In search of beloved Heidi

  • Thomas Burmeister
  • India
  • Aug 29, 2014

 

 

 

Where is Heidi?” the visitors ask. They have made journeys of thousands of kilometres, by airplane to Switzerland, and then by bus to Maienfeld, the setting of the Heidi children’s books and TV series. A 90-minute trek on foot brings them up to the green Heidialp pasture, which is dwarfed by huge rocky cliffs in the background. So where is that cute little girl with big eyes and braided hair? Up here there are only cows…lots of them… grazing on the lush grass in summer before they are taken back to the valley for winter in the time-honoured way. It’s a good thing that Grandfather is still on hand to provide some information. “Our Heidi had to go back (again) to her aunt in Frankfurt, back yonder in Germany,” he says. Mostly, when people ask about Heidi, it is a joke, says Markus Zindel. The cigar-smoking farmer is the official Warden of the Heidialp pasture, located at 1,111 metres’ altitude on the Ochsenberg mountain in the canton of Grisons. This makes him the reigning Grandfather of the most famous mountain child in the world.

Today’s adults mostly know Heidi from picture books they have read as children or from a 52-part Japanese anime series, Heidi, Girl of the Alps, which came out in 1974 and became one of the biggest global TV hits ever.

All the adaptations have their origins in two Heidi novels by Swiss author Johanna Spyri (1827-1901). Adults read the books as a kind of key to a world that used to be safer and nicer before the wars of the 20th century. Some bring along their copy of Heidi as a travel guide. An excerpt: ‘From the pleasant town of Maienfeld, a footpath leads up through shady green pastures to the foot of the high peaks that gaze down solemnly and majestically on the valley below’.
The Heidi novels have sold more than 50 million copies in more than 50 languages since the first book was published in 1879 by the F.A. Perthes publishing company in Gotha, Germany. Multiple films have been made about Heidi, and Peter the goatherd, the boy who adores her. Every year tens of thousands of Heidi fans can be found tracing her steps in and around Maienfeld. In 1997 the towns mentioned in the books came together to create the ‘Heidiland’ vacation region. “The response was so overwhelming that ‘Heidiland’ became synonymous with the whole Alpine world for many global tourists. Heidiland in fact comprises only a limited region - roughly 100 kilometres southeast of Zurich - between Maienfeld, Sargans, Bad Ragaz and Weesen (bordering on the principality of Liechtenstein). Here there is no escaping the Heidi phenomenon, which reaches its climax in a pretty area of the Rheintal valley region that author Spyri named ‘Doerfli’, and made the home turf of her heroine. Some of the ‘hucksterism’, creating the impression that the girl is a genuine historical figure, is quite brazen. ‘Welcome to Heidi’s homeland’, the posters say. ‘Nowhere else in the world is Heidi’s aura and personality more tangible than in the authentic Heidi village with its original Heidi house’, the official flyer says. The fact that Heidi could never have actually dwelled in the old stone-and-timber house doesn’t stop the crowds of tourists - a great many of them from Japan - from having their pictures taken in front of the sign at the entry. It reads: ‘Heidi’s House, The Original.’

The town’s real name is Rofels, and its handful of local residents makes good money from all the Heidi fuss. “We do get our peace and quiet ... every evening until the next morning,” an older woman says with a chuckle. Among the attractions is a small goat-petting zoo, and right next to that a Heidi shop selling Heidi sausage, Heidi wine, Heidi postal stamps, Heidi coffee, Heidi chocolate and much, much more. Relatively few Spyri fans trudge up to the Heidialp pasture, so that the mountain hut there, with its magnificent view of the cows, mountains and Rheintal valley, is usually an oasis of peace and quiet. Jean-Michael Wissmer, a Geneva author, says that the Swiss may disdain the bus tourists, but can themselves feel a twinge of delight up on the high mountain pasture. “Heidi is loved because the girl symbolises the love of nature,” he told the Swissinfo online news portal. Swissinfo also cites Director Gerard Demierre, who has staged a Heidi theatre play, as saying that Heidi is an integral part of two Swiss landscapes – ‘the alpine and the mental’ And, one is tempted to add, a third: the monetary.

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