Until 1952
the fiction prevailed in Switzerland that there was only
one citizenship in a family, and that was the
citizenship of the father. Children born in Switzerland
inherited the citizenship of their father automatically.
Conversely, a Swiss woman who married a foreign husband
lost her citizenship and took on that of her foreign
spouse. A foreign woman who married a Swiss husband
automatically obtained Swiss citizenship. This sometimes
led to quite bizarre situations. A woman who had become
Swiss through marriage, who did not speak a word either
of German or Swiss German, could twit a woman born in
Switzerland – one who was fluent in Swiss German and
familiar with conditions in Switzerland – on the grounds
that she was not Swiss at all. My mother experienced
this on one occasion, when her neighbour – who was
married to a Swiss husband, but of Italian extraction –
said to her: “I’ll show you what a good Swiss woman is”,
whereupon her mother gave her a box on the ear and
replied; “Now you know what a proper Eyetie is.”
This fiction of there being only one kind of citizenship
in the family caused great suffering to many families.
Our family was one of the ones seriously damaged. Even
though my mother (born 1930 in Zurich) and my
grandmother on my father’s side (Lina Widmer, born 1897
in Kirchdorf, canton of Argovia) were able to recover
their Swiss citizenship after the reform of the Civic
Rights Act in 1952 (for a stamp fee of 52 francs), we
others – that is to say, my father, my sisters and
myself – remained officially Italian. This in turn led
to tensions between my parents. In a political situation
that could not have been foreseen, my father might have
been deported to Italy with his daughters. But my mother
did not want to leave Switzerland under any
circumstances. It would have been possible in principle
to put in an application for naturalisation for the
entire family, but in our financial situation – living
on a monthly tailor’s wage of 350 francs – it was
unthinkable.
This photo
shows young Ursula (not quite 17 years old and in the
fifth month of pregnancy), happy and confident in her
belief that she would be able to marry Heinz, her Swiss
boyfriend, 24 years of age and father of her future
child. Two weeks after the photo was taken she was
handcuffed and carried off to Hindelbank (the largest
women’s prison in Switzerland) for “re-education”. Her
life from that time forth was carried on in a cell
without a doorhandle. Monday to Friday she was locked in
from 6.30 pm till 6.30 am, Saturdays and Sundays she was
locked in for the whole day, except for mealtimes and
one hour in the day when she was permitted with the
other inmates to go out into the prison courtyard. There
was no difference in treatment between the Browns of the
“Work Re-Education Facility” and the Blues of the “Penal
Correction Facility”: the only difference was that the
Blues were held by the state free of charge, while the
Browns had to pay for their keep themselves, if they had
any means whatsoever of paying. Her mother paid around
6000 francs for her.
– The consequence was that Ursula suffered for many
years from bulimia and claustrophobia. This
“re-education method for minors” was admittedly done
away with in 1969, that is just one year after Ursula
was released. But for Ursula it continued to be
necessary to justify herself all her life long –“I was
not in prison!!!’ – this constantly recurring
humiliation!
Thanks to double standards, the actual perpetrators got
off scot-free. Only many years later did Ursula learn
the terrible fates of those people who almost bereft her
of her life and her reason when she was a teenager.
Ursula has forgiven them, and she not only believes
that the experience has made her stronger – it is also
clear to her that she has continued on her life path
without losing her way and with much success.
This shows the young Ursula, now emotionally damaged
after over a year of imprisonment, at the age of
eighteen years and a quarter the mother of a baby of
eight months. Shortly after the birth of her son, the
child was taken away from her for adoption. After an
interminable three months the child was restored to her,
in response to her insistent demands. In this she was
very lucky.
But what became of the other women who did not any
longer have the strength or the energy for this?
Even though her life has been highly successful, Ursula
needed more than 30 years before she was able to work
through this trauma (sexual abuse, imprisonment and
having her child taken from her) and write the story of
her life.
The murderess Barbara told her with great satisfaction how she
had split the skull of her uncle with an axe – this after she
had warned him many times to stop sexually harassing her. She
got quite carried away in telling the story, and seemed really
to be enjoying the details. She described how the jet of blood
that shot out of his skull was “like the waterspout from the
blowhole of a whale”, and mentioned the unspeakably stupid and
puzzled look that he gave her before falling dead to the ground.
After committing the crime she had been ravenous and dying of
thirst. Having satisfied both cravings, she slept for two hours
and then rang the police. The relished depiction of these scenes
seemed to give her a devilish kind of amusement. She went over
them again and again. She made out that she felt her
imprisonment was rather to be seen as a reward. She was finally
“left in peace by that swine”, and for some years she also felt
safe from her family.
In her book “Geboren in Zürich” [“Born in Zurich”]
Ursula Biondi works through her traumatic growing up in
Zurich, and the battle her family had to achieve
naturalisation. She says she hopes to encourage people
everywhere to write down the terrible experiences they
have had.
Manuela Letsch: “You can fall down a thousand times if
you have to, but you mustn’t stay on the ground.”
This motto of her grandmother’s accompanied Ursula
Biondi on her arduous life path.
She was born in Zurich, as a fourth generation Italian.
