Pride Festival for Diversity and Joy
Day of festivities in the historic town of Lichtensteig in Switzerland, where the founding bank house of Swiss international bank UBS takes pride of place and on cultural impact.
 |
Crowd of people demonstrating diversity in front of the former town council building and a peek of the corner of the first bank building of the former Toggenburg Bank, founding place of Swiss international Bank UBS. |
After some years of economic decline that manifested after the Covid-19 pandemic, with windows boarded up and only some elderly evening drinkers in the bars of the once bustling market town, it seemed young people with ideas and fun were coming back. On the last weekend of April 2026, a crowd of cheerful people in costumes of unicorns and comic figures waving rainbow flags and home-made signs with slogans for love, peace and togetherness roamed the streets. The Italian restaurant served drag queen brunch, local businesses opened their doors, demonstrating tolerance and diversity.
The small town of Lichtensteig is situated in the region of Toggenburg in the State of St. Gallen in the foothills of the Swiss Alps. It was awarded the Wakker Prize for heritage preservation and town planning in 2023. Since then, citizen guides organize tours of the town for tourists, reviving the old tradition of events that people from other places in Switzerland and even internationally came to Lichtensteig for, when I was a journalist at the local newspaper, a few years before the pandemic.
Diversity Day revives lost traditions of the historic market town
There was the meeting of barrel organs, with players dressed in historic costumes churning out loud music from their instruments at every street corner, now called Day of Nostalgia in September. The flea market for photography, already saw a decline earlier when digital cameras phased out film-based ones and there were no used digital lenses and cameras of use yet available. In the last few years it has somewhat recovered, becoming a marketplace for used digital cameras and lenses as well es legacy film photography equipment for hobbyists and professional photographers who specialize in film photography. Also, there was a market for old timer motorcycle parts that so far has not seen a revival. As in many regions of western countries with advanced economies, especially in industrialized rural areas such as the Toggenburg, there came a time of decline, coming to the surface after the pandemic. In Switzerland this was actually not that obvious, because it is a wealthy country, high immigration of qualified human resources, building of modern housing, large areas of urban fringe in the non-alpine areas. In this blog post, I intend to feature some scenic pictures of the past and those that pave the way for the future, a future of transformation and inclusion, knowledge-based use of technology and innovation, modern rules for finance, production and secure societies, not medieval and superstitious cult, politicized and fake arguments from media and internet.
Personally, I have been subject to the most atrocious identity theft imaginable and to victimizing crime, wire fraud and violence, while at the same time doing the normal work I did my university studies in and was doing when this identity theft became manifested in 2022, changing work topics from normal agriculture science, sustainable finance and regional development, journalism to aiding enforcement, art for the illustration of this simple personal blog, which was started as a side hustle.
Interlude: Why I am writing this blog post
I have never been an investigative journalist or activist in any way. Four years of the utmost violence, including threats to life, hundreds of thousands of euros lost, property left to ruin and taken over, where I had led a normal life for decades, while explaining and clarifying white collar crime and organized crime, hybrid threats behind it, aiding enforcement, all for no pay plus defamation, libel according to the false narratives of the identity theft and being subject to the extreme violence that I have alluded to. During the last two months this has escalated further, which is why this blog post hasn't been finished and published yet, even though it is about an event that took place almost two months ago. Actually, my needs are quite modest. In September 2025 I was intrigued into believing that I could take documentation to a lawyer and get reconstitution for at least some of my losses. In October 2025 my car and drivers licence were stolen in a most atrocious assault by police and Swiss military, bank accounts blocked and depleted, a fake guardianship by non-existing persons was deployed, all because my name and data was in official databases such as farmers are obliged to have their data in, in order to receive direct payments and meet the requirements. Ever new perpetrators covered by official secrecy, or in open seem to fall in. Actually, my needs are quite modest: A place to live and work for income, privacy and to decide myself on the use if things that have always been mine, when and what to do with them, such as my sewing machine for example and to give back a drivers licence that was optained fourty years ago after 40 years of driving without any accident or offense, with the last four years of excellent driving electronically documented. There is no such thing as an extrajudiciary death sentence for a perfectly normal person in Switzerland. This interlude is to confirm that I am writing from experience and that the respect of diversity, be it sexual orientation, religious belief age, gender or way of life is very important for the whole of society.
