Pierre Schori Interview: Conversations with History; Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley
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Mr. Ambassador, welcome to Berkeley.
Thank you very much.
Where were you born and raised?
I was born in the small town of Norrköping in Sweden, by a Swedish mother and a Swiss father. But they only stayed there for six months, and then we settled in the southern part of Sweden, called Malmö, opposite to Copenhagen, where there is now a bridge.
Looking back, how did your parents shape your thinking about the world?
Oh, very much so, indirectly by their life, so to say, because my mother met my father in France when he was doing his practice for becoming a hotel director. He was a good Swiss: he went to hotel school, like Mr. Ritz, the famous Swiss. And there they met. She was an au pair, one of the first au pair girls from Sweden who went to Paris. They met and they married. And so he was in the hotel business. They had a small hotel after the war in Sweden, because they left the Cote d'Azur, the French Riviera. She was afraid that the war was coming. So they left in '36, came to Sweden, and bought a small hotel.
That small hotel was like a microcosmos, because you had all kinds of nationalities coming. The hotel got known as an international place, where you could speak your language and mingle with the owners, my mother and my father. So I met a lot of people from all over.
So you were sort of born to multiculturalism and multinationalism.
Indeed. And also, Malmö is opposite to Copenhagen, so you took the ferry, which was half an hour, an hour, to go across to Denmark, and there was the train station, the central train station. It was the door to the Continent -- you could go down to Paris or wherever in a rather short time.
But to the hotel came people: The first Chinese cooks to Sweden came and stayed there, Hungarian world champions in table tennis, the magicians, Egyptian belly dancers, shipbuilders from Czechoslovakia -- so you got them all. That was a fascinating world for a young boy to see.
What about your formal education? Where were you educated?
The University in Lund, in southern Sweden, and then I did also a stint at the University of Stockholm later on.
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