ABSTRACT
For historians, any research into contemporary Swiss history during the 1960s was completely dominated by the monopoly on sources granted to Edgar Bonjour. 1 The continuing research undertaken by the Basle historian was of such political importance that they successfully prevented any work on political history outside government control from 1962 until the mid-1970s: in the early 1960s, other historians were even denied access to documents on the First World War. In 1973 the Federal Archive Regulation of 1966 was revised, reducing the period for which documents were sealed from 50 to 35 years, thus allowing all historians more generous access to sources. Even this liberalisation, however, did not fully open the road to Eldorado as far as the records were concerned, as confirmed by the continuing restrictions on access which, for example, were the subject of Georg Kreis' complaint to the Federal Council in 1975.2
My historiographical contribution studies the official attitude to contemporary history in the post-war years and so provides evidence of the construction and dissemination of an artificial view of history which, as a function of a mythic concept of neutrality, formed a constituent element of a basis of community ideology rooted in a continuation of the spiritual defence of Switzerland. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the stimuli which affected the treatment of Swiss contemporary history in the 1960s came from outside Switzerland. The first of these was the publication, beginning in the 1950s, of the files captured by the (Western) Allies in the Documents on German Foreign Policy, which subsequently also appeared in German.3 Thus the observations which follow can claim a degree of topicality in so far as the Federal Council, in its resolution of 19 December 1996, commissioned the Swiss Independent Expert Commission on the Second World
War to investigate, inter alia, 'official historical treatments' and 'reactions to foreign editions of sources'.
