page_title: Early Modern Switzerland
section_title: German writings
hierarchical_section_title: Early Modern Switzerland / Culture during the early modern period / German writings
caption_attribution_description: English: Air-flow over different shapes (a first step in developing wings for flight) was one of many subjects studied by the Bernoulli family in Switzerland.
context_page_description: The early modern history of the Old Swiss Confederacy and its constituent Thirteen Cantons encompasses the time of the Thirty Years' War until the French invasion of 1798.
  The early modern period was characterized by an increasingly aristocratic and oligarchic ruling class as well as frequent economic or religious revolts. This period came to be referred to as the Ancien Régime retrospectively, in post-Napoleonic Switzerland.
  The loosely organized Confederation remained generally disorganized and crippled by the religious divisions created by the Swiss Reformation. During this period the Confederation gained formal independence from the Holy Roman Empire with support from France, and had very close relations with France.
  The early modern period also saw the growth of French-Swiss literature, and notable authors of the Age of Enlightenment such as the mathematicians of the Bernoulli family and Leonhard Euler of Basel.
context_section_description: In the 18th century the intellectual movement in Switzerland greatly developed, though it was naturally strongly influenced by local characteristics. Basel, Bern and especially Zürich were the chief literary centres. Basel was distinguished for its mathematicians, such as Leonhard Euler (1707–1783), and three members of the Bernoulli family, the brothers Jakob (1654–1705) and Johann (1667–1748), and the latter's son Daniel (1700–1782). But its chief literary glory was Isaak Iselin (1728–1782), one of the founders of the Helvetic Society (1760) and of the Economical Society (1777). He wrote about the philosophy of history, ideal politics and economics.
  In Bern both German and French were commonly used in writing, making the separation of Bernese authors into one category difficult.  Albrecht von Haller wrote both scientific works as well as poems which praised the beauty of the countryside. His son Gottlieb Emanuel von Haller (1735–1786), compiled a useful bibliography of writings relating to Swiss history, which is still used today.  Beat Ludwig von Muralt (1656–1749) analysed, in French, the racial characteristics of other nations for the instruction of his fellow-countrymen.  Samuel Wyttenbach (1748–1830), Gottlieb Sigmund Gruner and Johann Georg Altmann (1697–1758) all wrote descriptions of the countryside in a combination of literary and scientific styles.
  In Zürich JJ Scheuchzer wrote in Latin of his travels around the country, and shared them with the London Royal Society of which he was a Fellow. He associated closely with other Fellows of the Royal Society, including Isaac Newton.  JJ Bodmer and his friend Johann Jakob Breitinger (1701–1776) were among the most prominent purely literary writers in the city. Another famous Zürich writer was Solomon Gesner, the pastoral poet, and yet another was JK Lavater, now best remembered as a supporter of the view that the face presents a perfect indication of character and that physiognomy may therefore he treated as a science. Other well-known Zürich names are those of JH Pestalozzi (1746–1827), the educationalist, of Hans Caspar Hirzel (1725–1803), another of the founders of the Helvetic Society, and of Johann Georg Sulzer (1720–1779), whose chief work is one on the laws of art or aesthetics.
  Outside the three towns named above there were several significant writers of German-speaking Switzerland. One of the best known is Johann Georg Zimmermann (1728–1795), whose Betrachtungen fiber die Einsamkeit (1756-1784/1785) profoundly impressed his contemporaries. He, like the fabulist AE Erhlich, was born at Brugg. Johannes von Müller of Schaffhausen, was the first who attempted to write (1780) a detailed history of Switzerland, which, though inspired more by his love of freedom than by any deep research, was very characteristic of his times. JG Ebel was a Swiss by adoption only, but deserves mention as the author of the first detailed guidebook to the country (1793), which held its ground until the days of Murray and Baedeker. A later writer, Heinrich Zschokke (1771–1848), also a Swiss by adoption only, produced (1822) a history of Switzerland written for the people, which had a great vogue.
caption: Air-flow over different shapes (a first step in developing wings for flight) was one of many subjects studied by the Bernoulli family in Switzerland
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