Diversity Day in Lichtensteig
On such days of festivities the traffic through Lichtensteig is detoured so that all of the old town is filled with stands, stages for live music and people of different social, demographic and geographic backgrounds enjoy bratwurst, beer and wine, take photographs, chat and dance in the streets. On the last Saturday in April, with the sun shining, and warm Spring temperatures, a long table ran down the middle of Main Street with little vases of flowers.
 |
| Close-up of the long table running down main street where normally there is a lot of traffic. |
 |
| A table stretching along the whole length of the main street symbolized the feeling of community community. The arcades on both sides of main street show the influence of Italian merchants of the past. |
Historic Architecture and History of Banking and Finance
The arcades in Lichtensteig are not only an example of Italian style architecture, but also a remembrance to merchants from the northern part of Italy who were traders and financiers from medieval times on and brought innovation to banking and trade, facilitating industrialization. Their system of Lombard banking allowed the trade of commodities over long distances, started credit and finance, modern accounting rules (double-entry bookkeeping), the differentiation between fiscal and monetary economics and was the forebear of modern central banking lending, the Lombard credit, which is named after those bankers called Lombards, or in Switzerland Lamperter, a still quite common Swiss surname. The Lombards and their system of banking and trading are also remembered as the beginning of usury, as the legal systems of the time lagged behind with regulation.
During medieval times, Lombardy covered a much larger area than today. The most powerful Lombard families were in Florence and Sienna, but also in the Piedmont and Genova. The Lombard bankers of medieval times not only engaged in discrete negotiations with their customers, local and supra-regional merchants under the coverage of arcades and behind the Venetian blinds of their shops. They were Christians and therefore taking interest on credit was prohibited for them by the canon law of the catholic church. In order to avoid that order, they collected collateral in pawn shops. Lombardy banking was supported and used by the Vatican, because it was of use to collect taxes from far away monasteries. The Lombard brought their banking system along the historic travel routes of traders, the main one for Lichtensteig being the Way of St. James, with its different branches, pilgrims and traders coming from St. Gallen and Constance.
With Lombard banking, bargaining and sales could be managed with contracts and credit and the sellers and buyers could net their gains in their own coin-currencies at the place where they had their businesses.
As it goes with innovation, the Italiens got the system from doing trade with Persia, the modern country of Iran, which they refined, for example by developing new systems of bookkeeping and rules. There was much secrecy around this type of early finance, with people bringing prized family objects to pawn shops and such, that Lombard banking also brought a new culture such as banking secrecy and Venetian blinds. However, the German word for Bill of Exchange, Wechsel is from the Old High German language, as well as my last name, and was already known around the 8th century.
Those Italian merchants were also called money-changers, because there were many different political entities of which each had its own coin-currency. When my great grandfather worked as a waiter in his mother's beer garden in Munich in the 1850s and 1860s, he had to know the exchange rates of 30 different currencies and convert them, in order to ask for the right price of beer and give out the change, when guests paid for their beer.
History of Law and Economics
Lichtensteig was a market town from medieval times on and had a mint and a court of justice, including for capital punishment. The town was first mentioned in 1228, the right to hold markets confirmed in 1439. From the 16th to the 18th century Lichtensteig was at the center of bloody uprisings, conflict between Catholics and Protestants, struggles of power among burghers, feudal landlords and clergy. The small town saw the beginnings of democracy, commerce and industrialization, political unification and the specific type of Swiss democracy with referendums, confederacy and different bodies of political entities at the communal level. It saw the boom and bust crisis of the Gründerzeit from the 1870s during which the Toggenburg Bank was constructed, considered to be the beginning of Swiss international Bank UBS. That crisis is just now being analysed by economists with new methods of data analysis in order to better understand the uncertainty faced today by the global financial system and find policy solutions.
