The Draw of the Alps: Alpine Summits and Borderlands in Modern German-speaking Culture 9783111150536, 9783111149073

Table of contents :
Contents
The Draw of the Alps
Part 1: Constructing the Alps
Connecting Transnationalization and the Mnemotope of “the Pariah”: The Alps as Border and Contact Zone in Ferdinand von Saar’s Die Steinklopfer (The Stone Breakers, 1873)
Setting the Scene: Tourist Infrastructure, Landscape, and Literature in the Swiss Alps from the 1880s to 1930s
Constructing the Alps: Perspectives on the Perception of the Alps by the Tyrolean Anti-Transit Movement
Shifting Perspectives: Alpine Scenarios in the Work Complex Nach der Natur (Beyond Nature) by Austrian Architectural Photographer Margherita Spiluttini
Part 2: Desire and the Alps
After the Mountain Sublime: Erosion and Catastrophe in Max Frisch’s Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän (Man in the Holocene, 1979)
God da Tamangur: An Alpine Landscape of Longing and Loss
Walking Away, Going Astray in Alpine Spaces: Homeric Wanderings in Peter Stamm’s Weit über das Land (To the Back of Beyond, 2016)
Part 3: Into the Alps
Crevasses and Magic Mountains: Alpine Discourse in Vicki Baum’s Marion lebt (Marion Alive, 1942)
Dream, Nightmare and Alpine Fortifications in Christian Kracht’s Alternate History Novel Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten (2008)
More than Romantic Scenery: The Contested Alpine Landscape in Raphaela Edelbauer’s Das flüssige Land (The Liquid Land, 2019)
Part 4: Boundaries and the Alps
The Alps as a Site of Boundary Suspension? Wilhelmine von Hillern’s Die Geier-Wally (The Vulture Maiden, 1875) in Deutsche Rundschau
At the Limit: Edgework, Ethics and Environment in Paul Preuss’ Theory and Practice of Climbing
Bibliography
About the Authors
Index

Citation preview

The Draw of the Alps

Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies

Edited by Irene Kacandes

Volume 36

The Draw of the Alps Alpine Summits and Borderlands in Modern German-speaking Culture Edited by Richard McClelland

ISBN 978-3-11-114907-3 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-115053-6 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-115068-0 ISSN 1861-8030 Library of Congress Control Number: 2023939799 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Richard McClelland, “The Matterhorn seen from the Gornergrat”. Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Contents Richard McClelland The Draw of the Alps

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Part 1: Constructing the Alps Helen Moll Connecting Transnationalization and the Mnemotope of “the Pariah”: The Alps as Border and Contact Zone in Ferdinand von Saar’s Die Steinklopfer (The Stone Breakers, 1873) 35 Seán M. Williams Setting the Scene: Tourist Infrastructure, Landscape, and Literature in the Swiss Alps from the 1880s to 1930s 53 Maria Buck Constructing the Alps: Perspectives on the Perception of the Alps by the Tyrolean Anti-Transit Movement 87 Chris Zintzen Shifting Perspectives: Alpine Scenarios in the Work Complex Nach der Natur (Beyond Nature) by Austrian Architectural Photographer Margherita Spiluttini 103

Part 2: Desire and the Alps Johannes Wankhammer After the Mountain Sublime: Erosion and Catastrophe in Max Frisch’s Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän (Man in the Holocene, 1979) 123 Richard McClelland God da Tamangur: An Alpine Landscape of Longing and Loss

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Contents

Peter Arnds Walking Away, Going Astray in Alpine Spaces: Homeric Wanderings in Peter Stamm’s Weit über das Land (To the Back of Beyond, 2016) 159

Part 3: Into the Alps Veronika Hofeneder Crevasses and Magic Mountains: Alpine Discourse in Vicki Baum’s Marion lebt (Marion Alive, 1942) 179 David Anderson Dream, Nightmare and Alpine Fortifications in Christian Kracht’s Alternate History Novel Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten (2008) 189 Rebecca Wismeg-Kammerlander More than Romantic Scenery: The Contested Alpine Landscape in Raphaela Edelbauer’s Das flüssige Land (The Liquid Land, 2019) 205

Part 4: Boundaries and the Alps Leonie Silber The Alps as a Site of Boundary Suspension? Wilhelmine von Hillern’s Die Geier-Wally (The Vulture Maiden, 1875) in Deutsche Rundschau 221 Jon Hughes At the Limit: Edgework, Ethics and Environment in Paul Preuss’ Theory and Practice of Climbing 229 Bibliography

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About the Authors Index

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The Draw of the Alps There is no easy way to define a mountain. According to the OED, a mountain is a “large and natural elevation of the earth’s surface, esp. one high and steep in form” – a relative notion, “larger and higher than a hill.”1 Likewise, Duden defines a mountain through contrast: a “Berg” is “[eine] größere Erhebung im Gelände,” and the collective “Gebirge” describes a “zusammenhängende, durch Täler gegliederte Gruppe von hohen Bergen.”2 In the opening chapters of Martin F. Price’s Mountains. A Very Short Introduction, he states that, whilst altitude is not always a clear marker of when a mountain is a mountain, a steepness of sides often is.3 He continues to state that all definitions of mountains are, however, both “subjective” and that “perceptions change over time.”4 There is no question that the Alps are mountainous. One of the European continent’s most prominent topographical features, the Alps cover an area of approximately 180,000km2 and stretch for some 1200km, rising in the west on the Mediterranean coast of France and Monaco, before arcing through Italian, Swiss, German, and Austrian territory, and reaching their eastern terminus in Slovenia. The highest peaks in the chain soar to over four-thousand meters: the snowcapped Mont Blanc, Matterhorn and Mönch, to name but three. At the fringes of the chain, however, the limits of the mountains are not always clear-cut: the Alps variously give way to low-lying land (as in Germany’s Allgäu region) or link to other chains of lesser, but still prominent, hills (the French and Swiss Jura, for example). What is notable, however, is that the massive stone structures of the Alps rise in the heart of the European continent, looming out of the relatively flat landscapes surrounding them in a truly impressive way. Indeed, this barrier is so prominent that it has served as a cultural and linguistic dividing line between northern and southern Europe, the surmounting of which required great efforts well into the modern era. When considering the Alps, however, it is not just these general topographical facts that come to mind. In the popular imagination, Alpine territory has a specific and instantly recognizable look: snow-topped, craggy peaks rise above

 “Mountain,” OED, accessed 25 July 2022, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/122893?rskey= VK2enR&result=1&isAdvanced=false#eid.  “Berg,” Duden, accessed 25 July 2022, https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Berg_Gelaendeerhe bung_Gebirge.  Martin F. Price, Mountains. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2015), 1.  Price, Mountains, 2. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111150536-001

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verdant valleys, dotted with wooden chalets, and populated primarily by cows, their bells clanging as they lazily chew the cud. The human inhabitants of the Alpine region are similarly idealized and are cast in roles that range from plucky, mythologized freedom-fighters such as Wilhelm Tell through to resourceful, steadfast characters like Johanna Spyri’s heroine Heidi (1881) and the morally righteous population of Albrecht Haller’s Die Alpen (The Alps, 1729), blessed by the divinity through their Alpine home. The idealized, popular view of Alpine space belies a complex political, socioeconomic, and aesthetic history. This broad range of Alpine imaginations cannot, however, be fully separated from the geographical understandings of the mountains. Mountains are both a geological concept and an anthropological construct.5 As Debarbieux and Rudaz contend, though the mountain exists independently as a “brute fact” of “material reality,” it also exists as a “category of knowledge” and is a “social construct” with a history that can be written.6 Similarly, Christos Kakalis and Emily Goetsch draw on geographer John Wylie to argue that conceptually, (mountainous) landscapes are a combination of an objective understanding of the world, as in cartographic and topological depictions of space, and a subjective understanding of the world, as manifest in the individual (and their experiences) moving through it.7 In these understandings of Alpine space as both geographic place and mental construct, one can recognize the influence of the broader ‘spatial turn’ that has taken place in the humanities. A shift in theoretical understanding, the spatial turn is less about the physical topography of a space, but rather about recognizing that space is not only produced as a cognitive category by the individuals within it, but that it is also a product of social relations.8 According to Henri Lefèbvre model – explored in more detail in Veronika Hofeneder’s and my own contributions to this volume – this understanding of space happens in three ways. The most important for understanding the Alps, however, is the third, the so-called “representational spaces,” which combines the lived experience of space with the images and symbols that we use to conceive of that space  Sean Ireton and Caroline Schaumann, “Introduction: The Meaning of Mountains: Geology, History, Culture,” in Heights of Reflection: Mountains in the German Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century, ed. Sean Ireton and Caroline Schaumann (Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2012), 2.  Bernard Debarbieux and Gilles Rudaz, The Mountain: A Political History from the Enlightenment to the Present, trans. Jane Marie Todd (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 3.  Christos Kakalis and Emily Goetsch, “Introduction,” in Mountains, Mobilites and Movement, ed. Christos Kakalis and Emily Goetsch (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 2.  Barney Warf and Santa Arias, “Introduction: The reinsertion of space into the social sciences and humanities,” in The Spatial Turn. Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Barney Warf and Santa Arias (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 4.

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as a category.9 That is, we approach the Alps not only as a concrete space through which we move, but also via the myriad conceptual and aesthetic frameworks that have been projected onto the stone faces of the mountains historically and into the present. Expressed in another way, as Kathrin Geist outlines (and here she draws on Jörg Dünne and Andreas Mahler10), there is a contrast between the hard, physical space (harter Raum) of the actual topographical mountain and the soft or perceptual space (weicher Raum) that are its ideological and imaginary connotations.11 This dual understanding of space more generally and of the Alps specifically, is grounded in shifting knowledge and perceptions of the human relationship to the world. The perception of the mountains runs deep in our history and connects to fundamental questions of origin and purpose. As Hartmut Böhme argues, mountains are a fundamental category of cultural knowledge.12 The mountains are an “absolute metaphor,” an “Urphänomen” (primal phenomenon) like water or light, functioning as an inherently symbolic category that plays a crucial role in cultural evolution across the globe.13 Even at this abstract conceptual level there is no singular conception of the mountain: mountains are always already multivalent and are infused with complex clusters of meaning which, in turn, structure the “Topographie des Geistes” (topography of the spirit).14 As Andrew Beattie outlines, the Alps represent a surface onto which varying and various imaginations have been projected.15 As a result, the mountains “seem to speak in a myriad of different voices [. . .] a clamour of opinions and impressions.”16 Within German Studies, the Alps have long been a focus of scholarship. Recently, scholars such as Kathrin Geist, Leonie Silber, and Johann Georg Lughofer have examined the role of literary culture in establishing the popular image of the Alps, and Martina Kopf has linked this to other mountain regions in Asia and

 Henri Lefèbvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1991), 39.  Jörg Dünne and Andreas Mahler, eds. Handbuch Literatur und Raum (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015).  Kathrin Geist, Berg-Sehn-Sucht. Der Alpenraum in der deutschsprachigen Literatur (Paderborn: Fink, 2018), 26ff.  Hartmut Böhme, “Berg,” in Wörterbuch der philosophischen Metaphern, ed. Ralf Konersmann (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2007), 46‒49. Quoted in: Sean Ireton and Caroline Schaumann, eds., Heights of Reflection, 1.  Böhme, “Berg,” in Ireton and Schaumann, 1.  Böhme, “Berg,” in Ireton and Schaumann, 1.  Andrew Beattie, The Alps: A Cultural History (Landscapes of the Imagination) (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006), xiii.  Beattie, The Alps, xiii.

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South America.17 Patrick Stoffel takes the long view of the history of aesthetic and philosophical understanding of the mountains.18 In English-language publications, monographs by Tait Keller, Andrew Denning, and Ben Anderson and collections edited by Sean Ireton and Caroline Schaumann, and Dawn Hollis and Jason König, seek to chart the role of individual sports in shaping the mountains or look to reassess the pre-Modern understanding of the Alps on the edge of classical and medieval scholarship.19 Others have used the Alps to consider peripheral concerns for national questions, as in the 2010 special issue of Austrian Studies, ‘Austria and the Alps.’20 Or have linked national Alpine concerns to broader debates on the impact of anthropogenic climate change.21 Popular non-fiction in English has also seen a boom in considerations of the Alps. Though this has a long history – one might think of Leslie Stephen’s 1871 The Playground of Europe or Edward Whymper’s Scrambles Amongst the Alps, 1871 – recent examples seek to center the role of the English in mountaineering (most popularly Jim Ring’s How the English Made the Alps, 2000), or explore the psychological and physical draw of mountains more generally (Robert Macfarlane’s popular Mountains of the Mind, 2003). There are, as Leonie Silber relates, literary mountains devoted to the Alps and their attraction. This transcends national and linguistic borders and has both popular and academic appeal. The contributions collected in this volume present insights into the broad range of Alpine voices as they have emerged in German-speaking culture since the nineteenth century. One cannot overestimate the influence that Alpine space has had on shaping the cultural dynamics of the German-speaking world. As Eva-

 Kathrin Geist, Berg-Sehn-Sucht; Leonie Silber, Poetische Berge: Alpinismus und Literatur nach 2000 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2019); Johann Georg Lughofer, ed. Das Erschreiben der Berge. Die Alpen in der deutschsprachigen Literatur (Innsbruck: Innsbruck UP, 2014); Martina Kopf, Alpinismus – Andinismus. Gebirgslandschaften in europäischer und lateinamerikanischer Literatur (Heidelberg: J. B. Metzler, 2016).  Patrick Stoffel, Die Alpen: Wo die Natur zur Vernunft kam (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2018).  Tait Keller, Apostles of the Alps: Mountaineering and Nation Building in Germany and Austria, 1860‒1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); Andrew Denning, Skiing into Modernity: A Cultural and Environmental History (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2014); Ben Anderson, Cities, Mountains and Being Modern in fin-de-siècle England and Germany (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020); Sean Ireton and Caroline Schaumann, eds., Heights of Reflection. Mountains in the German Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century (Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2012); Dawn Hollis and Jason König, eds., Mountain Dialogues from Antiquity to Modernity (London: Bloomsbury, 2021).  Beniston, Judith, Jon Hughes, and Robert Vilain, eds., “Austria and the Alps.” Special issue, Austrian Studies 18 (2010).  Catríona Ní Dhúill and Nicola Thomas, eds., “Anthropocene Austria.” Special issues, Austrian Studies 30 (2022).

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Maria Müller argues, the Alps are unique as a cultural space because of the longterm and sustained impact that the concept of the mountains has had on the formation of national identities in Austria and Switzerland, as well as of regional identities in South Germany and in Italy’s South Tyrol.22 Lughofer contends similarly that the importance of the Alps as symbols and loci of national imagemaking is a “peculiarity” of the German speaking countries; neither France nor Italy invest the mountains with the same “significance.”23 What is more, the Alps mark the cultural and linguistic boundaries between northern and southern Europe and separate the German-speaking world from its southern neighbors. As Stephen O’Shea argues, “Disruption [. . .] has been their role in a colorful history.”24 Alpine passes have been utilized for centuries to enable transit across this barrier, but only in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with the rise of mountaineering, did they become a destination in themselves. In the same period, the Alpine regions became part of modern, industrialized nations (the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, France, and Italy), but this geographic fringe was often considered a cultural backwater.25 At the same time, however, the Alps were seen to be inhabited by idealized mountain-dwellers who benefitted in a psycho-spiritual way from their distance to the civilizing effects of modern society. This acted as a draw: the Alps were seen increasingly as a space to which urbanites travelled to rest and recover from the vagaries and corruption of Modernity itself. The papers collated here were first delivered at a digital conference in April 2021, hosted by the Ingeborg Bachmann Centre for Austrian Literature and Culture and jointly organized by Andrea Capovilla and the editor of this volume and author of this introduction, Richard McClelland. The conference transported us in mind and spirit from the narrow confines of our individual studies to the lofty peaks and valleys we collectively explored. Contributors draw on the major strands of research in contemporary German and Cultural Studies to consider questions of national and transnational identity, memory cultures, the legacy of twentieth-century history, and ecocritical considerations of climate breakdown and the new realities of humanity in  Eva-Maria Müller, Review of Johann Georg Lughofer, ed., Das Erschreiben der Berge. Die Alpen in der deutschsprachigen Literatur (Innsbruck: Innsbruck UP), in Journal of Austrian Studies 49 (2016), 133.  Lughofer does mention Slovenia as projecting similar identity-making processes onto the Alps, as evidenced by the presence of Mount Triglav on the state’s coat of arms. Johann Georg Lughofer, “Alpine Clichés and Critiques: Developments and Tensions in German-Language Literature,” Primerjalna književnost (Ljubljana) 45.1 (2022), 44.  Stephen O’Shea, The Alps: A Human History from Hannibal to Heidi and Beyond (New York: W. W. Norton and company, 2017), xii.  Andrew Denning, Skiing into Modernity, 11.

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the Anthropocene. Throughout, the contributors assert not only the centrality of this region to our broader disciplinary understandings, but also that the inflections of Alpine space bring new nuances to those concerns that are vital for our knowledge of historic and contemporary German-speaking culture. The volume has a decidedly transnational focus and explores the major and minor Alpine spaces not only of the German-speaking world, but also in places of intercultural and translingual contact, such as Switzerland’s Romansh and German-speaking Grisons. Throughout, one can see not only how Swiss, Austrian, and German Alpine discourses have developed from the nineteenth century onwards, but also how these relate to other national traditions. This border-crossing is also evident in the range of topics and methodologies collected here.

Tracing the Alpine imagination The question of what it is that continues to draw modern men and women into Alpine space looms large throughout this volume. There are many possible answers, but one is that the Alps constitute a space in which individuals are pushed to the limits of their physical and cognitive efforts. In the mountains, humans are confronted with their opposites. As Simpson describes, mountains across the globe function as “multivalent heterotopias, spaces of otherness.”26 In this view, the Alps stand outside of ordinary human experience and are a space of the uncanny, unsettling other. This is tied directly to the mountains’ wildness. As Veronica Della Dora states, in the western European cultural context, mountains “are places that have helped to shape our perceptions of wilderness and of the sacred. Their cultural history is largely the history of our relationship with the natural and supernatural Other.”27 This confrontation has shaped European understandings of nature and of the relationship between mankind and the wilderness.28 For Kathrin Geist, the Alps are both a “Prüfstein” (touchstone) for European culture and a “Seismograph” for our relationship to the natural world.29 It is for this reason that Dawn Hollis and Jason König state that scholarship of mountains has “never been more vital” – because mountains function as sites in which climate

 Thomas Simpson, “Modern Mountains from the Enlightenment to the Anthropocene,” The Historical Journal 62.2 (2019), 555.  Veronica Della Dora, Mountain: Nature and Culture (London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2016), 7.  Werner Bätzing, Die Alpen. Geschichte und Zukunft einer europäischen Kulturlandschaft (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2015), 9.  Geist, Berg-Sehn-Sucht, 9.

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change and its socioeconomic consequences are felt acutely.30 Indeed, at the time of writing the Austrian, Swiss, and German news is filled with reports of increasing temperatures in the mountains, and the adverse effects that this is having not only on topographical features such as glaciers and meteorological phenomena such as snow, but also on the flora and fauna native to the Alps. Alpine scholarship, together with cultural and aesthetic responses to Alpine space, have long posited a number of conceptual shifts that mark our changing relationship to the region. The general sense of these studies is that there are two major conceptualizations of the Alps. First, a former age in which humans at best ignored the mountains or, at worst, considered them as a blight upon the otherwise smooth surface of the created earth. In time, this was replaced by a conception of the Alps borne of obsession, in which the mountains exerted a strong draw over scientists, explorers, artists, and tourists alike. This dualistic view of the history of cultural responses to Alpine space can be seen most prominently, for example, in Marjorie Hope Nicholson’s ground-breaking and influential text Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (1963). In this volume, Nicolson draws on a rich arsenal of geological, scientific, philosophical, and literary writing to chart “one of the most profound revolutions in thought that has ever occurred” – that is, from the preceding age of “mountain gloom” to the later age of “mountain glory.”31 This argument is echoed by Werner Bätzing, who outlines a conceptual shift between 1760 and 1780 away from the Alps as a locus horribilis to the Alps as a locus amoenus.32 In the earlier period, European responses to the Alps were shaped by religious belief and superstition: the Alps were posited either as a geographical record of humanity’s sinfulness, or as the wilderness domain of wild beasts, demons, and – if Johann Jakob Scheuchzer is to be believed – dragons.33 The mountains were not abandoned, however. As Ireton and Schaumann state, since ancient times the mountains had “borne witness to human activity ‒ whether worship, hunting, exploration or passage.”34 The prevalence of such superstitions, however, effectively “precluded the large-scale exploration of the mountains up until the 1800s.”35 The  Hollis and König, Mountain Dialogues, 1.  Marjorie Hope Nicholson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory. The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Cornell UP, 1963), 3.  Bätzing, Die Alpen, 15.  Although Scheucher did not believe the tales of Alpine dragons that he heard on his travels, these can be read in his Itinera per Helvetiae alpinas regiones facta annis 1702‒1711 (Voyage made in the years 1702‒1711 in the Alpine regions of Switzerland). This was published in individual volumes from 1708 and in a collated, four-volume edition in Leiden in 1723.  Ireton and Schaumann, “Introduction: The Meaning of Mountains,” 5.  Ireton and Schaumann, “Introduction: The Meaning of Mountains,” 5.

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long eighteenth century marks the dawn of the second major conceptual understanding of the Alps. It was in this period, armed with the reasoned certainties of the burgeoning Enlightenment, that increasing numbers of explorers, writers, and scientists journeyed into the mountains. This resulting reconceptualization cast Alpine space in a positive light, as a region that exerts a strong psychospiritual draw. Bätzing acknowledges that this shift has a longer history – in her study Nicolson traces this back into the seventeenth century – and cites Rousseau’s international best-seller Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse (Julie; or, The New Heloise, 1761) as pivotal in disseminating this to a transnational audience.36 One can also see this dual understanding reflected in more popular engagements with Alpine space: Leslie Stephen, in his The Playground of Europe (1871), which charts the development of mountaineering through recollections of his own Alpine exploits, sees the 1760s marking a shift in gear in the history of Alpine engagement.37 Similarly, Robert Macfarlane’s highly popular Mountains of the Mind also replicates Nicolson’s model (as Dawn Hollis and Jason König note).38 The binary “Mountain Gloom” – “Mountain Glory,” though useful, is, however, an oversimplification of the aesthetic and cultural history of the mountains that flattens out premodern and medieval engagements with mountain space, as Hollis and König contend.39 The eighteenth century does, however, mark a watershed in responses to Alpine space in German and European culture more generally – as Hollis and König acknowledge – that continues to define engagements with Alpine space to the present. What is important here is that, as Nicolson outlines, even prior to the shift in Alpine conceptualization, individuals’ encounters with the Alps were “conditioned [. . .] by their literary and religious heritage.”40 She continues that seventeenthcentury writers and travelers in the Alps “described mountains only as books had taught them to speak.”41 In this early period, new ideas began to circulate about the structure of the earth, and treatises appeared proposing theories of geological development and the origins of the mountains. These, too, began to shape responses to the Alps. Crucially, these texts were not confined to a single national public, but rather circulated internationally. One can see this exchange, for example, in Thomas Burnet’s controversial The Sacred Theory of the Earth (first published in 1681 in

 Ireton and Schaumann, “Introduction: The Meaning of Mountains,” 14.  Leslie Stephen, The Playground of Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013), 40.  Hollis and König, Mountain Dialogues, 2.  Hollis and König, Mountain Dialogues, 4.  Nicholson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, 67.  Nicholson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, 67. Leonie Silber’s Poetische Berge (2019) charts a similar literary conditioning of modern and contemporary responses to Alpine space.

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Latin and in English in 1684). Having journeyed to the Alps in the 1670s, Burnet was motivated to propose a theory of orogenesis – of mountain origin – that married new geological understandings with Biblical accounts of creation. The Sacred Theory posits the earth as a hollow sphere, a mundane egg whose surface was smooth at creation. The mountains that now marked its surface were a product of the flood, which, according to Burnet’s theorization, burst forth through the shell of the earth from within. This broke up the surface of the smooth earth, permanently scarring the globe with reminders of man’s wickedness. Burnet’s text not only triggered fierce debate in his native England, but it also influenced understandings of the Alps in Germany. As Nicolson outlines, Johann Christoph Gottsched, from his seat in Leipzig, promoted Burnet’s theory in his circles and penned two works in which he positions himself as part of Burnet’s school of thought with regard to the effects of the flood on the origin of the mountains.42 What is interesting is that both Burnet’s native (North) Yorkshire and the landscape surrounding Leipzig are both undulating, but not exactly steep. In Burnet’s argument one can recognize the terror felt by the non-native upon seeing the Alps fused with a biblically-grounded justification for this response to a terrifying landscape: humanity’s sinfulness. For those who had not seen the Alps, Burnet’s theories and the writings they inspired undoubtedly cast the Alpine landscape as one of wickedness surpassing the markers of sinfulness (the hills and valleys) closer to home. Even in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, then, transnational intellectual exchange provoked and promoted new understandings of Alpine space. This trend intensifies as time progresses. The eighteenth century saw the birth of the popular image of the individual Alpinist: the solo artist, explorer or scientist setting out and engaging with Alpine space in new and magnificent ways. It is these individuals that we encounter in – and behind – the increasing number of literary and academic texts about the mountains that were written in the period. These authors, intimately familiar with the latest scientific, philosophical, and aesthetic theories and debates – and, indeed, often at the vanguard of such developments – prompted a continent-wide shift in the understanding of Alpine space through their own engagements with the mountains. As Martina Kopf argues, it is the production and circulation of texts that underpins the dissemination of new ideas about the mountains in the period.43 This image is, however, disseminated in other media: Caspar David Friedrich’s iconic Wanderer über dem Nebelmeer (Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818), for example, captures the lone gentleman-explorer both in retrospect and in advance. It is such men who, as Simpson outlines, represent the “canon of

 Nicholson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, 234.  Martina Kopf, Alpinismus – Andinismus, 16.

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European (and later Western) men [that] was positioned at the forefront of innovating modern imaginings of mountains against a backdrop of superstition and backwardness.”44 It is this image of man alone in the mountains that endures through time. As Peter H. Hansen outlines, there is a “particular strand of modernity” that features modern man, who “stands alone on the summit, autonomous from other men and dominant over nature.”45 We must not, however, let this image of the lone man elide the presence of women in the Alps: as David Meizel’s volume Mountaineering Women attests, women have long been an active presence in the global mountaineering community, overcoming societal and cultural prejudice and hindrances alongside the physical demands of their sport.46 Central to this invigorated engagement with Alpine space were the urbanites who travelled to the mountains, whether on exploratory, scientific expeditions, as part of supposedly edifying grand tours or, as time progresses, as leisure tourists. As outlined above, in the Alps they encountered individuals and cultures that were supposedly not marked by the decadent trappings of modern, European civilization. It is the Alpine dwellers who are seen as representative of the natural, Rousseauian individual. This, combined with the wild landscapes that the visitors encountered, meant that the Alps reflected modernity and civilization back on these individuals by presenting them with its opposite. As Kathrin Geist outlines, in the eighteenth century, the Alps became emblems of nature, wilderness, and authenticity and, therefore, stand as the opposite of the attributes of urban life, most notably culture, decadence, estrangement, and artificiality.47 For Simpson, this has the result that, as a conceptual category, the mountains “are quintessential products of modernity even as, and precisely because, they figure as its limit and its other.”48 This reflective quality returns again and again in the texts that are explored in this volume, in which the mountains figure repeatedly as the opposite of modern individuals and function as a space in which human beings are pushed to their physical and cognitive limits. The shift in understanding of the Alps was underpinned by the emergence and, later, dominance of the sublime as an aesthetic category. As Nicolson outlines, the sublime emerges from a shift in sentiment regarding the place of man and God in the universe from the seventeenth century onwards: “Awe, compounded of

 Simpson, “Modern Mountains,” 556.  Peter H. Hansen, The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering after the Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2013), 11.  David Mazel, Mountaineering Women. Stories by Early Climbers (College Station, TX: Texas A&M UP, 1994).  Geist, Berg-Sehn-Sucht, 10.  Simpson, “Modern Mountains,” 554.

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mingled terror and exultation, once reserved for God, pass over [. . .] first to an expanded cosmos, then from the macrocosm to the greatest objects in the geocosm.”49 Though this sentiment of awesome terror is not precipitated solely by the mountains, it is here that its modern expression takes shape. This happens in tandem with the dissemination of new philosophical and aesthetic understandings. The concept of the sublime gained influence in this period initially through the circulation of the first century Greek text On the Sublime, attributed to Longinus. In this text, Longinus considers the effect of rhetorical devices and outlines how good writing might create specific effects, including one considered sublime. Over time, the sublime shifted from a category in the writing of literature to a feeling that might be precipitated by literature itself and, eventually, was expanded to encompass not only the effects of other cultural products, but also the real-world subjects of said products. The development of the sublime as an aesthetic category can be traced in Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), in which the Irish philosopher proposes an empiricist understanding of aesthetic experience that arises from our sensual encounters with the world.50 In his influential discussion, Burke distinguishes between the beautiful and the sublime, arguing that the latter is a result of our encounter with the terrifying in nature, which we then process from a safe distance in the imagination. This attracts us in life and in art because the juxtaposition of the terrifying with the safe has a thrilling and ultimately cathartic effect on the individual, as Rodolphe Gasché argues.51 Burke’s definition of the sublime is important for understanding German responses to the mountains because his ideas were influential beyond his native Britain, in both France and the German lands.52 This influence can be seen, for example, in Kant’s discussion of the sublime in his Kritik der Urteilskraft (Critique of the Power of Judgement, 1790). Kant offers a differentiated understanding of the sublime and argues that the sublime attracts us because in our minds there is some connection between the encounter with the greatness of the sublime object and our sense of purpose as rational human beings.53 The sublime is an encounter with the limits of our

 Nicolson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, 143.  Rodolphe Gasché, “. . . And the Beautiful? Revisiting Edmund Burke’s ‘Double Aesthetics’,” in The Sublime. From Antiquity to the Present, ed. Timothy M. Costelloe (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012), 24.  Gasché, “. . . And the Beautiful?” 28.  Gasché, “. . . And the Beautiful?” 25.  Melissa McBay Merritt, “The Moral Source of the Kantian Sublime,” in The Sublime. From Antiquity to the Present, ed. Timothy M. Costelloe (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012), 40.

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imagination and intellectual capacity.54 In her analysis, Melissa McBay Merritt links this innate quality of the Kantian sublime to the German term das Erhabene and its derivation from the verb erheben, meaning ‘to raise or lift up’.55 She argues that the sublime “vocation of the rational animal” is tied to the act of “looking up to an ideal of perfect rationality” and the effect that this has on us.56 The ability to perceive the sublime properly in this way – that is, not to be simply overwhelmed by the terror of the natural world, but rather to be edified by it – is one that supposedly only people with the correct moral, cognitive, and aesthetic understanding possess. Though the majority of the earth’s population could not process the natural world in this way, the educated, enlightened (male) denizens of the European metropoles could, and it is in their writing and paintings that we find the sublime manifest most strongly. Given this understanding of the sublime, a major concept that underpins our historical relationship to the mountains (and one that continues to influence our perception of the Alpine to this day) is one that is deeply Eurocentric. This is argued by Martina Kopf in her discussion of Alexander von Humboldt’s scientific writings, produced in relation to his expeditions to Central and South America between 1799 and 1804.57 Kopf outlines how it is clear that the Alps are a prism through which the European imagination views all mountains and that the fundamentals of Alpine conceptualization, including the sublime, are applied, reviewed, and renewed in relation to other mountains globally. As the eighteenth century gave way to the nineteenth, the ongoing development of Romanticism contributed to the emergence of new ways of seeing these mountains alongside the solidification of existing responses to Alpine space. There is a continuation of the sublime as a major conceptual category into the new century as well as a positing of the Alps as a supposedly pristine natural landscape untouched by modernization and industrialization – a legacy that continues to the present.58 As mentioned above, the sublime resulted in part from a shift in spiritual understandings that were projected onto the geography of the earth. This trend continues in Romanticism, which saw Alpine space as “pivotal”

 Paul Guyer, “The German Sublime After Kant,” in The Sublime. From Antiquity to the Present, ed. Timothy M. Costelloe (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012), 102.  McBay Merritt, “The Moral Source of the Kantian Sublime,” 42.  McBay Merritt, “The Moral Source of the Kantian Sublime,” 42‒43.  Kopf, Alpinismus-Andinismus, 12.  Denning, Skiing into Modernity, 4.

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for the resacralization of the natural world, as Kate Rigby argues.59 But this is balanced by a contradictory scientific exploration and exploitation – most notably through mining and minerological extraction – of the mountains throughout this period. This exploration and exploitation of Alpine space is key to the fundamental reconceptualization that was gaining pace in the period: it is in the Alps that geomorphic transition is first observed and, as Rigby highlights, it is there that prehistoric bones were found, which pointed to the emergence and decline of species.60 The shift in understanding that such discoveries precipitated is huge and this reverberated far beyond the mountains. As Rigby states: “No longer a static artifact of divine manufacture, the whole natural world, from its changing climate and evolving biota right down to its only apparently inanimate and unmoving ‘skeleton’ could now be seen as a ceaseless process of becoming.”61 The sublime faded as the dominant response to the mountains during the nineteenth century. This period saw the emergence of conflicting views of the Alps. On the one hand, the legacy of Romanticism maintained that the Alps were a pristine, supremely natural landscape. On the other hand, increasing technological inroads into the mountains facilitated mass tourism. As Rigby outlines, by the middle decades of the century, the romanticizing poets would be replaced by tourist agents forging new routes for increasing numbers of urban pleasure-seekers.62 In 1863 Thomas Cook’s first organized tour to Switzerland took place, transporting tourists into the Valais and Bernese Highlands. Though the increasing number of tourists followed in the footsteps of their literary and scientifically-minded forebears, the development of infrastructure including roads, railways, and hotels meant that a trip to the Alps required less time and involved a lesser threat to life than it had done in the past. A result of this is a change in the common perception of and relationship to the mountains: whilst they still impress, the Alps had been “tamed” and were a space that might be “enjoyed in increasing (albeit still only relative) comfort and safety.”63 Increasing nationalism and militarization in the final decades of the nineteenth century resulted in the hardening of national boundaries segmenting the Alps that had previously not existed. As Matthieu outlines, this effect was dual.64 On the one hand, the emergence of the nation-state connected smaller, isolated

 Kate Rigby, Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in European Romanticism (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 131‒132.  Rigby, Topographies of the Sacred, 138.  Rigby, Topographies of the Sacred, 138.  Rigby, Topographies of the Sacred, 164.  Rigby, Topographies of the Sacred, 164.  Jon Matthieu, Die Alpen: Raum – Kultur – Geschichte (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2015), 19.

