Swiss Watching: Inside the Land of Milk and Money

by Diccon Bewes

A German studies scholar found a story about a little girl who lives with her grandfather, gets sent away to a foreign land, suffers terrible homesickness, but lives happily ever after once she is back in the mountains. And her name was … Adelaide (which can also be written as Adelheid, often shortened to Heidi). This version was written by a German author, Hermann Adam von Kamp, in 1830, half a century before Johanna Spyri wrote her Heidi, the one we know and love. Did Johanna plagiarise a forgotten work? It was an outrage comparable with suggesting that Shakespeare copied Marlowe, and the penknives came out immediately. The scholar behind the discovery was cast as Switzerland’s public enemy number one, but remained adamant that Heidi was a second-hand version of a German original. She might have had a Swiss mother, but her father was clearly Herr von Kamp. This is possibly an argument that will never end as,