Perhaps it takes the thoughtfulness of a poet to understand what is going on. Asked by the Neue Zürcher Zeitung if he is still involved in politics, Peter Bicksel (87) replied: “Yes, of course, I am very interested and saddened. Growing worldwide disinterest in democracy. Fall of liberalism. End of the American Revolution. In other words: the end of freedom.”
Peter Bicksel – Social Democrat, close friend and adviser to Social Democrat and Federal Councilor Willie Richard – mourns the “end of freedom”?
NZZ interviewers were also surprised: “It’s amazing, but you’re not a social democrat?” The poet replied: “Yes, but the Social Democrats are also children of liberalism, also children of the revolution.”
The anxiety of the great old man of letters casts a sad light on the festive year beginning today: 1848 – 175 years ago – the liberal revolution triumphed in Switzerland and created a modern federal state.
Freedom in the truest sense!
What was it? What is it? This means the won, developed and tested freedom of citizens – democracy and the rule of law, lived as a political everyday life.
This is why a free spirit in the literal sense is so much more than a free spirit in the party sense. The revolutionary term “Free-Sinn” is the original meaning of freethinking, which was taken over by all freethinking currents in the country, until Switzerland finally became a nation of freethinking parties – united in a constant historical family dispute.
Since then people have been against Freisinn because they are more liberal than Freisinn.
The most prominent example of this is the labor movement: it pushed economic liberalism towards a social revolution – towards a social market economy. And from the proletariat of the 19th century they made workers-citizens of the 20th century. The secularized and liberally inspired Christian Democrats also brought a Christian sensibility, a Christian-based understanding of political culture, to Helvetian politics.
Freisinn is the key word for politics as freedom, in line with the philosopher of freedom Hannah Arendt’s dictum that freedom should be the meaning of all politics.
And this is what Peter Bichsel, author of Des Schweizers Schweiz, a staunch patriot and therefore a notorious rebel, has to say to today’s Children of the Revolution. If the liberal spirit is understood as a spiritual homeland, Swiss and boundless at the same time, then Bichsel is a deep writer in his homeland.
What the Germans failed to do in 1848 in Frankfurt, Paulskirche, the Swiss succeeded: September 12, 1848.
But what does “Swiss” mean? We must thank Freisinn for this historic masterpiece. From which one could draw a legacy 175 years later, a challenge for all democrats in this country: to be the engine of intellectual, cultural freedom that embraces everyone again – across all party lines.
To prevent what Peter Bicksel fears: “the fall of liberalism. End of freedom.