Built on the foundations of a medieval fortified settlement, most of the buildings in Lichtensteig were built later, documenting the course of history. This history was often about division and exclusion and not the diversity and freedom of lifestyle displayed at the Festival of Diversity on the last Saturday in April 2026.
 |
| Skyline of the historic town of markets and jurisdiction in Lichtensteig in the region of Toggenburg |
The prominent building with the bell tower on it is the old town council. Officially built around 1400, it is probably much older. It is privately owned and therefore can no longer be visited. I saw the interior on the occasion of an assembly of the Swiss Heritage Society which awards the above mentioned Wakker Prize and got a glance at a part of the building that was not renovated, which must be much older. There is documentation of a Volknand of Staufen-Toggenburg, a member of the reigning dynasty of nobels who founded Lichtensteig, having founded the monastary in Adelberg Germany in 1178, since 1978 partner-town of Lichtensteig.
First Bankhouse of UBS in Lichtensteig
A sign on one of the historic buildings in Lichtensteig states that it was the founding place of the now one and only large international commercial bank of Switzerland: UBS. Lichtensteig has, since the beginnings of the 19th century been a rural, but industrialized region with export-oriented, innovative industry whose medium and small enterprises were leaders in the global markets of their sectors. Until the last quarter of the 20th century mainly textile industry. The Toggenburg Bank was founded in 1863, its building being erected in 1871/72 opposite the new town hall. Despite there being older banks that went into UBS by merger, the website of UBS also states Lichtensteig and the Toggenburg Bank as its founding place and institution. In 1912 the Toggenburg Bank merged with the Bank of the City of Winterthur to become Schweizerische Bankgesellschaft SBG, the direct forebear of UBS. Today, the building houses the municipal administration of Lichtensteig.
 |
| Former UBS Bank Branch of Lichtensteig with the heraldic animal of the Swiss Region of Toggenburg, a mastiff dog, in German Dogge. |
Such powerful real life mastiffs were the dogs of nobility, powerful ones, mean towards intruders and outsiders who were not burghers of Lichtensteig, subordinate to their masters, whose orders they followed with consequence. Those dogs were bred for hunting and warfare. The spiked collar shows that of the different uses of dogs in the military, the heraldic animal of the Toggenburg was for attacking war enemies, seeking out fugitives, insurgents and murderers. Maybe those dogs were also used for protection. What is known, however is that those former times were often hard. I have written about the symbolic meanings of the city gate in medieval towns in another post in German, concerning the passing away of my father and his grave.
The region didn't derive its name from the dog, as the Counts of Toggenburg had another coat of arms before the one with the dog on it.
Cultural imprint of violence from history and ways to protect
The life of a person wasn't worth much at that time, especially if they were serfs or villeins, or non-burghers who didn't owned houses within the city's walls. For some time such aliens were only allowed in on market days. Here is a quote from an old legal writing:
"...if a burgher disembodies another, he can stay protected in a house within the city walls for six weeks and three days. Then he be led to the top of the city wall and given a hammer and instructed to throw it with his left hand. As far as this hammer falls, he can run as a free man. Further on, the relatives of the victim can kill the manslayer without being punished."
Those who were not burghers lived outside of the city walls, be it because they were farmers or merchants in supra-regional trade with large warehouses outside of the city walls, or poor day workers, the sick, disabled and persecuted. The latter had no such privilege of six weeks in safety, if they had been accused of a capital crime. This time break for the privileged was probably in order to reach a settlement with the other party or to prove that the allegations were false. Another citation from the archives, published in the book by the administration of Lichtensteig in 1978, for the 750 year anniversary of the first official mentioning of the town, shows that the society of former times was based on the power of the mighty and exclusion of the weak:
"Any burgher of Lichtensteig is allowed to seize the belongings of and have arrested any alien for debt inside the city walls."
By contrast, at the Lichtensteiger Festival of Pride in April 2026, gay people wore the costumes of unicorns and comic figures, among them the dog Goofy, created by Disney in 1932, during the worst economic crisis of the 20th century, the Great Depression, made to cheer up people who had lost everything and felt cheated by the big shots of Wall Street after the crash of the stock market in 1929.
 |
| The costumes of gay people expressing fun, love, inclusion and protection of each other. |
In order to be protected, you have to stand up, said the Prime Minister of Israel in the context of antisemitism. But also, you have to stand together, as wolves hunt, or elite soldiers: Zero risk in combat. Always protect, secure your companion first. That I learned from reading the books of Jörg Trauboth, author, former army jet pilot and expert on security and anti-terrorism.
"Violence is the weapon of the weak."