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regions with broader national territories. On the other hand, however, this meant that border regions were marginalized at the expense of the centralized nation. What is more, the rise of nationalism was coupled with a passion for Alpine exploration in the second half of the nineteenth century, which saw the “golden age” of mountaineering in the decade between 1854 and 1865. This decade is inaugurated by Alfred Wills’ (1828‒1912) ascent of the Wetterhorn. Wills and his party believed this to be the first ascent of the mountain, though this had actually been completed a decade earlier in August 1844 by the Swiss Hans Jaun and Melchior Bannhauser. The “golden age” of mountaineering closes with Edward Whymper’s (1840‒1911) successful ascent of the Matterhorn, following his seven previous unsuccessful expeditions.65 This trend continued, however, well into the twentieth century, as seen, for example, in Jon Hughes’ contribution in this volume. The later nineteenth century attitude to the mountains is perhaps epitomized in the English mountaineer Leslie Stephen (1832‒1904), who was pivotal for shaping modern understandings of the Alps. In his widely read The Playground of Europe (1871), Stephen engaged with some of the major tropes that had marked conceptualizations of the Alps thus far, combining a new passion for athleticism in the Alps with a longer trend of lyrical appreciation of their natural beauty and a recourse to literary quotation to convey the effects that the landscape had had upon him. Stephen identified the decades between the 1760s and 80s as the point when modern understandings of the Alps shifted. What is more, in Stephen’s discussion of the ‘New School’ of Alpine mountaineering, it is as much the emergence of modern sensibilities and scientific inquiry that precipitated this shift as the efforts of individual mountaineers.66 As Hansen outlines, Stephen emphasized “the triumph of instrumental rationality, the individual imagination and the disenchantment of the world” as the factors behind this shift.67 As has been outlined above, however, this shift is not so clear-cut, even in Stephen’s account. In spite of the vision of man as mountaineering conqueror of virgin peaks, the Alps maintain their autonomy in the face of his efforts. As Simpson outlines, Stephen’s account maintains the agency of the mountains as “active and communicative presences with a ‘language’ of their own.”68 They are a space that has never been fully subjugated by the efforts of man and the processes of modernity.

 For popular accounts of this period, see, e.g. Trevor Braham, When the Alps Cast their Spell: Mountaineers of the Alpine Golden Age (Glasgow: In Pinn, 2004); Fergus Fleming, Killing Dragons: The Conquest of the Alps (London: Granta, 2000); Jim Ring, How the English Made the Alps (London: John Murray, 2000).  Stephen, The Playground of Europe, 36‒69.  Hansen, The Summits of Modern Man, 14.  Simpson, “Modern Mountains,” 557.

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The mountaineering efforts of the later nineteenth century continued into the twentieth. The foundation of the British Alpine Club in London in 1857 – the world’s first mountaineering association – has given the impression that the British dominated Alpine space in this period, a position reinforced in popular texts such as Jim Ring’s How the English Made the Alps (2011). As Hansen stresses, however, though the British Alpine Club “embodied imperial masculinity in the Alps,” it would be “absurd” to state that the British invented the Alps.69 Rather, mountaineering was always a “collaborative, intercultural and polyglot endeavour.”70 Even in Stephen’s account we see the Englishman and his compatriots accompanied by guides from Switzerland and France, whom Stephen praises as the true “heroes” of his adventures.71 What is more, the effects of burgeoning nationalism can also be seen in the background of such expeditions: in Stephen’s account of his ascent of the Eigerjoch in 1859, he mentions the racialized tensions between the Swiss-French and Swiss-German guides, the latter of whom promoted the “superiority of the Teutonic over the Latin races.”72 The physical exertions of mountaineering represent one side of the increasing levels of engagement with Alpine space in the late nineteenth and into the early twentieth centuries. Whilst mountaineers were drawn to the Alps to experience physical and mental exertion, other engagements with the Alps were of an altogether different nature, though the physical was still of prime concern. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the supposedly positive effects of mountain air on the individual were increasingly sought out and promoted as a cure for respiratory ailments and disease, not least of which was tuberculosis. Held in contrast to the polluted, ‘thick’ air of the industrialized cities, the peculiar qualities of Alpine air were promoted as an effective treatment for previously uncurable diseases.73 As Alison F. Frank outlines, the “commodification” of mountain air – or rather, the packaging and marketing of this natural resource – began from the 1860s onwards.74 Whether mountain air did provide true benefits for tubercular visitors is questioned by modern science: though Alpine air is undoubtedly cleaner than air in the industrialized lowlands, it is also thinner, a

 Hansen, The Summits of Modern Man, 19.  Hansen, The Summits of Modern Man, 19.  Stephen, The Playground of Europe, 13‒14.  Stephen, The Playground of Europe, 46.  Johannes Türk, “Elevation and Insight: Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg,” in Heights of Reflection. Mountains in the German Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century, ed. Sean Ireton and Caroline Schaumann (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012), 250.  Alison F. Frank, “The Air Cure Town: Commodifying Mountain Air in Alpine Central Europe,” Central European History 45 (2012), 185.

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reality which means the consumptive had to exert more energy to breathe in the mountains than they did at lower altitudes.75 Rather, it was the regularity and stability offered by life in a sanatorium and particularly regular exercise and a good diet over an extended period of time that facilitated recovery – and, perhaps more importantly, removed the infected person from centers of population in the lowlands.76 Nevertheless, there was a boom in convalescent journeys to the Alps to stay in one of the many new sanatoria that were built for this purpose. The first dedicated sanatorium for the treatment of tuberculosis was opened by the German Hermann Brehmer in the Silesian mountain-village of Göbersdorf (today Sokołowsko, Poland) in 1859, though he had been treating patients in the locale since 1854. It did not take long for medics and developers to export this institution to the Alps. This centered on Davos, in Switzerland’s Grisons. From 1844 onwards, medics and scientists including Luiz Ruedi, Alexander Spengler, and Friedrich Unger had noted the benefits of the locale for the treatment of the disease.77 From 1860 the first tubercular visitors came to Davos and were initially housed in inns in the village; in 1868 Spengler opened the Kuranstalt Spengler-Holsboer health clinic together with Willem Jan Holsboer. The first closed medical center dedicated to tuberculosis, the Sanatorium Turban, was opened in 1889 by the German Karl Turban (1856‒1935). Into the twentieth century, Davos established itself and was recognized internationally as the clear leader in the Alpine treatment of tuberculosis.78 What is more, the development of the Alps into a site to which individuals journeyed to improve their health laid the foundations for later mass tourism, as Susan Barton’s discussion of the development of tourism in Switzerland’s Alpine regions outlines.79 Seán Williams’ chapter in the present volume explores the development and literary marketization of Alpine hotels in this period further. This effective process of marketization of the Alps for recovery was only possible because of the aesthetic reconceptualization of the Alps that had taken place earlier in the nineteenth century under the influence of first the Romantics and

 Philip Brantingham, “Taking the Cure: A Stay at Thomas Mann’s ‘The Magic Mountain’,” Modern Age 44.4 (2022): 333‒340.  Helen Bynum, “Riding the waves: optimism and realism in the treatment of TB,” The Lancet 380.9852 (October 2012), 1465.  Peter Warren, “The Evolution of the Sanatorium: The First Half-Century 1854‒1904,” Canadian Bulletin of Medical History 23.2 (2006), 464.  Frank, “The Air Cure Town,” 189.  Susan Barton, Healthy Living in the Alps: The Origins of Winter Tourism in Switzerland, 1860–1914 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2008).

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then the mountaineers, as outlined above. This had a direct impact on how individuals perceived their time in the Alps. As Frank argues, this shift in understanding facilitated responses to Alpine space that were understood in spiritual and aesthetic terms; even when on vacation, individuals did not travel to the Alps merely to gain physical benefit.80 A further shift in understanding of Alpine space can be seen concurrent with the emergence of Modernism in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Existing aesthetic frameworks did continue to influence perceptions of the mountains, however, albeit in response to the broader cultural and aesthetic developments promoted by modernity. This shift can be seen in Georg Simmel’s Die Alpen (The Alps, 1919), in which Simmel explores the difficulties that beset aesthetic engagements with the Alps and offers an analysis of the sublime as an aesthetic category. Simmel contends that the Alps are difficult to reproduce in art because they are too vast a prospect to reduce into a singular representation, which elides their immense natural forms.81 For Simmel, it is the question of form that makes it difficult for us to approach the Alps because the mountains defy the strictures of conventional or classical aesthetic form and its inclination towards proportion, symmetry, and restraint. The mountains appear as a “chaos, as the unwieldy mass of the formless,” a reality that is difficult to comprehend.82 At the same time, however, key features of the formlessness of the Alpine landscape contribute directly to a sense of the sublime. It is the Alps’ “over-large, ascending cliffs, the transparent and shimmering icy slopes, the snow of the peaks,” which are disconnected from the realities of life in the lowlands, that are “symbols of the transcendent, leading the spiritual eye upwards.”83 It is no surprise, then, that it is precisely these symbols that recur again and again in connection with sublime sentiment in the materials explored in this volume. What is interesting in Simmel’s argument is that the “fundamentally, the metaphysically new” that might be experienced in the Alps is only accessible at altitude: it is only when one has reached the peak that one passes into this aesthetic experience.84 For Simmel, being in proximity to the world below “serves to draw us downwards” – a reality that makes the peak simply “the crown on a lower, easygoing landscape” of “serenity.”85 Again, the juxtaposition between the peak and the valley is one that recurs throughout the discussions collected in this volume.

     

Frank, “The Air Cure Town,” 196. Georg Simmel, “The Alps,” Qualitative Sociology 16.2 (1993): 180. Simmel, “The Alps,” 180. Simmel, “The Alps,” 180. Simmel, “The Alps,” 184. Simmel, “The Alps,” 184.

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In the period of early Modernism, the Alpine sanatorium is of vital importance for the cultural landscape of bourgeois European society. This is evident from that fact that Davos is also home to one of the most famous literary sanatoria in German – or indeed, world – literature: the Berghof of Thomas Mann’s magisterial novel Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain, 1924). Mann’s great work of Modernist Alpine literature has occupied a foremost position in the cultural imagination of the mountains since its publication. For Lughofer the novel stands as a “great epochal testament of the interwar period.”86 What is more, as Johannes Türk argues, the novel’s publication marks a key date in the history of the representation of mountains: “In the German tradition, [Der Zauberberg] is the most prominent work of literature whose entire plot and structure draws on mountains.”87 Mann was inspired to write his novel by his own journey to Davos to visit his wife Katia, who was diagnosed as tubercular and sent to the Swiss town in March 1912. Mann spent three weeks visiting Katia in May 1912 and, whilst there, he consented to be examined. The physician pressed Mann to stay at the sanatorium to cure a light case of tuberculosis but Mann refused, as he feared he would “succumb to the seductions of institutional life.”88 The protagonist of his novel, the young Hamburg engineer Hans Castorp, takes the opposite decision: after his examination following the development of a bronchial infection and high temperature, Castorp stays on at the Berghof at the suggestion of the director, Hofrat Behrens, and his originally planned three week visit to his cousin Joachim Ziemßen becomes a stay of seven years. The ‘Magic Mountain’ of the novel is not just the topographical mountain on which the sanatorium is located, but also, as Martin Swales argues, “a sophisticated human institution: the international sanatorium” itself.89 It is in this great institution that Mann plays out the human relationships and philosophies of a European civilization on the brink of catastrophe; the protagonist Castorp eventually leaves the sanatorium, only to die on the battlefields of Flanders. As Nancy P. Nenno argues, the extensive criticism of the novel has often viewed the Alpine through a simplistic metaphorical lens that posits a difference between the elevated environs of the sanatorium and the so-called “flatland” [Flachland] from which Castorp has journeyed.90 There is no denying that the opposition of ‘above’ and ‘below’ in the

 Lughofer, “Alpine Clichés and Critiques,” 48.  Türk, “Elevation and Insight,” 248.  Thomas Mann, quoted in: Martin Swales, Mann. Der Zauberberg (London: Grant & Cutler, 2000), 8‒9.  Swales, Mann. Der Zauberberg, 19.  Nancy P. Nenno, “Projections on Blank Space. Landscape and Identity in Der Zauberberg,” in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, ed. Hans Rudolf Vaget (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), 101.

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text is one that is paramount for understanding how Mann has ordered the topography of his narrative at a fundamental level, as Elisabeth Galvan argues.91 However, the lack of deeper critical consideration means that the historically and culturally contingent meanings that are embedded in the Alpine landscape and which emerge in Mann’s text have not been discussed in detail.92 For Swales, the landscape of the text is an “all too infrequently noticed glor[y].”93 Though the sanatorium’s Alpine setting might have been an inconsequential aspect of the narrative borne of the tubercular thread that runs throughout, the ever-present mountainscape serves, at an aesthetic-philosophical level, to further the integration of competing discourses in the narrative. Throughout the novel, Mann draws on the broad range of Alpine tropes that are discussed in this introduction and elsewhere in this volume. As Türk argues, these range from “Petrarchan humanism and [the] Romantic sublime to the thrill of sport and mountain climbing in modern times.”94 What is more, these tropes extend to include the advertisements that emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that “coin[ed] stereotypes of the Alpine” in the period.95 This proliferation of discursive filters through which the narrative engages with the Alpine means that in the novel, the mountains are always already filtered by existing representations, as Türk argues.96 At the start of the narrative, for example, the reader follows Castorp’s slow progress from Hamburg south across Germany, into Switzerland, and then up into the mountains proper. He has not yet journeyed to the Alps before his visit, and yet he possesses the vocabulary to describe and – he assumes – understand the landscape.97 At the same time, however, his expectations are at odds with reality: Castorp tells his cousin shortly after his arrival that the landscape is not as “overwhelming” as he had expected, only for Ziemßen to point out the treeline and glaciers visible from their carriage.98 Through this conversation, however, the landscape is codified and categorized by the cousins, a process that represents a major parallel between this text and other Alpine literature. A second major Alpine trope affects Castorp’s comprehension of the mountains at a fundamental level. As Nancy P. Nenno outlines, Castorp’s experience of the Alps  Elisabeth Galvan, “Nord-südliches Gelände. Zur Topographie des Zauberberg,” in Lebensraum und Todesnähe. Thomas Manns Roman „Der Zauberberg“. Die Davoser Literaturtage 2012, ed. Helmut Koopmann and Thomas Sprecher (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2015), 136.  Nenno, “Projections on Blank Space,” 100.  Swales, Mann. Der Zauberberg, 19.  Türk, “Elevation and Insight,” 248.  Türk, “Elevation and Insight,” 254.  Türk, “Elevation and Insight,” 254.  Türk, “Elevation and Insight,” 254.  Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg, 12th ed. (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1952 [2017]), 19.

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is underpinned by “a discourse that had long constructed the Alpine region as a symbolically laden extraterritorial space within the European continent.”99 That is, the Alps function in this text as a place of contact with the “unreachable Other” – a phenomenon of Alpine engagement discussed above.100 This comes to the fore most prominently in the subchapter “Schnee” (“Snow”). In this oft-discussed section of the novel, Castorp is driven by desire into the snowy landscape surrounding the Berghof against Behrens’ orders, on skis that he has secretly bought.101 Castorp’s desire to journey into the landscape in order to gain potential contact with the Alpine Other is a manifestation of the drive of the Alpinist highlighted by Martina Knopf.102 As Nenno argues, however, Castorp’s potential self-fashioning also links to the exploration of more distant landscapes, namely of the arctic world.103 This ties directly to the popularity of accounts of arctic expeditions at the time of the novel’s composition – a further discursive dynamic that is layered onto the Alps in the text.104 What is interesting about this point in the narrative is that snow has previously served to undermine Castorp’s expectations about the Alps: the changeable weather of the environs around Davos does not conform to his expectations from the “flatland,” and serves to contribute towards his increasingly destabilized sense of time. Already on his third day at the Berghof Castorp questions his cousin about the weather, which had changed “violently” from the previous day’s typically summer weather (it is August) to conditions that presaged snow.105 Castorp’s journey into the snow later in the novel is ultimately a disastrous endeavor that almost costs him his life. For Nenno the framing of the narrative in this section of the novel is tied closely to the development of film. She not only traces similarities between the presence of the mountains in Mann’s text and the 1920s mountain films of Luis Trenker, but also argues that the white snow blanketing the Alpine landscape effectively functions as a surface onto which “both personal and communal conflicts are projected.”106 Swales also considers this episode and argues that the blizzard itself, which Mann describes through “paradoxes [. . .], oxymoron and contradiction,” serves to undermine traditional concepts and forces Castorp’s encounter with otherness.107 The effect is such that the relationship between the reality of the landscape and the

 Nenno, ‘Projections on Blank Space,” 96.  Nenno, “Projections on Blank Space,” 96.  Mann, Zauberberg, 647.  Kopf, Alpinismus – Andinismus, 11.  Nenno, “Projections on Blank Space,” 96.  Nenno, “Projections on Blank Space,” 96.  Mann, Zauberberg, 131‒132.  Nenno, “Projections on Blank Space,” 107.  Swales, Mann. Der Zauberberg, 20.

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fictions that are layered and projected onto it become confused. Indeed, Castorp is increasingly unable to differentiate between the two, a process that culminates in his vision of an ideal society – in a southern European setting – whilst he lays against the external wall of a cabin to buttress himself against the vagaries of the snowstorm that has engulfed him.108 As Swales argues, Mann’s text demonstrates that, “[i]n the Alpine world, notions of the physical and metaphysical become troublingly transposed and intertwined.” Mann’s novel looms large in the Alpine imagination of the German-speaking countries, in part because of Mann’s stature in the intellectual landscape of the twentieth century, but also because of his effective incorporation of Alpine imaginaries from different epochs of European engagement with the mountains into the fabric of his narrative. Mann’s novel takes place on the cusp of a new world order that emerged in the aftermath of the First World War, and which swept away the structures and strictures of nineteenth-century European society. The maritime engineer Castorp is a modern man, and he engages in thoroughly modern Alpine pursuits: that he attempts his exploration of the Alpine landscape in the “Schnee” section on skies is significant, because this sport can be seen as a primary means of engagement with the Alpine landscape in the period of Modernity and, indeed, since. As Andrew Denning outlines, the development of the skiing industry brought mixed blessings to the Alps.109 The sport offers individuals access to nature away from the hustle and bustle of urban life, and in this one can recognize the long tradition of city-dwellers journeying to the Alps for respite from civilization. This had a transformative effect on individuals, who were able to engage in “acts of heroic self-assertion” in an elemental landscape that was part of an otherwise “increasingly banal” world – here one can hear the echoes of the Romantic resacralization of the world.110 The infrastructure that skiing demands, however, has scarred the supposedly pristine landscapes that practitioners seek out – a factor also present in the tensions underlying the golden age of mountaineering, mentioned above. Crucially, skiing resulted in a further reconceptualization of Alpine space. Denning proposes the emergence of an “Alpine modernism” in and through the skiing industry.111 Alpine modernism was not, however, a complete departure from previous – or indeed contemporary – modes of comprehending Alpine space. As Denning outlines, Alpine modernism “synthesized the pastoralism and  Castorp’s vision begins on page 670 of this edition of the novel; his journey to this point and his changing experiences of the snowy landscape fill the preceding thirty pages.  Denning, Skiing into Modernity, 4.  Denning, Skiing into Modernity, 14.  Denning, Skiing into Modernity, 15.

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nature worship of Romanticism with the cultural iconoclasm and celebration of technology seen in modernist submovements such as Futurism.”112 Again, we find that the written word was crucial for this transformation: it was in the writing and reports of skiers that the Alps were transformed from a “benighted landscape into a modern, progressive realm.”113 This trend can also be seen in other media and most notably in tourist posters from the early and mid-twentieth century. As David H. T. Scott’s study of Swiss tourist posters demonstrates, for example, this imagery combined representations of the mountains with cutting-edge technology to promote Alpine space as a major, modern tourist destination.114 The boom in Alpine tourism precipitated in part by skiing developed against a geo-political backdrop that saw the rise of fascism in Germany and, subsequently, Austria. The nationalist attitudes present in the nineteenth century, outlined above, hardened in the decades before the Second World War, when the Alps came to be seen as the landscape of the German soul.115 In Germany, mountaineering was seen as promoting National Socialist attitudes towards both the conquest of the natural world and the perfection of the idealized human form.116 The mountaineering successes of the Reich’s citizens were promoted as demonstrating German superiority over other nations, as when Hitler celebrated the successful climbing of the north face of the Eiger – one of the most treacherous routes in the Alps – by an AustroGerman team in 1938, four months after the Anschluss of Austria into the German Reich.117 It should be stressed, however, that even in the face of fascist interpretations of Alpine space, the images projected onto the mountains were not singular. Writing in 1938 from Palestinian exile, for example, Arnold Zweig saw the Swiss Alps as the last bastion of freedom in Europe against the encroachment of fascism.118 As Stoffel outlines, this contention is tied to the development and promotion of a Swiss geistige Landesverteidigung (spiritual defense of the nation), which staked Swiss identity on a non-partisan imagination of the nation that surpassed national and linguistic boundaries.119 The Alps were central to this image of Switzerland as a pluralistic, democratic state.

 Denning, Skiing into Modernity, 15‒16.  Denning, Skiing into Modernity, 16.  David H. T. Scott, Poetics of the Poster. The Rhetoric of Image-Text (Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2010).  Patrick Stoffel, Die Alpen, 11.  Tait Keller, Apostles of the Alps, 1.  Keller, Apostles of the Alps, 183‒184.  Keller, Apostles of the Alps, 1.  Stoffel, Die Alpen, 12.

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Later in the twentieth century, the birth of the environmental movement precipitated a further development in our perception of the Alps as greater awareness of humanity’s impact on the Alpine environment developed. This had a direct impact on images of the Alps as a space of natural beauty. As Bätzing states, awareness of environmental issues destroyed the image of an Alpine idyll.120 The effects of anthropogenic climate change can only intensify damage to the Alpine environment; as Kathrin Geist argues, climate change is exacerbating the effects of geological and ecological change in the mountains.121 In the summer of 2022, two news stories demonstrated this impact: in July it was deemed dangerous to continue climbing on Switzerland’s Matterhorn and Jungfrau, and regular routes to the summit of Europe’s highest mountain, France’s Mont Blanc, were declared inaccessible, because high temperatures had melted snowfields.122 On the same day it was reported that the melting Theodul Glacier had led to the recalculation of the ItalianSwiss border, which is determined as running along a drainage divide usually covered by ice.123 The impact of anthropogenic climate change is currently foremost in our minds and its significance for Alpine space in the present – and, indeed, the cultural texts that this inspires – cannot be overestimated. Maria Buck explores grassroots responses to environmental destruction in Austria’s Tyrol in her chapter in this volume.

Outline of chapters This volume takes a decidedly transnational approach to Alpine space to consider the commonalities of experience and expression across the Alpine spaces of the German-speaking lands. In this way, it is distinguished from many existing studies on the Alps, which often retain a national focus in their approach to the mountains. It gathers together in English major insights into contemporary scholarship on the Alps from a range of established, early career and independent scholars based in Germany, Austria, the UK, Ireland and the USA. Though there is a focus on the written word in the volume, contributions on photography (Zintzen), environmental

 Bätzing, Die Alpen, 18.  Geist, Berg-Sehn-Sucht, 9.  “Zu gefährlich: Keine Bergtouren mehr am Matterhorn,” SRF (26 July 2022), accessed 1 August 2022, https://www.srf.ch/news/schweiz/gefahr-von-steinschlaegen-zu-gefaehrlich-keine-berg touren-mehr-am-matterhorn.  Agence France-Presse in Zermatt, “Melting Glacier in Alps shifts border between Switzerland and Italy,” The Guardian (26 July 2022), accessed 1 August 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/ world/2022/jul/26/melting-alps-theodul-glacier-switzerland-italy-border-shifts.

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protest (Buck), leisure (Williams) and the philosophy of sport (Hughes) strengthen the interdisciplinarity of the volume and demonstrate that Alpine concerns extend far beyond the literary. Here, too, the volume departs from existing studies, which tend to be limited in their scope to a narrower consideration of the broad range of cultural texts inspired by Alpine space. Throughout the volume, contributors explore the rich, interlocking strands of Alpine discourse and assert the transnational, intercultural and constructed realities of Alpine space. At the same time, the volume draws on the rich history of both Alpine scholarship and intellectual, philosophical, and aesthetic understandings of Alpine space to offer new insights into our understanding of this environment and its representation in a variety of cultural texts. Though the focus of the volume is on German-language Alpine space and cultural texts, translations have been provided throughout into English. In doing so, the editor has aimed to make a broad range of Alpine themes fully accessible to an English-speaking readership, including those with an interest in Alpine space from other disciplinary backgrounds and those who might not speak German.

Constructing the Alps The first section of this volume explores the Alps as a site of construction. In the modern period, the status of the mountains was and is paradoxical: on the one hand the mountains are terrifyingly sublime, but on the other they are part of a broader series of physical spaces that potentially stand in the way of progress, or which might be exploited for material gain in the name of that progress. Modern engineering offered a response to both realities. From the latter nineteenth century onwards, massive Alpine engineering projects had a dual effect: not only did they bring people into the mountains to build the infrastructural projects, but these projects in turn transported individuals into the mountains for leisure and work. The Alps became simultaneously traversable and accessible. This triggered a secondary process: the Alps became marketable, and discursive construction followed in which people were encouraged to visit the region to take advantage of all that the landscape offered: fresh air, exhilarating walks, wonderous views. Here one can see the legacy of Romanticism positing the pristine Alpine environment and eliding the technology and individuals that exist in this space. Helen Moll explores the representational dynamics of Alpine construction through a close reading of Ferdinand von Saar’s novella Die Steinklopfer (The Stone Breakers, 1874). In this text, Saar presents a realist, non-Romanticized vision of the experiences of workers constructing the railway across the Semmering Pass in Austria. In her spatialized reading, Moll explores the juxtapositions posited by the text: between the poor, alienated stonebreakers and their exploitative foremen; between

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the untamed mountains and the taming effort of the engineering project; and, between the ‘uncultured’ individuals working on the mountain and the supposedly ‘cultured’ space of the valley below, to which the protagonists might journey but to which they do not belong. The latter dynamic emerges most prominently in the nascent love between the demobbed soldier Georg and Tertschka, a female stonebreaker. Though the harsh realities of life on the mountain threaten to preclude this ordinary yet ultimate human experience, the protagonists experience love, albeit not in the site of construction itself, but by meeting illicitly in the valley below. In her analysis, Moll explores how Saar employs the fate of the stonebreaker – individuals from across the broad swathes of the Austro-Hungarian empire – as a synecdochic vision of the empire itself, locating the continuing unfolding of Modern, post-Enlightenment subjectivities in Alpine space. The construction of infrastructural projects like the Semmering Pass allowed for individuals and goods to be transported across the mountains, thereby facilitating access to the mountains themselves. As touched upon above, in the late nineteenth century Alpine tourism expanded and the construction of grand hotels boomed. Spaces of true transnational exchange, the grand hotels represent Alpine modernity: cosmopolitan, cutting-edge by design, and oriented towards the mass marketing of their establishments. Seán Williams explores how Switzerland’s grand hotels were marketed to foreign tourists through the medium of books. Large and carefully-curated libraries were established in such hotels to provide guests with literature that situated guests within the Alpine landscape. At the same time, there was a self-conscious effort by the Swiss to construct Alpine space for the international market beyond Switzerland: through guidebooks, newspaper features, and editorials – but also in literary texts that were commissioned by the hotels themselves. Here one can recognize the mass marketing of Alpine discourse to a popular audience and the further cultivation of established Alpine tropes in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Where Moll and Williams explore the transnational dynamics of Alpine construction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the authors of the chapters in the second half of this section, Buck and Zintzen, move on to consider parallels in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Not only has infrastructure expanded in the Alps, but the direct impact that this expansion has on Alpine communities and the environment means that such projects have come under increasing criticism in recent decades. Maria Buck examines the antitransit protest movement in Austria’s Tyrol region, which emerged in the 1980s and continues to the present. Buck outlines how the construction of highways through the region was promoted as a means of improving transalpine socioeconomic conditions. In reality, however, increasing levels of mass transit had a direct and negative effect on the Alpine environment and those living in it. As

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Buck demonstrates, protestors have negotiated an image of Alpine space that does not fall back on idyllic, romanticized imaginations of the mountains, but instead emerges from their own experience as inhabitants of Alpine space living and working in the region year-round. Buck demonstrates how the negotiation of new identities and experiences at the micro level relates to those across Alpine space at a national and transnational level. In turn, Buck shows how the Alps, historically a border space of the nation-state, have become increasingly central within the EU in both a literal, geographic sense and as part of a burgeoning acknowledgment that regional issues are best addressed by the regions themselves. Chris Zintzen explores photographic series by the Austrian photographer Margherita Spiluttini, that examine the presence of infrastructure in the mountains and challenge previously-held assumptions of such constructions and their impact on Alpine space at a topographical and aesthetic level. Zintzen questions how the Alps are represented in photography and further explores the aesthetic limitations that determine typical representations of the mountains. If architecture represents the organization of space, then architectural photography is the framing of that space. What is more, such photography facilitates a presentation of detail and aspects that the observer would ordinarily overlook. In demonstrating how this presentation of detail manifests in specific images, Zintzen shows how Spiluttini’s photography deconstructs the kitsch Alpine mythos, which centers on beauty, nature, and the supposedly heroic dynamics of human endeavor in the mountains. Spiluttini’s photography represents a major reconfiguration of Alpine space and of the role of humans in it; far from presenting construction as an infringement upon the natural environment, Spiluttini’s project reveals the beauty of the constructed form.

Desire and the Alps The period of Alpine construction explored in the first section of this volume is marked, much like all modern engagements with the Alps, by desire. Whether the individual is in the Alps to control or enjoy the natural environment, there is an intrinsic and deep longing that links them to the mountains. Literature is a major lens through which Alpine desire is both mediated and understood. Existing texts not only provide frameworks through which individuals explore and understand the mountains, but literature is a major medium through which this experience is, in turn, disseminated. The three contributions in this section explore literary texts in which longing within and for Alpine space features prominently. In each essay, existing literary texts form a frame through which the Alps are experienced, at either the narrative level as a force that structures the literary work, or as objects

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encountered and read in the texts themselves. This desire centers on the Swiss Alps and takes the protagonists into spaces that are peripheral both geographically and figuratively, located far from the tourist hubs in the Bernese Oberland and Valais. Johannes Wankhammer offers an ecocritical reading of Max Frisch’s story Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän (Man in the Holocene, 1979). In this text, we follow the elderly Herr Geiser, trapped in his holiday home in the southern, Italian-speaking canton Ticino, by heavy rain that triggers landslides in the valley. At the same time, Geiser is plagued by headaches and memory loss, which he tries to combat by physically constructing knowledge on the walls of the home, creating a collage of geological history sourced from the books at the protagonist’s disposal. In his analysis, Wankhammer explores the (inter)relationship between the human and more-thanhuman world. He asks how the modern subject perceives Alpine space, and how the Anthropocene – as a period of geological time in which man’s impact on the planet is direct, destructive, and potentially irreversible – shapes our relationship to Alpine space.124 Wankhammer explores questions that feature throughout this volume, including how we might represent the unrepresentable of Alpine space in (post)modernity, and how man responds to an increasingly fragile natural world. Frisch’s text presents no easy solutions, however: though Geiser presumably survives catastrophe in the end, the valley and its agency remain as potentially uncanny, destabilized presences. The anthropogenic impact on Alpine space is the starting point for Richard McClelland’s contribution, which explores literary representations of the Swiss God da Tamangur, a remote forest in Grisons’ Val S-charl, south of Scuol. As McClelland demonstrates, the forest functions in Romansh-speaking culture as a lieu de mémoire, a marker of Romansh identity and its precarity in the modern world. In recent German-language writing by Romansh poet Leta Semadeni and German poet Ulrike Almut Sandig, the forest functions as a site onto which longing and loss are projected. In Semadeni’s novel Tamangur (2015), the forest is embedded into a broader symbolic landscape of longing and loss and is developed within the stories told by the “Großmutter” (Grandmother) to “das Kind” (the child) as the supposed land of the dead. In Sandig’s short story “Tamangur” (2015), however, the forest is a concrete space of longing and is the site to which the protagonist Eva journeys in winter, with

 Though the ‘anthropocene’ is a contested term, it relates to the period of time in which human activity has had a direct impact on planet Earth, through processes including but not limited to anthropogenic climate change. Wankhammer explores this term in more detail in his contribution to this volume, but readers may also wish to consult the following introductory works: Erle C. Ellis, Anthropocene: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2018); Simon L Lewis and Mark Maslin, The Human Planet: How We Created the Anthropocene (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 2018).

