'Cuckoo clocks,' said the President. Orson Welles on the Prater Wheel slipped in and out of my mind. 'Cuckoo clocks: the one area where the Swiss haven't run us out of business.' Last year I was made cochair of a government-university colloquium on the future of industry and society in Baden-Württemberg, Europe's most prosperous region, but one perilously dependent on the building of cars. In July we were in the early planning stages and the university president, Adolf Theis, was playing devil's advocate with some other ci-devant industries: 'The watchmaking companies in the Black Forest went over to quartz, lots of capital investment, but they lost out at the lower end to the Pacific Rim, and at the quality end to Swatch. And they've nearly all gone, or been taken over. But the cuckoo clock people didn't change at all. They've survived, and they're still family firms.' 'People associate cuckoo clocks with the Black Forest,' the chancellor said. 'They don't want digital technology. They're paying for tradition.'

LRB 26 January 1995 | PDF Download