Mahatma Ghandi (1869 - 1948)
In the year before, there had been demonstrations of hate before Diversity Day in Lichtensteig. This year, police and private security personnel were present at the event. According to the website of the Bavarian Justice Department for combating antisemitism, LGTQ people are among those with the highest risk of falling prey to hate violence. Here is a man from a private security company watching out.
 |
| Security was important at the event. There were also policemen and -women patrolling. |
2024 Swiss police statistics saw a high rise in crime, including so called sneak theft from homes. Swiss intensive care units at hospitals need security guards and locked doors, something that was unthinkable a few years ago. When I was a commuter to work around 25 years ago, the politician, Member of Parliament, president of the Social Democratic Party of Switzerland, Ursula Koch, would get get on the train by the door of the dining car, shake everybody's hand who was in there taking breakfast, drinking their morning coffee, before disappearing into the first class part of the train to Bern.
Security issues, then and now
Keeping people safe, especially vulnerable groups is the duty of the government, but also of society as a whole.
The Preamble of the Swiss Federal Constitution calls for:
". . . spirit of solidarity and openness towards the world . . . respect for diversity . . . and the knowledge that the strength of a people is measured by the well-being of its weakest members."
This citation is from the Revision of the Swiss Federal Constitution of 1999, around the time when leading Swiss politicians shook hands with ordinary people in the dining car of a commuter train and relatives, spouses, children and grandchildren could walk into intensive care units to visit their loved ones after minor or grave operations without being interrogated and checked before allowed access through a security door, meaning the weakest members that need to be taken care of are those who really need special attention, affirmative action, be it that they are disabled, sick, old or for other reasons have difficulties managing their lives without aid, and not excluded outside of the city doors in order to be arrested or killed on false claims due to the debt others have taken ob, be it on purpose, by predatory lending or force without their knowing. Social security and public health care such as Medicare and Medicaid in the US are under attack by racketeers, transnational organized crime and foreign subversive warfare, so-called hybrid threats.
As subsidarity also has always been a major value of the Swiss political and legal system, the citation from the Swiss Constitution doesn't say that those weakest members would be patronized or locked up.
Laws against discrimination and hate crime in Switzerland
Switzerland is actually on the legal forefront in laws against discrimination and especially identity theft. The latter, however has been recognized as being much further reaching and severe damage than imagined, especially since the advent of artificial intelligence AI. Identity theft can be a part of white collar crime which in itself has far reaching and devastating consequences. Swiss law on discrimination is based on the United Nations International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) from 1965, which Switzerland is obliged to implement into Swiss law. In July 2020 Swiss anti-discrimination law was amended to include hate speech and discrimination based on sexual orientation, which has been confirmed by a decision by the Swiss Supreme Court. The relevant Swiss legal provisions are Art. 261 bis in Swiss criminal code (Strafgesetzbuch StGB) and Art. 171c in Swiss military code (Militärstrafgesetz MStG). Swiss criminal law is currently not available in English.
Art. 261 bis of the Swiss criminal code has been interpreted as such, that it is only if hate speech such as devaluating, libel and harrassement has to be in public space in order to be litigable. However, as with other forms of hate crime, there are other legal codes such as for domestic violence, if discriminating hate speech is pronounced in private space. A man who took to slandering gay and lesbian people motivated by wrongly understood christian religion was sentenced recently by a local bench court. The judge from the Swiss Peoples Party SVP which was originally against including LGBT people explicitely in Art. 261 StGB, proclaimed his verdict with the following words:
"The defendant has defamed persons, incited hatred towards people who have a different sexual orientation than he has. This is not tolerable and punished as a criminal offense since July 2020."
The term discrimination itself is defined by behavior towards someone that is based on differentiation according to social or natural categories that don't correspond with the actual qualifications, merits and, or the victims actual behavior. Swiss law against identity theft is Art. 179decies of the swiss criminal code which only states the simple use of another persons identity as such with fairly minor punishment. However, as with hate crime, what is done with the false identity can be investigated and prosecuted on other charges. Therefore the new authorities in Europe of Anti-Moneylaundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism AMLA and the European Anti-Fraud Organisation OLAF which work with collaboration on different levels together and between countries are important, in order to abolish the incentives by criminal behavior that incites such antisocial and ideologically motivated participation in discrimination and identity theft.