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disastrous consequences. McClelland explores the power space can have over people generally and how Alpine space specifically is negotiated and mediated at a symbolic level in and through literature. The final contribution to this section examines Peter Stamm’s Weit über das Land (To the Back of Beyond, 2017), in which the protagonist leaves home and, like Odysseus, wanders for years before returning. Peter Arnds explores the central motifs of walking and journeying as a deliberate act of resistance against the strictures of Swiss life. Arnds asks what tropes of walking – including the wanderer, the flâneur, and the psychogeographer – bring to readings of Stamm’s novel. He employs Agamben’s notion of the homo sacer – an individual set aside, designated for the gods – to explore how man might escape from the bounds of regular society. Arnds asks what movement through space might facilitate, and questions whether a return to a more natural state, freed from the supposed restraints of modern civilization, might be possible. In doing so, Arnds expands several points of resistance to some of the broader Alpine tropes that are discussed in this volume. Whilst Homer’s Odyssey forms a major intertext for Stamm’s novel, it does not feature as a direct intertext: though the protagonist wanders, he does so seemingly without guidance from literary or cultural forebears, through Alpine space.

Into the Alps In her study of global representations of mountains, Martina Kopf argues that the Alpinist is driven by three forces or drives: an “urge to move,” a “will to conquer,” and the “desire to savor the [Alpine] panorama from above.”125 Whilst these drives can be seen in the protagonists and producers of the texts and images explored elsewhere in this volume, the contributors in this section question how we should understand experiences that drive individuals inside of the mountain. As Veronika Hofeneder outlines, this movement into the mountain has Romantic precedent in German culture. One might think here, for example, of Ludwig Tieck’s Der Runenberg (Rune Mountain, 1804), E.T.A. Hoffmann’s Die Bergwerke zu Falun (The Mines of Falun, 1819) or Novalis’ Heinrich von Oftendingen (1802) as texts that explore, to use Kate Rigby’s phrase, the “sacred subterranean realm of rock.”126 The importance of mining for conceptualizations of the Alps extends beyond the literary and into the scientific. As Patrick Anthony demonstrates, Alexander von Humboldt’s

 Martina Kopf, Alpinismus – Andinismus, 11.  Rigby, Topographies of the Sacred, 141.

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experiences in the mines of Saxony allowed him to conceptualize and depict mountains that he encountered on his travels in South America.127 This resulted in what Anthony describes as a “vertical consciousness” as a means of understanding the body’s movement through space. Hofeneder’s contribution presents a close reading of Vicki Baum’s 1942 novel Marion lebt (Marion Alive). Drawing on Henri Lefèbvre, she demonstrates how Alpine space is the consequence and effect of social conditions. She examines how Baum’s text explores the limits and potentialities of modern life in the mountains. In the text, the mountains function as a site of regeneration, from and in which individuals might draw a positive life-force – as manifest in the protagonist Marion’s son Michael, for whom Marion relocates to the mountains to treat his tuberculosis. At the same time, however, the mountains pose an existential threat: the Alps can overpower the individual, whose exertions (themselves a representation of the modernist drive to conquer the mountain) are increasingly in vain. Or, like Marion, the individual – en route to the summit – can slip into the cracks and crevasses that mark the surface of the mountains and the glaciers that cover them. As Hofeneder demonstrates, in Baum’s text this movement down into the glacier precipitates an interiority in the narrative that allows the protagonist to contemplate her being in space and time. This is connected to broader historical concerns: the novel is set against the backdrop of the rise of National Socialism in Germany and Austria and exile in Switzerland. Baum’s text shows how understandings of Alpine space shift, and what is posited as an Alpine idyll at the start of the narrative is fractured by the end. Significantly, this fracturing of Alpine space also affects the individual and the perceived symbiotic relationship between human and mountain. The effects of this dynamic are explored in more detail in the contributions that follow. David Anderson analyzes Christian Kracht’s Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten (I’ll Be Here in Sunshine and in Shadow, 2008). A dystopian alternative history, Kracht’s novel explores what might have happened had Lenin not left Switzerland in 1917 to instigate the Russian Revolution but had instead remained and triggered Communist revolution in situ. In this novel, we also follow the protagonist – an unnamed Black narrator from the Soviet Swiss colony in Nyasaland – into the mountain, in this case the – real – complex of fortifications that comprise the Swiss Redoubt, on his quest to hunt down the mysterious Brazhinsky. In Kracht’s text, the redoubt represents the dual reality of the alternative Swiss state: whilst it is a masterwork of defense and is hailed as the zenith of Swiss achievement, it simultaneously exposes the true nature of the Swiss state,

 Patrick Anthony, “Mines, mountains, and the making of a vertical consciousness in Germany ca. 1800,” Centaurus 62 (2020) 612‒630.

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which is hollowed out and protected by a brittle exterior that threatens to collapse. Anderson’s analysis shows that Kracht’s novel, though seemingly at odds with the other Alpine texts considered in this volume, draws on a succession of Alpine tropes, including the motifs of ascent and descent as parallel to progress and decline, and of the mountains as sites of discursive overdetermination. In his analysis, Anderson mines the rich intertextual seams of the novel, which range from pulp fiction and film noir through to alternative history and sci-fi in English and German. This relates in turn to the disturbing and rhizomatic structure of the redoubt and emphasizes the mountains as sites of dream and nightmare. Rebecca Wismeg-Kammerlander examines contemporary Austrian author Raphaela Edelbauer’s debut novel Das flüssige Land (The Liquid Land, 2019). Throughout this novel we encounter a deconstruction of the Alpine mythos that is the keystone of Austria’s ‘brand’; a major feature of tourist campaigns and depictions of Austria in national and international literature and film, the pristine Alpine landscape is posited as a space of recovery from the ills of modernity. As Wismeg-Kammerlander demonstrates, however, Edelbauer’s novel subverts these landscape tropes in a devastating way. In the text, the protagonist Ruth returns to her hometown, a seemingly picture-perfect Alpine idyll that hides a dark secret: not only is the ground beneath the town hollow, a result of extraction and historical slave labor, but the abyss threatens to open up, swallowing Groß-Einland whole. A physicist, Ruth develops a synthetic substance that could fill the hole and save the town, but with a double effect: this substance would destroy the natural flora and fauna of the district, and also erase the town’s dark history by preventing engagement with the history of the land itself. Wismeg-Kammerlander shows how Edelbauer’s text represents a further development of the rich history of anti-Heimat literature in Austria, which examines the dark underbelly of Alpine space, a potential reality seemingly at odds with the image of the nation that is promoted officially at home and abroad.

Boundaries and the Alps Transit and boundary-crossing are major tropes of Alpine discourse that are explored throughout this volume. The solidification of national boundaries in the nineteenth century effectively turned Alpine communities away from their neighbors and towards a distant, metropolitan center; this is a process that continued into the twentieth century, as exemplified in the history of Italy’s German-speaking

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South Tyrol.128 The boundaries in the Alps are not insurmountable, however. In the contemporary Alps, the mountains are crisscrossed with transport links: from ancient trade routes to modern trainlines and motorway connections, it has never been easier to traverse the Alps. With that in mind, the Alps have functioned – and continue to do so in a real way – as a border zone that is as much geographical as it is cultural and linguistic. In the contributions to the final section of the volume, the nature of this contact zone is explored in more detail and the chapters examine Alpine boundaries in both physical and figurative senses. That is, they consider how the Alps have functioned as a space in which individual humans have engaged with, subverted, and passed beyond the conceptual and physical boundaries that mark experience. In the first chapter in this section, Silber examines the literary representation of gendered boundary-crossing in the late nineteenth century. In the subsequent chapter Hughes explores the conceptual and philosophical opportunities that are opened at the limit of human experience via a consideration of sporting endeavor and mountaineering discourse in the early twentieth century. Leonie Silber presents a close reading of Wilhelmine von Hillern’s Die Geierwally (The Vulture Maiden, 1873) and focusses on the role of boundary crossing and suspension throughout. In her analysis of the original text (published in the periodical Deutsche Rundschau in two instalments in January and February 1875), Silber opens up a spatial understanding of the Tyrolean Alps on the cusp of modernity. In Hillern’s text, we follow the experiences of Wally, the eponymous ‘vulture maiden,’ whose wild demeanor and physical capabilities not only defy traditional gender expectations, but also begin to dissolve the boundary between the human and the animal. She is ostracized from her community, but the arrival of a traveler from the city – here we can see both the journeyman trope and the juxtaposition of the ‘down there’ of the valley with the ‘up here’ of the mountains as explored elsewhere in this volume – triggers a shift in boundaries in this Alpine setting. Throughout, Silber demonstrates that the formation, justification, and eventual disintegration of borders and boundary-crossing are integral to understandings of Alpine space at this key historical moment and into the present. Jon Hughes’ contribution analyses boundaries and boundary crossing in the sense of limits to human potential. He examines life at the ‘edge’ of experience, as exemplified in the mountaineering feats and philosophy of Paul Preuss (1886‒ 1913). In a period in which mountaineering and Alpine sport tourism boomed, Preuss was a trailblazer in a true sense of the word and promoted a theorization of mountaineering that emphasizes the role of ideals in determining human

 Historically, the German-speaking region of South Tyrol was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Following the First World War the region became part of the Italian Republic.

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movement through – and, indeed, up – the mountains. A proponent of free climbing during the so-called ‘piton controversy’ – Preuss believed that the mountaineer should climb without the aid of securing ropes, rather than utilizing manual aids to do so – he championed a fundamental self-awareness in climbing whilst pushing oneself to that dangerous zone at the edge of human potential and physical possibility – both in a literal and a broadly metaphorical way – from which self-knowledge emerges. Hughes examines Preuss’ mountaineering philosophy and demonstrates that the legacy of this mountaineer – suppressed in the decades after his death probably due to explicit and implicit antisemitism in those years – has much to say in relation to our contemporary experience and our unceasing desire to push ourselves to this limit in the natural world. Throughout, Hughes brings new light to the questions that permeate this volume, including the impacts that human activity can have on Alpine space and our potential to experience the mountains in a supposedly ‘authentic’ way. The contributions collated here explore the long history of Alpine space as manifest in German-speaking culture. The volume offers a transnational, transhistorical, and transmedial exploration of Alpine space and it examines both the maintenance and subversion of key discursive tropes as they pertain to Alpine space. In doing so, it offers key insights into a region that is not only geographically peripheral, but which is also peripheral to the concerns of contemporary German Studies as a discipline. As demonstrated throughout this volume, however, the region is pivotal to a fully nuanced understanding of German-speaking culture and the future of the discipline itself.

Part 1: Constructing the Alps

Helen Moll

Connecting Transnationalization and the Mnemotope of “the Pariah”: The Alps as Border and Contact Zone in Ferdinand von Saar’s Die Steinklopfer (The Stone Breakers, 1873) But there is one thing [. . .] that few will have thought of: the thousands and thousands of people who, by the sweat of their brow, exposed to all dangers, have blasted rocks, rolled stone blocks, bridged precipices and thus actually created that vaunted road on which you [. . .] [can] be transported from the restless, dust-ridden capital on the banks of the Danube [. . .] to the beaches of the blue Adriatic.1

As an opening example, this quotation stands for the conflicting spheres that Ferdinand von Saar’s novella Die Steinklopfer (The Stonebreakers), published in 1873, reveals: the contrast between the revolutionary, transnationalizing railway connection running all the way from Vienna (Austria) to Trieste (Italy) via the Semmering Pass and its construction being accompanied by precarious conditions of labor on the mountain. The Alps become a nodal point of the political and historical discourses that are discussed in the novella. At the same time, however, the border area of the Alps turns into a transeuropean contact zone: not only on a large scale – i.e., cartographically, economically, and culturally –, but also in terms of the microcosm created within the world of the stonebreakers, which is pars pro toto narrated on the basis of the protagonists’ – Georg’s and Tertschka’s – fate. In addition to transnational and transeuropean attempts at connection by means of an international railway route, this chapter also examines the microcosmic, particular possibilities and dangers related to tensions that arise in this area of conflict. Following a brief overview of the novella and its framework that refers to nineteenth-century history, a structural model is developed using the topography of the text. This contrasts the nodal point ‘Semmering’ in its connecting function and links it to the broader world, thereby creating the Alps as material and cultural entities in German-speaking culture. As I demonstrate, the Semmering turns into a mnemotope, a place of memory that creates identity. On the one hand this results

 Ferdinand von Saar, Die Steinklopfer (Heidelberg: Georg Weiß, 1874), 7. Further references to this text are given as “SK” in the main body of the text. All translations of Saar’s novel are mine, unless stated otherwise. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111150536-002

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from the hazardous process of constructing the railway, which still adorns the Alps today. On the other hand, and perhaps especially, it is a result of the underclass experiencing a transformation of self-awareness of themselves, the pariahs, as this is developed representatively in and through the protagonist Georg.

The novella and its historical framework Ferdinand von Saar’s first ‘social’ novella Die Steinklopfer tells the love story of two ‘pariahs’, the stonebreakers Georg and Tertschka, who are involved in the construction of the Semmering Railway. Georg Huber, a “person on leave” who had served “seven years” “in the twelfth regiment” (SK 16), arrives emaciated, weak, and feverish in the “high mountains” (SK 10). Tertschka, the supervisor’s stepdaughter and the only woman among the workers, takes care of the newcomer and introduces him to everyday life under the regime of her stepfather, who has seemingly unlimited power to exploit his workers. The two weakest characters form a companionship in destiny, which makes the hard fate of the stonebreakers slightly easier – and the supervisor suspicious. A joint secret visit to church in the valley makes Georg and Tertschka realize their love for each other, and Georg finally decides to leave the Semmering together with Tertschka to start a new life in the valley. The supervisor, who was not only responsible for the death of Tertschka’s mother but also abused his stepdaughter, does not accept the couple’s departure. In a quarrel he attacks Georg, who defends himself and kills the supervisor. After some time in custody, a lenient sentence is passed on the crime, and a colonel, a deus ex machina who is touched by the fate of the two workers, helps Tertschka and Georg gain a peaceful life as railway guards on the railway line to the south. The novella is mainly told by a third-person omniscient narrator who reports the plot subjectively and repeatedly intervenes with comments, evaluations, or explanations.2 In the frame narrative, the first-person narrator, who is, in fact, the omniscient narrator of the embedded narrative, locates himself in contemporary Vienna (“nowadays,” SK 7) and thus establishes a spatial and temporal distance to the events of the embedded narrative, which happened twenty years prior to the  To give examples of the narrator’s commentary function, the narrator evaluatively states: “But there is one thing that one can confidently assume that very few people would have thought of” (SK 7). The narrator also intervenes in the historical background of the novella with explanatory intent in connection with the currency common at the time: “Now she pulled out a little piece of paper that had been wrapped up and unfolded it. It was one of those banknote fragments which were in circulation in Austria at that time under the name ‘quarter’ and which had to replace the lacking banknote” (SK 28).

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frame narrative.3 The narrated present of the setting thus not only serves to distance the narrator from the diegesis, but at the same time ‘guides’ the novella, for the narrator promises the recipient – in an act of epic sovereignty – a “truthful” (SK 51) story through personal address (“You, kind reader,” SK 7). The narrator’s aim is not to capture the life of the workers in “lurid colors,” but to present “a simple picture of life from the great masses” and “to show how suffering and lust move every human heart and that the great tragedy of the world takes place everywhere in small things” (SK 9). In the embedded narration, the narrator takes on a more mediating, observing, and empathetic role between the fictional world and extra-textual reality.4 One characteristic of Saar’s artistic technique is to illustrate a general problem that is based on a concrete historical occasion, in this case the social grievances in the Austrian Empire as illustrated through the construction of the Semmering Railway and the work of the stonebreakers. The motif of the stonebreaker is nothing new for the second half of the nineteenth century: by giving the novella its title, von Saar marks a link to the painting “Les Casseurs de Pierre” (“The Stonebreakers,” 1849) by the French realist painter Gustave Courbet, who depicts the hard work of the stonebreakers and their dull senselessness, and refers to the hardship of being human.5 As an example of a literary adaptation of the stonebreaker-motif, Ludwig Anzengruber’s peasant comedy Die Kreuzelschreiber (The Cross Signers) (1872) may be mentioned, which creates the myth of ‘Steinklopferhanns’ (a generic name based on occupation, akin to ‘Johnny Stone-breaker’ in English), a life-affirming, simple man.6 The fictional narrative and its intertextual references are embedded in a real historical framework: right at the beginning, the third-person omniscient narrator situates the action on the Semmering, at the construction site of the world’s first high-alpine railway, the Semmering Railway, built between 1848 and 1854 under the direction of Carl Ritter von Ghega. The track segment that becomes the setting for Die Steinklopfer stretches over a route length of 41.7 kilometers from Gloggnitz

 The novella mentions that the story of Die Steinklopfer is set after the finalization of the official construction work (“The railway over the Semmering had been built” [SK 9]), i.e., in or after the year 1854. In the narrator’s present, “nowadays,” the Suez Canal (1869) and the railway tunnel through Mont Cenis (1871) have already been opened. The novella was published in 1873/74.  Kasim Egit, Ferdinand von Saar. Thematik und Erzählstrukturen seiner Novellen (Berlin: Agora, 1981), 104–106.  Eugen Thurnher, “Soziale Problematik im Werk von Ferdinand von Saar” in Ferdinand von Saar. Ein Wegbereiter der literarischen Moderne, ed. Karl Konrad Kolheim (Bonn: Bouvier, 1985), 44.  Burkhard Bittrich, “Einführung,” in Die Anfänge der sozialen Erzählung in Österreich (Salzburg and Munich: Pustet, 1979), 8.

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(Lower Austria) to Mürzzuschlag (Styria) and passes numerous viaducts and tunnels to cross the Alps at the Semmering saddle (985m asl) on its way from Vienna via Graz and Ljubljana to Trieste, a major port city at that time.7 The structure of the novella – a frame and embedded narrative – serves to distance the narrator in time and space, but at the same time demonstrates the particularizing view from both macro – the achievements of the time, the “cultural work of the people” (SK 8) – and micro perspective – the individual destinies of two people who sacrifice their lives for the aspirations of the more powerful. Conversely, as a technically unique project dedicated to find a solution for one of the greatest physical problems of time, the Semmering Railway opens a region and its nature, connects locals to ‘the world’ and attracts tourists to the mountains. Nature and technology merge into a new, fascinating landscape that combines the organic and the technical. For a short time, the Semmering is the center of the engineered world, a place where precisely “what had hitherto been thought impossible” (SK 7) comes true: a railway that creates a fast transport route between ‘north’ and ‘south’ and crosses the Alps en route. Yet visually the mountain world still bears the signs of the pristine, unworked nature to which it once belonged: “yawning chasms and craggy rock faces” (SK 7) characterize the landscape, though these hardly attract attention anymore. The Alpine mountains in the center of Europe thus no longer confront humanity as an insurmountable obstacle but can be comfortably crossed by train. It is this sovereignty of man that is the focus of the narrative framework of the novella, which records a shift in understanding of the sublime from the previously overwhelming mountains to the products of man – railway technology, engineering, and architectural art. Dizziness is no longer triggered by gazing into the surrounding landscape from the top of the mountain that cannot be grasped by the eye, but by driving through “vertiginous viaducts” or “seemingly endless tunnels” (SK 7). This “culture work” (SK 8) is done by the “so-called fifth class,” the “pariahs of society,” who build the “cathedrals and palaces, [. . .] educational establishments and art institutes” (SK 9) of the privileged bourgeoisie without being the beneficiaries of these innovations. While the motif of loneliness in the mountains is a major feature of eighteenth-century texts that also appears in Romantic texts of the nineteenth, the construction of the Semmering Railway represents an international spectacle and

 Günter Dinhobl, Die Semmeringbahn. Eine Baugeschichte der ersten Hochgebirgseisenbahn der Welt (Vienna/Cologne/Weimar: Böhlau, 2018), 13. Dinhobl’s insightful and unique monograph offers previously inaccessible source materials on the construction of the Semmering Railway and thus provides reliable background information on Saar’s novella. The construction of the railway connected places that in the mid-nineteenth century still belonged to Imperial and Royal Austria. Today, Ljubljana is Slovenian, and the old Austrian port city of Trieste is Italian. Nevertheless, the construction project is considered a transnationalizing project.

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gathers – similarly to the biblical Tower of Babel – a “numerous and restless tangle of people” from Bohemia, the “Moravian-Hungarian lowlands,” Veneto, and the “stony Karst” (SK 9) of the Slovenian-Italian border. Railway construction in the Alps thus not only unites people from all corners of the Austrian Empire, but also connects important European trading cities as a transnationalizing project.

Above vs. below: Topography as a structural moment of the novella In addition to the historical-cartographic locatability of the frame narrative, the topography of the embedded narrative in Saar’s “Steinklopfer” also holds an important role. According to Sigrid Weigel, topographical representations are given a double meaning: on the one hand in the function of (spatial) representation, on the other hand as a technical procedure of the text.8 This twofold structure is also visible in Ferdinand von Saar’s novella. First, through precise topographical locatability, the cartographic comprehensibility of the plot’s spaces of action, and the connection of correct historical and spatial ‘facts,’ the text has a certain claim to reality and truth. This blurs the boundaries between fictionality and factuality in the text and thus places it in a liminal position between a factual-historical document of the time (which is, of course, nevertheless fictional, quasi-mimetically attempting to represent reality or to be a part of reality) and a fictional, artistic product that emerges directly from the pen of a real author. This dichotomy or intermediate position is also reflected in the structure of the novella: while the narrative framework conveys a certain claim to reality through its location in the ‘here and now’ and above all through the enumeration of documented and historically clearly definable facts, the internal narrative is only factually documented by places and spaces that can be mapped; further, the story of Georg’s and Tertschka’s lives is not labelled with any markers of non-fictional reality. Following Weigel, the topography of the novella, as a technical procedure of the text, not only connects the frame and interior narratives, but also gives the fictional story of the stone breakers a factual basis and thus clarifies the novella’s claim to mimetic truth. In addition to this representative function of topography in Saar’s Steinklopfer, topographical narration forms the narrative basis of the novella and opens up a structural model that spans the ‘mountain’ and ‘valley’ as spaces of action – and

 Cf. Sigrid Weigel, “Zum ‘topographical turn’. Kartographie, Topographie und Raumkonzept in den Kulturwissenschaften,” KulturPoetik 2.2 (1992): 153.

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endows each with certain attributes. Thus, already in the context of the narrative, the ascent of the Semmering and its daring architecture is described as an experience of “sublime horror,” while the “flat ground” of the valley is considered “safe terrain” (SK 7). The narrative of Georg and Tertschka is thus preceded by this bipolar structural model of ‘above’ as a space of ‘danger’ and ‘below’ as a space of longing. Subsequently, numerous dialectical juxtapositions can be found in the novella, which adapt the narrated world to this bipolar structure of ‘above’ and ‘below’. This can be seen, for example, in the motif ‘work’ – ‘life’/‘leisure’, which is strictly aligned with the vertical axis of ‘mountain’ and ‘valley’. In the novella, the Semmering does not represent a place to linger, neither for the train passengers, who inevitably – and quickly – must cross the heights on their way south, nor for the stonebreakers, whose hard, physical work is situated there. The mountain is thus semantically connected to the field of labor. In contrast, ‘leisure’ and life away from work is inevitably associated with the valley and the stonebreakers’ “Sunday existence.”9 Sunday, as a day off from labor, is the workers’ only opportunity to “become aware [of] their humanity” and to experience life away from harsh employment.10 As an ‘extraordinary’ day of the week, Sunday seems to proleptically mark many of the ‘extraordinary’ events of the plot in the novella: for example, the first meeting of Tertschka and Georg takes place “one Sunday afternoon” (SK 10f.). Nevertheless, Tertschka – as the only woman on the Semmering – has to do all kinds of sewing and housework on Sundays and after daily tasks – there is no day off for her. In contrast, her stepfather “went down to Schottwien with the others to drink wine” (SK 13, emphasis mine). The working relationship of the employed stonebreakers and the supervisor, who in turn is only an emissary of the construction company, is characterized by dependence and lack of freedom: through an agreement with the construction management, the supervisor has the sole monopoly position when it comes to the livelihood of the stonebreakers on the mountain. It is not only low-quality food, which he sells at expensive prices, that increases his turnover, but above all the debt business, which lures the workers deeper into a debt trap and thus into dependence on the supervisor with every glass of brandy or extra piece of meat they cannot pay for immediately. Life as a stonebreaker on the mountain resembles a life in captivity, which, like a vicious circle, can only end badly in a constant downward spiral. In contrast to being a prisoner on the Semmering, the

 Martin Halter, Sklaven der Arbeit – Ritter im Geiste. Arbeit und Arbeiter im deutschen Sozialroman zwischen 1840 und 1880 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1983), 157.  Theodor H. Oelckers, Fürst und Proletarier. Roman aus der Gegenwart I (Leipzig: Otto Klemm, 1846), 102.

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valley is a space of freedom and the possibility of shaping one’s own life as a selfaware subject. The mountain is thus not only a place of work, but also of the supervisor’s boundless and lawless power. The valley, on the other hand, offers the stonebreakers an opportunity for reintegration into society. It is also closely linked to moral and religious values: in the valley there is space for everything that no longer has a place on the mountain. Thus, on the way to the meeting point with Tertschka, Georg “descends the steep footpath in bright sunlight” and “looked out for the cross in the valley [their meeting point, H.M.] and soon saw how it protruded rotten and crooked from young spruce saplings” (SK 40).11 This summit cross, which has been transferred horizontally downwards, tells a lot about the conditions of the summit area. In the nineteenth century, in addition to their religious purpose and symbolic proximity to God, summit crosses were also regarded as symbols of the Enlightenment because of their scientific function (holding measuring instruments) and their function as lightning rods. Conditions at this summit, however, mean that all symbolic content of the cross is given a negative connotation: the achievements of the Enlightenment, above all the subject’s coming to reason, are negated and the spirit of scientific discovery is transformed into a materialistic, exploitative, anti-social attitude.12 On the summit of the Semmering, pre-Enlightenment conditions prevail that allow the individual to sink into a de-individualized mass. As a result, the topography of the mountain world in Die Steinklopfer represents an exceptional situation in all respects: Mount Semmering as a habitat is clearly demarcated from the ‘normal’ society living in the valley, and its harsh living conditions leave stigmas on its inhabitants; the topography is part of the characters’ environment and thus also of any individual’s personality.13 For example, the landlord of the inn in whose garden Georg and Tertschka stop after going to church is clearly differentiated from the “unaccustomed guests” (SK 47)

 Even though the valley is quite clearly associated with religion, its status is doubtful. Not only does the rotten cross in the valley symbolize a ‘downhill slide’ of religiosity, but also the priest in the pilgrimage church of Maria Schutz, located not far from Schottwien, reads the mass “indifferently” and “with sullen features” (SK 45) and puts Christianity in a less favorable light. Nevertheless, religion offers a space for hope and confidence for the stonebreakers, which is essential to endure the hard work on the mountain.  Philipp Felsch, Beat Gugger, and Gabriele Rath, Berge, eine unverständliche Leidenschaft (Vienna and Bozen: Folio, 2007), 40.  Herbert Klauser, “Verörtlichung und Symbolik in den Novellen Ferdinand von Saars,” in Ferdinand von Saar. Zehn Studien, ed. Kurt Bergel (Riverside: Ariadne Press, 1995), 108. The stonebreakers’ suffering is further intensified by the topography of the rugged mountain world (Klauser, 113).

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by his neat clothing in the form of “snow-white shirt sleeves” and a “green velvet hat” (SK 46). Even in their Sunday garb Georg and Tertschka stand out as aliens in the society of the valley. The gap grows even greater when a bride and groom arrive at the inn and the narrator describes their “smart” appearance at length, contrasting this with the “appearance” of the stonebreakers, who begin to feel “an anxious, oppressive feeling of abandonment among the many people,” since “some of them eyed their appearance with scowls, as if to ask: ‘what are they doing here?’” (SK 49, emphasis in original). The stonebreakers are thus outsiders to society who only seem to fit in on the mountain. There, outside society, not only are bourgeois laws and ways of life negated, which the supervisor replaces with his own rules of coexistence, but stereotypical gender roles are also dissolved: Tertschka smashes hard limestone without any problems (SK 20), and tasks specifically associated with the female sex, such as sewing and mending, are strikingly difficult for her. This is partly a result of Tertschka’s lack of education (SK 15), but also of the physical consequences of the hard stone-breaking work: working with needle and thread is “quite sour” for Tertschka, “because her rough, calloused hand, which guides the needle laboriously and clumsily, has probably otherwise only hoes and shovels to touch” (SK 11f.). But the reversal of gender stereotypes also works in reverse: the supervisor, who cares little about the work to be done on the mountain, “has [. . .] his own desire to stand by the stove” (SK 27) – and thus performs a traditionally more femininely coded task. Clearly, then, the mountain world of Semmering forms a space of the extraordinary that stands out from, and is limited by, the surrounding valley. While the stonebreakers are involved in the construction of the Semmering Railway – a project that shortens time and space, connects, innovates, and transnationalizes – their lives on the mountain stagnate: when they start working on the Semmering, it becomes the stonebreakers’ entire “world” (SK 40). This limitation, this ‘being out of the world’ is not accompanied by a feeling of security, as Bernhard Visscher described it in the 1930s, but rather creates a claustrophobic isolation that limits the individual.14 Virginia Lewis points out that the power monopoly of the supervisor, who secures his own – economic, but also interpersonal – interests through constant observation, turns the Semmering mountainscape into a reminder of panoptical structures, as Michel Foucault sees them anchored in society since the eighteenth century: in addition to actual surveillance within the  Bernhard Siert Lambertus Visscher, Ferdinand von Saar. Sein Verhältnis zur Biedermeierdichtung (Groningen: J. B. Wolters, 1938), 93: “The region that is described is not of an immeasurable vastness but has the limitation of an enclosed space. The boundary gives the feeling of security, it is a landscape described in Biedermeier style, with bourgeois-Biedermeier people.”

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‘panopticon’ (Jeremy Bentham) (cf. SK 37), however, the concept is above all based on self-discipline and the subordination of the individual to the normative expectations of the system. It is precisely this ambivalence – between oppression and selfdiscipline – that characterizes more than half of the novella Die Steinklopfer and the social reality of the time in which it is set.15

Transnational networking The self-contained limitations of the mountain world around the Semmering, the ‘world within the world’, are contrasted with a structural model of networking, which, in addition to the mountain world as a node where different discourses meet, provides the novella with a gesture that connects different levels of the text.16 The concept of connectivity as the ability of a program or system to establish a connection to other systems17 can be very aptly applied to the complexity of the novella: at the textual level, various systems, layers, and themes of the text are interwoven and networked through the stonebreakers’ work for the railway, which symbolizes the connection to the world, globalization, and the shortening of time and space. Various elements of the novella contain connective potential and thus link spatial and textual structures. For example, it is primarily the tracks of the Semmering Railway that cohere in the novella: not only the first section of Die Steinklopfer describes “the railway track across the Semmering” (SK 7), but also the last, which tells the story of the stonebreakers’ life together, beginning with a description of the section of the Semmering Railway: “There, where the blackish rails run along the rushing Mur, past green meadows and charming pastures; in the vicinity of Ehrenhausen Castle, which looks down kindly on the town of the

 Virginia Lewis, “Breaking Stone: Agency and Morality in the Age of Commodification as Seen in Saar’s Die Steinklopfer,” in Ferdinand von Saar. Richtungen der Forschung. Gedenkschrift zum 100. Todestag, ed. Michael Boehringer (Vienna: Praesens, 2006), 103. Cf. Michel Foucault, Überwachen und Strafen. Die Geburt des Gefängnisses, trans. Walter Seitter (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2008).  Giovanni Tateo, “‘Ein wirklicher Erzähler’: Ferdinand von Saar und Arthur Schnitzler – ein literarhistorisches Konstrukt?” in Textschicksale. Das Werk Arthur Schnitzlers im Kontext der Moderne, ed. Wolfgang Lukas and Michael Scheffel (Berlin and Boston: De Gruyter, 2017), 44. According to Tateo, networking is a basic model used “obsessively,” which is “incidentally often doubled again within the narratives.”  Cf. “Konnektivität,” in Duden online, https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Konnektivitaet, accessed 26 May 2020.

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same name from a wooded hill, stands a lonely railway guard’s house” (SK 75). Georg and Tertschka’s common path through life is inevitably linked to the tracks of the Semmering Railway, which – with all its ups and downs – also symbolically depicts the ups and downs of a life’s journey.18 In addition to the tracks, however, there are other elements that enhance the connective character of “Die Steinklopfer.” The text elaborates a closely meshed network of glances19 and gestures, which is articulated in terms of content through increasingly stronger ties. ‘Looking’, which Barbara Wróblewska declares to be a “constitutive feature of Ferdinand von Saar’s work”,20 becomes almost a survival strategy in the interwoven network of the mountain world. The connectivity of the tracks in space is duplicated at a narrative level by the connecting lines of gazes: on the one hand, these are the narrator’s gazes on the characters in the plot, which he relates to the plot space itself; on the other hand, there are also the gazes of the characters at each other. For example, on the day after his arrival at the Semmering, Georg observes how the other workers behave in order to directly adapt to the normative structures of the group: “He saw the men gradually leaving the meagre camp, grabbing all kinds of tools that were leaning against the walls all around and going out the door with them” (SK 18). Georg mirrors their behavior, “[e]veryone had also risen, slipped into his smock and stood there indecisively and expectantly” (SK 18). He also observes the supervisor, whose figurative naming in the novella (‘Aufseher’) can hardly be separated from the relevance of the gaze and thus not only monitors the work but also the conspiratorial glances of his subordinates. What is more, “everyone saw” how the supervisor pours brandy to those paying and serves himself – in contrast to the workers’ meagre meal – “a deliciously prepared chicken” (SK 32). However, this observing gaze is abruptly interrupted by the supervisor, in order to both maintain his aloofness and – contrariwise – his alliance with his subordinates: “‘Why are you sitting there gawping? [. . .] I don’t need a spy here’” (SK 33). Despite these attempts to cut the connections in the web of gazes, Georg and Tertschka’s relationship deepens through intensified gazing. At the beginning of  Rainer Baasner, “Happy-End trotz Schopenhauer oder das Glück eines armen Soldaten. Ferdinand von Saars Die Steinklopfer,” in Ferdinand von Saar. Ein Wegbereiter der literarischen Moderne, ed. Konrad Polheim (Bonn: Bouvier, 1985), 56.  In general, of course, Giselheid Wagner’s dissertation, Harmoniezwang und Verstörung. Voyeurismus, Weiblichkeit und Stadt (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 2005) deals extensively with the topic of the gaze – especially the male gaze – on the feminine and is helpful to consult for further information. In addition, Barbara Wróblewskaʼs essay “Beobachtung und Projektion: Zur männlichen Schaulust in den Novellen Ferdinand von Saars,” Colloquia Germanica Stetinensia, 22 (2013): 69‒86, elaborates on Wagner’s approach.  Barbara Wróblewska, “Beobachtung und Projektion: Zur männlichen Schaulust in den Novellen Ferdinand von Saars,” Colloquia Germanica Stetinensia, 22 (2013): 69‒86.

