Liechtenstein: A dearth of information, but an abundance of carbs and football
I’ve no interest in football and “spy thrillers” leave me cold, so why did I find myself spending the week paying good money to watch a Fassbender film, while reading about one of the world’s least successful teams? Because the literary and film world have given the tiny, false-teeth making, semi-constitutional monarchy of Liechtenstein a wide-berth. This is strange considering the many people out there attempting to #ReadTheWorld. I could have read Seven Years in Tibet, by Heinrich Harrer (as he died in The ‘Stein), I could have search for the autobiography of Baron Eduard von Falz-Fein, the man who created Liechtenstein’s first tourist shop (but its only available in Russian), but instead I plumped, with great reluctance, for Stamping Grounds, a 336 page obsession with the country’s qualifying campaign for the 2002 World Cup. I am not sure why I forced myself to wade through this strange, pointless book, which is, ironically, about a British man (Charlie Connelly) forcing himself to undertake a strange pointless task. Was this life imitating art or the other way round? In a strange way it was an enjoyable experience, except for the football…
Similarly, this week’s film was great other than the acting and the plot. Having failed to find a copy of Liechtenstein’s only feature film Kinder of Berge, I plumped for Black Bag, a film so new, it required me to pay £10 for the “joy” of watching it. I feared the Liechtenstein link may be light, but lolled when I realised I was spending 1 hour 33 minutes watching a sub-par James Bond for 20 seconds of satellite footage of a car leaving a Liechtenstein safe house and driving down a road. It was a Liechtenstein road to be sure, but it still didn’t seem to add THAT much to my understanding of this tiny nation.
Käsknöpfle, however, made up for all previous fails. A supremely unvegan dish of eggs, flour, cheese, soya milk and veggie bacon, it’s food to keep you going in a mountain hut on the darkest and coldest of winter nights. More dumpling than pasta, you simply make a dough and then push it through a colander into a boiling pan of water — it was freaky but it worked! And though it sat heavy in my stomach it was comforting and homely. I did find a vegan version but have not yet made the time to try it. My Swiss Family were clear that adding bacon was NOT traditional, so maybe it is the very thing that separates Liechtenstein from their bigger cousin.
Switzerland and Liechtenstein are such close friends that the Swiss handle both countries’ customs, and thus, I thought it would be fair to buy Swiss wine in place of the Liechtenstein footballer Benjamin Büche’s wine so oft plugged in Charley Connelly’s book. The wine was red and a joy to drink, but having the wrong flag on the bottle made me feel like a fraud.
Having failed with the book, the film and the drink, you will be glad to know that the music came through in the form of internationally renowned composer in Josef Rheinberger who made wonderful versions of Catholic classics and who tutored Englebert Humperdink! So it turns out that it was Liechtenstein’s fault that Strawberry Fields Forever was kept off the number 1 slot by his hit Release Me in 1967!
Next week you will find me trying to shoehorn obscure Beatles references into the story of Lithuania. Wish me luck!
