Heidi and her grandfather in the Swiss Alps, the provincialism of Swiss cities, and the obsession with order and common sense have hardly been conducive to the development of modernism in Switzerland. In European modernist literature, Switzerland tends to serve as the model for a pre-modern, idyllic vision of life that European writers often invoked as a refuge from the chaos of the modern metropolis. Yet Zurich, the largest Swiss city, was the center of European modernism during the two world wars. After these two invasions of modernist writers, artists, composers, dancers, and theater people, the Swiss launched their own modernism after 1945.

First World War

During the First World War, neutral Switzerland became the chosen refuge for European pacifists, revolutionaries, anarchists, and anti-war protesters. James Joyce, Romain Rolland, V. I. Lenin, and the German Expressionists and socialists Ludwig Rubiner, Ernst Bloch, Otto Flake, René Schickele, Klabund, and Annette Kolb were among the thousands of refugees living in Switzerland during these years (and keeping the Swiss police very busy). They primarily settled in Zurich, which thereby became the center of modernism in Europe during the First World War.