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their shared work on the mountain, Georg still behaves “coyly” and hardly dares to “look at her” (SK 23). The immediate connection of the two stonebreakers, which intensifies over the course of the day, is reflected in Georg’s gaze “deep into the soft brown eyes” (SK 29) of Tertschka. The visual, but also physical, connectivity between Georg and Tertschka does not go unobserved, however; they are “roughly and suddenly torn apart” (SK 36) by the supervisor and “hardly dare to look at each other,” “[t]he supervisor kept a sharp eye on them, and the others also seemed to watch over them with dull glee” (SK 37). During the joint Sunday excursion into the valley, which forms the basis of their future together, direct glances can finally be exchanged, “Georg stands in front of her and looks at her [Tertschka, H.M.]” and compliments what he sees: “‘How beautiful you look today!’” (SK 41) – looking at each other is finally possible within the liberated environment of the valley. The “sliding into one another” of Tertschka’s necklace’s “two parts of the little clasp” (SK 44) ultimately seals the connection between the two stonebreakers on a metaphorical level. In the further course of the text, the couple’s connection is repeatedly emphasized,21 for example during the meal in the inn, which recalls the Last Supper:22 Georg and Tertschka “begin to eat together,” share cutlery, “enjoy [. . .] the wine together,” and drink “one after the other” from “a large glass with a handle” (SK 47), which the innkeeper puts in front of them. The loving bond between Georg and Tertschka is finally shown through the physical connection of laying hands on each other (cf. SK 47) and shortly afterwards “their lips [. . .] join in a long, deep kiss” (SK 51). Nevertheless, this union must be kept as a secret “in the depths of their inner being” (SK 51): on the mountain, their liaison is only expressed through “furtive smiles” or “a fleeting handshake” while “passing each other” (SK 52). The hidden bond between Georg and Tertschka is complemented by an obvious connectivity of numerous words in the text, which in the original German flow into each other through alliteration.23 The transnationalizing railway over the Semmering as a connection to the world24 is consequently reflected in precisely those figures who do not receive any profit from the railway they have built, but on the contrary are trapped in  SK, 46: Georgʼs statement “‘[w]ho knows if we’ll walk with each other again’” is repeated word for word by Tertschka shortly afterwards: “‘But you’re right: who knows if we’ll walk with each other again.’” This repetition emphasizes togetherness and the impossibility of this on the mountain.  Lewis, “Breaking Stone,” 107.  For example: “Tiefe ihres Inneren,” “ihres Wesens waren,” “wenn sie sich“ “des Morgens, Mittags und Abends,” “gemeinsamen Gange“ (SK 51f.).  Trieste was an Austrian port until 1919. Ports have always been considered as gateways to the world. The Empire of Austria was thus – despite its supposedly encircled location without a coast – able to catch up with other nations on the water as well.

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the nodal point ‘mountain world’. In this reflection, it becomes clear that connectedness can be considered in relation to a social, but also a political concept of power, which makes it possible to achieve success through a sense of community, bundled strength, and joint action. In the novella Die Steinklopfer, then, all ‘border areas’ are interconnected – topographically, textually, and interpersonally. Topographically, the interconnectedness along the Semmering Railway is reflected by the constant localization of the plot in space. Already at the beginning of the narrative, the plot’s space of action is not drawn as closed, but is located in a ‘coordinate system’ of the Semmering by prepositions and directional indications, which link it geographically to the ‘world’: The arrival did not reply, but merely dragged himself a few steps sideways, where he settled down in the grass with all the signs of exhaustion. There he lay, while the sun sank lower and lower, spilling its last gold. Silence reigned all around; only high in the bright azure of the evening sky did a vulture roam with a long-drawn-out cry. Suddenly, in the distance, a fierce male choir sounded. [. . .] Closer and closer, stronger and stronger the song resounded, and it was not long before a flock of wild-looking fellows approached [. . .] (SK 13f., emphasis mine).

This spatial network of connections to the ‘outside world’ stretches across the entire novella. At the same time, the numerous indications of direction create the impression that the narrator will be located in the middle of the action: it is through his view of the plot and the characters that space and connectivity are created in the first place. However, the flow of the text is repeatedly interrupted by dashes, which separate the frame from the internal narrative (cf. SK 9; 75) by framing proleptic interpolations and narrator comments (cf. SK 35f.), whilst also clarifying pauses of action, for example by textually bridging the stonebreakers’ night’s rest, but still depicting it through the use of a dash (cf. SK 40). The connectivity even extends beyond the individual novella, for according to Saar, his novelistic writings only make sense as “parts of a system,” as “novellas in a series,” and must be read from an overarching point of view.25

The protagonist Georg’s process of becoming aware of himself However, the Semmering – in addition to its unifying and connecting functions – takes on another essential role in the course of the novella: it mirrors and catalyzes Georg’s process of becoming a self-determined subject, which liberates him

 Anton Bettelheim, Ferdinand von Saars Leben und Schaffen (Leipzig: Hesse, 1908), 159.

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from the predetermined fate of the de-individualized ‘pariah’ and thus allows the Semmering to become the fictitious, but nevertheless identity-forming locus of a social group. This process of becoming aware of the pariah is manifest – and becomes representative for all social outsiders – in Georg’s emancipation. In particular, this process expresses itself in the emancipation of the gaze from the mountain to the valley, but also in the perception of the mountain world and its flora and fauna in general. At this point, previous research on the novella misses an essential fact: the view of the summit and the perception of nature are only portrayed from the perspective of the rational subject when the latter is aware of itself – this change takes place in the final third of the novella. Rainer Baasner subsequently falls short when he argues that “here looking down – from the realm of disaster [the mountain, H.M.] – [. . .] the protagonist’s vistas anticipate their happy future: thus Tertschka first looks down the slope as an ‘expectant one’.”26 This observation by Baasner is described in exactly the opposite way in the novella: the narrator experiences the mountain world of Semmering, which is not only threatening but also beautiful, gazes at the landscape and describes what Georg and Tertschka cannot perceive because of their work, but also because of their own mental limitations: The sun was no longer up high; dark, silent shadows had already settled over most of the hilltops and slopes. But on the meadow in front of the hut and in the tops of the forest rising to the side, the bright rays still flashed and sparkled, in which a flock of butterflies, bees and dragonflies cavorted over colorful flower clusters. The lonely woman, however, paid no attention to the lovely summer splendor spreading out before her, but kept her gaze fixed steadily on a damaged man’s jacket, which she was busily repairing (SK 11, emphasis mine).

The processing of the assigned tasks clearly denies a different view of the mountain world, which – at least for the third-person omniscient narrator – opens up in all its facets. The status that this limitation of the workers’ view on Semmering assumes is made clear by Albrecht Koschorke’s thesis, which describes the perception of space and the panoramic view as a “basic pattern of bourgeois empowerment of nature.”27 Thus, Georg and Tertschka on the mountain still embody the status of two preEnlightenment, immature figures who are actually misplaced in the nineteenth century. This state of affairs is described even more concretely at the beginning of the second section: the workspace on the Semmering, which offers Georg and Tertschka never-ending work, in addition to a harsh environment and unbearable heat, is stylized as a paradise on earth according to the perspective of the narrator:

 Baasner, “Happy-End trotz Schopenhauer,” 56.  Albrecht Koschorke, Die Geschichte des Horizonts. Grenze und Grenzüberschreitung in literarischen Landschaftsbildern (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), 119‒120.

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The place where they were sitting offered a magnificent view over the mighty ups and downs of the wide-spread mountain landscape. Close to the railway and at the same height as it, the ruins of Klamm Castle clung like a vulture’s nest to a wooded rocky spur; deep down in a narrow gorge, elongated and with reddish roofs, lay the market town of Schottwien. Behind it, the Sonnwendstein towered darkly, and from the green meadows at its foot, surrounded by trees, gleamed the friendly little church called “Maria Schutz.” But the busy people had no eye for the magnificent picture; they hammered and knocked in dull eagerness, bent low to the ground (SK 20).

This perception, however, can again only take place with sufficient distance from the life-threatening work on the mountain, because, as Martin Halter describes, “the hard work breaks the capricious, barren subjectivity of the individual; it destroys the childish impartiality” and “the [. . .] irresponsibility [. . .] of passive enjoyment.”28 The symbol of this lack of ‘maturity’ is the head bowed to the ground, the turning away of the gaze from the world and the acceptance of the status quo.29 Almost all of Ferdinand von Saar’s novellas show a resignation and a voluntary acceptance of the protagonists’ given situation; the individual seems to be tethered to their fate. Every action of the characters in the novellas is thus subject to a predestined compulsion that cannot be escaped.30 Thus, Virginia Lewis attests that Georg Huber possesses a ‘foreign determination’ that predefines his entire course of life: “The protagonist’s simple life story, a story which his own future was always decided without his input, reveals an adult existence of exploitation and abuse in the name of national defense and ‘progress’.”31 Already in childhood, Georg’s future life is determined by the early death of his parents and shaped by his work as a goose- and cowherd. As he did not qualify as a farmhand due to his weak stature, he was called to military service by “the lords of the Assentirung,”32 (SK 21) until he fell seriously ill and was sent home, where he was “maintained by the community” for some time – but “then they told [him] to go and break stones” (SK 21f.). As Barbara Wróblewska

 Halter, Sklaven der Arbeit, 110.  The only exception happens on a Sunday, described in detail, when Georg and Tertschka meet in the valley. There, at the foot of the mountain, without any work to do and thus in ‘freedom’ – at least for one day – Georg interacts with the ‘sparkling’ world of Sunday silence, he picks colorful flowers for Tertschka and adapts to nature by attaching a fern frond to his hat (cf. SK 40f.).  Cf. Herbert Klauser, “Ferdinand von Saar, der Gestalter einer Welt im Wandel: Der Dichter der Vergänglichkeit und der Resignation,” in Ferdinand von Saar. Richtungen der Forschung. Gedenkschrift zum 100. Todestag (Vienna: Praesens, 2006), 33.  Lewis, “Breaking Stone,” 102.  ‘Assentirung’ is an old Austrian term for the physical examination used to determine a person’s suitability for military service.

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describes, this chronic and melancholic rigidity and the powerlessness of the characters inevitably leads to confrontation in Ferdinand von Saar’s novellas.33 The trigger for this confrontation is the ever-increasing injustice Georg experiences through the supervisor. In addition to ‘normal’ nastiness (inferior quality food, bad quarters, his guilt/debt business, oppression of Tertschka, violence), the situation comes to a crisis after the supervisor learns of Georg and Tertschka’s “agreement” (SK 36) to “unconsciously comfort each other” and to endure “the long sunny days next to each other in the quarry” (SK 35) together. Henceforth they are forced to do their work at separate workplaces. For the first time, Georg shows “courage” (SK 37) when he disregards the supervisor’s contact ban and approaches Tertschka. As a result, a secret plan is made to spend Sunday together in the valley. There, a first step towards emancipation emerges – towards the narrator, but also towards the text itself: while the protagonist Georg Huber otherwise seems to be isolated from his surroundings, perceiving neither his environment nor himself in it, his senses seem to return at the cross in the valley: “A Sunday silence surrounded him; even the bees above the gentians, which opened their dark blue calyxes in abundance, did not seem to be humming. Georg began to listen involuntarily, and as he listened to the silence, he felt as if he were hearing a soft, solemn waft of bells in the air (SK 40).” Self-determined eavesdropping reanimates his senses and catalyzes the process of becoming aware, whereby Georg detaches himself from the narrator’s sovereignty in a further step: still at the beginning of their walk to church, Georg calls Tertschka ‘Tertschka’ (“‘I think we could do ourselves some good today, Tertschka’” (SK 46)), thus following the narrator’s and the supervisors linguistic example in an obvious way, who introduce the girl to the Text as ‘Tertschka’ (cf. SK 14). Immediately after his arrival at Semmering, Georg realizes that the Bohemian ‘Tertschka’ “here in this country” should actually be called “Resi” (SK 24). However, he continues to use the name ‘Tertschka’ throughout the further course of the novella. It is only in the valley, with the onset of the ‘process of empowerment’, that he suddenly calls her ‘Resi’ towards the end of Sunday. This manifests Georg’s linguistic detachment from the narrator’s narrative direction, which underlines the further process of becoming aware of himself as a subject. The physical confrontation between Georg and the supervisor finally takes place in the following days back on the mountain: living out his newfound selfdetermination, “even when he had to take his pushcart to the quarry to fetch gravel, [Georg] sometimes ventured quickly up to Tertschka, where the world sank into the lovers’ brief embrace” (SK 52). But “[i]n one such moment” they are

 Wróblewska, “Bedrohte Ordnungen,” 21.

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caught by the supervisor, who hurls Georg to the ground out of jealousy “with his face distorted by scorn and rage” (SK 52) and dismisses him. After this drastic experience, Georg reflects for the first time on the injustice he has suffered, and it is precisely at this point that he takes his first faraway glance: Stunned, deprived of his senses, Georg had reached his comrades. He had mechanically unloaded the wheelbarrow; then he sat down on a stone and gazed thoughtlessly out into the distance. The sky had already been slightly cloudy in the morning; now a dull, grey day had gathered. Autumnal breezes brushed softly through the tops of the fir trees and a fine, cold rain fell on the earth (SK 53).

In addition to the reflection of the inner self in the outer, rainy grey of the (atmospheric) landscape – as the fine rain sprinkles the landscape, so “a hot shower [. . .] trickles through the emptiness of his chest” (SK 54) – the distant view confirms what Koschorke describes as the “visual consummation of bourgeois emancipation from the domination of the old social powers.”34 Gazing out into the ‘distance’ thus not only revitalizes Georg’s sensations once again, but also – following Koschorke – breaks up the structures of power on the mountain. As a result, the process of becoming self-aware begins, which ultimately leaves Georg as a reasonable, reflected, and self-aware subject: Little by little, however, the consciousness of the humiliation he had suffered forced itself more and more powerfully upon him and mixed with the burning feeling of the injustice that was about to be committed against him and Tertschka. They wanted to chase him away and tear them apart, who were so deeply and intimately connected? Who was allowed to do so? No one! And the longer he thought about it, the more outraged his otherwise so timid and acquiescent soul became, and a noble strength, a holy courage arose in him to oppose any power on earth that would submit to such violence. His inconspicuous features gradually took on the expression of firm determination and his bright eyes sparkled wondrously. At last, he rose and, while the others looked after him in amazement, strode up to Tertschka (SK 54).

With the visual crossing of the border area of the ‘mountain world’, the restrictions also seem to crumble inside Georg, he escapes passivity and determinacy, verbalizes and reflects on his experienced injustice, which is illustrated on the level of the text by the rhetorical questions in the quotation above.35 The narrative structure also adapts to the new situation: whereas previously the narrator located the characters in their immobility in space, from now on Georg is the driving force of the novella. Narration and protagonist even seem to synchronize,

 Koschorke, Die Geschichte des Horizonts, 157.  Koschorke, Die Geschichte des Horizonts, 256: Koschorke categorizes the prototypical nineteenth-century hero as trapped and traumatized within himself. Obstacles and limits are subsequently no longer – or only marginally – to be found in nature, but rather inside the subject.

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as evidenced by a simultaneous pause of the text and Georg himself: “– Georg paused involuntarily” (SK 63). Semantically marked as a dash and thus a pause in the text, Georg also pauses – both verbally and physically – and thus illustrates the character’s sovereignty over the text. Subsequently, events escalate until Georg is finally attacked by the supervisor and knocks him down in self-defense with his hammer (cf. SK 63). Despite his subsequent imprisonment in the bunkhouse in Vienna-Neustadt , Georg does indeed live spatially “unfree” from now on, but in a “thoughtful state” (SK 67) – the confinement of the bunkhouse thus promises the rational subject more freedom than the confines of the mountain world. A closer look at the novella consequently shows that the mountain landscape is indeed only selectively – namely technically – domesticated, but this does not mean that moral, social, and cultural processes on the mountain can also be reconciled with it. The Semmering, which becomes a space for testing human dominance, nevertheless still represents the uncivilized, uncultivated, the ‘extraordinary,’ which is opposed above all to those at the lower end of the social hierarchy. With Georg’s process of becoming aware of himself and by breaking with a seemingly imposed determinacy, the injustices of the mountain that have been inflicted are levelled. In the working process of stone breaking, the external, material work of ‘hewing’ the pieces of rubble is mirrored internally in the protagonist, who in the act of breaking and knocking stone hones his own personality and thus turns from a work-slave and “nomad of labor” (SK 10) into a mature and self-confident citizen. Georg recognizes the injustice inflicted on him and is finally able to articulate it as such, thus taking control of both the ‘mountain’ with its iniquitous structures and of himself. Die Steinklopfer thus recalls the achievements of the Enlightenment at a time when these are again being forgotten and reversed through globalization, industrialization and social hierarchization: the ‘pariahs’, as unfree, immature, the lowest social strata, have to re-experience and work out the process of becoming conscious and rational as individual subjects in order to no longer be considered outsiders and thus find a way into broader society.

Conclusion All the strands and levels of the novella entwine and layer around the process of empowering oneself in the face of a resistant mountain nature, a process that in von Saar’s novella becomes a troubling accessory to the capitalizing, mechanizing and globalizing railway across the Semmering, where working nature is degraded to modern ‘slave labour’. The exploitation of human capital, which includes the

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stonebreakers, goes hand in hand with an exploitation of the mountain world and its resources: humans literally dig into and through the mountain to reduce distances, minimize transport times and manifest their dominance over nature. In this way, the novella embeds individual destiny in larger discourses – but offers no satisfactory solution as to how the small relates to the bigger picture. Thus, the engineered, man-made grandeur of the frame narrative and its violence towards mountain nature are on par with exploitative, social oppression: construction, networking, mastery of nature, and consciousness-raising processes are juxtaposed in the text. This passivity of the novella, as manifest in the lack of a bigger solution at a macro level, is contrasted to Georg’s process of emancipation, who manages to let his own narrative strand end autonomously and not as if seemingly predetermined by ‘fate’, because, for the two stonebreakers, the novella ends with the only happy end in Saar’s oeuvre. In the text, but also in the extra-textual reality, the Semmering thus becomes a transnational junction that not only connects different social classes and national borders, but also becomes a place of remembrance of a social class that is exploited and plagued by social ills. The memory of such individuals is present today in the materialized form of the railway line, which recalls the circumstances of the construction of the line and thus does not allow illness, death, poverty, and exploitation to be forgotten. Through Georg’s process of becoming aware, the railway across the Semmering becomes the fictitious, but identity-forming place of a social group, which gives hope of being able to free itself – like Georg – from the determinism of the ‘pariah’ and thus escape the fate of “thousands and thousands” (SK 7), the “world’s great tragedy” (SK 9).

Seán M. Williams

Setting the Scene: Tourist Infrastructure, Landscape, and Literature in the Swiss Alps from the 1880s to 1930s In March 1873, George Augustus Sala – newspaper columnist, travel writer, and founder of London’s Savage Club – published an article titled “The Philosophy of Grand Hotels” in Belgravia magazine.1 Imagining the British capital engulfed in flames, Sala fantasized about a fabulous grand hotel rising from the ashes in Leicester Square. A year earlier, the Great Boston Fire had ravaged the American city, igniting interest in architectural renewal (and in general, hotel fires were a regular occurrence in the late nineteenth century). In a sideswipe at the English Gothic revival architect Gilbert Scott, Sala wrote that the hotel he envisaged would not be some mere annex of a modern railway station – as was the case, he implied, with Scott’s Midland Grand Hotel at London’s St Pancras. Instead, Sala’s article proposed a new luxury residence that would take pride of place in central London, boasting the “best characteristics” of American, French, and “SwissGerman” grand hotels. For British guest accommodation still lagged behind the international competition: as a handbook from 1852 put it to travelers to London, “abroad one never wishes to be out of a hotel; in England one never wishes to be in one.”2 Sala, for his part, credited the Americans with being trendsetters in hospitality. He celebrated the culinary talents of French hoteliers. When it came to Switzerland, though, Sala simply acknowledged the country’s many reputable hotels; and he quipped that they housed too many children for his liking.

 George Augustus Sala, “The Philosophy of Grand Hotels,” Belgravia 10 (March 1873): 137‒144.  Hints to Railways Travellers, and Country Visitors to London, by an Old Stager (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1852), 9. Cited in: Habbo Knoch, Grandhotels. Luxusräume und Gesellschaftswandel in New York, London und Berlin um 1900 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2016), 48. Note: I would like to thank Caroline Bland, Andrea Capovilla, and Patrick Vincent for their specific suggestions. I am grateful not only to the editor of the present volume, but also to participants at a conference in Brijuni, Croatia, in May 2022: “The European Spa as a Transnational Public Space and Social Metaphor.” Elsewhere, the hotelier Urs Kienberger and archivist Evelyne Lüthi-Graf prompted me, with their enthusiasm, insight, and in generous engagement with my questions, to disentangle discursive “best practice” from the actual practicalities of hotel libraries, and to embark on a separate study of the latter. I am indebted to Marcello Cattaneo, too, for his infectious bibliomania. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111150536-003

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Contemporary Swiss establishments were renowned, to be sure – not least as family-friendly spaces. Habbo Knoch emphasizes just two, rather than three influential hotel hotspots for world-leading hospitality in his recent history of luxury hotels during the second half of the nineteenth, and the early decades of the twentieth centuries: U.S. “public hotels” on the one hand (especially along the East Coast), and “European family hotels” on the other. The latter were located, above all, in Switzerland; and in such accommodation, guests dined together with a table d’hôte, before withdrawing in the evening into communal rooms for socializing. There was a house culture of conviviality over novelty.3 In architectural terms, these hotels were built in a classical style. The entertainment on offer was conservative, too, and modelled on the ideal of an aristocratic country house. Thus in the 1870s, the finest Swiss hospitality was remarkable inasmuch as it was representative, in both an exemplary and a superlative sense, of a generically ‘European’ grand hotel. In fact, Swiss hoteliers themselves were as famous for working abroad (and around the world) as at home in their native Switzerland. Sala credits a “Mr Etzensberger, late of the Albergo Vittoria, Venice” as incoming manager-in-chief of the new Midland, who was probably a Swiss citizen (or at least, such is Sala’s implication). It is no coincidence that in Arnold Bennett’s later novel in English, The Grand Babylon Hotel from 1902, the fictional owner of the eponymous high-end establishment on London’s Embankment is Swiss. By the turn of the century, the real-life Swiss emigrant César Ritz had become the world’s leading hotelier; he gave his name to grand hotels not only in London, but also in Paris and Madrid. In the word ritzy, his surname came to describe glamour itself; the far-reaching fame of his British signature hotel was immortalized in Irving Berlin’s song about New York, Puttin’ on the Ritz (1929), dancing out the roaring twenties. The situation of Switzerland as a specific destination in the global grand hotel landscape (and, with it, that of Swiss-based hoteliers) changed fundamentally in the final few decades of the nineteenth century. Swiss urban centers and a few prominent Alpine settlements had long been popular, and became even more so: as Patrick Vincent summarizes for the French-Swiss border region of Chamonix, 1,500 summer tourists arrived at Mont Blanc in 1783, while 4,000 visited in 1830. 5,000 travelled there in 1850, compared to the most significant increase in 1865: somewhere between 12,000 and 20,000 holiday-makers made the trip that year.4 The quantitative spurt morphed into a qualitative shift, and so

 Knoch, Grandhotels, 36‒48, especially 45.  Patrick Vincent, “Visitors’ books and registers in nineteenth-century Chamonix: ordering the sublime,” Studies in Travel Writing, 25.3 (2022): 406‒407.

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Sala was writing on the threshold. Soon Switzerland’s rural, rugged Alpine countryside became not only as intuitively, but also as specifically connotative of Belle Époque grandeur as either the world’s – and especially America’s – cityscapes, or the mainly urban hotels that Knoch cites among the early leading, European examples: the Schweizerhof in Lucerne (built in 1846), for instance, and the Hotel Beau-Rivage in Lausanne (established in 1861). Both these landmark Swiss hotels had lakeside settings and mountains in view, yet were located in well-connected, built-up areas: Switzerland may have been a prime place for holiday-making that traded on natural beauty, but for much of the nineteenth century it was somehow also comparable with Paris or perhaps even London as far as hotel visitors were concerned. The 1860s saw a handful of remote hotels being built at altitude and which became iconic; within a couple of decades, they were emulated across the countryside. As Henry James quipped ironically in an essay written on Switzerland as a “show country” in late 1873, if not prophetically then not without plausibility: “I expect to live to see the summit of Monte Rosa heated by steam-tubes and adorned with a hotel setting three tables d’hôte a day.”5 By the 1880s, as Knoch points out, guests checked in at scale to an expanding market in modern, magnificent mountain hotels, which extended to all corners of the Alps.6 In the canton of Graubünden, as but one example, the number of hotels and guest houses rose from 179 to 626 between 1880 and 1912.7 The new establishments could hardly be replicated in the streets of the rest of Europe. The construction of both such hotels and their environmental settings is briefly explored in the following pages, before I turn to how these physical locations and spaces were branded and enhanced experientially – with books. In any case, these tourist destinations were in large part founded on a literary image. Throughout the chapter at hand, though, I bring the perspectives of the Swiss hotel industry and associated tourism businesses to the fore, charting the history and use of the ‘literary’ in an unusual sense: mostly as documented in the hospitality sector’s own bilingual, national trade magazine for hotel proprietors that was first published on 12 March, 1892 – as the Schweizer Hotel-Revue / Revue Suisse des Hôtels – together with other archival sources. As such, I explore the oftentimes self-conscious instrumentalization of literature, rather than its more metaphorical or broader social uses; and I move away from studies of wellestablished literary genres such as the ‘hotel novel’ (works that frequently were  Henry James, “The Autumn Journey,” The Galaxy, April 1874: 536. (The essay was later retitled “The Old Saint-Gothard” in Italian Hours, 1909).  Knoch, Grandhotels, 44.  Roland Flückiger-Seiler, “Architekten im Engadiner Hotelbau des 19. Jahrhunderts,” Bündner Monatsblatt. Zeitschrift für Bündner Geschichte, Landeskunde und Baukultur 1 (2022): 34.

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written by hoteliers or other industry-insiders themselves).8 In considering explicitly ‘applied’ approaches to literature, I address an area of research that to date has remained largely unexplored. In this venture, I also examine an unconventionally longer period for the ‘age of the grand hotel’: from the late nineteenth century through to the 1930s. For many histories of grand hotels and spas – of Switzerland and further afield – concern only the Belle Époque, concluding with the First World War and the supposed fall of the Old World order.9 Yet many of the customers and strategies in the Swiss hotel sector remained fundamentally similar, whether during the decades either side of 1900 or in the years preceding the Second World War. In this sense, the supposed historical interwar transition assumed for tourism, which was instead more of a contested and controversial continuity, is analogous to the consistency of clientele directly after the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 – despite an apparent end of the Enlightenment-era Grand Tour in cultural discourse.10 For the twentieth century, I contend that it was not the interwar era, but rather the period after World War Two that marked the decisive structural and epochal break for Swiss hoteliers. In setting the scene over the course of roughly fifty years, I focus on placemaking strategies and then promotional techniques to that end. In both respects, literature was a key structural and discursive, rather than simply decorative consideration. Alongside designing deluxe hotels and preserving – if also, paradoxically, developing – Switzerland’s signature Alpine landscape, hoteliers were advised to purchase, curate, and evoke books in order to whet the appetites of potential visitors and to enrich the experiences of guests who had already arrived and checked

 On cultural controversies surrounding grand hotels in Switzerland, especially in the wake of the First World War, and on the genre of the ‘hotel novel’, see, e.g., Seán M. Williams, “Home Truths and Uncomfortable Spaces: Swiss Hotels and Literature of the 1920s,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 55.4 (2019): 444‒465. Some of the historical context in that essay is reproduced and supplemented in the present chapter. My thanks to the General Editors of FMLS, on behalf of the Court of the University of St Andrews, for permission to republish.  On Swiss hotels of the ‘Golden Age’, especially from an architectural point of view, see the trilogy of books by Roland Flückiger-Seiler: Hotelträume zwischen Gletschern und Palmen. Schweizer Tourismus und Hotelbau, 1830–1920, 2nd ed. (Baden: Hier und Jetzt, 2005a); Hotelpaläste zwischen Traum und Wirklichkeit, 1830‒1920, 2nd ed. (Baden: Hier und Jetzt, 2005b); and Berghotels zwischen Alpweide und Gipfelkreuz, 1830‒1920 (Baden: Hier und Jetzt, 2015). In these and FlückigerSeiler’s many articles, the First World War is understood as a clear historical endpoint. In contrast, Knoch, Grandhotels (2016) is a substantive exception to this trend, incorporating the interwar years in an overarching transnational narrative that begins circa 1850.  Patrick Vincent, “British Travellers in Geneva in 1816: A Demographic Reassessment,” Notes and Queries 64.4 (2017): 566‒569.

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in. (Whether they acted on such advice would demand bibliographic study rather than attending to the level of historical discourse.) As we shall see, in an age of increasing holidaymaking and with it a concomitant trend for literary tourism, the Swiss hospitality industry and associated sectors ostensibly acknowledged that fiction constituted both geocultural and advertising capital, as well as straightforward income. Put differently, fiction could make and promote place. While extensive scholarship exists on hotels and literature or the arts, and on the relationship of fiction to real-world holiday locations specifically, its tendency is to move from representation to reality. To cite but one example, Robert A. Davidson considers hotels in cultural representation (namely art history and cinema), before reading the “poetics” of the modernist built environment.11 I wish to approach the topic the other way around, though on an abstract level I agree that both representation and reality are governed by poiesis. The following reflects on the prescribed, practical uses of literature that followed and complemented physical infrastructure and landscape, even if literature in part constituted perceptions of such natural places ripe for development. In a reversal of the usual emphasis, then, I argue that literature not only metaphorically, but quite literally helped set the scene for tourism. Encouraging reading in situ and promoting or enabling a ‘literary’ enactment of tourism more generally became recommended practices for the Swiss hotel industry. Within scholarship, it is commonly accepted that guidebooks and newspapers constituted an ever-more popular means of advertising holiday resorts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – and that, on the whole, both professional and amateur copy writing benefitted contemporary hoteliers. We see a similar early story unfold here. As Sala jokes for the United States, “a good many tourists seem to have visited [. . .] with the special purpose of writing about hotel life, and nothing else.”12 (Indeed, at the end of the decade, Sala would himself depart Liverpool for the United States on a tour of the best addresses for visitors.) However, general fiction that was already published, and independently of specific hotel visits, was also increasingly anthologized and otherwise used for commercial, reputational, and imagological gain. Allowing tourists to borrow and read canonical, non-instrumental literature in the places that were written about, or at least to associate works of fiction with guests’ own holiday settings, was understood implicitly to shape the tourist imagination in and of Switzerland, as an Alpine ‘literary geography’. That is to say, although hoteliers and publishers may not have said so explicitly, they realized that even simply locating ordinary

 Robert A. Davison, The Hotel: Occupied Space (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018).  Sala, “The Philosophy of Grand Hotels.”

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processes of the everyday consumption, circulation, and reception of fiction in a particular place – as a tourist destination – made sound business sense.

Hotel building The turn of the twentieth century transformed Switzerland from a country of crops to one of more intensive dairy farming, banking, and, above all, tourism. The Alps secured Switzerland’s place within a competitive and lucrative worldwide hospitality market. In 1884, the Maloja Palace Hotel was built in Engadine with twenty dining halls and ballrooms as Switzerland’s largest building, despite a pan-European financial crisis at the time; towards the close of the nineteenth century, as the economy returned to rude health, nine hotels at Mount Rigi had a total capacity of 3,000 beds.13 In other words, notwithstanding intermittent financial shocks, the era was characterized by an overall rise in ‘new money’ from industrialization, global business, and speculation. By 1913, the Swiss writer Konrad Falke observed that a “foreigners’ colony,” or “Fremdenkolonie,” occupied around thirty hotels in the Alpine village of Wengen.14 Church services catered for both German Protestants and French Catholics, and mass was also said in English. Falke’s Wengen. Ein Landschaftsbild (“Wengen: An Image of a Landscape”) paints a picture of a remote area that had been developed into a tourist resort within just two decades; and Falke walks along paths that are mapped out by reference to landmark hotels. He remarks that land prices in Wengen had soared – and were far more profitable than when used as traditional pasture. Grand hotels now dotted almost every Alpine panorama. These establishments may have traded on the sublime image of the Alps, yet at one and the same time they were microcosms of capitalist cosmopolitanism that catered to every cultured, consumer demand. A mountain hotel at Caux that opened its grand doors to fanfare in summer 1893 boasted all the mod-cons and comforts of the new age, including rooms dedicated to billiards, smoking, socializing, women’s congregation, a heated glass veranda – and salons for reading, in which the real-life context of vacationing was mirrored in literature, non-fiction, and picture books. There was a theatre for plays and concerts as well.15 Civilized pastimes were equally expected amid the awesome simplicity of nature: the hotel that “answers the demands of modernity” also had its own spring, and was said

 Ralf Nestmeyer, Hotelwelten. Liftboys, Luxus, Literaten (Ditzingen: Reclam, 2015), 41‒43.  Konrad Falke, Wengen. Ein Landschaftsbild (Zurich and Leipzig: Rascher, 1913), 43.  “Caux,” Schweizerisches Hotel-Revue, 3 June 1893. The magazine is unpaginated.

