Demystification or Restoration of Neutrality? Confronting the History of the Nazi Era in Switzerland

Abstract

The Eichmann trial is considered a turning point in reflections upon the Holocaust. This article raises the questions of how it influenced reckoning with the past in Switzerland and whether it impacted entrenched Swiss assumptions on the Nazi era past. For most of the post-war era grappling with wartime history has been intimately linked to neutrality which was both a determinant and outcome of collective memory production. A specific framing of wartime memory was decisive for stabilising narrow conceptions of neutrality during the Cold War which justified Switzerland’s international isolationism. Neutrality (and the values associated with it), in turn, was a chief obstacle to confronting received representations of the past. In recent years, however, an uncoupling of memory and neutrality conceptions can be observed. With its demystification in the wake of the Holocaust era asset scandal, wartime memory has lost its significance for national identity formation, while, ironically, neutrality is experiencing a revival.