Kim Hays--Switzerland's Secret Aristocrats

DEBORAH CROMBIE: First up today, a REDS ALERT! The winners of Ellen Crosby's BLOW UP are Karen in Ohio and Bibliophile. Email Ellen at ellen.crosby@gmail.com with your details!

And, now, on to today's guest, Kim N. Hays, the author of one of last year's break-out debuts, PESTICIDE, set in Bern and featuring Swiss detectives Giuliana Linder and Renzo Donatelli. The second installment in Kim's police procedural series, SONS AND BROTHERS is out now! I raved about the first book and am now in the midst of SONS AND BROTHERS and loving this one, too. The characters are complex and empathetic, and the Swiss cultural details like the one Kim is sharing today are fascinating. Welcome, Kim!

Switzerland’s Secret Aristocrats

It’s confession time: I have a weakness for aristocrats.

My politics lean left, and I grew up with Democrat-voting parents descended from struggling immigrants. I believe in equality and despise snobbery. But strange things happen to you when you read countless fairytales about princesses and have an anglophile librarian mother who tells you tales of English kings and queens and introduces you to Lord Peter Wimsey books. My teenage passion (never outgrown) for Georgette Heyer’s Regency romances only made matters worse.  

Now I live in Switzerland, home of the original castle of the Hapsburgs, a dynasty founded a thousand years ago that ruled great chunks of Europe for centuries. I’m finally surrounded by dukes, countesses, and barons, right?

Well, no. Back in the days of that eleventh-century Hapsburg castle, there were titled nobles galore, including Berthold, fifth Duke of Zähringen, who set off from his castle near the German city of Freiburg to conquer a good part of what was then Burgundy, including my home city of Bern in 1191. But you can’t have nobles without a king or queen to bestow titles on their favorites, and after the confederated cantons that became Switzerland liberated themselves from their Hapsburg overlords, they didn’t want a monarchy. So today there are no titled families pulling the strings in various Swiss cities and cantons.

Notice that word “titled.” In fact, the Swiss cities are home to an untitled elite who wield the influence of an aristocracy. These men and women, whose families were dominant for centuries in their regions of origin, carry names that are instantly recognizable today to anyone who lives where their ancestors once held authority. Members of the Escher family in Zürich, for example, or the Burkhardts in Basel, the Sulzers in Winterthur, Patrys in Geneva, or von Graffenrieds in Bern: many of these men and women are active in the government, economy, social welfare, and cultural life of their cities and cantons. And quite a few of them are very rich. Some even own castles. But none of them uses a title.

Perhaps because Bern was once the largest city-state north of the Alps, its collection of untitled aristocrats is the best known in Switzerland. The organization they’ve founded together is Bern’s Burgergemeinde, or community of burghers, which owns enormous quantities of land and hundreds of buildings in and around the city and spends a great deal of money keeping the city’s museums and symphony going. Newcomers to the city have been buying themselves into this elite circle for decades. Still, the original and most important burghers of Bern have ancestors who were running the city in the Middle Ages, during the years when the trade guilds were the most important institutions in all the Swiss cities.

Today’s Bernese aristocrats still belong to guilds, since most of their forefathers began as the city’s bakers, tanners, carpenters, and stoneworkers. These early tradesmen and merchants rose to become first guild masters and then members of the city council. Eventually, a core of them declared themselves patricians and became a ruling elite, until Napoleon conquered Switzerland and overthrew them. But their family names—and their influence—didn’t disappear.

Some of the sons of these great families made their living as mercenary captains.  Switzerland may be neutral today, but for over eight hundred years its young men sought their fortune as killers-for-hire. Starting in the sixteenth century, professional soldiers from wealthy Bernese families would recruit whole companies of poor peasants and laborers seeking wealth and adventure (or maybe just a job) and lead them off to fight for foreign rulers in European wars. The Pope’s Swiss Guard is a relic of the time when one in ten Swiss men was fighting for a foreign power. As a result of these services to European royalty, a few of the mercenary officers from patrician families were given aristocratic titles that could be passed on to their children. But these are never used in Switzerland.

I once got up my courage to ask my delightful OB/GYN, whose father was then the president of Bern’s community of burghers, if he had a title. He told me that when he went to a medical congress in, say, France, he could sign the hotel register as Baron. “But I’d never do that, of course,” he assured me earnestly.

How could I write mysteries set in Bern and not include these Bernese aristocrats in my stories? For Pesticide, the first book in the Polizei Bern series, I created Frau von Oberburg, a very old but lively member of the community of burghers who lives in an apartment on Junkergasse, a real street in Bern that by its very name (a Junker is a Prussian aristocrat) is a good place to house a member of the gentry.

Now, in my second Polizei Bern book, Sons and Brothers, I’ve actually killed a Bern burgher. My newest aristocrat is named Johann Karl Gurtner and is from the Emmental region of Canton Bern, where he grew up in a small castle that is the property of his mother’s family, the von Eichwils. He is a well-respected surgeon and works hard in his family’s traditional trade guild as a charitable volunteer. 

But if you want to know who killed him, you’ll have to read the book!

Am I the only one with a secret passion for lords and ladies? Does anyone else share this un-American fascination with aristocrats?

DEBS: I think question is so appropriate, with the coronation of King Charles III coming up this weekend!  I grew up loving Georgette Heyer, too, and of course my first detective love was Lord Peter Wimsey, so I guess I was indoctrinated early. What about you, REDs and readers?

Sons and Brothers, the second police procedural in Kim Hays’s Polizei Bern series, was published on April 18 by Seventh Street Books. In it, a cardiac surgeon in his seventies is attacked and drowned in Bern’s Aare River. The district attorney suspects the victim’s estranged son Markus, but Bern police detectives Linder and Donatelli have other ideas about the crime. In her endorsement of the book, Julia Spencer-Fleming says, “Giuliana Linder and Renzo Donatelli are compassionate, conflicted, and utterly compelling. Sons and Brothers is a must-read.”

Kim Hays is a dual Swiss/US citizen who lives in Bern with her Swiss husband. The first book in her Polizei Bern series, Pesticide, was shortlisted for a Debut Dagger Award by the Crime Writers Association. Deborah Crombie called it “a stand-out debut for 2022.” For more information about Kim and Switzerland, see www.kimhaysbern.com.