Männliturm

About this audio guide

This guide to the Mannliturm, one of the surviving towers on Lucerne's Musegg wall, turns on a few strange weeks in November eighteen forty-seven, when Switzerland's last war on its own soil reached this medieval fortification. It follows an unnamed signalman sent up to operate equipment nobody stationed there had used before, and traces the tower's name back to the two-metre iron warrior watching over its turret since the fifteenth century. You will hear how an old defensive wall was drafted into a very different kind of fight.