Book buying at the airport is always tricky. Airport bookstores often are skewed towards inferior books. This dud written by the Süddeutsche Zeitung's Swiss foreign correspondent is but the most recent example. Wolfgang Koydl, admitting that he didn't know much about Switzerland beyond "here be bankers and cows" has undertaken to explain to his fellow Germans how Switzerland ticks. Unfortunately, the man has arrived but a year before he handed in his manuscript. The only Swiss he encounters meet him in a professional capacity (as government employees, realtors, language teachers, shop assistants, etc.) or his neighbors having the difficult task of civilizing a Hun. Often, these encounters reveal less about Switzerland and more about the lack of good behavior of the author, e.g: cleaning up after your dog is standard practice in most civilized cities.

Koydl has left other stink bombs in his books for his readers. There are so many mistakes in this book that I assume that not a single Swiss reader has read the manuscript before it was sent to the printer. His examples of Schwiizerdütsch are full of typos or misunderstandings. "Gwüschterti" naturally should not miss out an additional "sch": "Gschwüschterti". Jean-Jacques Rousseau happens to be from Geneva, Switzerland, not France. 282 pages of a blind man describing the colors. If Koydl informs his SZ newspaper readers in similar fashion, SZ would do well to return to the previous practice of the last two years of not having a Swiss foreign correspondent. ( )