The Poor Man of Toggenburg - Autobiography of Ulrich Braker

Only when these superstitions died out, at least among educated people, could Switzerland's mountains begin to be appreciated for their wildness itself. Mountains could inspire "holy terror" in the poet or artist, even the ordinary traveller could enjoy "the shivering pleasure of being half scared to death" (Schama, p 450).

The Swiss mountains became a destination for tourists, not just a tiresome obstacle between northern Europe and the classical delights of Italy and Greece. The high mountain passes, essential for trade and troop movements, were long since well known, but it was not until the mid-18th century that the high peaks attracted much interest. Mont Blanc was one of the first to be reached, in 1786, after some unsuccessful attempts; the most difficult, the Matterhorn, not until 1865. Many of the "conquerors" of the peaks were not Swiss, and even the amenities of Alpine tourism, such as village hotels and climbers' huts, were first set up by foreigners. In the early 19th century, however, the Swiss were on their way to developing their pre-eminence as hotelkeepers, tutors, couriers and guides, not only in their own country but all over the world. Even Swiss women, particularly the French-speaking Protestants, were in demand as governesses and children's nurses. By about 1830 tourism was big business, people came from all over Europe, and also America, to climb, botanise, and geologise, and even to sociologise, because the Alpine peasants were considered to be just as interesting and edifying as their surroundings. Watching the proceedings of a Landsgemeind was considered an essential part of a Swiss tour.

Even cultivated landscapes were no longer admired just for their productiveness, they were now seen as having beauty in themselves, they were

picturesque

, and as that word implies, were looked at as if they were pictures. Coxe, for example, writes of the countryside of Appenzell as "hills and vales being thickly strewed with hamlets, scattered at a small distance from each other, and exactly placed in the very spots which a man of taste would have chosen." (p 25). Bräker might well have reminded him that the placing of hamlets was more likely to depend on such prosaic matters as the depth of soil and the water supply. He might have been shocked at the idea that God created mountains and waterfalls so that they should form pictures pleasing to man, but I think he would have welcomed, from reasons of patriotism as well as self-interest, the increased prosperity brought by tourism.

Salome Bräker was to have a long widowhood, she lived on till 1822 [Chronik, p 517]. Bräker never doubted her love for him, and no doubt she mourned him sincerely, but perhaps his death may nevertheless have come as a relief. It is not difficult to see that in Bräker's writings about his marriage we are hearing only one side of the story; many of her complaints about him are justified. The most that can be blamed on both of them was that neither really tried to see the other's point of view; though living under the same roof they were effectively living in different centuries. She would find the doltish Johannes and his gentle wife easier to understand, and perhaps to control, than "Herr Brägger" with his books and his high-class friends and his peculiar ideas about religion - and meetings with young women in taverns and forest glades. She would not have expected much in widowhood beyond a roof over her head with her remaining son, and he, like his two brothers, died before she did. She would share in the housework as long as her health allowed, and in the thankless task of trying to keep her grandchildren alive. The hard times that followed the Revolution may not have given her much spare time to think about her lost husband; let us hope that her love for him outlived, in her memory, all the quarrels and misunderstandings.

Of her children, Johannes lived to 1820, Susanna Barbara to 1830, and Anna Maria to 1827. The Chronik says nothing of the fate of Anna Katharina, banished to the Thurgau, nor of her errant husband.