At the beginning of the 20th century, Feldkirch was a quiet, if not sleepy little town. Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle was a bit more exact and described Feldkirch as a place in a green valley, below arched hills and a thousand feet below the Arlberg pass.

Both Conan-Doyle as a student and musician and Joyce as an author spent some time in Feldkirch. "I make music here on the "Bombenhorn", this is a perfect training for my lungs", that´s what Conan-Doyle, the young inventor of Sherlock-Holmes reported home about his studies in the well-known Jesuit college "Stella Matutina". By the way, Leo Naphta, in Thomas Mann´s famous work "Zauberberg" (The Magic Mountain) studied at the same college.