Nostalgia or Swiss Disease

On Saturday, 28 June, we say farewell to the guests who have been with us for a quarter of a year.

At 12.30 pm, we will look at the feelings that arise when we are far from home. We call it melancholy, world-weariness or nostalgia. The Portuguese call it saudade, meaning a sad state of intense longing for someone or something that is absent. In the pictures in his exhibition, Ikuru Kuwajima has shown places of longing. On display were pictures of places on the Baltic Sea, including a series entitled ‘Two Seas’, which evokes memories of the Königsberg-born architect Bruno Taut.

Johannes Hofer from Mühlhausen in Alsace submitted a dissertation to the University of Basel in 1678 in which he described an illness he called nostalgia. In his 20-page treatise, the young physician discussed the causes and symptoms of this serious illness. In one fell swoop, he made the ailment known throughout Europe. Like the plague, nostalgia or Swiss disease was regarded as epidemic and generally considered incurable.

In 1770, the threat of nostalgia was addressed by Immanuel Kant in a lecture. Although the problem of nostalgia did not fit into the system of his critical philosophy at all, it was important to him when he applied for the position of Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Königsberg.

200 years after the publication of Kant’s observations on homesickness, people who are still in the place where the great philosopher lived in his youth are once again afflicted by this ailment.

Brigitte Matern, an author from the foothills of the Alps – which brings the subject of Nostalgia back to where it was first recognised as a clinical picture – described the consequences of the nostalgia of East Prussians, which has been rampant in Kaliningrad since 1991, in the Swiss weekly Wochenzeitung as follows: “Since then, so-called homesick tourists have visited the country in their tens of thousands. […] The fact that so many Germans want to see their old homeland again has led to the establishment of hotels, one-man taxi companies, city cleaning firms and restaurants. But the end is foreseeable, in ten or fifteen years […].”