Her mother Trudi Hasler had lost her Swiss nationality
by marrying an Italian, whose mother had herself been
Swiss but on marrying an Italian had been branded as a
foreigner.
In her book “Born in Zurich” the author, now 50 years
old, works through her experiences as a child and
adolescent, and describes the struggle of one family to
achieve naturalisation.
A humiliating reality
“When my mother saw the film “Die Schweizer Macher”
[“The Swiss Makers”] in the cinema for the first time,
she burst into tears,” Biondi reports. According to her
account, official procedures were even more humiliating
than as they are presented in the film. Naturalisation
officials came at all times of day without notice,
opened all the cupboards and interviewed the neighbours.
Not wanting to acquire a bad reputation, the father
forbade his daughters to meet boys, so that no one could
charge him with having children who were “hussies”.
Ursula’s very first love came to grief as a result of
the stern attitude of her father. She was not quite
fourteen at the time, when the mother of her boyfriend
charged her with seduction of a minor. Her boyfriend
Albert was just two months younger than she was. She
acquired an official criminal record. Worse, though, was
her father’s comment – “I wish she were dead”.
Today she cannot find it in her heart to be angry with
her father, says Biondi in her remarks following the
reading. They said what they had to say, cried all the
tears they had to shed, and she understands now the fear
he laboured under. She herself, by contrast with her
father, has always been one of those who mount the
barricades, says Biondi. So when she was seventeen she
ran away to Italy with her boyfriend Heinz, where she
was picked up again just a few days later.
Imprisoned without trial
When it then came out that she was pregnant, she was
sent for two years to the women’s prison in Hindelbank –
without trial, without having committed any crime and
without even being given a hearing. Ten days after he
was born, her son was taken away from her. Biondi
describes repeatedly the screaming fits that she had in
her cell, especially after her baby had been taken. On
one occasion another prisoner imitated her screaming.
This enraged her so much that she grabbed a board and
hurled it at the woman with all her might. She was
herself astonished by the strength she had. “That was
the moment when I became the militant that I still am
today,” Biondi declares with conviction. After three
months she had her child restored to her, and was then
released after another year on grounds of good conduct –
“eighteen years old, with a baby on my arm and 23 francs
as start-up capital.”
Writing process brings release
It was a long time before she was ready to write her
story. But writing came to her as a liberation. “Put on
paper what you have been through,” Biondi urges her
audience, “so that you don’t have to spend your whole
life carrying around a thorn in your flesh.”
Some notes on Ms
Ursula Müller-Biondi’s “processing” of her experiences, on the
occasion of the book launch
-
Telling
stories can have entertainment value when they have
literary merit.
-
Telling
stories can have a hypnotic effect, based on the spell
of the narrative (think of the telling of fairy stories,
the Thousand and One Nights...)
-
Writing
down stories can make history, in the sense of a
historic narrative or classic work
-
Writing
down one’s life story in the form of a “narrative
reconstruction” can have a healing effect – especially
when the life story is very painful in parts and
approaches the limits of what a human being can possibly
bear. Originally Ms Müller came to me to request a
training certificate for her training in holistic
psychology, but our discussions then developed in the
direction of the psychological processing of the many
traumatic experiences she had gone through between the
ages of eleven and eighteen.
It was my
task as a therapist to stand by Ms Ursula Müller-Biondi
as she wrote down her life story and at the same time
worked through the traumas that had been inflicted on
her, to accompany her with my good will and to give her
support when the pain was overwhelming, to give her the
courage to continue and help her find the confidence
that she would one day manage to believe in herself. –
It was a fine task, and I was glad to do it.
-
Today, now
that the finished work is before us, I can only
congratulate her. First of all for her having had the
strength to have got through her life, such as it was,
at all – and secondly for her courageous processing of
her own very personal narrative, in the form of
“narrative reconstruction”. This “narrative
reconstruction” approach is coming to be seen as
increasingly important in therapeutic circles as a
“philosophical form of therapy”.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
dear family members and friends,
I am happy that I have
the privilege of welcoming you here today with all my heart in
the name of my wife, the author Ursula Müller-Biondi, on the
occasion of the launch of her new book.
The place where we are gathered for this event is not a
coincidence. In fact it was deliberately chosen. You see, Ursula
lived for the first five years of her life just round the corner
at Froschaugasse 2, in the penthouse apartment on the top floor,
which her parents also referred to as the “dovecote” because
there actually were pigeons nesting under the eaves. For this
reason Ursula still feels a special tie with this part of the
city.
After a long period of inner preparation, Ursula has spent two
and a half years of gruelling work to write the story of her
life and to produce the book now before us – “Ursula Biondi
- Geboren in Zürich“ [“Ursula Biondi – Born in Zurich”].
I would like to congratulate her most warmly on her book.
