Books generously donated to the Thammasat University Library by Ajarn Charnvit Kasetsiri explain aspects of Swiss national identity. Two editions of the popular children’s novel Heidi by Johanna Spyri (1827-1901) were donated by Ajarn Charnvit, as well as a translation into Thai language. They are shelved in the Charnvit Kasetsiri Room of the Pridi Banomyong Library, Underground 1 level, Tha Prachan campus. As all Thais know, there has long been a close connection between the Kingdom and Switzerland. Heidi is set in the Swiss Alps. The book’s motto states that it is intended for children and those who love children. This reminds us of the TU slogan, I love Thammasat because Thammasat teaches me to love the people.

The story of Heidi, like many novels of the 1800s, involves an orphan who is sent to be raised by her grandfather in an isolated little mountain village. Many Thais are familiar with the novel from the 1800s, Sans Famille (Without a Family) by Hector Malot that inspired Her Royal Highness Princess Galyani Vadhana to be aware of problems of an orphan far from the Kingdom. Because Heidi is cheery, optimistic, and hard-working, she manages to win over her grandfather and charm all the residents of the village.

Heidi has had particular influence through many adaptations for film and television of the story. Heidi, Girl of the Alps, a Japanese anime series from the 1970s directed by Isao Takahata, was dubbed into different languages.

Tourist attractions

To lure Japanese and Korean tourists, an area of Switzerland has been informally renamed Heidiland. The town of Maienfeld is at the heart of what is now referred to as Heidiland, and a nearby village was renamed Heidi Village as well. Heidiland in Eastern Switzerland includes places to go skiing and hiking, as well as a selection of spas and golf courses. The idea is that while child tourists may be charmed to see Swiss villages such as the ones that are described in Heidi, their parents can also enjoy traditional tourist diversions. There is a Heidi House in Maienfeld and a Heidi Trail, Heidi Path, and Heidi House. A fully staged Heidi musical is performed to entertain tourists. There are the Heidi Adventure Trails, an extensive hiking network, among other activities.

Heidi in Asia

The novel Heidi was first translated into Japanese language shortly after 1900. For Japanese readers, Heidi has given a strong impression of basic elements of Swiss life, although some observers in Switzerland and elsewhere explain that this image is no longer accurate, if it ever was. In 2010, a Swiss doctoral candidate pointed out that Heidi may have been inspired by another children’s book from the 1800s, Adelaide, the Girl from the Alps, written by a German author. Some Swiss fans of Heidi were upset by the idea that the source of their beloved national tale may have been a book written in Germany, not Switzerland. Why do Asian readers enjoy Heidi so much? One online commenter explained that the reasons that draw Asian readers to Heidi are similar to those which make the books about Harry Potter popular. Both Heidi and Harry Potter

are orphans

who live with an aunt who doesn’t really want them.

Both end up in the hills in the middle of nowhere

where they are looked after by an old man with a white beard…

and suffer from disturbed sleep as a result.

Both discover the value of true friendship…

The writer concludes that Johanna Spyri truly was the JK Rowling of her day, the most celebrated children’s author alive.

To be sure, Heidi remains the most popular work of Swiss literature, translated from the original German into 50 different languages. The translation into Thai language in the TU Library collection dates back to 1973. Over 50 million copies of Heidi have been sold over the years internationally. Some collectors are willing to pay up to $10,000 USD (332,675.00 Thai baht) for rare editions of the novel.

Academic scholarship

Because of the book’s lasting cultural impact, some serious academic scholarship has been devoted to Heidi. In 2013, an exhibition at the British Library examined how Heidi’s illustrations were a key factor in making the book one of the first works of children’s literature to be permanently important in the United Kingdom.

In 1994, Professor Peter Skrine of the Department of German, University of Bristol, UK published a research paper in the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, a journal published by Manchester University Press, UK. Noting that while Johanna Spyri’s Heidi was read for enjoyment by people of all ages,

underlying the German text Spyri wrote, and evident in a way which its English versions minimize or conceal, is Spyri’s serious, indeed ambitious sense of literary as well as moral purpose… Heidi established itself as a children’s classic within a few years of its first appearance in 1880-81. By 1884 it had been translated into English, and soon established itself as a firm favourite with that most voracious of reading publics, the British and American middle classes. The success of a children’s book depends quite as much on the approval and generosity of parents and relations as on the enthusiastic responses of the young; in their turn, the early readers of Heidi bought it for the next generation of children, and this pattern has persisted for over a hundred years. Illustrated editions, abridgements and adaptations have poured from the presses of Germany, Switzerland, Britain and the United States ever since…To the readers of its earliest translations into English, Heidi represented a fresh new literary landscape which their parents were just beginning to discover for themselves in the increasing numbers which Switzerland’s rapidly developing railway network and tourist infrastructure were making possible, or for which suitable substitutes were being discovered and developed nearer home. Indeed it may claim to be the first major best-selling work of fiction to place the Swiss alpine landscape at the centre of attention.

In 2006, another expert in literature, Professor Frederick Hale of the Department of English, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa published an academic research paper noting:

Notwithstanding their immense international popularity, Heidi and the other stories by Spyri have been the subject of relatively little serious scholarly inquiry. That religious motifs permeate her writing has been a truism in critical commentary on these celebrated works. Precisely what the spiritual themes in them are, however, and how they function within Spyri’s ideational world remain much less well understood, and patently false assertions about the matter have long burdened the secondary literature about this author. A fresh look at this crucial dimension of the two-part Heidi novel is thus in order. In the present article it is my purpose to take steps towards clarifying the religious elements in Spyri’s best-known work by identifying crucial weaknesses in the pertinent criticism and highlighting both the kind of Christian themes and the limits of the Christianity which she proclaimed therein.

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)