Peter Sager (17 January 1925 – 1 July 2006) was a Swiss political scientist and economist, an expert in Eastern European affairs, as well as a right-leaning conservative and later libertarian politician (BGB, SVP, LPS). He was the founder and former head of the Swiss Library of Eastern Europe and the Swiss Eastern Institute. His political views and anti-communist publications and lectures made him one of the most controversial figures in Switzerland after World War II.
Education and scientific career
Sager was born in Bern. Together with his brother Hans he was raised there by their mother Anna Sager (née Abderhalden). His father Franz Sager who was the general manager of the Gurten brewery, died in a car accident in June 1925. After attending primary and secondary schools, Peter Sager spent a year at the Jomini boarding school in Payerne (known today as the Ecole en Guillermaux). Afterwards he attended the trade school of Lausanne where he graduated in 1945. Already in 1943 he had read Hitler's Mein Kampf asking himself how contemporary international politicians could have underestimated the dangers of Nazism. The counter-offensive of the Red Army in World War II later caused him to read works by Lenin and Stalin.
After beginning university studies in Lausanne, he relocated to Bern where he enrolled at the university to study political economy. In the same year he began to work for Berner Student the university students' newspaper, where he eventually became an editor. In 1947 he joined the Zofingia fraternity whose Bern chapter also included Ahmed Huber and Jean Ziegler. His doctoral thesis in 1952 treated Die theoretischen Grundlagen des Stalinismus und ihre Auswirkung auf die Wirtschaftspolitik der Sowjetunion [The theoretical basics of Stalinism and its effects on the economical policy of the Soviet Union]. After that, Sager visited the Soviet Union Program at Harvard University for two years where Alexander Gerschenkron, Merle Fainsod, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Robert Lee Wolff and Isaiah Berlin were teaching.
He briefly returned to Bern, but would leave again for the US in 1956 where he got a scholarship at Harvard's Russian Research Center. Influenced by the events of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, he came back to Switzerland prematurely to build a political information centre for the research of communism.
Swiss Eastern European research
Peter Sager was founder of the Swiss Library of Eastern Europe and the Swiss Eastern Institute. While he presided the Library of Eastern Europe only until 1963, he continued to lead the Eastern Institute for more than thirty years from 1959 to 1991. With his numerous publications and lectures – according to Sager himself, he held an estimated 2,000 lectures – he participated importantly in defining the political discourse of Eastern European events in Switzerland.
Sager's original intent was a scientific career, but after the Hungarian uprising he more and more contributed to establishing the Swiss Eastern Institute. It has been noted that this change accentuated the prevalent educational note of Sager's scientific research. Foreign intelligence organisations therefore judged him as "not very scientific, but a first-rate propagandist". Sager was committed to anti-communism and used to polemise against movements like the Swiss New Left, which earned him a reputation of "the Cold War in person". WOZ Die Wochenzeitung wrote in Sager's obituary that, "in case of doubt", Sager had not been obligated to democracy and human rights, "but to Western power. In this respect he was a typical Cold Warrior, albeit clearly less simple than other members of this caste."
Apart from establishing the Library of Eastern Europe since the late 1940s, Sager in the 1950s also began to collect historical western European prints and maps of Russia. This collection called Rossica Europeana has been held by the Swiss Library of Eastern Europe since 2005.
Peter Sager died in Blonay on 1 July 2006.
Politics
In 1945, Peter Sager joined the Party of Farmers, Traders and Independents () where his father had already been active. In 1959 and 1979 he ran for a seat in the Swiss National Council for BGB and the conservative Swiss People's Party (SVP) respectively, but was not elected. In 1983 he succeeded to win a seat in the National Council for the SVP of Bern. Sager held this seat until 1991. From 1984 to 1991 he was also a member of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, as well as its vice president, and from 1987 to 1991 he was chairman of the Assembly's board for relations to European non-member states.