If Auschwitz Were in Switzerland

Socialist government; this report exposed widespread institutional profiteering on expropriated Jewish wealth. Immediately thereafter, American lawyers demanded reparations from Swiss banks on behalf of Holocaust survivors. 1998 saw the settlement of these demands. At the same time, 1998 marked the 150th anniversary of the democratic Swiss constitution, an event that was celebrated as the foundation of the modern Swiss Willensnation. Between 1996 and 1998 more feathers were ruffled in the political and cultural arenas than ever before. The political climate was often tense, since different members of the Swiss polity viewed the reparations movement in profoundly different ways, and each side expressed its views in polemical and divisive terms. Some conservative Swiss commentators saw American legal intervention into Swiss politics and economy as a global threat to Swiss sovereignty and integrity; citizens of a more progressive cast welcomed the reparations movement as a long-awaited opportunity to come to terms with Switzerland's role during World War II. The Nazi gold affair worried many intellectuals because a crisis of national dimensions was raised and solved according to purely economic rules. Many critics responded to

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