The Gotthard

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The guide The Gotthard wrote Carl Spitteler on behalf of the Gotthard Railway Company .

Spitteler traveled to the Gotthard area more than 30 times for his research and, in addition to the train journey, also described the history of the Gotthard transit and the most important side valleys such as the Maderanertal near Amsteg . Spitteler had an ambivalent relationship to his assignment; at first he wanted to publish the book anonymously. The railway company paid Spitteler a fee of 7,000 francs, which was high for the time, and gave him a first-class free ticket every year until 1909. The guide was printed in 1897 in an edition of 4,000 copies, in 1922 Spitteler prevented a second edition. The railway company had 500 copies distributed across Europe to the reading rooms of the larger hotels in health resorts and seaside resorts , and 100 copies were available in the libraries of the world's most important passenger steamers.

expenditure

  • Carl Spitteler: The Gotthard. J. Huber, Frauenfeld 1897 ( digitized in the Internet Archive ; also as PDF; 9.6 MB )
  • Carl Spitteler: The Gotthard. Europe, Zurich 2014.
  • Carl Spitteler: The Gotthard. With Carl Spitteler through the traffic and cultural landscape. Edited and commented by Fritz Schaub. With an afterword by Dominik Riedo. Pro Libro, Lucerne 2016, ISBN 978-3-905927-46-7 .

literature

  • Werner Lauber: Chronicle of Carl Spitteler's Gotthard Book. Räber & Cie, Lucerne 1938. Special print from: Innerschweizerisches Jahrbuch für Heimatkunde , Vol. 3, pp. 24–40.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kilian T. Elsasser: St. Gotthard - The Worlds Most Picturesque Route: How the Gotthard Railway Company's marketing significantly shaped the way Switzerland sees itself. In: Historischer Verein Zentralschweiz (Hrsg.): Der Geschichtsfreund. Vol. 163 (2010), p. 144 ( PDF; 16.2 MB at e-periodica.ch).