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to be a stone’s throw away from the Alpine rockface. At competitor establishments, hairdressers worked on site: whether in urban settings such as in Zurich’s Dolder Grand, which opened in 1899 and overlooked the lake, or in Bern’s Hotel Bellevue – where the in-house stylists also served locals – or increasingly also in the remote mountains.16 An advertisement in the Schweizer Hotel-Revue classifieds section from 1902 seeks a multilingual hairdresser to manage the hotel salon at Kurhaus Tarasp in Engadine, for the winter season.17 In raw numbers, roughly 2.3 million tourists visited Switzerland during 1897, according to reported industry figures: 34% arrived from Germany, 18% from Great Britain and North America, and 12% from France. A total of 12 million nights were booked in Swiss hotels and guest houses that year.18 By 1914, there were about 22 million overnight stays – a dramatic upwards trend that was soon cut short by the First World War.19 But it was not only the tourists themselves who ascended the mountainside en masse. Throughout Switzerland, the Alps were conquered by technology – with (often British-led) engineering bringing the visitors to new heights. Over forty Swiss “Bergbahnen,” or funicular mountain railways, were built in 1912;20 and according to Falke in 1913, almost 200,000 people travelled on the mountain railway at Wengen each year. Tourists increasingly travelled for pleasure and outdoor pursuits, rather than for health cures at the summit. Resorts specializing in winter sports were designed for the Alpine slopes in this period, to complement the summer walking season.21 An article in the Schweizer Hotel-Revue takes delight in the French apparently having surveyed Engadine hoteliers in 1907, only to find that seventy percent of winter guests had moved from visiting the Mediterranean previously to vacationing in Switzerland. It is striking that the number given for “new” Swiss sports hotels that opened between 1904 and 1906 is quoted as 321, making a total of about 540 establishments that catered to skiing and similar winter leisure activities.22

 On the Dolder, see “Kleine Chronik,” Schweizer Hotel-Revue, 11 February 1899.  “Hotel-Coiffeur,” Schweizer Hotel-Review, 16 August 1902.  “Kleine Chronik,” Schweizer Hotel-Revue, 10 December 1898. See also, on English tourism to Switzerland, the Rhine, Southern Germany, and Italy: “Ueber die Reiselust der Engländer,” Schweizer Hotel-Revue, 16 September 1899.  Clive H. Church and Randolph C. Head, A Concise History of Switzerland (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2013), 189. The statistic is also repeated across Flückiger-Seiler’s works.  Jakob Tanner, Geschichte der Schweiz im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2015). Erster Teil: 2. Kindle ebook.  Susan Barton, Healthy Living in the Alps: The Origins of Winter Tourism in Switzerland, 1860‒ 1914 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2008).  “Der Wintersport in der Schweiz – eine Gefahr für die Riviera,” Schweizer Hotel-Revue, 6 July 1907.

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However, wartime and the immediate aftermath of the First World War adversely affected the Swiss hotel sector – despite the country’s neutrality (and the related fact that its landmark buildings survived intact). The Swiss were soon afflicted by economic woes and new political structures in line with other nations, and indeed by the very interwar realities of neighboring countries: after all, the German and Habsburg monarchies had fallen, and so Swiss tourist palaces just over the border that catered to aristocratic sorts of guests were more sparsely populated and perceived by many in society to be part of a world order that had now passed into history. Furthermore, hyper-inflation in Germany and Austria had knock-on effects on their small neighbor. Supplies were scarce for a while, and demand dried up: most foreign tourists from the Old World tended to stay at home, either because of their depleted finances, or domestic political upheaval (or both). Hotels across the continent, and within common language areas especially, vied for the few available customers more fiercely than ever before. Yet while the dire state of inflation obviously disadvantaged domestic tourism, ironically it could be all the more appealing for some potential foreign visitors. The Schweizer Hotel-Revue reported with outrage on 24 January 1920 that a sanatorium in the Austrian Republic had sent postcards to Davos visitors alerting them to the contemporary exchange rate and encouraging them to move over the border to establishments that offered more for clients’ money.23 Upmarket health retreats, grand hotels, and spas seemed out of place in straitened times; those that remained fought over the scraps from a bygone age. The first challenge for Swiss hoteliers and even national politics, then, was to secure existing custom. In practice, that meant a policy of continuity in adversity. Even literary depictions of long-standing hoteliers who were down at heel from the mid-1910s to the early 1920s, before later rising like a phoenix from the ashes, tended to imagine a returning clientele: they characterized new customers as the same types as the old ones.24 The degree of profit for hotel proprietors may have reduced drastically, but business plans were familiar – and the current stakeholders were legally protected. For, in an effort to help existing hoteliers during the war and the initial post-war downturn, the Swiss federal government introduced legislation on 2 November 1915 that allowed hotel owners to delay either the interest they owed or their capital repayments in circumstances where loans were financed on the assumption that guests would arrive from abroad. There was a concerted attempt to safeguard the status quo. Moreover, a perceived flood of  “Unfaire Konkurrenz!” Schweizer Hotel-Revue, 24 January 1920.  See, e.g., Robert Jakob Lang’s little-known serialised novel, “Das Hotel ‘Zum blauen Band’. Ein fröhlicher Roman,” in Schweizer Bibliothek 4 (1925), 71–106; 5 (1925), 113–60; and 6 (1925), 93–146. The story is discussed in Williams, “Home Truths and Uncomfortable Spaces” (2019).

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competition at a time of crisis could be stemmed at home, if not abroad. Article 27 of “the provision concerning the protection of the hotel industry from the consequences of the war” banned both the establishment of new hotels or guest houses and the expansion or redevelopment of old ones – unless permission was granted by parliament. Change of use into additional accommodation for foreign visitors was also forbidden. This protectionist law was known from 1920 onwards as the “hotel-building ban,” or “Hotelbauverbot,” and continued in various forms until a referendum in 1952.25 However, the original ruling of 1915 was relaxed in 1925, as the hotel industry began to recover. Hence the second structural challenge became how to create renewed demand at scale, once the worst effects of the economic situation had receded. By the middle of the twentieth century’s third decade, extensions to properties became much easier to pass by the authorities, though they were still subject to individual approval. Hotel proprietors had to prove a market need in order to obtain consent, but their arguments and evidence were often creative.26 Planning cases for bigger and better hotels were usually predicated on speculative logic. In other words, a consensus formed that hotels must be re-modelled and enlarged in order to stimulate demand. Here, too, hoteliers attempted to not only ‘build back better’ – but as before. A popular strategy was to appeal to well-heeled American visitors with grandiose establishments. The US had long been the world leader in luxury accommodation and innovation, so Americans were thought to expect the most modern of conveniences and the grandest of palaces if they were to holiday in Switzerland. And Americans had visited the Swiss Alps in significant numbers before the war, after all. Thus, there was a gradual return to hotel building, albeit still controlled and not quite to the extent seen before the First World War – and the efforts focused on a known customer base. Proposals for hotel development became all the more discursive, though, looming large in public debates and rhetorically charged. Most significant in (re-)constructing holiday locations was a sense of place that went beyond a ‘standard’ Alpine view, yet which would still meet the seasonal expectations of tourists. The changing fashions with which hoteliers had to contend in the interwar years included a continental migration to beach towns at the hotter times of the year – a transnational trend that even led to new summer resorts in

 Marcel Just, “Das “Hotelbauverbot” 1915–1952,” in Arosa. Die Moderne in den Bergen, ed. Marcel Just, Christof Kübler, Matthias Noell, and Renzo Semadeni (Zurich: GTA, 2007), 24–27.  For criticism of the “Hotelbauverbot”, especially in technical and industry writings from 1918 until 1939, see Daniel Kessler, Hotels und Dörfer. Oberengadiner Hotellerie und Bevölkerung in der Zwischenkriegszeit (Chur: Bündner Monatsblatt, 1997), 17, ftn. 4.

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Southern Norway (though mainly for domestic tourists).27 Beaches were cut into the Swiss mountainside and waterfront promenades were built, styling Alpine rivers and lakes as if they were in the Mediterranean. A “Strandbad,” or beach bathing area, was opened on the lakeside in Davos, in 1930. Government attempts to ban swimming in natural waters, on safety grounds, were defeated in the face of domestic opposition from the general public. (A rescue and advisory body was set up instead: in 1932, the Schweizerische Lebensrettungs-Gesellschaft was born.) To be sure, the change in consumer leisure and especially travel choices was not wholly new, but instead one of degree. The French and Italian riviera had long been in competition with landlocked Switzerland, as well as with nearby mountainous Austria. (The Austrian Empire had sought to establish an appealing coastline that catered to tourists in the Kingdom of Dalmatia in late 1897 already, in an attempt to rival the glamour of the Italian and French resorts on the occasion of the Emperor Franz Joseph’s 50th jubilee the following year.)28 But in later decades, competition became much tougher – above all, in the summer months. Notably in the 1920s and early ’30s, the appeal of sea and sand had to be taken all the more seriously, even if sun had been marketed at St. Moritz from the start. Walking in the pastured mountains lost out to lounging on the (coastal) beach. The St. Galler Tagblatt summarized succinctly in 1929 “that the sea has become a successful rival of the Alps.”29 Another response by hoteliers alongside creating an Alpine ‘seaside’ was to build on the existing cultural foundations of a place. From 1925 onwards, Davos projected a refined image of itself by advertising the resort’s literary, artistic, scholarly, and sporting activities and achievements in a special, bilingual periodical: the Davoser Revue / Revue de Davos. Exhibitions of local and avant-garde artists were installed in hotels. In addition, Davos traded in more abstract terms on contemporary literature for its brand identity, and adjusted its accommodation accordingly. David Clay Large observes that from the mid-1920s onwards, spas across Central Europe more broadly embraced the hosting of conventions as an additional source of income to cures. In Germany, Bad Homburg became the market leader.30 In Switzerland, it was Davos. The “Internationale Davoser Hochschulkurse,” or “International University Courses at Davos,” ran for four summers from 1928 (although

 Dag Hundstad, “A ‘Norwegian Riviera’ in the making: the development of coastal tourism and recreation in southern Norway in the interwar period,” Journal of Tourism History 3.2 (2011): 109‒128.  “Eine österreichische Riviera,” Schweizer Hotel-Revue, 31 December 1897.  Reprinted as “Um das Hotelbau-Verbot,” Illustrierte schweizerische Handwerker-Zeitung, 28 November 45.35 (1929), 417.  David Clay Large, The Grand Spas of Central Europe: A History of Intrigue, Politics, Art and Healing (Lanham, MD and London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), 293.

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classes in languages, mathematics, and accountancy, among other subjects, had been offered in the 1890s already).31 According to Peter E. Gordon, Thomas Mann’s novel Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain, 1924) offered a “ready-made script” for holding intellectual debates in the town’s hotels.32 The keynote speakers for the 1929 session were Martin Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer, both of whom were put up in the Grand Hotel Belvedere, while Davos’s other hotels were filled to capacity by visiting students.33 Since Mann’s novel set a precedent for understanding Davos as the site for a culture clash, Heidegger’s and Cassirer’s exchanges and their opposing philosophical convictions were quickly embedded, as Gordon elucidates, into a mythical struggle between conservative and liberal cultural thought and between Analytic and Continental philosophy. Also in the late 1920s, the German financier Eduard von der Heydt erected a hotel in the Bauhaus style on Switzerland’s Monte Verità – one of only a couple of exceptions to the “hotel-building ban” as an entirely new construction. It opened in 1928. The location was chosen in part because of its counter-culturalist, artistic heritage in recent history: as a home of the ‘life-reform’ movement around 1900.34 In that earlier era, there was a wide range of such bourgeois activists who advanced anti-bourgeois cultural critique. For example, Carl Hilty reflected on happiness and industriousness, asking how Michelangelo or Titian could be so productive without the need for visiting “baths and spas” year after year.35 He thought they were unnecessary and so dispensable. Organizations were then established to protect the nation’s indigenous homeland, or Heimat, in 1905 and its natural landscape in 1909 (restricting advertising billboards, among other initiatives). That a new temple to consumption in the interwar period traded on the lingering reputation of alternative, anti-bourgeois ideas is an irony all too familiar and amenable to capitalist society. As is so often the case, the paradox proved profitable. On the one hand, therefore, the Swiss countryside was adapted to market trends and (perceived) consumer demands so that it was easily comparable and thereby internationally competitive – with American hotels, say, or European seaside towns. On the other, hotel developers and promoters capitalized on narratives and popular conceptions of place that were thought to mark out a location as authentic and, as such, as distinctive. This two-pronged, if contradictory strategy entailed practical (re)

 Ralf Schenk, Geschichte des heilklimatischen Kurortes Davos im Spiegel seiner Tagespublizistik (Bochum: Brockmeyer, 1991), 348‒349, 360‒361.  Peter E. Gordon, Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard UP, 2010), 90.  Gordon, Continental Divide, 110.  Tanner, Geschichte der Schweiz, Erster Teil, 2.  Carl Hilty, Glück, 3 vols (Frauenfeld and Leipzig: J. Hubers and Hinrichs, 1901), Vol. 1, 154.

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building work, but also increased efforts in branding, in ways that had begun in the late nineteenth century already: namely, promoting place by using words and images that resonated with ideas which circulated in the contemporary cultural imagination. Hoteliers had to tap into, and tell, ‘stories’ that stuck.

Ringfencing landscape Paradoxically, as hoteliers sought to physically change the landscape for the latest consumer fashions and to create a market niche, they simultaneously made efforts to support the preservation of a pure, untouched idea of the Alps. For the mountainous landscape was the ultimate raison d’être of Swiss hotels. When the Swiss Hoteliers’ Association welcomed an American delegation in 1926, Switzerland was the last stop on a European itinerary that had included Great Britain, France, Holland, Germany, and Austria. Opening an initial eight pages of the Schweizer Hotel-Revue specially in English on 13 May, the editors emphasize the Alps as their unique selling point: It will be difficult, even impossible, for us to offer anything similar to that which other countries already visited have offered. But we place confidence in the hope that the natural beauty of our country which, all too rapidly, will glide before your eyes, will nevertheless provide you with happy memories and help to amplify our modest but hearty welcome to our colleagues.36

Preserving such natural national beauty had been, and continued to be, a major item on the domestic political agenda. On 1 August 1914, the Swiss national holiday, a federal resolution announced the establishment of a national park that would rewild the Alpine countryside and was understood in the first instance as a commitment to scientific policy (given the popular reception of evolutionary theory at the time and the emergent academic discipline of ecology, among others). In the interwar years, there followed protracted – and ultimately unsuccessful – discussions about creating additional areas of wild land under federal protection. As Patrick Kupper shows, however, in the course of these debates it was “in tourism [that] the government found an economically and politically more powerful ally than science.”37 Or, indeed, a more convenient partner compared to local interest: a parliamentary group represented by the Glarner democrat David Legler argued that in

 Schweizer Hotel-Revue, 13 May 1926.  Patrick Kupper, Creating Wilderness. A Transnational History of the Swiss National Park, trans. by Giselle Weiss (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2014), 224.

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order to be a truly national park, land should be marked out in the middle of the Swiss Alps, which would be more accessible – and supposedly more easily guarded from Italian poachers.38 That campaign was not turned into reality. The confirmed location of the Swiss National Park in Lower Engadine complemented – literally, economically, and conceptually – the hotel industry. In Upper Engadine (or the region surrounding St. Moritz), as Kupper notes, 400 inhabitants were registered in the 1880s, whereas 3,000 lived there by 1910.39 The lower part of the canton was re-wilded as the upper area was industrialized to an ever-greater extent. The positive reports on the Swiss National Park in the Schweizer Hotel-Revue cast the initiative as a win for science and for Swiss society as a whole. Perhaps surprisingly, the supposed ‘wilderness’ that would result (or more specifically, return) was not fetishized as an enhancement of any image of the country that the tourist trade might portray beyond the borders of Switzerland. Rather, the emerging acceptance among hoteliers of a national park on the eve of the First World War was perceived as commercially advantageous for a more indirect reason: what today we would call ‘greenwashing’. Supporting the national park was beneficial for hotel proprietors within social debate at home and in domestic politics, in order to then lobby for the commercial development of the landscape elsewhere in Switzerland outside of the Lower Engadine. The park allowed other areas of Switzerland to be industrialized and circumscribed the legitimacy of arguments in favor of the protection of nature, or “Naturschutz,” to the borders of the original park. In an article from 20 June 1914, for example, a correspondent in the Schweizer Hotel-Revue describes differing opinions concerning a proposed funicular railway between Kandersteg and Oeschinensee. While acknowledging the apparent inconsistency in developing “every quiet corner” at the same time as finalizing the plans for a national park, the hoteliers’ magazine lays great stress on the importance of opening the mountainside to winter sports.40 Hence the Lower Engadine was understood as a ‘reserve’ in a double sense: alongside becoming a ringfenced natural habitat, it was also a rhetorical figure invoked for limiting the hotel sector’s public support of restrictions on commercializing the Swiss landscape to a specific area only. In corners of the Alps away from the Swiss National Park, the perception of the natural environment could be mechanically aided, according to the hotel industry anyway, yet apparently still be “poetic” – so long as the visitor adopted the right state of mind. At this juncture, we are reminded that the Swiss Alps were sold in what was broadly a literary and artistic rhetoric. As an article in the

 Kupper, Creating Wilderness, 49.  Kupper, Creating Wilderness, 80.  “Verkehrswesen,” Schweizer Hotel-Revue, 20 June 1914.

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Schweizer Hotel-Revue put it in 1924: the landscape appreciated by Rousseau, Goethe, Byron, and others is the ground and foundation – or Grundlage – on which the Swiss tourism sector is built.41 The summary of Switzerland’s sites of natural beauty by the same magazine in English for the visiting American delegation two years later is worth quoting at length. Regarding Zermatt: The view one enjoys from the Gornergrat is one of the most beautiful of the world. Formerly it meant a walk of fully five hours. To-day electricity and the cog-wheel permit also less sturdy people to admire this wonderful alpine scenery. There are those who accuse the railway of having desecrated the mountains. We refute the accusation, because the poetical charm of the mountains will only be revealed to him who is ready to receive it in his soul: The attraction of the Alpine World is not affected by the means of transportation used by the visitor, be it on foot, on the back of a donkey, in a carriage or by railway.42 [My emphasis.]

The contemporary objections to Alpine engineering that are hinted at in this passage suggest another paradox of the era: idealized environmentalism and civilizing developments were not only coeval, but also re-enforced each other. Jakob Tanner expresses their simultaneity in general terms: “the more humankind learned to master nature, the more sublime nature became. And the more sublime and beautiful nature became, the more endangered it then appeared to be by technical and scientific conquest over the natural domain.”43 In other words, an earlier critique of civilization (known in German as Zivilisationskritik) and fringe environmentalism around 1900 returned with a vengeance in the interwar period, and became more mainstream as modernization was re-booted. The tension is exemplified by Meinrad Inglin’s novel Grand Hotel Excelsior from 1928, which was written against the backdrop of social controversies concerning hotel building at that time. The portrayal of outside space in that story speaks to the related and sensitive contemporary debate about the development of the natural Swiss landscape. In one instance, the antagonistic, Romantic, and counter-cultural character of Peter sits down among the birds and the bees in a dark green field that becomes, to his relief, “no longer parkland, but a real forest.” However, the hotel’s red flag is suddenly raised and sullies the idyll: it waves in the wind behind the pine trees, such that the setting turns into “no longer a forest, but hotel parkland.”44 The two images are in obvious competition with each other, but they  “Die schweizerische Landschaft als Grundlage der Fremdenindustrie,” Schweizer Hotel-Revue, 31 January 1924.  Schweizer Hotel-Revue, 13 May 1926.  Tanner, Geschichte der Schweiz, Erster Teil: 2.  Meinrad Inglin, Gesammelte Werke in zehn Bänden, ed. Georg Schoeck (Zurich: Ammann, 1988), Vol. 2: Grand Hotel Excelsior, 110‒111. More generally, see Williams, “Home Truths and Uncomfortable Spaces” (2019).

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could also be confused – albeit momentarily and contingent on personal projection and sentiment. In the early twentieth century, hotels depended on a generalized picturesque image for their branding and for social debates in a national forum. But they also relied on the ability to build a place for their guests, to make their cosmopolitan visitors comfortable and the experience of nature convenient – and they had to ensure that their position within the market was visible. In spite of general political polarization, there was one related issue on which hoteliers and environmentalists both agreed: the need to banish the blight of the billboards and placards from the countryside, especially around train stations. An earlier letter to the Schweizer Hotel-Revue in June 1913 complained that advertisements and billboards were a blot on the landscape once again, after similar arguments had raged previously and intermittently in the recent past – at the close of the nineteenth century, and then again around 1909. Apparently, only a small minority of industries were now at fault, since most companies had cleaned up their acts. But the topic required another airing all the same. “Outside advertising” destroyed “the natural landscape as God created it,” and the column in the hoteliers’ magazine goes on to argue that fighting such visual pollution could be justified in terms of a sound business strategy.45 To that end, the correspondent cites examples of best practice in other industries, such as the work of the inventor and manufacturer of Odol mouthwash Karl Linger of Dresden. He reportedly confined his product marketing to designated areas in towns and cities and to advertisements in newspapers. The contributor to the Schweizer Hotel-Revue concludes with the hope that the Swiss Commission for the Protection of the Environment, or “Schweizerische Naturschutzkommission,” would inspect and clamp down on advertising as littering across the Alps. Significantly, he further advocates “a new and artistic means of advertising.” Thomas Wegmann has considered the creative and commercial uses of literature for advertising in the period, not least the adaptation of lines from Gotthold Ephraim Lessing for Odol mouthwash.46 Commissioning poets and authors to pen commercial copy became a favored contemporary approach to product promotion. Similarly, Swiss hotels and associated businesses increasingly turned not just to newspaper classifieds, but also to creative fiction for its potential advertising – and cultural – capital. After all, the Alps were acknowledged to be poetic, even by industrialist hotel proprietors.

 “Reklame in der freien Natur?”, Schweizer Hotel-Revue, 14 June 1913.  Thomas Wegmann, Dichtung und Warenzeichnen. Reklame im literarischen Feld 1850‒2000 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2011), 158.

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Libraries and literary branding A typical promotional device for early resorts in the late nineteenth century across Europe and North America, according to Stephen V. Ward, was the guidebook.47 Indeed, the Schweizer Hotel-Revue regularly ran articles on the latest tourist handbooks published on the continent, in Britain, and in Russia. Furthermore, the central office of the hotel proprietors’ association itself published an illustrated guide, The Hotels of Switzerland, in three languages: English, French, and German. Clearly, such pocket guides were a standard means of advertising – and with that status, they became a necessary evil for industry insiders. As guidebooks proliferated in types and editions, so too did their problems for hoteliers. For one thing, fake news could spread: the trade magazine gave accounts of counterfeit Baedekers, for example; and accusations were printed of damaging, ill-informed opinions (as hotel proprietors perceived them) or incorrect information in leading handbooks, with reports on hotel owners’ attempts elsewhere to launch legal action against, or to simply change factual inaccuracies by, famous German titles such as Baedeker or Meyer.48 Yet throughout the same era, hoteliers were also advised to accommodate authors of guidebooks in their best rooms, to feed them for free, and even to welcome their wives and children at no cost – all in order to rise up the rankings. (At a table d’hôte, so went the commercial logic, a few more non-paying guests made little difference.) With a hint of irony, hotel owners were told in 1898 that sometimes a visiting assessor’s money runs out for onward travel: in such instances, he could be given a “loan” on departure of 50 or 100 francs, never to be repaid.49 The explosion in advertising and sponsored recommendations at the turn of the twentieth century raised financial concerns for the hotel industry, whether off or on the books. For declared expenditure, there was the strategic question of where individual hoteliers should direct their limited promotional budget. In June 1894, an acerbic correspondent advised readers of the Schweizer Hotel-Revue not to pay the Association of German Glove Manufacturers for their own establishments to be listed under a planned new column, which would feature reputable hotels in that organization’s newsletter. Their money would be better spent on a pair of glacé gloves, for at least then they would receive something material “in the

 Steven V. Ward, Selling Places: The Marketing and Promotion of Towns and Cities 1850‒2000 (London: E & FN Spon, 1998), 37.  See e.g., “Zur Verteidigung der Hoteliers gegen falsche Bekanntmachungen in den Reiseführern,” Schweizer Hotel-Revue, 1 June 1901, and “Wieder etwas von Meyers Reisebüchern,” Schweizer Hotel-Revue, 15 December 1906.  “Die Reklame im Dienste der Hotellerie,” Schweizer Hotel-Revue, 15 January 1898.

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hand” in return for their money.50 In March the following year, the magazine acknowledged how the Swiss rail companies, which produced their own brochures in-house, often worked in service of their advertisers, and the editors picked up on praise abroad by the Financial Times of London for the brochures of the JuraSimplon train company especially. The British newspaper had encouraged its readers to exchange Brighton for the Bernese mountains, such that advertising with the railways was said by the Schweizer Hotel-Revue to reap rewards.51 Nevertheless, the same representatives of Swiss hoteliers cautioned against generalizing too much: the “souvenir travel guide,” or “Souvenir-Reisehandbuch,” of the Norddeutscher Lloyd shipping line, by contrast, was outsourced to the profiteering publishers C. Reichmann and Cantor in Berlin. Those third-party editors were thought to be unreliable. In the November issue of 1895, the Schweizer Hotel-Revue warned of sharp practices not only among some guidebook publishers, but also in the newspaper sector. Editors of a Parisian newspaper supplement had secured thousands of francs from a Swiss railway in return for publishing a long-form promotional article, but apparently cut and relegated the submission to a mere advertisement. What is more, the name of the railway company was used to lure in other hoteliers for overpriced classified ads.52 The real concern in this report is that such fraud, which was apparently commonplace, occurred in what were otherwise accepted as being the distinguished or “noble” forms of advertising: editorial features in guidebooks, newspapers and their supplements, and magazines – instead of announcements or placards. This fear of squandering finite finances on seemingly endless amounts and supposedly high-brow types of advertising was still prevalent in 1920, when it was implied that readers of the Schweizer Hotel-Revue should know better than to trust academics – who were now in on the game, too. Professor Hans Pohl of Zurich had edited an “advertisers’ guide through Switzerland” that was apparently artful, but a waste of money.53 The more elevated sort of product placement extended, according to the earlier article from 1895, to the paratexts or “editorial parts” of prose fiction, or novellas and novels. These presumably mean mentions or advertisements in the notes, flyleaves, or prefaces. At the turn of the twentieth century, therefore, the importance of literature for selling Swiss hotels and their regions became all the greater – beyond some general marketing semantics of the ‘poetic’. Indeed, Wegmann considers theoretically the conflicts and commonalities between literature and advertising,    

“Reklame,” Schweizer Hotel-Revue, 23 June 1894. “Reklame,” Schweizer Hotel-Revue, 23 March 1895. “Vornehme Reklame,” Schweizer Hotel-Revue, 23 November 1895. “Ein Reklame-Professor,” Schweizer Hotel-Revue, 3 April 1920.

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which increased exponentially with the second industrial revolution around 1900, in broad terms; the grounding of that close and contested relationship in the creation and promotion of place for the purpose of tourism would surely constitute a more specific set of examples that would reward future study.54 In any case, Konrad Falke states in the unpaginated preface to his book Wengen. Ein Landschaftsbild (“Wengen: An Image of a Landscape, 1913”) that he wrote for the Swiss and German holidaying public at large, publishing his work in both Zurich and Leipzig as a corrective to typical travelogues which, like advertising copy, were said to be scant on truth. If commercial literature was thought to be unreliable and the result of vested interests (often the wrong ones, from hoteliers’ own commercial points of view), the perceived freedom and the social prestige of fiction could be capitalized upon. In 1935, an article in the Schweizer Hotel-Revue went one stage further and coined the term “indirect literary advertisement” for what was actually a promotional, real-world intervention in the domain of fiction. While it was usually too costly to pay an author a fee in return for a fashionable story that would place a location in popular standing, the correspondent suggests that a hotelier can persuade a writer to stay once or twice in their establishment for between 8 and 14 nights for free, such that they would write a (or more likely a chapter of a) novel or novella while in residence at a mountain hotel.55 The following year, the local tourism organization for Davos paid the higher price and in fact commissioned its own novel: the hoteliers sought a cheerful counter-story to Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) of 1924. Erich Kästner’s Der Zauberlehrling (The Magician’s Apprentice), written in 1938, remained a fragment in which a Berlin academic, Prof. Dr Alfons Mintzlaff, is invited to give a public lecture by the Davos art society. The streets are glamorous and cosmopolitan, lined by “palatial hotels,” posters for American films screened in the evenings, and shop mannequins adorned with Parisian evening wear.56 Mintzlaff arrives perturbed to find that someone of his name has been staying in Davos for a week already and has been accommodated in the Grand Hotel Belvedere with an en-suite bathroom and south-facing balcony. Although this particular example of product placement did not make it into print until later decades, Swiss hotel owners understood that literary representations of the country’s hotels could have a positive advertising effect. On a more everyday and less instrumental level, hotel proprietors were advised by their peers to enhance holiday-making through enabling customers to read on vacation in their chosen destination – by establishing hotel reading rooms  Wegmann, Dichtung und Warenzeichen.  “Tourismus und Propaganda,” Schweizer Hotel-Revue, 12 December 1935.  Erich Kästner, Gesammelte Schriften in sieben Bänden (Cologne: Kiepenheuer und Witsch, 1959), Vol. 2: Romane, 233.

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and libraries. The business practice is evident early on, in America and in Europe. The Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York had opened a “literary depot for books, magazines, &C” for its customers in 1859 already.57 Bookshops and reading rooms in hotels increased over subsequent decades; literary tourism more generally was promoted as a lucrative business opportunity among American booksellers in the late nineteenth century;58 and, according to Manuel D. Lopez, American hotel libraries peaked in popularity during the 1920s.59 Indeed, the large library in New York’s Biltmore hotel – which opened its doors in 1913 – was given special mention in a Berlin newspaper report on the finest features of American hotels in 1923, in the same context as praise for a circus show with lions and elephants inside a competing establishment.60 Similarly, ocean steam liners conventionally offered libraries since their advent in the mid-nineteenth century, and according to Susann Liebich: “by the 1920s, ships’ libraries had become an expected standard service for passengers on trans-Atlantic crossings.”61 On the European continent, meanwhile, there were examples of libraries in select spa towns as early as 1802, when Doberan on the Baltic coast boasted a collection of German and English classic literature that could be borrowed – before the bookselling market expanded in German holiday resorts more generally around 1900.62 Knoch notes that the Schweizerhof, which opened in Switzerland’s Lucerne in 1846, broke new ground in its design by including a library instead of a reading room; and more generally, in Koch’s interpretation, Lucerne’s Schweizerhof styled itself as an aristocratic palace – implying that billiards and more organized bookshelves trickled down to modern tourism from noble practices and tastes.63 Then in the mid-1920s, Berlin’s landmark Hotel Excelsior competed with ‘American’ public space and spectacle by opening a library with 5,000 volumes, a 200-page catalogue, and a full-time librarian.64

 Cited in N. Frederick Nash, “The North American hotel as publisher, bookseller and librarian,” Library History 6.5 (1984): 137.  Margaret D. Stetz, “Selling Literary Tourism in The Bookman,” in Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-Century Culture, ed. Nicola J. Watson (Palgrave Macmillan: London, 2009), 119‒127.  Manuel D. Lopez, “Books and Beds: Libraries in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century American Hotels,” The Journal of Library History 9.4 (1974): 196‒221.  “Hoteleindrücke aus Amerika. Beobachtungen eines Fachmannes,” Berliner Tageblatt und Handelszeitung, 17.05.1923. Cited in Knoch, Grandhotels (2016), 344.  Susann Liebich, “A Sea of Fiction: The Libraries of Trans-Pacific Steamships at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” The Library 20.1 (2019): 6.  Christine Haug, Reisen und Lesen im Zeitalter der Industrialisierung. Die Geschichte des Bahnhofs- und Verkehrsbuchhandels in Deutschland von seinen Anfängen um 1850 bis zum Ende der Weimarer Republik (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2007), 208.  Knoch, Grandhotels, 45.  Haug, Reisen und Lesen, 233.

