who would be able to live happily by herself.”
When she was a child, Schweizer was given a concertina. “I took some lessons, and later I was a member of the Schaffhausen concertina club. We often rehearsed together, and played folk songs and hits from sheet music. Later, my parents bought a full-size accordion. That didn’t work, it was much too large for me, I didn’t like it. I stuck it in the corner and changed over to my sister’s piano in the living room. Lotte had piano lessons for years and played classical piano very well. She had private instruction, but she never wanted to become a teacher.”
Margrit: The Younger Sister
Schweizer’s younger sister, Margrit Schlatter, was born September 30, 1942 in Schaffhausen. She worked as a pharmacist. “I’m married and we have a son. And I was working, we had our own business, and for 20 years I didn’t have much time to spend with my sisters. But now we are in contact more often, and I like that.”
Odette: Server as Second Mother
Odette, the server in the Landhaus, played an important role in the Schweizer household. Schweizer relates that she was very involved in taking care of the children: “she knitted things for us and took us to the Rhine Falls, or even to Zürich when she had the time. She devoted a lot of attention to us; she was my second mother. Odette always had one free day a week, while my mother never had a day off, because the restaurant was always open, every day.” Odette’s father was French, “and she spoke perfect French. She grew up in the canton of Bern, and her father was a language teacher in Schaffhausen; her mother had passed away. From my point of view, her father was already ancient; he might have been 60 or 70, but to me he seemed like an old man. Odette was around 30 when we were children. She was a very beautiful young woman.”
Margrit remembers: “During the war, our father was sometimes away for a few weeks for national defense. Of course, our mother was then incredibly burdened. I don’t think we ever really did anything with our father, he never had time. Odette was very busy taking care of the guests, she was very fast and she had the reputation in town of providing really good service. The primary school and secondary school were only five minutes away, and the canton school was also close by. Odette’s father had a language school at the top of Herrenacker Street, near the city theater. It was a beautiful old house with a schoolroom and a small apartment. Odette was our second mother, sometimes she went swimming with us, or went along with us wherever we children wanted to go. She watched over us closely. She was involved in our upbringing, but you could say that we took care of ourselves and brought each other up to some extent. We were very much left to ourselves.”
The Piano in the Festival Hall: I Had no Idea
In the Landhaus there were three pianos: in the hall, in the small sitting room, and in the apartment on the upper floor. Margrit remembers that first Lotte took classical piano lessons, “and then Irène started to play concertina. But she suddenly changed to the piano; she didn’t want to have anything more to do with the concertina. And after that she played piano, but of course it wasn’t in a classical direction, it was jazz. From the beginning. She also had piano lessons for a little while, but after that she was completely self-taught. The piano was a bond between Lotte and Irène, of course. For our mother, how should I say it, this was always a crazy world. She never really understood it, probably because she was born in a time when there was absolutely no jazz in Switzerland. She liked Johann Strauss, operettas, that kind of thing. She thought jazz was awful, she never understood it. Besides classical music, Lotte also played piano in her friend’s Dixieland band. At the beginning, Irène also played boogie-woogie and ragtime, but the band was very well-behaved, I never saw anything wild.”
Once a week, Schweizer took piano lessons from a young teacher, Erwin Schnell. She remembers: “he had some sheet music of pieces by Dave Brubeck and Gerry Mulligan, he was actually quite open-minded. I studied Bach with him, but I always had a hard time reading music. I really just wanted to play jazz.” The money for the piano lessons wasn’t a problem for their mother: “We just had to want to do it. Until I was finished with school I had piano lessons once a week, and then later in the French-speaking part of Switzerland too, and in England all I did was rehearse with musicians. I practiced a lot and worked out for myself how the chords went. Sometimes saxophonist Rolf Oechslin, who knew the chord changes to all the tunes, wrote some things down. Later he worked as a teacher near Schaffhausen.” From a young age, she always watched the hands of the pianist in the festival hall, “looking to see what he was doing, how he played. At that time I still had no idea at all about jazz or notes; I didn’t know anything. I always listened carefully, that was the beginning, and later when I heard music, I was very attentive to who was doing what. I was also fascinated with drummers—for many years I played drums, self-taught. I learned the most when I was living in London. Back then you still couldn’t get the Real Book, which has melodies and chord symbols for all the important jazz pieces, to play from, and anyway reading music was frowned upon. So I always wanted to learn everything by ear. And I always paid close attention to the musicians’ stage presence and how they acted when they played.”
World War II: In the Air Raid Shelter
Sometimes Margrit has the feeling that her sister Irène “can’t really remember anything, or doesn’t want to. Her childhood and youth seem to have bounced off her. She really doesn’t remember anything. Schaffhausen was the city in Switzerland that was the most affected by the war. Sometimes she’ll talk about how she was outside on her tricycle when the bombs came, and was quickly taken into the air raid shelter. She remembers that, but that’s it.”
Schweizer says that on the day when the Schaffhausen train station was bombed, all the windows in the Landhaus burst, “and we had to go into the air raid shelter every time a bomb fell. Schaffhausen was being bombed by the Americans—they thought it was Germany because it was so close to the border. My father was a private, an ordinary soldier, and he often had to go perform service. So my mother was often alone during the war.”
On March 28, 2014, in a piece called “When the Americans Bombed Schaffhausen,” the Swiss television channel SRF reported on the bombing of Schaffhausen on April 1, 1944. Schweizer was two and a half years old:
On April 1st, the bells will ring in the town of Schaffhausen. On this day exactly 70 years ago, this border town on the Rhine was attacked by the US Air Force. Around 400 bombs left behind a devastated city. This was during the Second World War. Switzerland—surrounded by warring countries—sought to preserve its neutrality and sovereignty without offending any of the countries at war. But, on April 1, 1944, one and a half years before the end of the war, Switzerland was caught between the fronts. At 10:58 AM, the US Air Force dropped 371 bombs over Schaffhausen. The bombing lasted 40 seconds. After it was over, 37 people were dead, hundreds injured, over 300 homeless, even more without food and desperate. Was the USA punishing Switzerland for supplying industrial goods to Nazi Germany from SIG Neuhausen in Schaffhausen? The official explanation is: no, Schaffhausen was the victim of a navigational error on the part of the US Air Force. The bomb squadron, departing from Great Britain, was supposed to attack the German town Ludwigshafen. Historian Matthias Wipf, who lives in Schaffhausen, is also convinced that the US pilots made an error: ‘The mission was a total disaster,’ says Wipf in Schweiz aktuell. ‘The US Air Force pilots got lost after setting out via England and France. Radar technology was new at the time, and in this case it stopped working,’ says Wipf. ‘The pilots had no idea where they were.’ Tragically, fifteen aircraft then bombed Schaffhausen. It is known that during the Second World War the air raid alarm sounded more than 500 times in Schaffhausen. Usually nothing happened, and the people got used to it. When the alarm went off again on April 1, 1944 at 11 o’clock in the morning, many Schaffhausen residents did not seek cover in the air-raid shelters. Instead, they ran out onto the street to see where the planes were. ‘It was almost considered an entertaining spectacle,’ says Wipf. He estimates that the number of deaths could have been a third less if the people had sought cover. The US President at the time, Franklin D. Roosevelt, later apologized to the population of Schaffhausen for the erroneous bombing. The US paid the city 40 million Swiss francs in compensation.
Children’s Room: She’d Rather Be on the Scooter
In the spacious apartment in