Waser reported from London on British cultural events for more than thirty years. He died in his adopted country on July 20 at the age of 76.
George Waser (1946-2022).
It’s not every day that NZZ foreign correspondents are honored with a reception in a Swiss embassy somewhere in the world for their work. Such a rare honor was bestowed on Georges Waser in 2007, who had been the cultural correspondent from London for the arts section of this newspaper for many decades. Born in Schaffhausen, he was in his post for so long that some took him for a born Englishman who had the peculiar quirk of speaking a Swiss dialect with a strange Schaffhausen tinge.
Georges Waser first studied art history and literature in Perugia and Florence before going to London to study English. Had he been given a choice, he might well have devoted himself to the Renaissance, which he had studied in Italy, as he later turned to all things British with passion and just as much knowledge. Perhaps his greatest fulfillment was being reborn as a Brit through the years.
Nothing was alien to him
From 1977 he reported for the NZZ from the island. In the process, he went from being a keen observer of the islanders and an admirer of British culture in all its forms to becoming an Englishman himself, and in the end even “very British” with all the attributes. Nothing was alien to him as a journalist, but he liked the eccentrics best, regardless of whether they lived in the royal family, politicized in the House of Lords or as an artist flooded the market with charlatanism costing millions.
He took on all topics with expertise and seriousness. And the understatement of his sentences always resonated with the joke he had copied from the English. So he mocked six years ago, when Queen Elizabeth’s 90th birthday was celebrated, about the packed lunch from the house of Marks & Spencer. And when, in 2008, after the Lehman debacle in New York, the financial world plummeted, Georges Waser wrote about the social sensitivities in the London banking center and summed up soberly: “At the end of the boom is the boomerang generation.”
On this occasion, a sinister, black humorous poster in the shop window of a real estate agent caught the eye of the flaneur in London’s streets: “Keep Calm and Carry On”, the business owner encouraged passers-by on the street – and probably feared the collapse of the housing market himself the most. It should be noted that the poster and slogan were from World War II.
One last article
For all his focus on the present, Georges Waser remained a Renaissance man at heart and therefore also a man of pleasure. London was dear to him, but he must have preferred Burgundy and its wines. For a long time he lived alternately in the British metropolis and in the French provinces: here devoted to the beautiful and above all to the good, but by no means exclusively.
Because when refugees were transferred from the “jungle” in Calais to Chardonnay Castle in the fall of 2016 and there was protest among the population, he reported on it. His last article for the NZZ appeared almost exactly four months ago: he described the fate of the Saint Valéry church on the cliffs of northern France, which was painted many times by the Impressionists and is in danger of sinking into the sea. It was like a silent announcement. As we are only now finding out, Georges Waser died in London on July 20 after a serious illness. He not only left behind a wide range of journalistic work. He was also active as a writer. In 2006 he wrote an art forgery novel, in English, of course: «Metamorphosis of a Courtesan».