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Across Switzerland specifically, reading material for loan in a hotel was common by the end of the nineteenth century. A selection of skits and sketches called Travelling Companions from 1892 (and reprinted from Punch magazine) includes a picture of an “elderly Englishwoman” sitting on her suitcase reading, as her party prepares to depart the Swiss Alps near Bern; she is trying to finish the final hundred pages of a novel borrowed from the hotel’s library.65 An article in 1907 from the Schweizer Hotel-Revue introduces this aspect of a hotel’s customer service as meeting the needs of its cultivated guests, and the correspondent acknowledges that when on holiday himself, “the Baedeker” (“der Bädeker”) alone is not stimulating enough as intellectual material, which is why he packs “some ‘literature’” as well. However much commercial interests may have wished to conflate guidebooks, advertising, and fiction, hoteliers were simultaneously committed to the idea that these genres were popularly conceived as distinct. Apparently, the modern cultural traveler reads longer works than newspapers and other ephemera: “reading has become a primary need for the modern cultured person – not just reading a newspaper, but the almost uninterrupted preoccupation with those aspects and ideas that are intellectually fitting for our times.”66 Of course it is an exaggeration to suggest that guests were somehow more cultured than in previous decades: until radios or, later, television sets became a standard part of hotel furniture, reading was simply a widespread way of passing the time between day trips and dining, when relaxing in a private room or the lobby. In a more competitive environment, hoteliers became more attuned to their guests’ needs and desires. Yet customer complaints about library stock were also prevalent. The British women’s periodical Home Notes advised its readers in 1896 to pack needlework when travelling abroad, “for a hotel library is not richly stored with literature.”67 Similarly, an earlier travelogue from Davos in 1886 lamented the local hotel libraries for their focus on novels to the detriment of learning and the preponderance of mainly weekly, serialized fiction – notably the regular anthology for popular prose fiction, “Hackländers Romanbibliothek” – over edifying tomes.68 Visitors’ expectations could be greater than the reading material that was available, and their objections appear to have been more or less accurate. The publisher Hugo Richter conceived of the Davoser Blätter as a weekly periodical during the tourist season; in its sixth year, 1877, he boasted to German booksellers that it would be kept by many hotel guests as an elegant souvenir – and that it lay on the tables at spas  F. Anstey, The Travelling Companions: A Story in Scenes (London: Longmans Green, 1892), 65‒66.  “Die Hotelbibliotheken,” Schweizer Hotel-Revue, 14 September 1907.  “On Foreign Holidays: Tips to Travellers,” Home Notes, 6 June 1896.  Bilder aus dem Davoser Kurleben von einem alten Kurgaste (Davos: Hugo Richter, 1886), 15.

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throughout Switzerland – as he touted for new advertisers.69 The “Hôtelbibliothek” of the Kurhaus Tarasp, according to a guidebook in 1890, comprised newspapers and illustrated journals that supposedly provided sufficient distraction.70 Surely for this reason, by the mid-1890s the Swiss Société des Bibliothèques des Grands-Hôtels (S.B.G.H.) had been set up for the sale of books and maps in English, French, and German to places where there were no book shops nearby.71 Similarly, for over ten years from 1893 onwards the Basel bookseller Adolf Geering advertised in the Schweizer Hotel-Review that readers could purchase hotel libraries completely, cheaply, and from a catalogue for their guests.72 By 1903, Geering described his wares as reading material for leisure in German and undefined “foreign” languages. Occasionally, authors also took it upon themselves to advertise their own books in the classifieds of the main magazine for hotels directly, as recommendations for hotel libraries. C.H. Mann promoted his anthology of touring the natural landscape of, and humorous reflections on visiting, the canton of Bern in this way.73 The means through which hotel libraries were actually established, expanded, and organized are complex and must be deferred to another study in itself (and become one of a specifically bibliographical nature). At the level of advisory discourse, or rhetorical “best practice,” though, it is clear that reading was increasingly understood as being in service of the travel industry in a paradoxically abstract and substantial sense: as an imaginative, practical, and rooted enhancement of the experience of place. To that end, entries of the Schweizer Hotel-Revue in the early 1890s recommended two books to hoteliers for their guests. The first is in German, the second in English. In May 1892, the magazine reported that a “very pretty” volume – a “little literary work” – had been published by Hotel Axenstein: by the establishment’s founder, Ambros Eberle, and his sons.74 (Hotel Axenstein was a grand hotel that opened its doors in summer 1869, was visited by Queen Victoria on completion, and was extended within a few years already.)75 Some hotels kept printing presses on their premises for menus, posters, cookbooks, and apparently

 “Vermischte Anzeigen,” Börsenblatt für den deutschen Buchhandel, 17 March 1877, 1046. Note also that the Davoser Blätter included light, entertaining fiction about local hotel life to be read on holiday and written by those working in the industry: see the novella by Franz Gelbke, director of the Schweizerhof, in the issues from 19 November 1875 to 28 January 1876 (cited in Schenk, Geschichte des Kurortes Davos, 346).  Dr J. Pernisch, Das Kurhaus Tarasp und seine Umgebungen (Zurich: Orell Füssli, 1890), 22.  See reference in Karl Baedeker, Switzerland and the Adjacent Portions of Italy, Savoy, and Tyrol: Handbook for Travellers (Leipzig: Baedeker, 1895), 16th ed., xviii.  “Hotel-Bibliotheken,” Schweizer Hotel-Review, 1 April 1893 or 16 May 1903.  “Für Hotel-Bibliotheken,” Schweizer Hotel-Review, 19 August 1899.  “Literarisches,” Schweizer Hotel-Revue, 14 May 1892.  Flückiger-Seiler, Hotelträume, 148–49.

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also the potential to disseminate literary material of their own. Poesien und Bilder vom Axenstein nebst Brunnen und Umgebung (“Poetic Pieces and Pictures from Axenstein, together with Brunnen and the Surrounding Region”) seems to have been in circulation since the 1870s, and was said to comprise 70 illustrations, an anthology of poems and fragments from fiction, and a map of the area in one. The text was written by a local academic, Professor Eduard Osenbrüggen, and the book as a whole seems to have been intended as both a frame of practical reference for hotel guests and as a means of endowing their experience with the allure and prestige of the literary. The canonical author Meinrad Inglin, born into the hotel proprietor’s extended family in 1893, grew up playing and perhaps reading in the Hotel Axenstein;76 his own hotel novel in 1928, Grand Hotel Excelsior, mentioned earlier, is in one sense the heir to this more literal type of hotel writing. But Inglin’s famous work was not the only legacy of such ‘applied’ literature created in-house. In 1884, Osenbrüggen appears to have re-published the hotel anthology for broader audiences, now under a slightly expanded title to include the broader area and with the Zurich press J.A. Preuss.77 The latter version opens with a portrait of Ambros Eberle, who died in January 1883, and includes – like the original volume – poetry by the leading hotelier himself; it praises the library at Axenstein; and it signposts readers to a memorial stone to Schiller that overlooks the Vierwaldstättersee (Lake Lucerne) and which Ebele engraved to mark the centenary of the German poet’s birth.78 (Tourists from Germany had often held copies of Wilhelm Tell in their hands while on holiday in Switzerland, in the years shortly after the play’s publication, until Karl Baedeker embedded quotations from Schiller into his seminal travel guide in 1844, and the commemorative stone was unveiled in 1859.)79 Other hotels are also incorporated into Osenbrüggen’s narrative, such that the book becomes promotional literature for the region more widely – albeit with Hotel Axenstein positioned as the jewel in the crown. Intriguingly, an English translation of the book was also printed in 1884, with the same publisher, but the focus on the locality’s German literary heritage remained.80 The second volume of note is similar in significant respects, but was intended for English-speaking tourists from the outset. In May 1893, the Schweizer Hotel-Revue

 Beatrice von Matt, Meinrad Inglin. Eine Biographie (Zurich and Freiburg im Breisgau: Atlantis, 1976), 42–45.  Eduard Osenbrüggen, Poesien und Bilder von Axenstein am Vierwaldstätter See, nebst Brunnen und Umgebungen (Zurich: J.A. Preuss, 1884). Reprinted again in 1891. An earlier, perhaps the original version was published with Orell Füssli in 1876.  Osenbrüggen, Poesien und Bilder, passim, 26, and 50.  Uwe Hentschel, Mythos Schweiz. Zum deutschen literarischen Philhelvetismus zwischen 1700 und 1850 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002), 286.  Osenbrüggen, Poesies and Scenery of Axenstein.

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acknowledged the importance of hotel libraries in general (as were supposedly found in Swiss spa resorts especially), and it considered the question of how to cater for visitors from England and the United States.81 While the columnist refers to Tauchnitz English-language editions, much more space is devoted to an anthology published that year with the art department at Orell Füssli in Zurich: Switzerland Poetical and Pictorial. A collection of poems by English and North American authors about the Swiss countryside and its customs, the volume was compiled by Henry Eberli and it further comprised 87 illustrations.82 The book is described by the editors of the hotel magazine as an ideal “promotional object,” and a necessary addition to every Swiss hotel lounge, reading room, or library. Apparently, the hotel proprietors’ association had bought 100 copies at a discount. For Switzerland Poetical and Pictorial seeks to appeal, according to the unpaginated preface, “to both the lovers of English Poetry and the lovers of Switzerland!” Its poems range from the historical, since the eighteenth century, to the contemporary – though some of the selected poems by William Wordsworth are given new titles, and poets living in Switzerland at the time, such as John Addington Symonds, re-wrote the openings to their contributions.83 (Symonds later died that same year.) In any case, the anthology’s sections are organized by theme (politics and history), stock personae (guides, herdsman, and hunters), the sound of the Alphorn, flora (with an image of Edelweiss embossed on the book’s cover), daylight and the seasons, and the ‘Swiss’ Alps in general: a region that stretches all limits of plausibility, not only to the French Mont Blanc and the Italian lakes, but also – and with considerable poetic license – to Venice. While the literary cartography is sometimes imprecise, the collection’s poems that are organized by theme rouse stereotypically Swiss sentiments in the reader that were stock cultural topoi. The chapter on the Ranz des Vaches (a simple melody played by herdsmen to attract cattle) implies that Swiss nostalgia, or Heimweh, can be a sentiment expressed and felt by English and American poets and tourists. Indeed, an article in French during the First World War by Arnold Nunn – a founding member of the English Alpine Ski Club and later knighted in Britain for his contribution to Anglo-Swiss relations – moves from an invocation of the Alps as portrayed by Joseph Addington Symonds, to the claim that Englishmen can experience longing for the Alps in a way that those at home in Switzerland cannot. Nunn proceeds to express generational recollection of the vacations and holiday places of youth, predicting a “rude popularity” of Swiss tourism among English soldiers after the Great

 “Hotel-Bibliotheken,” Schweizer Hotel-Revue, 20 May 1893.  Henry Eberli, Switzerland: Pictorial and Poetical. A Collection of Poems by English and American Poets (Zurich: Art Institut Orell Fussli Publishers, 1893).  Eberli, Switzerland, 533 (ftn. 2) and 536 (ftn. 38).

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War.84 Note that the supposedly “Swiss sickness” (or “Schweizer Krankheit”) of nostalgia, triggered by the sound of cowbells, was first diagnosed by the doctor Johannes Hofer in 1688 on treating soldiers abroad.85 Above all, however, most of the poems and pictures in Switzerland Poetical and Pictorial are grouped by specific Swiss places rather than themes; locations that are geographically clearly delimited. The collection is primarily arranged by cantons, cities, or rivers and lakes in Switzerland. Most strikingly, the words and the images in the anthology tell two different stories about such settings – a binary opposition that holds irrespective of the various places described or depicted. While the literature evokes the Alpine countryside as an unspoiled idyll, the illustrations portray the development of the Alps for tourism. Although there is no mention of hotels within the literary landscape, the picture of Ryffelalp and Matterhorn shows an imposing, hotel-like building with flags and figures dotted about – a structure that looks up towards the mountainous summit.86 Further, images credited to Orell Füssli represent a steam train moving through the countryside and a steam boat on Lake Uri alongside sailing craft.87 The bucolic and commercial, the idealized and the more realistic, the literary and the visual appear side by side. Eberli’s anthology may have been an appropriate choice for Swiss hotels and associated businesses to commodify both belles lettres and landscape. But it was also true to its literary material, in two senses. First, Wordsworth had himself encountered a constructed image of Switzerland at the turn of the nineteenth century – and he contributed explicitly to tourist commodification, albeit of England via allusions to the Swiss Alps. Wordsworth is the most well represented poet in Eberli’s collection: all but one of the twelve chapters include, at the very least, one poem by him. While on a walking tour in Switzerland in 1790, Wordsworth was astounded not just by the landscape, but also by an intricate model of Lake Lucerne and the surrounding mountains, all to scale. The finely measured mountain-scape, created by the surveyor Franz Ludwig Pfyffer von Wyher, was on display to groups of tourists at the time. Wordsworth recalled the exhibition when writing an anonymous essay that accompanied a luxury edition of prints of the Northern English landscape in 1810, and which was expanded and published in his name as a Guide to the Lakes in later editions.88 Following the precedent of Thomas West’s Guide to

 “Les Anglais et la Suisse,” Schweizer Hotel-Revue, 4 November 1915.  For an English translation, see “Medical dissertation on nostalgia by Johannes Hofer, 1688,” trans. by Carolyn Kiser Anspach, Bulletin of the Institute of History of Medicine 2 (1934): 376–391.  Eberli, Switzerland, 115.  Eberli, Switzerland, 419 and 21.  William Wordsworth, A Guide through the District of the Lakes in the North of England, 5th ed. (Kendal: Hudson and Nicholson, 1835). For a description of Wordsworth’s encounter with

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the Lakes (1778), Wordsworth made analogies with Switzerland in order to convey the British countryside and its comparative distinctiveness for armchair and actual visitors. And so Switzerland Poetical and Pictorial is as commercial an application of literature as Wordsworth himself once engaged in. The second sense in which Eberli’s collection reflects a longstanding and, indeed, quite ordinary process of commercial place-making through literature – though creative prose and poetry may not be originally intended to be purposive – is that modern fiction about Switzerland had shaped the country’s image abroad for around a century and a half already, including for foreign tourism. Particularly Rousseau’s eighteenth-century novel Julie (1761) became a pan-European success story, and it shaped the popular conception of the Swiss landscape as a site of homeliness, aesthetic sensuality, and natural wonder: the name “Rousseau” and references to his life are invoked throughout the earliest modern travel guides to Switzerland, such as Johann Gottfried Ebel’s Anleitung auf die nützlichste und genussvollste Art in der Schweitz zu reisen (Guide to the most useful and enjoyable ways of travel in Switzerland) in 1793. As Nicola J. Watson notes, reading Rousseau engendered a form of (literary) tourism that was about the imagination of, and experience in, place, primarily as it was understood discursively.89 Such a sensibility for a vaguely cultural, if geographically specific landscape departed from the earlymodern or Enlightened practice of “visiting” particular localities and places connected with notable people, such as poets’ graves or dwellings.90 This geocultural shift is also reflected in nineteenth-century travelers becoming inspired to see the

Wyher’s model, see John Worthen, The Life of William Wordsworth (London: Wiley Blackwell, 2014), 58. See also Seán M. Williams, “Little Switzerlands: Alpine Kitsch in England,” Public Domain Review 2021, https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/little-switzerlands-alpine-kitsch-inengland.  Nicola J. Watson, “Rousseau on the Tourist Trail,” in Romanticism, Rousseau, Switzerland: New Prospects, ed. Angela Esterhammer, Diane Piccitto, and Patrick Vincent (Palgrave Macmillan: London, 2015), 84‒100. Rousseau himself objected to such a practice of contemporary ‘literatourism’: see Marcus Twellmann, “‘Ein ordentliches Meer’. Bodenseeliteratur und Tourismus,” Jahrbuch Franz-Michael-Felder-Archiv der Vorarlberger Landesbibliothek 21 (2020): 271–284.  Harald Hendrix, “From Early Modern to Romantic Literary Tourism: A Diachronical Perspective,” in Literary Tourism and Nineteenth-Century Culture, ed. Nicola J. Watson (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 13‒24. Giovanni Capecchi presents a typological overview of literary tourism, in relation to Italy and in Italian, in Sulle Orme Dei Poeti. Letteratura, turismo e promozione del territorio (Bologna: Pàtron Editore, 2019). Capecchi briefly confirms a historical distinction between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries on the one hand, and modern, “Romantic” literary tourism from around the start of nineteenth century on the other: see 24‒25. Recent work on literary tourism, especially within cultural geography, tends to neglect a historically grounded perspective. See, e.g., Ian Jenkins and Katrín Anna Lund, eds., Literary Tourism: Theories, Practice and Case Studies (Oxford: CABI, 2019).

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countryside of Wilhelm Tell. For Watson, such Romantic, ‘Rousseau-ean’ tourism soon became “Byronized.” Indeed, Switzerland Poetical and Pictorial includes many poems evoking Rousseau, about Wilhelm Tell and Schiller, and even describing Gibbon in Switzerland, along with the words of Byron. More broadly, the international reception of Julie as a novel led directly to Marie Antoinette building a stylized ‘Swiss’ cottage at Versailles in the eighteenth century, complete with cows and even a real-life dairy maid. In time, Julie also influenced what was known internationally as the ornate Swiss cottage, or chalet, in the long nineteenth century.91 The term “cottage,” too, recurs across Eberli’s anthology and a postcard image of “Cottages in Unterwalden” is reproduced with an accompanying poem.92 This Swiss romantic architectural style became not only fashionable for private buildings around the world, but also determined transnational hotel design – albeit with regional twists. In Norway, for instance, Swiss cottages were typically wooden structures; they were built for tourists in the form of Hotel Union Øye, constructed in 1891, and the Kviknes Hotel from 1913. The purposive curation of literature from or about Switzerland around 1900 thus turned out to be a use of the arts for promoting place to which they had already contributed, albeit unintentionally, in everyday processes of consumption, circulation, and reception for over a hundred years. Indeed, the historicity of literary images – however historically (in)accurate – appears necessary for the creation and promotion of place, rather than inventing new stories for a location. The literary anthologies in Switzerland that were specific to place, appealed to canonicity, and which were printed by or primarily for hotels, are comparable both to works that were found in, and to the ways of organizing, hotel libraries in North America. But Axenstein’s collection or Eberli’s volume from the first half of the 1890s appear to be very early and perhaps even among the earliest examples of a transnational trend. The Schweizer Hotel-Review reports on the first express train to Siberia in 1898, as the Trans-Siberian Railway was still under construction. In addition to a restaurant car and hot water, the luxurious hotel on rails provided travelers with a library that included “everything that has been published on Siberia in the last few years” – and doubled up as a salon and dining carriage, complete with piano, chess board, and apparatus for smoking.93 Yet sometimes reading in situ could also feel out of place: from Liebich’s survey it seems that library stock on ocean liners seldom included works ‘of the sea’ with appropriately maritime settings – not least because,

 More generally, see Irene Cieraad, “Bringing Nostalgia Home: Switzerland and the Swiss Chalet,” Architecture and Culture 6.2 (2018): 265‒288.  Eberli. Switzerland, 461.  “Der erste sibirische Schnellzug,” Schweizer Hotel-Revue, 9 April 1898.

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as one contemporary from 1911 conjectured, reading was a popular distraction from sea-sickness.94 To return to dry land, Lopez observes that the Library Catalogue of the American Hotel St. Francis classified holdings according to “Californiana” and “Miscellaneous” in 1904, with a foreword explaining the division.95 Californiana, like Eberli’s selected literature on the Swiss Alps, was similarly a category that pushed all plausible geographical boundaries. In fact, in the early twentieth century volumes such as Switzerland Poetical and Pictorial assumed renewed significance – and for undecided, potential tourists as much as for those already in the Alps. A correspondent in June 1927 issue of the Schweizer Hotel-Review reminds hotelier colleagues of Eberli’s anthology once again, describing it as “dignified, unobtrusive propaganda” that should not be forgotten. The journalist goes on to suggest sending the poetry collection to an agency in New York that represented the Swiss Federal Railways, the S.B.B.96 Thus, literature can immerse readers in a present, immediate sense of place and yet has longevity in doing so; at the same time, it can transport them to other, distant, and desirable worlds. In these two respects, literature is doubly ideal as promotional and place-making material – and was understood as such either side of 1900, and into the interwar years. The idea of guests reading commercially and geoculturally relevant literature in the hotel itself – reading on holiday, amid and about the literary setting – appears to have grown in importance for representatives of Swiss hospitality as the new century progressed. Or at least, the topic was talked about in the main trade magazine. In Schweizer Hotel-Review, the hotel library was presented tacitly as a possible means of place-making, and proprietors were advised on the specific books to buy. Building a library was no longer considered to be simply a response to consumer demand, but instead a method of cultivating an attachment to a touristscape. A contributor in 1907 criticizes the usual woeful collection in hotel libraries of family magazines, French and English novels from the middle of the previous century, fragments of Goethe’s and Schiller’s works, and Gothic fiction.97 He does not do so on account of their assumed unpopularity, but implicitly because of their lack of imaginative specificity (unless, of course, a book in hand is Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell). Instead, the hotelier emphasizes that old editions of Gottfried Keller, C. F. Meyer, and Carl Spitteler could be found fairly cheaply and that the works of such writers are essential stock for any Swiss hotel library. Only then does he mention affordable and respectable copies of German authors, namely Paul Heyse and Joseph Victor von Scheffel. The    

Cited in Liebich, “A Sea of Fiction” (2019), 19. Lopez, “Books and Beds,” 199‒200. “Deutsche Vekehrspropaganda,” Schweizer Hotel-Review, 9 June 1927. “Die Hotelbibliotheken,” Schweizer Hotel-Review, 14 September 1907.

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recommendation was at the very least enacted by the Zurich publishing house Rascher, which in 1913 brought out a series of editions for tourists of known and frequently heard Swiss literary names. According to the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, there was hardly a Swiss author to be seen in contemporary hotel libraries. Although the national newspaper welcomed the project and agreed that visitors to Switzerland wanted to read about the country’s culture in situ, curiously the columnist admits that in a hotel setting other – unnamed – factors and writers come into play than purely literary and aesthetic ones.98 In any case, between the lines in either article the message for hotel owners and their directors reads: a Swiss hotel library should house not only the intellectual ideas of the age. First and foremost, the cultural and geographical imaginary of Switzerland must dwell among the shelves. A further column of the Schweizer Hotel-Revue in May 1923 returned to the topic of purchasing library stock. Alongside anthologies of poetry, short stories, and novels, hoteliers should buy guidebooks, works of non-fiction about the area in which their hotel is situated, local history, legends of the Swiss mountains and valleys, and books on Swiss architecture and artists, among other subjects. Some titles should be ordered in English for “Anglo-Saxon” guests, too. Above all else, though, it is the literature of Swiss authors and the illustrations of Swiss artists that should be prioritized (regardless of whether they are Swiss-German or Swiss-French), since Switzerland holds its own within “world literature” (“Weltliteratur”).99 When in Switzerland, read and look at the canonical Swiss names. The correspondent gives an instructive example of a record card for keeping track of borrowed titles, and the entry reads: “Gottfried Keller, Der Landvogt von Greifensee” (The Governor of Greifensee). Within such articles from 1923 or 1907 (as outlined above), the branding rationale for a Swiss canon in a Swiss hotel is not expressed overtly and may be thought to be mere nationalist sentiment. But encountering Swiss authors and artists in situ increases the emotional, intellectual, and imaginative attachment to the countryside – and from the hoteliers’ perspective, it must have been thought to have increased guests’ loyalty to their location and thus to the hotel. That more general effect of greater experiential affinity, albeit without reference to place-making per se, is expressed in a column of the Schweizer HotelRevue from 1940: “an interesting, good book that is read in your establishment will forever remind the guest of your hotel.”100 The Neue Zürcher Zeitung agreed in 1943, criticizing the outdated souvenirs sold by hotels and especially the library collections found in them (which included light fiction, detective novels, and

 “Saisonchronik. Hotelbibliotheken,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 14 June 1913.  “Hotelbüchereien oder nicht?,” Schweizer Hotel-Review, 17 May 1923.  “Die Gäste-Bibliothek,” Schweizer Hotel-Revue, 5 September 1940.

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apparently the odd canonical Swiss author). Above all, the journalist called for the creation or re-organization of hotel libraries with the latest and respectable literature about Switzerland: general Swiss history, biographies of Swiss figures, works about Swiss memorials and cultural sights, and Swiss literary histories of the various national languages, for example.101 By the post-war period, hoteliers became even more explicit in the purpose of their reading recommendations within hotel libraries and – despite the later shifts in tourism and branding – they initially continued with pre-war place-making strategies, about which they were now more overt. In 1945, the hoteliers’ magazine suggested members stock their libraries with an anthology of foreigners’ historic perspectives on Switzerland, Augusta Volmar’s Die Schweiz im Spiegel der ausländischen Gäste (Switzerland as Seen by Foreign Visitors; Bern: Paul Haupt, 1945), in order to stimulate a renewed interest in Switzerland as a tourist destination from the past into the present.102 In 1947, a correspondent further advised hotel owners and managers to clear out older confessional works and now outdated nineteenth-century light fiction, and to purchase contemporary entertaining stories instead – as well as detective novels for the English guests. Above all, though, Swiss works by Gotthelf, Keller, and Meyer, alongside literature about the locality, should take pride of place on the shelves – because the more a visitor settles into a place, the more interested they apparently become in reading about it.103 If Switzerland was avant-garde in conceptualizing hotel anthologies and libraries for place-making and literary branding in its advice for hoteliers (even if the country was not necessarily in the vanguard of hotel libraries in and of themselves), by the 1930s literature in hotels around the world was all the more about location, location, location. For example, the autumn 1931 issue of an in-house hotel magazine in the U.S., the Hotel Saranac Quarterly, printed an article about Robert Louis Stevenson having once visited the locality – and it was written by someone connected to a museum that had been set up nearby, in the house Stevenson had stayed in.104 What is more, in 1934 the copy writer W.G. Lockett published the illustrated Robert Louis Stevenson at Davos, albeit in London with Hurst & Blackett. (His previous works included an essay on Symonds and the Alps in the Swiss Travel Almanac, Summer Season 1923, published by the Swiss Tourist Information Office and printed in Zurich and Lausanne.)105 There are many such examples of books that bound together tourist places and authors or works from

    

“Das Buch im Hotel,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 16 July 1943. “Büchertisch,” Schweizer Hotel-Revue, 13 December 1945. “Die Hotel-Bibliothek,” Schweizer Hotel-Revue, 27 March 1947. Nash, “The North American Hotel,” 131‒132. Cited in “Literatur,” Schweizer Hotel-Revue, 10 May 1923.

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the early decades of the twentieth century – and which were aimed at travelers worldwide. But the reading materials available in Swiss hotels appear to constitute paradigmatic cases in point. Their prominent position within this industry practice was surely because Swiss Alpine tourism was itself largely founded on a Romantic, literary, Rousseau-like image, and on its reception in German and English – and to a lesser extent French – literature that was read by German, English-speaking, and some French tourists.

Setting the scene A sense of place that was strengthened by the classics of Swiss literature – especially those books that were translated into other European languages, and which secured the status of being household names internationally – and literature in English about Switzerland became an implicit branding strategy that spread to other branches of the hospitality sector. In most cases, the reading lists for hoteliers and holiday makers matched the literary canon, whether in German or English. But there were gaps. As an ode to the Swiss Alps, Heidi – Johanna Spyri’s children’s novel in two volumes, from 1880‒1881 – was soon translated into French and English on publication in German. The story hints at the presence of a domestic hotel industry in the late nineteenth century: Aunt Dete works as a chambermaid “in a large hotel” in Bad Ragaz.106 Contrary to what we might expect, however, the Schweizer HotelRevue does not once recommend this tale to hotel proprietors and managers, or their guests, or for their children – notwithstanding supposedly child-friendly hotels. Nor do hotel owners mention editions suitable for hotel libraries. If Heidi seems inseparable from our tourist image of the Alps today, it is surprising that it was hardly applied to a commercial agenda at the turn of the twentieth century. There appears to have been just one exception to the rule. Four weekly issues of the trade magazine Schweizer Hotel-Revue from 25 March 1937 onwards ran an advertisement for a new product by the German food manufacturer, Knorr: “Heidi Soup” (“Heidi-Suppe”). There is an ironic dimension to the advertised mixture, given its creation by a German firm and the opposition between the Swiss mountains and industrial Frankfurt in Spyri’s novel (even if Knorr’s powdered soups were not necessarily made in Germany, but in Northern Italy). Nevertheless, the literary-inspired product is presented with a happy, naïve, and idyllic image of the Swiss Alps. The

 Johanna Spyri, Heidi’s Lehr- und Wanderjahre (Gotha: Friedrich Perthes, 1880), 5; Heidi: Her Years of Wandering and Learning, trans. by Louise Brooks (Boston: Cupples, Upham & Co., 1885), 9‒10.

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advertisement and its place of publication suggest that guests would be able to taste their holiday location and identify with it at the level of the (literary) image and gustatory imagination – all while associating literature and food with the site of consumption: a Swiss hotel’s dining room, perhaps with an Alpine view. Here, the branding of place plays on the stock geocultural imaginary, appropriating it for an embodied experience of Switzerland that is framed in ‘literary’ terms, broadly understood. This seemingly exceptional invocation of Heidi for branding purposes within the hotel sector – a rare instance between the original publication of the story and the Second World War – ‘sets the scene’ for uses of literature in the Swiss tourist industry in two respects. First, like the other examples discussed throughout this essay, appropriating the literary within tourist infrastructure evoked a sense of ‘Swissness’ specifically for visitors staying in, or being persuaded to visit, Switzerland; it worked in service of an authentic experience of place. Switzerland seems to have led the way in such a practical understanding of hotel literature. Contemporary luxury hotels in the USA, by contrast – at least according to one letter printed in the Schweizer Hotel-Revue – more conventionally offered their discerning guests canonical works from a generically Anglophone canon: namely Shakespeare and Oscar Wilde, regardless of the location in which the visitor resided.107 The Swiss hoteliers’ association repeatedly implied that literary recommendations should either be by Swiss authors, or about Switzerland, wherever books were under discussion. In this regard, Swiss hospitality was an early example of an emergent international business practice. The second respect in which Knorr’s “Heidi Soup” sets the scene is that it was a prelude to later developments, preparing the ground for branding campaigns and product lines that were to come. A nostalgia or Heimweh that drove tourists to the Swiss Alps, among other places, went mainstream in the post-war cultural imaginary of the mid and late twentieth century, and was located in fantasies of childhood especially. These intersected with more prosaic, structural changes to contemporary holiday-making. Although children had long been taken on holiday (indeed, traditionally Switzerland was seen as family friendly), after the Second World War children, as emergent consumers, themselves influenced the choice of destination for the annual family holiday. Californian Disneyland opened in 1955; in 1971, Walt Disney World was launched as a park in Orlando, to global fanfare. At the end of that decade, UNESCO named 1979 “the year of the child.” Capitalizing on Heidi in the Swiss Alps, as a child character of children’s literature, has a particular mid- to latetwentieth century history.

 “Hotelbüchereien oder nicht?,” Schweizer Hotel-Review, 31 May 1923.

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More importantly, the ‘Heidi-fication’ of Swiss touristscapes is also a media and institutional story. By the mid-1970s, Heidi had gone global on children’s television, as the Japanese anime series Heidi, Girl of the Alps (1974) was dubbed and subtitled around the world. At the same time, Switzerland needed to (re-)brand itself for the summer season – given the country’s success in attracting skiers and winter tourism, but its own lack of coastline for the warmer months. Thus the marketing director for St. Moritz saw the potential of the label Heidiland for an area in the well-developed Upper Engadine, which was actually miles and miles away from where Spyri set her novel in Maienfeld. In July 1976, three Spanish children and their families won a trip to St. Moritz for eight days in a competition organized by the Central Swiss Tourist Board (Schweizerische Verkehrszentrale), together with Swiss Air and a Spanish milk company, which was themed around Heidi dairy products and connected to the Spanish version of the Japanese animated television series.108 The Swiss national government also offered diplomatic support in promoting Heidi abroad, encouraging people to visit her homeland: when in 1978 the Embassy of Switzerland in Argentina co-hosted a series of public exhibitions with representatives of the tourist industry, one in Buenos Aires was titled “the story behind Heidi.”109 It was in the 1970s, then, that Swiss tourist organizations, government departments, and businesses first seized on Heidi (or indeed any literary character) in a remarkably planned and co-ordinated way: their publicity efforts became less trends of similar initiatives promoted by industry representatives as best practice and instead top-down policies – even with legal protection, since Switzerland’s Heidiland was coined and registered as a trademark in advance of the famous novel’s centenary. From this time onwards, advertising and literary place-making became institutionalized on a regional and a national level. In due course, the shift spilled over into the domestic sphere, influencing logos and names for food products sold in Swiss supermarkets, or the ways in which local places situated themselves within Switzerland. The ‘Heidification’ of the Swiss cultural landscape thereby turned into a paradigmatic example, once again: not only of the early sort of literary branding that continues into the present day,110 but also of national branding in a post-war period of emergent

 “Heidi Ole,” Die Schweiz/Suisse/Svizzera/Switzerland: offizielle Reisezeitschrift der Schweiz 9 (1976): 54.  Hotel-Review, 30. November 1978, 5.  For further examples of nineteenth- or turn-of-the-century century, now classic children’s stories that have been illustrated and televised and which are used for tourism and place-making at the time of writing, compare the recent refurbishment of The Randolph in Oxford, where the hotel’s dining room is themed as The Alice in homage to the Oxford don Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). At Rosewood London, meanwhile, guests over 18 can drink a cocktail named

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neoliberalism alongside nostalgia, and of child readers – or rather, viewers – who act as consumers like their adult parents.111 For the historical period considered in the present chapter, however, it suffices to say that tourist infrastructure and Swiss literature did not yet work hand in glove, but they were similarly ‘put to work’ in order to attract and create experiences for foreign visitors in a transformational age for the hospitality sector: from the late nineteenth century, through to the close of the interwar years. To date, there have been many empirical histories of the hotel industry at that time and of its relationship to the technical and economic developments of specific regions, or to Switzerland as a whole.112 Literary approaches to the ‘hotel novel’ in the same era are equally common. But here I hope to have demonstrated that historical, commercial applications of literature are also remarkable and were part of the same ‘real-world’ business contexts as hotel building and development of the Swiss landscape. It is only in recent scholarship on tourism today that perceived narrative links, shaped by advertising and mass-media storytelling, have been shown scientifically to increase either personal attachment or positive affects connected to place among potential visitors. Nowadays we know explicitly that evoking canonical or pop cultural fictional worlds within advertising motivates travel to particular destinations, not least to the Swiss Alps.113 But Swiss hoteliers at the turn of the twentieth century tacitly understood such consumer behavior, as they built, landscaped, and branded their establishments in a competitive international environment – with bricks and books.

after the children’s book series Mary Poppins that began in 1934 and was made into a Disney film three decades later; those who check in to the hotel Cliveden House, on the banks of the Thames, are offered copies of Kenneth Graeme’s The Wind in the Willows (1908) for purchase. There have been initiatives in the English Lake District to promote Beatrix Potter and marketing by Canadian firms selling an image of the land of Anne of Green Gables (1908). See also Lincoln Geraghty, “Destination Antwerp! Fan Tourism and the Transcultural Heritage of A Dog of Flanders,” Humanities 8 (2011). None of these examples, however, are as coordinated as the original Swiss case.  For a definition of ‘national branding’, see Melissa Aronczyk, Branding the Nation: The Global Business of National Identity (New York: Oxford UP, 2013). Aronczyk distinguishes the phenomenon typologically from corporate public relations campaigns, tourism initiatives, and broader promotional strategies; national branding makes an understanding of national culture marketable, and a competitive aspect of national productivity – and so it shapes a nation’s self-image.  E.g., Cédric Humair, “The hotel industry and its importance in the technical and economic development of a region: the Lake Geneva case (1852–1914),” Journal of Tourism History 3.3 (2011): 237‒265.  See Sameer Hosany, Daniela Buzova, and Silvia Sanz-Blas, “The Influence of Place Attachment, Ad-Evoked Positive Affect, and Motivation on Intention to Visit: Imagination Proclivity as a Moderator,” Journal of Travel Research 59.3 (2020): 477‒495, which takes Heidi and the Swiss Alps as a representative example (mediated by the animated series, as televised in Spain).