Also, identity theft is a widely used intrument by criminal organisations. Not only can the identity of individuals be stolen, but also of companies, of organisations and authorities. I personally was threatened massively by policemen in easy to identify false uniforms and such that I couldn't tell if they were actual policemen. They used the name of another policeman whose identification I had seen that I knew they were not him. There was outrage in Switzerland in a case, where a woman had her arm broken, allegedly by a policeman who was then indicted and not convicted. But even from the media reports, it was possible that it hadn't been that policeman, but an identity thief. It was a case, where by law, police should not have been called in in the first place. Pressreleases by St. Gallen Cantonal Police show that they are very busy now fixing vital security issues with transnational organized crime. When the Swiss federal council for finance, Karin Keller-Sutter was minister of justice of the State of St. Gallen, around 2008, she said at an event where I was as a journalist that transnational organized crime from eastern European countries was coming into the city of St. Gallen and robbing clothing stores and it would only be a matter of time, before such organized crime would be sneaking into family homes in the suburbs and villages of rural areas, because the police had no means of countering such criminals that had sophisticated technology. The symbolic picture below is from a press release about a month old, where they chased and arrested such robbers from Rumania.
 |
| Perpetrators of violence will be arrested and held accountable. |
 |
| Respect and protection of each other by people of different identities. From a series of photographs of pairs. |
Call for enforcement and better data protection against group-based vulnerabilities
In Switzerland, official agencies for the protection of vulnerable adults and children have been involved in criminal activities, depriving handicapped and disabled persons living at home with their families of basic rights, institutionalization and seizure of assets. With the unbelievable rise of antisemitism and identity theft, the relatively new laws for marriage between people of the same sex should require better data protection. The Jewish-German painter Charlotte Salomon (1917-1943) was found out by Nazi-Gestapo and deported to Ausschwitz, because she had married and thus her Jewish name was registered in the marriage records of the town of Gurs in southern France. She was not living in the concentration camp in the same town, where Jewish-German people from the German state of Baden-Württemberg were deported to in 1940. Gurs had bad living conditions, but was not a death or transit camp. Many who had to stay there survived. Salomon had come there from her hometown of Berlin, because her grandparents were living there. When Nazi-Germans took over, she was pregnant and she wanted to legalize the status of herself and the child that would be born and thus married and left her data for Nazi-secret police Gestapo to find her out.
My personal data was spied out from official databases such as the one for farms for the administration of direct payments for farms. Cybersecurity is not only about vulnerable groups, but a problem of group-based data as such. Perpetrators operate by filtering out groups of people according to certain characteristics. Australia for example, which is also at the forefront in banning excessive use of smartphones and social media by minors, has put in place very strict regulations on the use of data from their indigenous peoples for finance. Banks and non-bank financial institutions (NBFI) are allowed and encouraged to finance projects for housing and economic development, but if they use personal data, which sometimes is of use in order to meet the requirements of the community, of government programs, get back investment costs, etc., the executives are made accountable if damage is done, by for example identity theft, fraud or other breaches of law made possible by the misuse of data from a group of people.
Group-based hate crime, based on religion, antisemitism, identity theft from databases and downstream criminal activities of white collar crime, trick the victim first into not taking it seriously. Quite soon it is too late. A young journalist at Bloomberg laughed at first, when she got a present and notice of welcome from a university to which she had never applied, until she found out that the person who had filled out entry forms using her name and personal data had also applied to other universities and taken out student loans using the victim's name and had the money transferred to their own bank account. Luckily, the journalist came across very helpful people. Even a school where you could get a degree simply by paying tuition, without exams, a so-called degree-mill was helpful to her with the nullifying of the false application. However as to her having joked at first upon receiving that welcoming present from a university she had never heard of, when she had long ago finished her university education, in the end she said that nothing would ever be the same again, as her name is still floating around in the dark net and available for perpetrators of financial crime to use her name and data again.
My own situation as a victim of identity theft and forged papers via snail mail have also escalated, delaying me from writing this post and making me include such negative topics of warning, when I only wanted to write some travel journalism with the historic background of an event of festivities in a picturesque town that is pride of place to Swiss bank UBS with a lot of photos, as I used to do as a part-time farmer and journalist for the local newspaper. My training and practical experience has always been for sustainability, preventing economic crisis and rebuilding, economic development, but due to circumstances and the global environment of uncertainty and because I have been a victim, I will be writing more about the crisis and unlawful practices, crime and justice than I originally wanted to.
