Zurich as a centre of German-language printing and publishing

Froschauer and the Reformation press

Zurich’s place in the German-speaking world was shaped early by the printing press. The decisive figure was Christoph Froschauer, born around 1490 in Kastl near Altötting in Bavaria, who came to Zurich around 1515 as a journeyman in the small print shop of Hans Rüegger. After marrying Rüegger’s widow in 1517 he took over the business, and two years later, in 1519, he acquired the citizenship of Zurich. Froschauer turned the modest workshop into a major publishing enterprise with four presses, a type foundry, a woodcut workshop, a bindery and a paper mill. More than seven hundred titles appeared under his name, among them Bible editions, the Zurich translation of the Bible and works of theology, history, medicine and natural science. The “sausage eating” in his workshop during Lent 1522, when Froschauer and his workers broke the fast in the presence of Zwingli, led to the open conflict between the reformer and the old church that set the Zurich Reformation in motion. Froschauer also printed Johannes Stumpf’s richly illustrated Swiss Chronicle of 1547/48 and the cosmography of Johannes Honterus. He died of the plague in 1564 and was succeeded by his nephew Christoph the Younger.¹

The Zurich Bible is also a landmark in the history of the German language in Switzerland. The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland describes the Zurich Bible of 1524 to 1526 as a document of the transition from Alemannic to the emerging common written German. Although its first editions were almost purely Alemannic in their forms, from about 1527 onwards they moved gradually towards the conventions of Early New High German.² The choice was commercial as much as linguistic. A printer who wished to sell books beyond the borders of the Confederation had to use a language that readers in Swabia, Franconia and the Rhineland could understand. Froschauer’s workshop thus anticipated a pattern that has characterised Zurich ever since: the city produces for a German-speaking market much larger than itself and must therefore write a German that is understood in that market.

The chain of institutions that began with Froschauer remained unbroken. His business passed through several hands and, after further changes of ownership, took the name Orell, Füssli & Co. in 1798. The firm introduced copperplate printing as early as 1603 and flourished in the eighteenth century in publishing and in the new newspaper business. In the nineteenth century it became the largest and most diversified printing enterprise in Switzerland. Security printing began in 1827. After becoming a joint-stock company in 1890, the firm added offset printing in 1915 and gravure printing in 1923 before being reorganised as a holding company in 1999.³ The move into security printing connected the old publishing house directly with the financial centre. Orell Füssli printed its first banknote, a ten-gulden note, in 1848 and has printed notes for the Swiss National Bank since 1914, beginning with the five- and twenty-franc notes. It later produced banknotes for foreign states as well, among them Hungary in the early 1920s.⁴ In a literal sense, the Swiss franc is thus a product of the Zurich printing tradition that goes back to Froschauer.

The Enlightenment, the NZZ and the language of economic reporting

The eighteenth century made Zurich a centre of German literary debate. Johann Jakob Bodmer, who lived from 1698 to 1783, and his colleague Johann Jakob Breitinger defended the value of imagination and of older German literature against the rationalist poetics of Johann Christoph Gottsched in Leipzig. The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland credits Bodmer with having deepened the linguistic self-awareness of the German-speaking Swiss.⁵ The quarrel between Zurich and Leipzig, one of the great literary controversies of the German Enlightenment, placed Zurich on the map of German letters as a place where the standard language was debated as well as used.

