The Cuckoo Clock Is Not Swiss, and Orson Welles Found Out Too Late

The cuckoo clock is not a Swiss invention. It grew up in the Black Forest in south-west Germany, where tradition credits Anton Ketterer of Schönwald with the first one in 1737. Its Swiss reputation comes largely from the cuckoo clock line Orson Welles improvised in The Third Man (1949).

You will find them in souvenir shops across the country: a little carved house, a bird that pops out on the hour. Visitors take them home as the most Swiss thing there is. They are not Swiss at all, and the reason everyone thinks so is one line in a film.

The line that did it

In The Third Man, from 1949, Orson Welles plays Harry Lime, who defends himself with a short speech: Italy under the Borgias had war, terror and murder and produced the Renaissance, while Switzerland had brotherly love and 500 years of democracy and peace. Then the punchline: «And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.»

The speech is not in Graham Greene's script. According to the BFI, which holds the annotated shooting script, Welles improvised it, and he later told Peter Bogdanovich that he wrote his own part (BFI).

The clock is from the Black Forest

Cuckoo clocks grew up in the Black Forest, in the German state of Baden-Württemberg. Tradition credits Anton Ketterer of Schönwald with the first one, in 1737. The look everyone knows, a little railway signal house with the bird in the attic, came out of a design competition that Robert Gerwig, founder of the clockmakers' school in Furtwangen, ran in 1850. Even there, cuckoo clocks were only a small share of what the region made. The German Clock Museum in Furtwangen shows about 1,300 Black Forest clocks if you want the full story (Baden-Württemberg tourism).

Welles's correction was wrong too

Welles later told Bogdanovich that after the film came out, the Swiss «very nicely pointed out» that they had never made cuckoo clocks. In the same breath he put the Black Forest in Bavaria (SlashFilm, quoting This Is Orson Welles). It is in Baden-Württemberg. Two countries, one bird, no luck.

The joke is older than the film

Welles said he took the idea from an old Hungarian play, which nobody has found. Engelsberg Ideas traces it instead to the painter James McNeill Whistler, whose «Ten O'Clock» lecture of 1885 already mocked Switzerland for «the sudden cuckoo, with difficulty restrained in its box» (Engelsberg Ideas).

What the speech gets wrong about Switzerland

• Peace. In the Borgias' own time the Swiss were among the fiercest soldiers in Europe (Engelsberg Ideas), and the country fought its last civil war, the Sonderbund War, in November 1847 (Historical Dictionary of Switzerland, in German).
• Five hundred years of democracy. Women got the vote in federal matters only in 1971 (Historical Dictionary of Switzerland).
• What it produced. Rather more than clocks. We made a list of six inventions with surprising stories.

Buy the cuckoo clock if it makes you happy. Just know you are taking home a souvenir from Germany, wrapped in one of the best lines in film history. And if you like your Swiss myths taken apart kindly, Wilhelm Tell is next.