Tolerance and diversity
 |
| Display room in the new winery situated in a former hotel and then for many years the main postal office. |
For decades people including myself stood in the room that is on the picture above, waiting in line in order to get to the counter of the postal office for paying bills or sending off letters. Now an entrepreneur has opened a winery there. On Diversity Day, you could taste the wine that is offered. I was greeted there by a cheerful older man with:
"I worked at Heberlein for forty years"
For more than two centuries the family-owned industrial company Heberlein shaped economy and life in the region of Toggenburg. People worked there or were in some way connected. The entrepreneurial family invested in public infrastructure and social enterprises. In Wattwil they even built a community center with a ballroom and stage, a restaurant and rooms for assemblies called Volkshaus, a tradition of the Swiss workers and union movements in the turbulent times of the first half of the 20th century which they gave to the communal authorities for free. The textile printing unit of Heberlein closed in 2001. The industrial machinery company by the same name still exists as well as other industrial companies, which is important for economic development, because then you still have knowledge and skilled workers in the region, a good sign for new industry to come in. However, many of the employees of those industrial companies decide not to move into the region, but stay with their families in their original communities and commute to work. In Switzerland, income tax is paid to the communal authority, so apart from them not participating in afterwork activities, engaging in politics and culture, the community looses taxes and funding. Therefore, such festivities in Lichtensteig such as Diversity Day are important, to bring in people from other places who might decide to move to the region.
Signs of love and peace on Diversity Day
On Diversity Day, there were a lot of home-made signs calling for more humanity and understanding.
 |
| This sign says in Swiss German: "More love for all! . . .😊. . . for you too" |
 |
| The hearts say: Us. . . Peace, Togetherness, Openness, Diversity, Love. |
 |
| A service dog for disabled people in training. |
I believe we are in a period of transition now, a really big one such as the one 10'000 years ago, when humans transitioned from hunters and gatherers with a nomadic lifestyle to settlement and farming. Then it was hard. Robbers and marauders came and destroyed settlements and murdered and looted. People endured by getting closer to one another. Experts working on such topics, as for example in the northern part of Israel, excavating at archaeological sites of the history of biblical stories, say that this transition worked out, because the relationships among humans and those between humans and animals became closer and more good-natured. Whereas today dogs and cats are pets, in early times, they were companions and helpers, but humans also learned from them, such as about herding from the wolves that thus turned from wild animals to dogs. Cats in Egypt at the time of the Pharaos and building of Pyramids were considered to be holy, because they got rid of the mice and rats that otherwise would have eaten up the stored grain.
 |
| One of the symbols seen on diversity day was the fantasy animal unicorn. Here as a balloon. |
Cultural Imprint of Violence of the Past
The Swiss-German forensic psychiatrist Frank Urbaniok recently wrote a book based on his experience with convicted and jailed offenders of murder and sexual violence, focusing on the cultural imprint of those sentenced and jailed for manslaughter and violent sexual crimes who had a background of migration, mainly from North African Muslim countries and eastern Europe and how that can shape the risk and probability of them committing such crimes again after release from prison. Urbaniok said:
"In Western Culture, we also have cultural imprints of violence. Over centuries we beat each other up, because of religion."
To the conflicts about religion in former times, you can add poverty, exploitation in feudal societies and law, politics and economics that favored the rich and powerful. In Switzerland the harsh conditions for farming made for centuries of emigration, because of not enough food. Sometimes people were forced to leave, such as in the mountain town of Elm in the State of Glarus. After a mine for slate that employed most of the working class caved in in 1881, the community saw itself not able to support the many widows and poor people without means of income. First they sent a scout with money to buy land in America, who never came back. Then, the village council voted on who they would send away, bought tickets for the fare and saw them off to America. At least that was what the guide said, when I was staying in Elm and the guided tour on the history of that mountain town was offered. Most of the early immigrants from Europe to the United States paid for their fare with debt that they had to pay back with forced labor. Some were spirited away by rackateers, often because other indebted ones wanted to pass on their own debt. This was not only for emigration, or after a disaster, such as in Elm, but it was also done with orphans of Jewish decent, whose ancestors had fled to Switzerland from the progroms of the Jewish settlement Pale in the Russian Zsar's empire, if their families hadn't been granted Swiss citizenship. During World War II that was still half of the Swiss Jewish population.
