municipality
It was the era of the Cold War. The armed forces presented “total national defence” in a hedgehog-shaped concrete bunker, and the people lived in growing suburban anonymity. The attitudes of society had become self-satisfied, but cracks were appearing under the veneer. It was only a few more years before the outbreak of the student revolution in May 1968 and James Schwarzenbach’s first xenophobe initiative, the “Nationale Aktion”, in 1969. In the eyes of government official Giger, the Gulliver project project ran the risk of waking a sleeping giant. Expo 1964 marked the first active and creative use of the cinematic medium at a national exhibition in Switzerland. Five short films about everyday life, each with a different motif, were shown under the aegis of the “Die Schweiz im Spiegel” (Reflections on Switzerland) project. “Weg der Schweiz” (The Swiss Path) recalled the Höhenstrasse of the national exhibition in Zurich twenty-five years earlier. The flags of all 3000 Swiss municipalities formed an image that remained in the mind of every visitor.
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