–
Ursula, congratulations. –
Her book is partly
dedicated to the processing of her own experiences, but on the
other hand she also goes into the way things were in the sixties
– no more than forty years ago – when women still did not have
the right to vote, but concubinage was strictly forbidden and
divorced marriage partners who were at fault were not allowed to
marry again. At that time the Civic Rights Act – a pure product
of patriarchal politics – was still in force, the main idea of
which was the unity of nationality within the family, and as a
result of which any Swiss women marrying a foreigner lost their
Swiss civic rights. Based on this law even the children of Swiss
mothers – like Ursula’s father and Ursula herself – were
regarded as foreigners. From 1952 on, women at least were able
to claim back their Swiss nationality, but fathers and children
remained foreigners. Today such conditions are almost
unthinkable – but what these statutory stipulations meant to the
young Ursula is a matter she goes into in her book, without any
kind of gloss. The book aims to provide a witness to the
Zeitgeist of the period, and to demonstrate how it was
possible for such things to happen in our city and how the
authorities exercised their power over helpless individuals. I
myself, as a young lawyer, belonged to the class of officialdom,
but I would never have dreamed that in such circles injustice of
this kind could be done to a young and helpless individual,
especially to so-called ‘foreigners’ who based on today’s law
would no longer be such, and actually never were. The story of
the young Ursula Biondi is gripping, it gets under your skin. I
can only recommend that you read it carefully, draw your own
conclusions and derive from it what lessons you may
Ursula Biondi’s
great-grandfather came to Dietikon as a mason in 1897. Seventy
years later, his great-granddaughter was committed to the penal
institute of Hindelbank on no good grounds. Today she is reading
her story at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
“You can fall down a
thousand times if you have to, but you mustn’t stay on the
ground.” This maxim comes from the first cook at Dietikon’s Bear
Inn, who was Ursula Biondi’s grandmother. To begin with she
found this an absurd sentiment. But our new author was to find
that it gave her moral support on a number of occasions in her
life. On 21 April 1967, when only seventeen and in the fifth
month of her pregnancy, she was committed to the women’s penal
correction facility of Hindelbank.
The woman who opens
the door to me appears almost dainty at first glance, and yet at
the same time she is clearly a grande dame from the
classy Zürichberg district. But this impression vanishes as soon
as she begins to speak. Reading between the lines, it becomes
possible to sense the woman whose joy in life could not be taken
from her even in the most distasteful circumstances. Even though
today she speaks many languages fluently, has worked as an
educator all over the world, has a UNO pass and a racing
driver’s licence, she has not been concerned to suppress the
roots which link her to the working population of Zurich. Biondi
calls a spade a spade, and without any beating about the bush.
“I was young, and I
had a lot of questions”
Questions. “Questions
like – Who was God after all, and why did he only have time for
us on Sunday mornings, when I would rather have had a late
lie-in,” Biondi relates. Her father generally responded to such
questions by giving her a box on the ear. At that time, the girl
was not yet aware that her father, like so many others, was just
afraid of not being able to live up to the expectations of
society. What followed should not have been permitted to happen
– and to the present day it stands as an inglorious chapter in
the history of Zurich justice.
Abandoning her home,
the young woman ran away with her boyfriend to Italy, where she
was soon picked up again. And she soon gave evidence of what
would be chalked up as her only “crime”: she was pregnant. For
“her own protection”, without trial and without even having been
heard by the lady official responsible, the young woman was
committed to the women’s penal correction facility in Hindelbank.
Ten days after the birth of her child, he was taken from her.
“Half way through the
sixties, I was like a young person today – which meant I was
something which society just could not tolerate,” Biondi says.
The handicap of having been an inmate of Hindelbank at some time
in her past remained with her for good. The fact that in reality
she had never been imprisoned as a criminal became peripheral.
What followed shows
that grandmother’s maxims do sometimes have relevance. Biondi’s
militant spirit was roused. She obtained one qualification after
another, and moved to Geneva, where she worked for some years
for the International Labour Organisation and then later for the
UNO, as an IT trainer. “Geneva gave me the sense that I did have
a place in this world. At the time Zurich seemed to me a mother
that had rejected me.” Since 1992 Biondi has been living in
Zurich again. “I love the city as it is today – it has become
more colourful.”
In hope of forgetting
the pain and working through the events she suffered, Biondi –
now married to a Swiss lawyer – has written her life history and
self-published it. “First and foremost my writing was therapy
directed at myself, because even today it is sometimes not easy
for me to accept these difficult years that I lived through as a
young person,” Biondi says.
At the Basel Book
Fair, to which she had been sent an invitation as a “scribbler”,
she happened to make the acquaintance of the German publisher
Hänsel Hohenhausen. What happened next astonishes Biondi even
today. “To my surprise, the publisher seemed interested and
asked me for a copy of my book.” She had already sent her book
to fifteen Swiss publishing houses, accompanied by a friendly
letter; and she expected that this time too it would be returned
to her in the same way in a matter of days. But she could not
have been more wrong. The publisher and the publishing house
wanted to make the acquaintance of the 50-year-old author, and
were keen to bring out her book as soon as they possibly could.
Today at 3.00 pm
Biondi is reading extracts from the story of her life at the
Frankfurt Book Fair, having been invited by Cornelia Goethe
Literaturverlag [Cornelia Goethe Literary Publishers]. On 30
November she will be back where it all started: Biondi is taking
her story to Hindelbank, at the request of numerous inmates of
the women’s prison.
)