It was from this milieu that the newspaper emerged which would become the city’s best-known contribution to the German-language public sphere. On 12 January 1780 Salomon Gessner, poet, painter and partner in the publishing house Orell, Gessner, Füssli & Co., founded the Zürcher Zeitung. The paper took its present name, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, in 1821, when Paul Usteri assumed editorial responsibility. Under his direction it became the voice of liberalism in favour of the federal state and against censorship and the Sonderbund. After the collapse of the “Escher system” in 1868 the Zurich liberals set up the NZZ as a company with dispersed shareholding. The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland attributes the paper’s reputation to its economic reporting and above all to its foreign desk, supported by a wide network of correspondents built up since 1870.⁶

The NZZ matters for the linguistic infrastructure of the financial centre for two reasons. It set a standard of written German in Switzerland that combined Swiss vocabulary with a style readily understood in Germany and Austria. For more than two centuries it has also been the main forum in which the Swiss business elite discusses economic policy, banking regulation and monetary questions in German. Its business pages report on the Zurich financial centre in great depth and are read by decision-makers north of the border as well. Anyone who wishes to understand the debates that shape Swiss financial regulation before they reach the Federal Gazette has to read them in German, in the pages of the NZZ and of the other Zurich newspapers.

A publishing city for the German-speaking world

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries Zurich repeatedly served as a refuge for German-language publishing when censorship or persecution made it impossible in Germany. During the Vormärz, the decades before the revolutions of 1848, political writings that could not be printed in the German states appeared in Zurich and Winterthur.⁷ After 1933 writers persecuted by National Socialism turned to Swiss publishers. The most important of them was Emil Oprecht, born in Zurich in 1895, whose Europa Verlag, founded in 1933, published political and contemporary history by émigrés such as Ernst Bloch, Arthur Koestler, Else Lasker-Schüler, Heinrich Mann, Alfred Polgar and Ignazio Silone. In 1938 Oprecht co-founded the Neue Schauspiel AG, which carried the Schauspielhaus Zürich, chairing its board until his death in 1952.⁸ After the war, independent literary publishers such as Diogenes and Ammann built catalogues in Zurich for readers who lived mostly in Germany and Austria, although Swiss publishers generally lacked the means to establish distribution networks of their own in Germany.⁹

This tradition left the financial centre with a lasting asset. Zurich is accustomed to producing texts for a German-speaking readership that lives mostly outside Switzerland. Its law firms, banks and publishers know how to write German that works in Germany and Austria while remaining faithful to Swiss law and usage. The legal publishing houses of Zurich produce commentaries and journals that are read well beyond the Swiss border, since German-language Swiss legal scholarship takes part in the debates of the German-speaking legal world on corporate, contract and private international law. The ability to write for a larger German-speaking market therefore continues a craft that began in Froschauer’s workshop five centuries ago.

Notes

1. Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz (HLS), Helmut Meyer, “Froschauer, Christoph”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/010612/. ↩
2. HLS, “Deutsch”, loc. cit. The article distinguishes an eastern writing landscape centred on Zurich and St. Gallen from a western one centred on Basel and Bern, and dates the adoption of New High German forms by the chancelleries to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. ↩
3. HLS, Elena Folini, “Orell Füssli”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/041660/. At the beginning of the twenty-first century the group comprised security printing, publishing, bookshops, business information and Atlantic Zeiser, a manufacturer of digital printing and coding equipment. ↩
4. Orell Füssli, “500 Jahre Orell Füssli: Banknoten”, https://ofv500.ch/banknoten/. According to the company, the sixth series of 1976 was the first produced entirely in Switzerland. ↩
5. HLS, “Deutsch”, loc. cit. ↩
6. HLS, Thomas Maissen, “Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ)”, French version, http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/f/F48585.php. According to the article, Kaspar Villiger became the first board member from outside Zurich in 1988. ↩
7. HLS, Markus Bürgi, “Froebel, Julius”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/013473/: Julius Froebel was co-founder and literary director of the “Literarisches Comptoir Zürich und Winterthur” from 1840 to 1847, where he published works of the Vormärz banned in Germany and made the enterprise “zum bedeutendsten Exilverlag”. ↩
8. HLS, Michael Gautier, “Oprecht, Emil”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/009535/, which calls Oprecht the most significant Swiss publisher of exile authors. ↩
9. HLS, “Verlage”, version of 19 March 2015, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/014028/2015-03-19/. The article notes that Ammann ceased publishing in 2010. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of September 2025.