Maria Buck

Constructing the Alps: Perspectives on the Perception of the Alps by the Tyrolean Anti-Transit Movement Introduction When the Inntal and Brenner highways, which pass through the Austrian province of Tyrol from Kufstein to the Brenner Pass, became continuously more trafficable for the first time in the early 1970s, people expressed their excitement in a variety of ways.1 For example, a travel guide enthusiastically described the sights along the route The crossing of the Alps with a modern highway is a technical masterpiece of road construction that is so far unique in the world. For the first time, a mighty mountain wall [. . .] has been overcome and a fast, safe, and convenient connection between the two economic areas north and south of the barrier has been created.2

Only ten years later, the discourse sounded quite different: nothing was left of the euphoria. Instead of the promise of an economically prosperous future and the benefit for the landscape through infrastructural development, the focus had shifted to the destruction of the alpine region by roads: Road construction in the Alps – this is one of the crucial issues for the survival of this environment. On the one hand, too many asphalt roads are already cutting apart and fragmenting the valleys and mountains [. . .]. On the other hand, however, the interest of the economy and many communities in these ‘lifelines’ is far too great to be able to put an end to it.3

The demand for growing transport capacities resulted in greater need for the transformation of the Alpine landscape: the construction of roads, tunnels and protective barriers highlighted the tangible material effects of transit traffic. Such interventions in a landscape always lead to public disputes. According to the

 The paper was completed as part of the FWF-DACH project “Issues with Europa. A Network Analysis of the German-speaking Alpine Conservation Movement (1975‒2005),” which is funded by the FWF and based at the Universities of Innsbruck, Basel, and Munich.  Hermann Frass, Über die Alpen in den Süden auf der ersten Gebirgsautobahn der Welt (Bozen: Manfrini, 1976), 3.  Michael Heinrich, Sind die Alpen noch zu retten? Die Zerstörung eines Lebensraumes (Munich: Heyne, 1988), 127. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111150536-004

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environmental historian Christian Pfister, these reflect “the changes and shifts in spiritual and cultural needs and values.”4 In Tyrol, the discussion was mainly triggered by transalpine transit traffic, which not only caused visible changes in the Alpine landscape, but also threatened the Alpine region and its inhabitants through noise and air pollution, forest dieback, and high ozone levels. Although these environmental problems were not specific to the Alps, the consequences were particularly evident due to the Alps’ geographical and topographical conditions. The increasing pressure of environmental problems was accompanied by a vehement discourse amongst committed citizens. As claimed in an Austrian radio show in 1983, the Alps were on the verge of ruin, and it would hardly be long before the collapse of the complex, highly fragile natural Alpine environment.5 The causes were easy to identify: the unlimited expansion of traffic routes would lead to serious changes in the economic structure of the Alps and therefore also to the transformation of the natural landscape. Thus, from the beginning of the 1980s, an active resistance movement arose in Tyrol against the constant increase in transit traffic and its effects. This was primarily driven by initiatives by local inhabitants who were exposed to such effects – as outlined in more detail below. The actions and discussions also made the activists think about the future development of the Alpine region: given the ecological and social burdens they faced, the idea of a romanticized, idyllic mountain region seemed antiquated to activists.6 Instead, in the numerous publications and manifestos, in interviews and in speeches during protest events, they created – in some cases more or less explicitly – new and multifaceted images of the Alps. Against this backdrop, this chapter asks about the images of the Alps that were constructed in the discourses of the Alpine environmentalists in Tyrol. Subsequently, the question arises to what extent these images of the Alps in turn shaped the actions of the activists. I argue that the creation of specific images of the Alps – what I call the ‘construction’ of the Alps – not only served as an identificatory factor for the movement, but that these perspectives on the Alps also provided legitimation for protest against the constantly increasing transit traffic. The discursive appropriation of the

 Christian Pfister, “Landschaftsveränderung und Identitätsverlust: Akzentverschiebungen in der Modernisierungskritik von der Jahrhundertwende bis um 1970,” Traverse. Zeitschrift für Geschichte = Revue d’histoire 4 (1997): 49.  Von Tag zu Tag. Rettet die Alpen, Ö1-Radio Show, 31 October 1983.  Matthias Stremlow, “Naturschauspiel, Erlebniskulisse oder Modellregion Europas? Gesellschaftliche Alpenbilder im Wandel,” in Schöne neue Alpen. Eine Ortsbesichtigung, ed. Sylvia Hamberger, Oswald Baumeister, Rudi Erlacher, and Wolfgang Zängl (Munich: Raben, 1998), 131 and 133.

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Alpine environment by the activists also involved a negotiation of demands for power and sovereignty of interpretation. My approach combines concepts from cultural and environmental history with aspects from cultural studies in order to create a differentiated and multi–layered picture of the construction of the Alps by the actors of the Tyrolean transit resistance movement. The analysis is based on a concept of landscape that emphasizes the role of the landscape in creating identity. I deploy a cultural history approach, because “the definition of nature is not self–evident but is socially constructed through certain modes of perception and attributions of meaning.”7 Based on the example of the anti-transit movement in Tyrol, this study shows how a history of the perception of the landscape, in this case the Alpine landscape, must incorporate the context of cultural norms and values in a profitable way. Following cultural history premises, it is necessary to describe what has been thought and known about the Alps.8 In doing so, I understand the Alps as an imagined space and follow the hypothesis that Alpine space is constantly exposed to processes of discursive negotiation. Thus, an exact definition of the Alps is not necessary for my discussion, and I therefore use a discursive concept of Alpine space; such an approach avoids normativity and demonstrates how the Alps can more usefully be seen as a cultural product instead.9

Protest against transalpine transit traffic in Tyrol The history of transit resistance in Tyrol is above all a history of protest. Therefore, this chapter follows Dieter Rucht’s definition of protest as “collective, public action by non-governmental agencies that expresses criticism or dissent and is linked to the formulation of a social or political concern.”10 The roots of transit resistance in the region date back to the post–war period, when Tyrol ambitiously developed its transalpine road network. When the highway between Kufstein and the Brenner Pass finally became passable year–round in 1975, this transit route connected the important economic centers of the European North with those of

 Achim Landwehr and Stefanie Stockhorst, Einführung in die Europäische Kulturgeschichte (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2004), 101.  Landwehr and Stockhorst, Einführung, 100.  Romed Aschwanden, Politisierung der Alpen. Regional- und Umweltbewegungen im Kontext der Europäischen Integration (Cologne: Böhlau, 2021), 15.  Dieter Rucht, “Protest und Protestereignisanalyse: Einleitende Bemerkungen,” in Protest in der Bundesrepublik. Strukturen und Entwicklungen, ed. Dieter Rucht (Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 2001), 19.

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the South. But starting in the 1980s, the Tyrolean government’s post-war slogan traffic is life faced increasing pressure.11 The consequences resulting from transit traffic, such as noise and pollution, which had a negative impact on the health of local inhabitants and the environment, were no longer considered acceptable. This was followed by a founding wave of citizens’ initiatives in the communities along the Inntal and Brenner highways. The foundation of citizens’ initiatives opposing transit traffic coincided with a discussion about forest dieback.12 Particularly in the Alpine region, where forests fulfill important protective functions, the forest condition report of the Tyrolean Forestry Department in 1984 caused an outcry, as it identified significantly higher levels of forest damage along the Inntal–Brenner highway transit route. It resulted in a broad social debate on air quality and forest dieback in Tyrol and was quickly linked to the constant increase in freight transit traffic.13 Scientific studies measured the pollution caused by road traffic, noise, and emissions for the first time and thus objectified the subjective experiences of the inhabitants that had been observed previously: the limit values for air pollutants were regularly exceeded along the Inntal and Brenner highways, heavy metals contaminated the soil and lead was even detected in breast milk.14 From the 1980s to the present day, against the background of this external, anthropogenic pressure on the Alps and the devastating consequences for people and nature, activists have expressed their annoyance in frequent, sometimes spectacular protest actions. The numerous blockades of the Inntal and Brenner highways were one of the most effective forms of action in terms of media coverage.

 Martin Achrainer and Niko Hofinger, “Politik nach ‘Tiroler Art – ein Dreiklang aus Fleiß, Tüchtigkeit und Zukunftsglaube’. Anmerkungen, Anekdoten und Analysen zum politischen System Tirols 1945‒1999,” in Tirol. “Land im Gebirge”: Zwischen Tradition und Moderne, ed. Michael Gehler (Vienna/Cologne/Weimar: Böhlau, 1999), 94.  Martin Schmid and Ortrun Veichtlbauer, Vom Naturschutz zur Ökologiebewegung. Umweltgeschichte Österreichs in der Zweiten Republik (Innsbruck: Studien, 2006), 40; Volkmar Lauber, “Geschichte der Politik zur Umwelt in der Zweiten Republik. Vom Nachzügler zum Vorreiter – und zurück?,” in Umwelt-Geschichte. Arbeitsfelder, Forschungsansätze, Perspektiven, ed. Sylvia Hahn and Reinhold Reith (Vienna: Oldenbourg, 2001), 184.  Christa Udschi, “Zur Diskussion über die Blockade,” Lebensraum Tirol Vol. 2 (1987): 5; Karl Ott, “Alpenquerender Transit aus der Sicht der Tiroler Verkehrsplanung,” in Alpenquerender Transitverkehr aus regionaler und überregionaler Sicht. Rechtliche, technische und wirtschaftliche Problemlagen, ed. Waldemar Hummer (Vienna/Cologne/Weimar: Böhlau,1993), 106 and 107.  Walter Tipotsch, “Verkehr als krankmachender Faktor,” Lebensraum Tirol Vol. 2 (1987): 9; Ö1 Mittagsjournal, “Zustand der heimischen Wälder,” 11 August 1989; Jürgen Gaulke, “Blei in der Bergluft. Österreich wehrt sich gegen den Lastwagen-Transit,” Die Zeit, 9 June 1989, 27.

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The protesters represented a socially and politically heterogeneous group.15 Although the citizens’ initiatives themselves consisted primarily of locals, they were supported by numerous Tyrolean municipalities, environmental associations, the Austrian medical association, citizens’ initiatives, the Austrian Alpine Club, and the Catholic Family Association. Thus, they represented a broad range of the population, a fact that later helped them to generate many supporters among the public. What united participants was the reason for joining these groups: they could not accept bearing the burdens resulting from transit any longer and decided to become involved themselves. On the party-political level, the (Austrian) Greens proved to be supporters, but the initiatives kept a certain distance because they attached importance to political neutrality: they were motivated by civic commitment and not political calculation. It should also be noted that the activists all originated from the Alpine region itself and thus had a direct, everyday connection to the affected environment and to the transit problem. This distinguishes the Alpine environmentalists involved in transit resistance from earlier movements that aimed at protecting the Alps at a fundamental level. Until the mid–twentieth century, it was mainly urban dwellers who were concerned about and committed to Alpine areas. Now, however, it was the inhabitants of the Alps themselves who advocated for the interests of the Alpine environment according to their own needs.16 This was not just a Tyrolean phenomenon, but rather something that can be observed throughout the entire Alpine region from the 1970s onward. Nor has resistance to transit traffic been an exclusively Tyrolean affair; citizens’ initiatives also arose along other transit routes in the Alps. Similar movements can be identified in Austria in Salzburg, Carinthia, and outside of Austria in South Tyrol, and in Swiss and French Alpine regions. Form an analytic point of view, the transit protests in Tyrol join a list of environmental protests. Activists followed the principle of human and nature as the focus of political action. The protests addressed a heterogeneous bundle of measures on traffic restrictions.17 The aim was not only to protect Alpine living and economic

 Romed Aschwanden, Maria Buck, and Kira J. Schmidt, “Dicke Luft in den Alpen. Widerstand gegen den Transitverkehr in Tirol und der Schweiz,” Histoire des Alpes – Storia delle Alpi – Geschichte der Alpen Vol. 27 (2022), 231‒246; Hubert Sickinger and Richard Hussl, Transit-Saga: Bürgerwiderstand am “Auspuff Europas” (Thaur and Vienna: Kulturverlag, 1993), 64; Transitforum Austria-Tirol, Tatort Brenner – Band 1: Über Demokratie und Widerstand, über Wahlversprechen und Wahlbetrug. Am Beispiel Alpentransit: Gnadenlos verraten und Verkauft (1999), 45.  Romed Aschwanden, Maria Buck, Patrick Kupper, and Kira J. Schmidt. “Moving Mountains: The Protection of the Alps,” in Greening Europe. Environmental Protection in the Long Twentieth Century (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2021), 227.  Aschwanden, Buck, and Schmidt, “Dicke Luft in den Alpen.”

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areas, but also to stabilize the Alps as a sensitive ecosystem and preserve them as an important central European leisure destination.18

Alpine landscape and identity The Alps themselves were central to the Alpine environmentalists, both on a political and symbolic level. They represented a space of action and a frame of reference to which the activists were personally and emotionally attached. The Alpine landscape, after all, shapes the appearance of Tyrol; the mountains form a uniquely characteristic aspect of the landscape.19 The concept of landscape applied here – and elsewhere in this volume – means that the Alps are subject to a specific process of transformation and exchange. The Alpine landscape should not to be understood as a naturally given constant, but is exposed to permanent discursive and physical changes, resulting from both frequently varying conceptual images and descriptions, as well as to human interventions.20 Romed Aschwanden regards the Alps primarily as a discursive construct of which the exact boundaries are blurred, but which nevertheless have an actual physical substance.21 Bernhard Tschofen argues for landscape “to be understood as something that is not simply given or ‘natural’, but wants to be understood as an open social construction.”22 What Tschofen formulates for the landscape in general is especially true for the Alps. These constructions express themselves on the one hand in mental images, on the other hand in concrete practices, that materialize the former. Landscape is thus not a state of nature, but quite the contrary: it is a constructed and human-shaped nature that has been transformed by cultivation.23  Fritz Gurgiser, “Transportwiderstände – der Widerstand im Alpenraum,” in Mit der Natur rechnen, Internationale Alpentransit-Tagung, 21. und 22. Februar 1997, Kongresshaus Innsbruck, ed. Transitforum Austria Tirol [no further information].  Ulrich Leitner, “Berg – Tirols poetischer Ort. Ein Modell zum Raum- und Landschaftsbezug der Identität,” in Berg & Leute. Tirol als Landschaft und Identität, ed. Ulrich Leitner (Innsbruck: Innsbruck UP, 2014), 57.  Ulrike Jureit, Das Ordnen von Räumen. Territorien und Lebensraum im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2012), 12.  Aschwanden, Politisierung der Alpen, 16.  Bernhard Tschofen, “Was ist Landschaft? Plädoyer für Konzepte jenseits der Anschauung,” in Entdeckungen der Landschaft. Raum und Kultur in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Michael Kasper, Martin Korenjak, Robert Rollinger, and Andreas Rudigier (Vienna/Cologne/Weimar: Böhlau, 2017), 17.  Aurel Schmidt, Die Alpen – schleichende Zerstörung eines Mythos (Zurich: Benzinger, 1990), 270.

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As landscape is constructed, it plays a central role in the processing of identity and alterity. In this context, I follow Georg Kreis, who argues that identity is a relatively stable, meaningful mental construct that an individual or group acquires from the environment.24 The Alpine landscape served as an element of orientation for the Alpine environmentalists and had an identity-shaping effect. In this context, we can speak of a landscape-related identity25 or place identity.26 This concept is dedicated to the identificatory aspect of landscape; it is about “the personal and emotional commitment of people to particular places or areas.”27 In essence, bonds create frameworks of reference in which complex psychosocial processes operate. These refer to a physical-material world, but do not completely merge into it. Thus, it is about the “cognitive-emotional representation of spatial objects (places) in the consciousness of an individual or in the collective judgment of a group.”28 Experiences and the history of a society might also play a role here. A Swiss study on Alpine landscape from 2007 also referred to the identificatory dimension of landscape and how it evokes feelings of belonging.29 Furthermore, Roger Sablonier emphasizes that the struggle with one’s own identity plays a crucial role within the population of the Alpine region. He justifies this with the pressure for acculturation that is felt particularly strongly from outside and inside – e.g., through tourist and energy industry interests.30 In the context of the commitment of Alpine environmentalists, who were at the same time citizens of the Alpine region and thus experienced the landscape of the Alps as their everyday environment, this sense of identity evoked by the landscape can be observed.31 It should be mentioned that, in addition to their identity-

 Georg Kreis, Die Schweiz unterwegs. Schlussbericht des NFP 21 Kulturelle “Vielfalt und nationale Identität” (Basel: Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1993), 25 and 200.  Leitner, “Berg – Tirols poetischer Ort,” 49.  Peter Weichhart, Christine Weiske, and Benno Werlen, Place Identity und Images. Das Beispiel Eisenhüttenstadt (Vienna: Institut für Geographie und Regionalforschung der Universität Wien, 2006), 21.  Weichert, Weiske and Werlen, Place Identity und Images, 21.  Weichert, Weiske and Werlen, Place Identity und Images, 33.  In total, six dimensions of landscape are defined in the study: namely physical, sensual, aesthetic, identificatory, political, economic, and ecological dimensions. Norman Backhaus, Claude Reichler, and Matthias Stremlow, Ein Landschaftsmodell für den Alpenraum. Erkenntnisse aus einem schweizerischen Forschungsprogramm, Histoire des Alpes – Storia delle Alpi – Geschichte der Alpen Vol. 12 (2007): 315 and 316.  Roger Sablonier, “Alpenforschung aus Sicht des Historikers,” Histoire des Alpes – Storia delle Alpi – Geschichte der Alpen Vol. 1 (1996): 59.  Joachim Radkau, “Germany as a Focus of European ‘Particularities’ in Environmental History,” in Germany’s Nature. Cultural Landscapes and Environmental History, ed. Thomas Lekan and Thomas Zeller (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 2005), 18.

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forming function as a landscape, the Alps also matter in the sense of a natural environment that serves as an everyday habitat of experience for the actors: due to the special topography of the Alps, the distribution of noise and pollution in narrow valleys differs considerably from that in the lowlands. But also, the awareness of the Alpine population of the significance of an intact, protective forest – which has been endangered by the pollution resulting from traffic – against erosion, mudflows, and avalanches testifies to traditional knowledge and inherited experiences in everyday life in the Alps. The demand for increasing transport capacities for goods in transit, however, has had an influence on the transformation of the Alpine landscape: the construction of roads, tunnels, and protective barriers exposed the physical effects of transit traffic. The location of the Alpine environmentalists’ sphere of activism, Alpine space itself, thus also affects the object of resistance – transit traffic – as well as the actors’ agency and motives. As such, Tim Ingold’s finding regarding landscapes can be validated in this example: “Landscapes take on meanings and appearances in relation to people, and people develop skills, knowledge and identities in relation to the landscape in which they find themselves.”32 As humans and landscape shape each other reciprocally, we can talk about a material hermeneutics: things and places are involved in the construction of knowledge.

Perceptions of the Alps from the perspective of Alpine environmentalists (1980–2000) Having addressed the theoretical concept of (Alpine) landscape and identity in the previous section, I now turn to the activists’ ambivalent images of the Alps. In my analysis, I focus primarily on three central dimensions of Alpine imagery: the Alps as a living, economic, and leisure space for Alpine dwellers; the Alps as a site of heritage; and the Alps as a model for other mountain regions. The boundaries drawn here for the benefit of analytical clarity are, of course, fluid, with the individual images linking to or merging into one another.33 For the Alpine environmentalists in Tyrol, the Alps take on a variety of functions: for example, the (Austrian) Alps

 Tim Ingold, Being Alive. Essay on Movement, Knowledge and Description (London: Routledge, 2011), 129.  These further images of the Alps are analyzed in the author’s ongoing dissertation project, with the working title “For a new political culture in the Alps. Transit Resistance and Alpine Conservation in Austria (1975‒2005).”

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served as a unique European cultural and natural area, as well as a unique living, economic, and leisure area in the middle of the Alpine arc.34 This image of the Alps can be found in almost every publication or speech by the activists (as outlined above). The individual elements are related to each other. For example, activists point out that environmental protection only works together with a growing local economy and vice versa.35 They keep reiterating that in the Alpine region only an extremely limited area can be fit for habitation; everyday life and work take place in the same small subset of space of the area as a whole, since mountain tops and lakes, for instance, cannot be the site of saw mills, orchards, villages, etc. Moreover, available space is further restricted by the spatial demands of traffic corridors and tourist facilities. In the opinion of the activists, the resulting conflicts of use must be decided in the interest of the population living in that area, because only in this way can a future life in this space be possible. For the activists, living in the Alps is seen as a privilege with rights and duties. Above all, in their view, these functions of Alpine space had to be preserved, protected and defended.36 The actors of the transit resistance movement demanded that the development of Alpine space should be shaped in a way that would allow a socially, economically, and culturally sustainable future for the local population without threatening or even destroying the ecological needs of the natural Alpine environment, including the protective function of the forest, as outlined above.37 Although the Alpine environmentalists declared the Alps to be a common good, they recognized that the commitment of the local population was needed to protect this fragile ecosystem from extra-Alpine demands. Here, the land-use conflicts regarding Alpine space, which were negotiated in the protests against transit traffic, become apparent once again: analytically, these are competing consumer claims to a collective good.38 A collective good is characterized by the fact that it is free of charge

 Transitforum Austria Tirol, Brennerbasistunnel. Der Generationenverrat (Innsbruck: 2007), accessed 12 April 2021, https://www.transitforum.at/pdf/20070409BrennerMemo.pdf, 3.  Fritz Gurgiser, “Begrüßung,” in Mit der Natur rechnen, Internationale Alpentransit-Tagung, 21. und 22. Februar 1997, Kongresshaus Innsbruck, ed. Transitforum Austria Tirol [no further information], 3.  Gurgiser, “Begrüßung,” 4.  Walter Danz, Leitbild für eine Alpenkonvention (Vaduz: Internationale Alpenschutzkommission CIPRA, 1989), 8.  Alexander Badenoch and Andreas Fickers, Materializing Europe. Transnational Infrastructures and the Project of Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Paul Messerli and HansRudolf Egli, “Alpen und Verkehr – ein Spannungsfeld zwischen Bedrohung und Überlebensnotwendigkeit,” in Geographische Rundschau Vol. 7–8 (2015): 56.

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and, in general, does not exclude any actors from its use.39 A dilemma arises from the fact that many consumers aim to utilize few resources. In the case of the transit resistance, it relates to the extra-Alpine – defined by the activists as ‘European’ – demands in the field of transport and the intra-Alpine needs for protection. Closely related to this is the idea of empowerment and self-governance of the Alpine territories by the local communities living there. The environmentalists saw themselves as lawyers of the Alpine region, since they argued that its needs could only be adequately addressed by inner-Alpine articulation. For example, the Transitforum Austria-Tirol, which was founded as an umbrella organization of the various antitransit initiatives and saw itself as their spokesperson, formulated this as follows: Because as a matter of fact, we are the only ones who are responsible to our children for how to deal with this unique and irreplaceable living and economic space that is the Alps.40

The focus of the activists on the responsibility for the alpine region can be explained in the context of European integration: the Alps have moved from a peripheral position to the center, into the heart of Europe, guaranteeing new visibility and importance at the political level.41 When Austria joined the European Union in 1995, the Alps were then geographically at the center of the European internal market and thus became the focal point of controversial interests of EU member states. For example, while the EU perceived the Alps primarily as an obstacle to traffic that should be passed through as smoothly as possible through liberal transport policies, anti-transit activists, as well as the Austrian government, called for restrictive rules to reduce transit traffic through the Alps and shift it to the more environmentally friendly railroads. Consequently, this self-awareness of the habitat had led to the beginnings of an “Alpine consciousness” and formed an expanded basis for the democratic consideration of goods and requirements in questions of future development.42 A politicized Alpine space emerged, which served as a framework for action for the Alpine environmentalists. Within this context, they invoked “Alpine resistance”

 Ute Hasenöhrl, Zivilgesellschaft und Protest. Eine Geschichte der Naturschutz- und Umweltbewegung in Bayern 1945‒1980 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2011), 32.  Transitforum Austria Tirol, Tatort Brenner, 5.  Romed Aschwanden, “‘Für eine Opposition in den Alpen.’ Transnationale Dimension des Widerstands gegen den Transitverkehr durch die Alpen in den 1990er Jahren,” Histoire des Alpes – Storia delle Alpi – Geschichte der Alpen Vol. 23 (2018), 263.  Jon Mathieu, Die Alpen. Raum. Kultur. Geschichte (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2015), 215.

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and motivated each other to take their own future into their own hands and to commit themselves to sustainable development in the Alpine region:43 The decision has been taken: the right to participate and to co–determination for the Alpine region. We do not want decisions to be made about us in Brussels, in Vienna, in Bonn or elsewhere.44

The Alpine environmentalists called for a decentralized Europe of the regions and for the active participation of the citizens of the Alpine region.45 At this point, another dimension to the Alps emerged, generated by the Alpine environmentalists: the Alps as a model region with an exemplary role for ecological and socio–political issues. Since the 1980s, the ongoing construction boom in Alpine areas has provoked criticism and resistance: questions about sustainable ways of use came to the fore and discussions with a focus on environmental problems were increasingly reported in the media. The Alps were presented as an ecologically sensitive area that serves as an early warning system for Europe. Due to their specific natural conditions, Alpine ecosystems were claimed to be particularly vulnerable to the unsustainable economic practices of the European tertiary society.46 Accordingly, the Alpine region was assigned the role of a model region: The challenges of the future stand clearly in front of us: especially in our mountains, we not only have to be the pioneers for nature and environmental protection. Even more than before, we have to be pioneers for a democracy that takes the special conditions in the Alps into consideration. For this goal, every commitment and every effort are worth it.47

In this understanding, the Alps should serve as a role model for sustainable development in Europe, but the activists purposely distanced themselves from the notion of an idealized idyllic mountain world, which they considered exaggerated and unrealistic in times of mass tourism, hydroelectric power plants, and transit avalanches.48 On the contrary, they identified the Alps as a central, interconnected region in

 Naturschutzblatt, Mitteilungen zum Natur- und Umweltschutz in Südtirol, “Es brannte wieder,” Nr. 3 (Bozen, 2001), 4.  Fritz Gurgiser, “Treuhänder und Erben unseres Lebensraumes,” Pro Vita Alpina 43/44 (1997): 42.  Peter Glauser and Dominik Siegrist, Schauplatz Alpen: Gratwanderung in eine europäische Zukunft (Zurich: Rotpunktverlag, 1997), 24.  Glauser and Siegrist, Schauplatz Alpen, 13.  Transitforum Austria-Tirol, Tatort Brenner, 30.  Matthias Stremlow, Die Alpen aus der Untersicht. Von der Verheissung der nahen Fremde zur Sportarena. Kontinuität und Wandel von Alpenbildern seit 1700 (Bern and Vienna: Haupt, 1998b), 268; Karl-Werner Brand, “Umweltbewegung,” in Die sozialen Bewegungen in Deutschland seit 1945. Ein Handbuch, ed. Roland Roth and Dieter Rucht (Frankfurt a.M. and New York: Campus, 2008), 219‒244.

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Europe, which was clearly distinguishable from other parts of Europe because of specific spatial and structural problems. Environmental issues were discussed on and in the Alps as a representative example, pointing to the particular vulnerability of this ecologically sensitive natural and cultural landscape.49 In a similar vein, another image of the Alps also applies, namely that of a heritage that is passed on from one generation to the next. Such a characterization is particularly evident in the so-called “Brenner Memorandum,” again produced by the Transitforum Austria-Tirol: [We want] to give our children the security [of knowing] that we are aware of the responsibility for our homeland as well as our obligation to ensure the livelihoods and economic foundations [. . .] that our children can continue to live, work, and recover in this region in the next five, ten, twenty, and fifty years.50

However, it is less about ownership than about the management of this heritage: the responsible use of the Alpine space by one generation to then be able to pass on a fundamentally intact and vital environment to following generations.

Contemporary discussions about threats to the Alps The Alps have represented a space with specific geological, climatic, and cultural characteristics. They form the largest and highest mountain range in Europe, but the Alpine region cannot be clearly defined – neither geographically nor politically.51 Various aspects have been cited for determination, depending on the context and interest, resulting in very different definitions.52 As Ingwald Gschwandtl, former chairperson of CIPRA (International Commission for the Protection of the Alps) Austria, pointed out, there is no such thing as the Alps; the conditions are too diverse and incomprehensible.53 Accordingly, Alpine space is not a unit, but a collection of different subspaces with various structures and developments in a

 Stremlow, “Naturschauspiel,” 133.  Transitforum Austria-Tirol, Brenner Memorandum, Brennerpass (Tirol), (Innsbruck 2006), accessed 28 August 2019, http://www.transitforum.at/pdf/20060602MemoGurgiser.pdf.  Werner Bätzing, Die Alpen. Geschichte und Zukunft einer europäischen Kulturlandschaft (Munich: Beck, 2015), 21.  Mathieu, Die Alpen, 25.  Ingwald Gschwandtl, “Die Alpen – alte Mythen oder neue Visionen?,” in Mythos Alpen. CIPRA Jahreskonferenz, 10–12. Oktober 1996, Igls (Schaan: Internationale Alpenschutzkommission, 1996), 14.

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geographically small area. The Alpine region is characterized by federal structures with a relatively extensive autonomy of regional or local entities.54 Even though there is no universally accepted definition of the Alpine region, as mentioned above, the environmentalists referred to the Alpine Convention, signed in 1991 by the environment ministers of the Alpine countries and the EU, in their definition of the Alpine space.55 In the 1970s, in the wake of the global environmental movement, discourses on the vulnerability of the Alps to modern environmental problems and the potential impact on the sensitive Alpine ecosystem became more widespread.56 The need to protect the Alpine environment at this time was not a new issue: at the turn of the twentieth century, a movement had emerged that spoke out against massive interventions in the Alps and campaigned for their protection.57 But in the 1970s, the debate on the threats to the Alpine environment acquired a new dynamic, supported by numerous citizens’ initiatives, Alpine and nature conservation associations, and political interest groups; the dangers to the Alps and their protection became established as an issue debated all over Europe.58 Throughout the Alpine region, a founding wave of initiatives took place protesting against infrastructure projects: reservoirs for energy production, tourist developments, especially in the winter sports area, and new transit routes.59 Demands for a new approach to the protection of the Alps and a specific “Alpine policy” were now increasingly discussed in the media. Particularly in the 1980s, there was a veritable boom in publications with titles such as Sind die Alpen noch zu retten? Die Zerstörung eines Lebensraumes60 (‘Can the Alps still be Saved? The Destruction of a Habitat,’ 1988),

 Friedrich Schindegger, “Die Alpen als ökologisch sensibles Gebiet – Gefahren und Chancen in der EU,” in EU und die Alpen. Auswirkungen der Agenda 2000 auf den Alpenraum, ed. Christoph Wildburger (Vienna: CIPRA Österreich, 1999), 28‒29.  Ewald Galle, Das Übereinkommen zum Schutz der Alpen (Alpenkonvention) und seine Protokolle (Berlin: Schmidt, 2002); Katharina Conradin and Christian Baumgartner, “Die Alpenkonvention und ihre Protokolle. Ein Rahmen für eine nachhaltige Entwicklung in den Alpen,” in Alpenreisen. Erlebnis, Raumtransformationen, Imagination, ed. Kurt Luger and Franz Rest (Innsbruck/Vienna/Bozen: StudienVerlag, 2017); Jon Mathieu, “Der Alpenraum,” Europäische Geschichte Online (EGO), ed. Leibniz-Institut für Europäische Geschichte (Mainz: 2013), accessed 15 May 2018, http://ieg–ego.eu/de/threads/crossroads/grenzregionen/jon–mathieu–der– alpenraum.  Patrick Kupper, “Dennis Meadows u.a., Die Grenzen des Wachstums (1972),” in Geschichte des politischen Denkens. Das 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Manfred Brocker (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2018), 548‒561.  Karl Stankiewitz, Wie der Zirkus in die Berge kam. Die Alpen zwischen Idylle und Rummelplatz (Munich: Oekom, 2012), 225.  Aschwanden, Politisierung der Alpen,16.  Aschwanden, “‘Für eine Opposition in den Alpen,” 259.  Heinrich, Sind die Alpen noch zu retten?.