One of the most famous persons from Lichtensteig was the writer and diarist Ulrich Bräker (1735 - 1798), whose heavily indebted father had to work in the hard profession of a nitrate boiler, causing his adolescent son Ulrich, the later diarist of hard times to be spirited away as an involuntary mercenary of the Prussian Army, a practice frequent among lenders and racketeers of the time. Nitrate was boiled from the half rotten beams of old barns and houses left for ruin in order to extract the saltpeter from the urin and vapor of farm animals and people, then sold for the manufacturing of gunpowder. Bräker managed to desert from the Prussian army. He returned home, married and lived the life of an unsuccessful businessman in textile trading, stigmatized because of his origins from a poor family of indebted saltpeter boilers.
Bräker became to be known as The Poor Man of the Toggenburg. He was lucky enough to be allowed to go to school during winter, where he learned to read and write and spent his later years as a self taught philosopher and member of the Moral Society of Lichtensteig (Toggenburgische Moralische Gesellschaft), a protestant group aimed at promoting virtue and honesty.
 |
| A drum picturing the diarist and writer Ulrich Bräker, The Poor Man of Toggenburg, photographed through the shop window of the Toggenburger Museum, reflecting the buildings across the street. |
Not too long ago, that shop window was from a long-time furniture store, exibiting furniture on five stories, providing middle management in industrial companies of the region and business owners with high quality furniture. The store closed after the pandemic. After renovation the former furniture showroom now houses the local library and and museum shop.
 |
| The local library. |
Actually the conflict between Protestants and Catholics wasn't that great in Lichtensteig. The Bank building was built on the site, where from 1435 to 1870 there stood a church that was used both by the Protestant and Catholic believers. The custom of parity churches was common in the Swiss region of Toggenburg until the 1960s.
Modern Art in the Entrance of Former UBS Bankhouse
The former bank building of UBS now houses the municipal administration. The magnificant entrance hall has a huge modern sculptured bronze man dangling over the heads of those retrieving their money from the machine. The sculpture's posture can be either understood as a man clinging with one handed to the ceiling, or in the course of tumbling down. The bank building was raised raised twice in order to make that entrance more impressive, with a system of specialized hydraulic levers that lifted the whole stone building, for the first time in 1912, when the Toggenburg Bank merged with the Bank of Winterthur into the Schweizer Bank Gesellschaft SBG. Before World War I both the Toggenburg region and Winterthur were centers of Swiss textile and machine industry for export that needed big finance for profit, innovation and expansion in order to compete in global markets. In 1988 in the course of a greater renovation, the whole building was lifted once again and the bronze muscle man installed.
 |
| Bronze sculpture of a man clinging to the ceiling and money machine in the entrance of the old bank building where UBS had its beginnings. |
 |
| Stone man The Lost Shadow by the sculptor Stefan Kreier in front of UBS founding place, with a company for hand-made soap in the former Jail in the background. |
Historic places marking the history of banking in Lichtensteig are the old town hall that housed the mint and the building next to it, where there was a goldsmith shop, where another famous man of Lichtensteig, the mathematician, clock-maker and scientist Jost Bürgi (1552-1632) did his apprenticeship. Goldsmiths were the first bankers, who rented out space in the vaults where they kept their gold to merchants, so they could store their coins there.
 |
| Old Town Council with mint on the right. A close-up of the door to the former goldsmith shop, with the owners Verena Forrer on the right and the goldsmith David Widiz on the left, originally from Augsburg Germany, mark another history from the origins of banking and finance in Switzerland. |
Augsburg in Bavaria was the town of the wealthy merchants and bankers Fugger, who marked another important chapter of banking, trade and economic history that can also be visualized with historic buildings and stories from Lichtensteig. I will continue this topic in another post or a series, after having seen the current exposition in the Swiss National Museum in Zürich:
Switzerland, the land of banks (June 12 until November 11, 2026)
 |
| At the end of the day, the demonstration of pride passes by the court on the right. THE END |
No comments:
Post a Comment