Legends from the Swiss Alps

Translation: students from the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of Zurich, Leung Ping-kwawn (Chinese) and Helen Wallimann (English). Illustration: Julia Steiner. This title features an essay on Swiss Alpine films by Natalie Bohler. The Alps have always been the prime icon of Swissness. Often idealized or aestheticized, this world of high peaks shrouded in clouds, of dark forests and verdant flower-studded meadows, of wild animals and isolated chalets with their rugged peasants and cows and goats has generated a wealth of local myths and legends. In the past the mountains were still the haunt of spirits and demons. With today’s urbanization the Alpine world is perceived in different ways - as a sublime, unspoiled world of beauty, purity and innocence, the realm of freedom, a field of energy and mysticism; as a link to one’s true nature, to one’s childhood; or as a place of long winters, loneliness, depression, but also purity and redemption. Collected by Swiss students of Chinese at the University of Zurich as a pendant to their study of the ghost world in modern Chinese films, the seventy-five legends published in this collection entertainingly reveal the fascinating co-existence of the real and the imaginary in the Swiss Alpine world.