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Die Alpen – schleichende Zerstörung eines Mythos61 (‘The Alps – Slow Destruction of a Myth,’ 1990), or Rettet die Alpen. Der Dachgarten in Bedrängnis62 (‘Save the Alps. The Rooftop Garden in Distress,’ 1983) addressed the threat to the ecologically sensitive Alpine region and thus increased public attention on the Alps. One of the most influential books, Die Alpen. Geschichte und Zukunft einer europäischen Kulturlandschaft (‘The Alps. History and Future of a European Cultural Landscape’) by geographer Werner Bätzing, was first published in 1984 and has been reprinted in numerous editions since. He emphasizes that current uses of Alpine space are destroying the biodiversity and ecological stability in the Alps and calls for decentralized management and sustainable environmental responsibility. Only in this way would the Alps not disappear as a human habitat and economic area as well as an intact ecosystem.63 Based on his scientific research, Bätzing has thereby generated a new image of the Alps: urban sprawl and tourist overspill have now also become characteristic Alpine problems. In contrast, some Alpine regions were affected by strong emigration at the same time.64 The Tyrol region, which was home to the activists discussed in this paper, belonged to the first group. The Inn Valley in particular was characterized by high urbanization and population growth. The discourse on the vulnerability of the Alps, encouraged by Alpine environmentalists, finally also entered political debate. This was expressed by the founding of Arge Alp (Association of the Alpine States) in 1972 or the Alpine Area Group in the Committee of the Regions of the European Union in 2001.65 Such organizations highlighted that natural hazards and socio-economic developments seemed to be comparable in all Alpine areas. A symbolic milestone for Alpine environmentalists was the Convention on the Protection of the Alps, or Alpine Convention, of 1991. This is an international legal treaty for the protection and sustainable development of the Alps, which aims to work out matters of nature and landscape protection on a transnational basis and to guarantee a transnational exchange of information and experience.66 The Alps have not only achieved a new visibility at the European level through the Alpine Convention, but also globally through the UN’s Agenda 21 action plan of 1992, in which they were recognized for the first time, like other  Schmidt, Die Alpen.  Leopold Lukschanderl, Rettet die Alpen: Europas Dachgarten in Bedrängnis (Vienna: Orac, 1983).  Werner Bätzing, Die Alpen, 9.  Glauser and Siegrist, Schauplatz Alpen, 15.  Arbeitsgemeinschaft Alpenländer, Nachbarn im Herzen Europas. 20 Jahre Arbeitsgemeinschaft Alpenländer (Munich: Bruckmann, 1992); Werner Bätzing, “Die aktuellen Probleme des Alpenraums und die Frage einer staatenübergreifenden ‘Alpen-Konvention’,” in Schützt die Alpen! Aufgabe der europäischen Umweltpolitik (Stuttgart and Munich: Bonn aktuell, 1991), 29‒43.  Stremlow, Die Alpen aus der Untersicht, 220.

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mountain regions, as natural areas deserving of protection. Chapter 13 on Mountain Management of Fragile Ecosystems: Sustainable Development of Mountain Areas established the importance of mountain regions as resource reservoirs and calls attention to their imminent threat.67

Conclusion In Tyrol, Alpine environmentalists have generated diverse and multi-dimensional images of the Alps through their activism: The Alps represented the living, economic, and leisure space of Alpine citizens. The activists have constructed a discursive space that could be recreated again and again and, depending on the context, receive different attributions as a surface for projection. In this way, the Alps have served in equal measure as a space of imagination, a frame of reference, and a focal point to address problems.68 The activists referred – often unconsciously – to contemporary discourses on the threat of modern environmental problems to the Alps. Extra-Alpine demands – in this case in the field of transAlpine transit traffic – were held responsible for the burden on the Alpine region and its inhabitants. In this way, the actors have constructed a problem–oriented image of the Alps, which disrupted the idea of an idyllic Alpine landscape.69 To summarize, the Alps have presented an imagined space in which different and sometimes conflicting economic, ecological, and political interests were negotiated. It remains to be noted that the actions of the Alpine environmentalists have been guided by their self-imposed function as preservers, administrators, and lawyers of the Alps.70 Even though the various images of the Alps were addressed separately above, this division only serves analytical clarity. Of course, the transitions between the different dimensions are fluid, the activists’ images of the Alps merge into one another and are closely linked in discourse. The Alpine environmentalists in Tyrol emphasized the central position of the Alps in Europe and attributed the function of a contact and exchange zone to them, which has been positioned at the junction of various transnational entanglements. This is

 United Nations. Managing Fragile Ecosystems: Sustainable Mountain Development. United Nations: Agenda 21. United Nations Conference on Environment & Development. Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 3 to 14 June 1992, Rio de Janeiro 1992.; See Jon Mathieu, The Third Dimension: A Comparative History of Mountains in the Modern Era (Knapwell and Cambridge: White Horse Press, 2011).  Aschwanden, Politisierung der Alpen, 20.  Bätzing, Die Alpen, 18.  Maria Buck, “Von den bedrohlichen zu den bedrohten Alpen – Aneignungsprozesse und Identifikationsfiguren alpiner Umweltschützer”, in Gebirge – Literatur – Kultur Vol. 14 (2021).

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particularly evident in the example of transalpine transit traffic, which demonstrates the close integration of the Alpine regions into the trade flows between the economic centers of Europe and beyond. The Alps, as an identifying landscape for the actors, have formed both a real experienced environment and an imagined point of reference in the discourses and practices of the Tyrolean transit movement.

Chris Zintzen

Shifting Perspectives: Alpine Scenarios in the Work Complex Nach der Natur (Beyond Nature) by Austrian Architectural Photographer Margherita Spiluttini Introduction As little as there can be innocence in modernity, so little can there be innocence in the representation of the Alps. [. . .] The assertion that there is still a deep and individually accessible aesthetics of the Alps beside the hackneyed and well-trodden is as old as the Alpine myth itself and has been one of its most important driving forces from the very beginning.1

Bernhard Tschofen’s comment on the perceptual and artistic ‘invincibility’ of the Alps signals that the standards that are placed on the artistic processing of the Alpine motif are high. The quotation sharpens our attention concerning our own expectations of the arts: that they must represent the ‘very other’ and that they must provide us, as recipients, with radically new perspectives beyond our aesthetic habits. However, it is true that this ‘very other’, insofar as it is conceived and implemented in a culturally immanent way, must remain a self-contradiction and thus lead to expectations that cannot be fulfilled. The motif of the Alps, which is used in European cultural history as an intended representation of imaginary alterities in perception, experience, or transcendence, shows this struggle to break out of our being in culture – an escape that of course can never succeed. The perception of this aporia results in a sharpened analytical perspective on the specific contexts and presentation practices to which a work of art (here: a portfolio of works) relates.  Bernhard Tschofen, “Das Alpine. Ein Wahrnehmungsangebot der Moderne,” in Alpenblick – Die zeitgenössische Kunst und das Alpine, ed. Wolfgang Kos (Exhibition Catalogue, Vienna: Kunsthalle Wien, 1997), 39. Trans. C.Z. Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Andrea Capovilla and Richard McClelland for the invitation to contribute to their transalpine journey and, therefore, for the opportunity to further develop my previous studies on Margherita Spiluttini’s work; moreover, I owe Richard valuable support in translating some of the German quotes. Furthermore, I am grateful to Rudolf Schier for critical advice and Iris Ranzinger (Spiluttini Archive/Architektur Zentrum Wien) for providing selected images. But I am grateful particularly to Margherita Spiluttini herself, who taught me that the allegedly obvious is not so obvious at all. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111150536-005

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In presenting the Alpine photographs of the Austrian photographer Margherita Spiluttini, I am dealing with a conceptual, artistic approach as well as with the contexts in which this approach is located. Knowledge of these contexts helps to contour the specific character of Spiluttini’s oeuvre and to present its special perspective within the framework of a certain constellation of (production) aesthetics and within mediaspecific and discursive historical horizons. In contrast to my earlier essays on the oeuvre of the photographer,2 interpretation must remain secondary in favor of an altered interest, which is essentially a reconstruction of the aesthetic and discursive horizons of the Austrian intellectual and artistic climate from the 1980s to the 2000s. There are two aspects that play an intrinsic role in this essay: first, there is the historical perspective, which, as the photo theorist Herta Wolf points out,3 should serve to avoid the mistake of an aesthetically contingent, or anachronistic interpretation of the photographic object.4 If, second, we consider the arts as a “school of seeing” (Ulrich Horstmann), we can explore and appreciate epistemologically added value, through which aesthetically and conceptually original works of art contribute to the body of knowledge of a time.5 Or, as expressed by Reinhard Falter and Jürgen Hasse: “Landscape photographs taken with an awareness of the limits of representation can often convey more to the viewer than naïve images that represent little more than a trivial gesture of showing.”6

 Cf. Chris Zintzen, “Margherita Spiluttini. Beyond Nature,” trans. by Steven Gander, in Metamorph. Catalogue 9th International Exhibition of Architecture / Biennale di Venezia, September–November 2004 (Venice: Marsilio Editore, 2004), 215; Chris Zintzen, “The Trap: Body and Building,” trans. by Steven Gander, in Margherita Spiluttini, Räumlich/spacious. Fotografie/Photography (Vienna and Salzburg: AzW/Fotohof, 2007), Exhibition Catalogue, 188–191; Chris Zintzen, “Dupe and Duplicity. Gravity and Lightness of Deception,” in Margherita Spiluttini, Archiv der Räume (Exhibition catalogue, Linz/ Salzburg: Landesgalerie Linz/Fotohof, 2015), 114–115, (see additional references in the bibliography).  Herta Wolf, “Vom Nutzen und Vorteil des historischen Blicks für die Fotografie. Ein Gespräch mit Heinz-Norbert Jocks,” in Kunstforum International 172 (2004): 44–55.  Carlos Spoerhase, Autorschaft und Interpretation: Methodische Grundlagen einer philologischen Hermeneutik (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2007), 187–189; Fabian Stoermer, “Hermeneutik und Dekonstruktion,” Review of Toni Tholen, Erfahrung und Interpretation. Der Streit zwischen Hermeneutik und Dekonstruktion (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag C. Winter, 1999), IASL Online, 3 April 2001, accessed 1 September 2021, https://www.iaslonline.lmu.de/index.php?vorgang_id=2436.  Gottfried Jäger, “Bildsystem Fotografie,” in Bildwissenschaft: Disziplinen, Themen, Methoden, ed. Klaus Sachs-Hombach (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2005), 349.  Reinhard Falter and Jürgen Hasse, “Landschaftsfotografie und Naturhermeneutik. Zur Ästhetik erlebter und dargestellter Natur,” in Erdkunde 55.2 (2001): 125. Trans C. Z.

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Methodology In my approach to Margherita Spiluttini’s photographic work, I will consider various contexts. These contexts include, first: the photographic-historical background of landscape and Alpine photography of the nineteenth7 and twentieth8 centuries, from which Spiluttini’s photography differs – as Dietmar Steiner has emphasized – through her inclusion of industrial-technical motifs in the sense of the ‘New Topographers’.9 At the same time, the media-specific implications of photography will be taken into account,10 which distinguish the photographed mountain from the real and from the painted, drawn, filmed, and narrated Alps. A second framework for analysis concerns the complex and overdetermined motivic inventory of the Alps in visual art and literature that must be kept present,11 and whose paradigms (the threatening vs. the sublime, power vs. helplessness, nature vs. culture) are shifted by Spiluttini’s photography in the direction of a hybrid of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ and projected into the spatial composition of cubatures. A third context is the specifically Austrian national, patriotic, or ‘Heimat’ (‘homeland’) appropriation/fiction of the Alps, as it was portrayed in the mass media since the era of the Ständestaat (Federal State of Austria, 1934–1938), under National Socialism (1938–1945) and into the Second Republic (from 1955). This fiction was systematically deconstructed only during the 1990s. Finally, I refer implicitly to the context of ‘Anti-Heimat’ literature and art which preceded academic deconstruction and which (as with Schönherr, Turrini, Mitterer, Jelinek in literature and Hermann Painitz in art, respectively) worked to debunk the popular, tourist and political fictions of the ‘beautiful Alpine country’: in doing so, as is often noted, the ‘Anti-Heimat’ reflex remains dialectically trapped in the clichés of the

 Ulrich Pohlmann, “Naturwunder und Territorium. Anmerkungen zur Landschaftsfotografie im 19. Jahrhundert,” Der weite Horizont. Landschaft und Fotografie, ed. Iris Metje and Stefan Schweizer, Fotogeschichte 120 (2011): 5–20; Rolf Sachsse, “Industriebau und Fotografie,” Fabrikbau – Form, Funktion und die ‘soziale Frage’, Kunsttexte.de 1 (2017): 1–12.  Anton Holzer, Die Bewaffnung des Auges. Die Drei Zinnen oder Eine kleine Geschichte vom Blick auf das Gebirge (Vienna: Turia und Kant, 1997); Klaus Honnef, “Die Evidenz des Sichtbaren. Zur modernen Landschaftsfotografie seit den 1970er Jahren,” in Der weite Horizont. Landschaft und Fotografie, ed. Iris Metje, and Stefan Schweizer, Fotogeschichte 120 (2011): 21–34.  Dietmar Steiner, “Foreword,” in Margherita Spiluttini, Räumlich/Spacious. Fotografie/Photography (Exhibition catalogue, Vienna and Salzburg: AzW/Fotohof, 2007), 6.  Cf. Gregor Matjan, “Wenn Fotos nicht lügen können, was können Sie dann? Zum Einsatz der Fotoanalyse in der Politikwissenschaft,” Österreichische Zeitschrift für Politikwissenschaft 31.2 (2002): 181–184.  Cf. Barbara Lafond-Kettlitz, “Die Alpen in Literatur und Malerei. Albrecht von Haller, Caspar Wolf, Ludwig Hohl, Ferdinand Hodler,” Études Germaniques 256 (2009): 933–953.

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‘Heimat’.12 This essay cannot refer to all these valences exhaustively, but their validity is hereby implicitly claimed. I would like to present the Alpine oeuvre of the Austrian photographer Margherita Spiluttini under the assumption – fed by many perceptions – that, after the deconstructive turn in Cultural Studies in art and discourse (at least since the 1990s), which sought to unpick discursive constructions that had previously determined meaning, interpretation, and representation, the motif of the Alps has moved in a newly accessible way into the space of advanced and reflected art. This can be seen, for example, in the issue Alpine Avantgarden und urbane Alpen of the cultural studies journal sinnhaft, which insinuated a diagnosis of a “vague Alpine” in 2008.13 The conceptual literary texts of the writer Bodo Hell, the adaptation of folk music motifs in the “Neue Volxmusik” (bands such as Attwenger, Broadlahn, Franui), and the new approaches to Alpine architecture, which I will report on in the context of Spiluttini’s photography, could serve as indicators of a revision and redevelopment of the Alpine motif.

Nach der Natur/Beyond Nature With her portfolio of works Nach der Natur. Konstruktionen der Landschaft (Beyond Nature. Landscape Construct|ion|s) the Austrian photographer Margherita Spiluttini (1947–2023) first appeared in public with pictures beyond the narrow context of architecture.14 The pictures were shown in 2002 in an exhibition staged monumentally by the architect Elsa Prochazka at the Technisches Museum Wien

 Bernhard Tschofen, “Das Alpine”, 34 and 39; Bernhard Tschofen, Berg Kultur Moderne. Volkskundliches aus den Alpen (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 1999), 305; Chloe Paver, “What’s so Austrian about the Alps? Local, Transnational and Global Perspectives in Austrian Exhibitions about the Alps,” in Austria and the Alps, ed. Judith Beniston, Jon Hughes, and Robert Vilain (2010), 181; Ernst Hanisch, Landschaft und Identität. Versuch einer österreichischen Erfahrungsgeschichte (Vienna: Böhlau, 2019), 55–59.  Karin Harrasser, Julia Köhne, Theresa Öhler, et al., “Editorial. Alpine Avantgarden und urbane Alpen,” sinnhaft. Journal Für Kulturstudien 10.21 (2008): 2.  The title Nach der Natur was translated as Beyond Nature in the book accompanying the exhibition, whereby the aspects of the temporal (post naturam) addressed in this essay as well as the allusion to the discipline of hand drawing (‘Zeichnen nach der Natur’ in the sense of ‘drawing from nature’) are lost. For this reason, I use the German title of the work complex in this paper. – Cf. Margherita Spiluttini, Nach der Natur. Konstruktionen der Landschaft/Beyond Nature ‒ Constructions of Landscape (Exhibition catalogue, Vienna and Salzburg: Technisches Museum Wien/Edition Fotohof, 2002).

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(Vienna Museum of Science and Technology) and presented in an accompanying book.15 The exhibition was a great success and established the photographer’s breakthrough in the art world. Since the exhibition Nach der Natur (the show has taken place in several locations, most recently in Salzburg in 2020), the artist’s oeuvre has also been received outside the paradigms of architecture and urban planning and in particular with regard to its landscape depictions. A forerunner was the show Alpenblick (1997) curated by Wolfgang Kos, which set in motion a powerful reflection on the “Heimtücke” (‘insidiousness’) of the Alpine motif in art in the Kunsthalle Wien.16 Numerous invitations followed to participate in thematic group exhibitions on the landscape and the ‘Syndrome’ of the Alps, e.g.: Montagnes Magiques (‘Magic Mountains’ 2006: Aix en Provence), Alpine Desire (2011: New York), Alpenliebe (‘Alpine Love’ 2014: Visitor Center of the Grossglockner Hochalpenstraße), Landscape in my Mind (2015: Vienna, BACA Kunstforum) and Natural Histories. Traces of the Political (2017: Vienna, mumok). As this list reveals, the Alps are also booming in the exhibition sector: the more urban the exhibition venue, the bolder the title slogans associated with this topic seem.17

The Alps as a cultured space The portfolio of works Nach der Natur depicts the Alps in a focused and sober way. The large-format photographs show road structures, tunnels, routes, bridges, and dams in the Austrian and Swiss Alps. Spiluttini’s photography embarks on a terrain overdetermined by motif traditions and genres such as landscape and postcard photography, nature photography, and photography of ‘heroic’ engineering structures – not to mention the patriotic and touristic appropriations, whose “pool of connotations”18 and “image direction”19 are difficult to escape. Spiluttini’s view of the Alps is less oriented towards the representation of well-known scenic ‘beauties’ or towards the reproduction of prominent ‘views’,

 Margherita Spiluttini, Nach der Natur; cf. Chris Zintzen, “Nach der Natur. Die österreichische Architekturfotografin Margherita Spiluttini,” in Neue Zürcher Zeitung (15 May 2002); Zintzen, “Margherita Spiluttini. Beyond Nature,” 215.  Wolfgang Kos, “Alpenblick Revisited – Ein Bilderverbot und seine Erosion,” in Alpenblick – Die zeitgenössische Kunst und das Alpine, ed. Wolfgang Kos (Exhibition catalogue, Vienna: Kunsthalle Wien, 1997), 17–27.  List of exhibitions: Cf. Christine König Galerie, Margherita Spiluttini (Official biography), accessed 1 September 2021, https://files.artbutler.com/file/2304/f2c436075713493d.pdf.  Bernhard Tschofen, Berg Kultur Moderne, 10. Trans. Richard McClelland.  Anton Holzer, Die Bewaffnung des Auges, 1. Trans. Richard McClelland.

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but rather places landscape and architectural spatial problems in the photographic image. This change of focus and perspective contributes to the defamiliarization of Alpine motifs, which enables viewers to perceive these scenarios anew as hybrids of nature and culture, thus transforming the usual re-cognition into an unexpected insight. In Spiluttini’s photography, the focus is less on the Alps as a natural space, as a narrative, as a fiction or metaphor, as a world or a counter-world, and rather on the Alps as a cultured space whose three-dimensional plasticity is translated into two-dimensional photographic images by means of a high level of compositional calculation. The Alps figure as a spatial mixture of depths and surfaces, textures and lines, as a found arrangement of volumes in space. This architectural and sculptural perspective constitutes the theatricality and narration of these images, while the paradigms of ‘Heimat’, ‘identification’, ‘identity’ and ‘subject’ recede into the background. The theatre of this photography contains the immobilized dramas of the relations between solids and surfaces. It stages dialogues between forms and spaces, and it depicts harmonies and tensions. In contrast to the montane and Alpine photographs by photographers from the Düsseldorf Becher School20 or from Walter Niedermayr’s Alpinen Landschaften (‘Alpine Landscapes’),21 Spiluttini’s pictures are anthropofugal, so they do not include human figures.

The Grossglockner High Alpine Road (Großglockner-Hochalpenstraße) The new and surprising perspective that Spiluttini’s photographic gaze gains from well-known and iconic motifs is particularly evident in the photographs that Spiluttini took of the Großglockner-Hochalpenstraße in 2002, an area with profound symbolic and political connotations in the Austrian context. The pass road in the High Tauern, constructed in the 1930s at the time of the Ständestaat, was

 See Andreas Gursky’s photographs “Albertville” (1992) and “Engadin” (1996).  Walter Niedermayr, The Aspen Series (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz, 2013).

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Fig. 1: Margherita Spiluttini, Großglockner-Hochalpenstraße, (Salzburg/Carinthia, Austria), 2002.22

marketed as a pioneering patriotic tourist structure and signaled the claim: “Austria aims high.”23 Spiluttini’s photographs show the Glocknerstraße as a landscape-determining element: omnipresent, often surprisingly discreet – the organic-looking embedding of the characteristic serpentines of the road in the terrain becomes apparent. Another unusual perspective shows the patriotic runway in barren high mountain terrain as if it were a sector of the Great Wall of China in distant mountain deserts (cf. Fig. 1: Margherita Spiluttini: Großglockner-Hochalpenstaße, Austria, 2002). The extent of this defamiliarization and the cognitive value of this new view of a photographically exhausted motif would have to be discussed further in the context of the oversized mountain panorama photo montage by Robert Haas and Günther Baszel for Oswald Haerdtl’s Austrian pavilion at the 1937 Paris World Exhibition, but that would go beyond the scope of this chapter.24

 Spiluttini, Räumlich/spacious, 136‒137.  Cf. Georg Rigele, Die Großglockner-Hochalpenstraße. Zur Geschichte eines österreichischen Monuments (Vienna: WUV, 1998), 181–200.  Oswald Haerdtel’s pavilion, designed in a clear form, was laid out as a large, glazed showcase. This provided a view of a 30 x 10meter mural created by photographer Robert Haas, which depicted three prestigious infrastructural projects of the Austro-fascist regime in a large collage colored by hand: the Grossglockner Road, the Gesäuse Road and the Pack Road. What is remarkable about this work is not only the artistic overlapping of photography and painting, the blending of

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Entrances and exits, routes, and transit areas Like the omnipresent roads, the photographs of tunnel entrances and exits, of semi-open galleries, and other transport structures in the Alpine region (which are not very picturesque according to traditional criteria) indicate the dynamics of transit in the solid rock of the Alpine massif. These images extrapolate the fact that this space is not a place for people to stay, but rather represents an area of routes and passageways. The traffic and its logistics are thematized as a prerequisite, a condition – if not as a medium – of the perception of the Alps, in contrast to the topics of ‘nature’ and ‘originality’. The deserted streets, routes, and traffic structures appear as traces and signifiers of the Anthropocene in the landscape – there is no polemical assessment of them as ‘alienated’ or ‘unnatural’ nature. The terrain, which is routed by roads, organized by dams, and staked by slope reinforcements, represents a spatial state post naturam:25 it is a technically shaped, cultured, ‘second nature’, whose beauties and irritating strangeness become visible thanks to the photographer’s uncommon perspective. In contrast to the traditional photographic depiction of landmarks, sights, or stereotypical scenes,26 the clearest signature of this photographic approach is the unorthodox angle, which is particularly noticeable in the case of the bridge subject: Spiluttini’s bridge shots largely avoid the argument of height in the sense of staging the contrast between mountain peaks, bridges, and the deep valley. It is also noteworthy that bridges (unlike in traditional painterly and photographic images) are only exceptionally depicted in the perspective of their horizontal face: the predominant compositional principle of the series of images Nach der Natur breaks out of the plane-parallel imperative of architectural photography27 and is based on the principles of rotation and diagonals given by the physical formation of the landscape – the composition principles common in the

the factual and the fictional, but also the (political) staging of road constructions as media for the reclamation of “landscape” and “homeland” by private/touristic individual transport. – Cf. Anton Holzer, “Künstler mit Kamera. Ein Fotograf zwischen Wien und New York,” in Robert Haas. Der Blick auf zwei Welten. ed. Anton Holzer and Frauke Kreutler (Vienna and Ostfildern: WienMuseum/Hatje Cantz 2016), Exhibition Catalogue, 14–21; Martin Keckeis, “Fenster in die Alpen” (= about the postcard: H. Chipault, No. 167, Pavillon de l’Autriche, 1937, Silbergelatine, Photoinstitut Bonartes Wien), accessed 1 September 2021 https://postkarten.bonartes.org/index. php/herausgegriffen-detail/fenster-in-die-alpen.html.  Chris Zintzen, “Margherita Spiluttini. Nach der Natur,” in Reporter ohne Grenzen: Jahrbuch Grenzgänge: 100 Fotos für die Pressefreiheit 11 (2004), 62.  Holzer, Die Bewaffnung des Auges, 10.  Sachsse, “Industriebau und Fotografie,” in Fabrikbau – Form, Funktion und die ‘soziale Frage’, ed. Marion Hilliges and Elmar Kossel, special issue Kunsttexte.de 1 (2007), 4.

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western pictorial tradition to achieve the effect of dynamism and drama. For example, Spiluttini’s photograph of the bridge route of the Schöllenenbahn (a single-track rack railway in Switzerland’s Gotthard massif) is an explosive and expressionistic28 tableau of diverse diagonals formed by rock formations, rock fragments, and the steeply rising railway line (cf. Fig. 2: Margherita Spiluttini: Schöllenenbahn, Switzerland, 2001).

Fig. 2: Margherita Spiluttini, Schöllenenbahn (Gotthardmassif), (Uri, Switzerland), c. 2001.29

 Indeed, Expressionist painting, especially in the work of E. L. Kirchner, shows a clear tendency towards this form of composition. Cf. Annemarie Dube-Heynig, “Kirchner, Ernst Ludwig,” Neue Deutsche Biographie 11 (1977), 658–661, accessed 1 September 2021, https://www.deutsche-bi ographie.de/pnd118562398.html#ndbcontent.  Spiluttini, Nach der Natur/Beyond Nature, 25.

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Spiluttini’s photographs of bridge structures in the high Alpine region reflect the dramatic, gestural, and expressive character of these structures and represent (like the photographs of dams) an examination of the tradition of photography of engineering structures that has existed since the nineteenth century:30 the bridge as a technically-constructive and also visually attractive way of dealing with a difficult landscape situation is presented here less in the sense of heroic achievement, but rather is exemplified in its materiality. The example of the spectacular key point in the Schöllenen Gorge (in Switzerland’s Canton Uri) in the Gotthard area, where the new Devil’s Bridge arches over the old Devil’s Bridge, shows how the two stone structures contrast with the surrounding rocks: the materiality of the substance ‘stone’ emerges in different valences (rock, quarry stone, clinker) without the landscape degenerating into a mere backdrop – as in conventional photography of engineering buildings.31 In an interview with curator Wolfgang Kos about the exhibition Alpenblick, Spiluttini remarks: “Buildings at very great heights have always been technically particularly elaborate, which also gives them a specific aura. The aesthetics is never an end in itself, it results from the character of the problem that needs to be overcome.”32

Inventory/study The ‘problem to be overcome’ thus becomes the object of the picture just as the tangible building becomes the means of processing or overcoming a problem. Such a perspective looks behind the phenomena of the seemingly picturesque and finds its dramaturgical knot in the depiction of the landscape-spatial and structural ‘problem’, which – and not the landscape view – constitutes the actual plot of the pictorial narrative. Perhaps it would be helpful to reflect the photographic exposure (Aufnahme) in the tradition of the graphic ‘recording’ (Aufnahme), in the sense of both ‘inventory’33 and ‘study’. The recourse to the drawing is also suggested by the second level of meaning of the title Nach der Natur, namely the central exercise in the classical training of applied art in ‘drawing from nature’ in the sense of ‘depicting what  Pohlmann, “Naturwunder und Territorium,” 12–13.  Pohlmann, “Naturwunder und Territorium,” 12–13; Klaus Honnef, “Die Evidenz des Sichtbaren,” 22.  Margherita Spiluttini, “Dieser Eindruck von Beschwingtheit,” in Alpenblick – Die zeitgenössische Kunst und das Alpine, ed. Wolfgang Kos (Exhibition catalogue, Vienna: Kunsthalle Wien, 1997), 210. Trans. C.Z.  Gottfried Jäger, “Bildsystem Fotografie,” 350.

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is there’. An essential element of this drawing from nature is to replace the mental image of an object with the graphic representation of the object. Indeed, this aspect of ‘inventory’ or ‘study’ essentially characterizes Spiluttini’s photographic work. As a photographer and picture editor, she was instrumental in the creation of Vienna’s first systematic architecture guide – Architektur in Wien. 300 sehenswerte Bauten (‘Architectural Vienna. 300 must-see buildings’), edited by Dietmar Steiner, Vienna: MA 18/Prachner 1984 – and she produced the major part of the photographic documents for it. Since then, she has documented the new and newest architecture – first in Austria, later increasingly abroad. Spiluttini’s archive, which is now part of the Architektur Zentrum Wien, documents 30 years of innovative architecture in Austria as well as in neighboring countries and proves the consistency and system with which Spiluttini documented the development of architecture and urban planning.34 The photographer’s vivid interest in the oeuvre of pioneering and experimental architects (especially the Swiss architect duo Herzog & De Meuron) contributed significantly to the development and sharpening of her photographic perspective on spatial problems and architectural solutions.

Dispositive of (architectural) photography The naturally irregular shape of the landscape enables a most welcome break out of the paradigm of the horizontal and vertical, which is fundamental for architectural photography, while at the same time retaining the maneuvers characteristic of this discipline to accentuate spatial depth (angular view, two-point perspective). In this context, reference should be made to the photographic process with the apparatus of the analogue large-format plate camera, which, during a long exposure, depicts the targeted motif turned 180° (“upside down”) and mirror-inverted on a gridded ground-glass screen (Mattscheibe). The effect of this technical representation on the perception of the motif and on the composition of the image is similar to the gridded ‘perspective machines’ that have been widespread since the Renaissance, as well as to the old forgery technique based on drawing the object to be copied upside down in order to sharpen perception while drawing. The processes of perception, composition, and recording, slowed down and visually abstracted by the technical equipment of the large-format plate camera –

 The Spiluttini Archive (which comprises around 120,000 slides and negatives) forms a valuable source inventory of the Architektur Zentrum Wien: https://spiluttini.azw.at/index.php.

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a Linhof Technika 4x5ʹʹ35 – are clearly different from the practice of conventional 35mm and modern digital photography. In contrast to the 35mm camera, the large-format plate camera (already due to the large ground-glass screen) supports a carefully composed, detailed and sharp image;36 moreover, analogue photography – in contrast to digital photography – produces a material image object and photographic original: the negative.37 While architectural photography usually aims to depict a clearly defined and limited subject (e.g., a single building), the focus of landscape photography is more noticeably on the choice of a detail. However, the factor of authorial or subjective framing – think here of the photography of interiors or of large buildings/ ensembles of buildings – tends to be underestimated by reception in architectural photography,38 or, as architecture critic Judith Eiblmayer writes: “It is necessary to show all those details that the viewer’s eyes would not see if no framing were present.”39 If one understands architecture as a technique of organizing and designing space (with all its functional, technical, sculptural, and theatrical aspects),40 the medium of architectural photography has an interpretive, mediating, and translating role: the real and three-dimensionally built space is translated into individual views (single images and frames) on the one hand and into a two-dimensional representation on the other. Spiluttini’s architectural photography documents and analyses the spatial solutions proposed by the architects in toto (as overall buildings, as objects in the surrounding space) and in detail (interiors, details, light and spatial relationships): the interlocking of interior and exterior, the dramaturgy of materials and the design of vistas qua architecture. Architecture thus becomes a “school of seeing” (O. Kokoschka) for landscape photography. In her contribution to the catalogue Räumlich/Spacious, the photo historian Monika Faber notes that Spiluttini’s landscape photography draws essential

 Karin Haupt, Standpunkt, Perspektive und Blick als Kompositionsmittel in der Architekturfotografie unter Einbeziehung von Ansichten und Werk der Fotografin Margherita Spiluttini (Vienna: MA thesis, 2012), 50.  Honnef, “Die Evidenz des Sichtbaren,” 25–26; Andreas Gursky, “Mikrostrukturen, Megastrukturen,” in Alpenblick – Die zeitgenössische Kunst und das Alpine, ed. Wolfgang Kos (Exhibition catalogue, Vienna: Kunsthalle Wien, 1997), 112.  Petra Löffler, “Bild – Spur – Messung,” in Bild/Kritik, ed. Bernhard J. Dotzler (Berlin: Kadmos, 2010), 106–110.  Monika Melters, “Die Versuchungen des Realismus. Zur Theorie und Forschungsgeschichte der Architekturfotografie,” Fotogeschichte 132 (2014): 5.  “Es gilt all das zu zeigen, was das Auge des Betrachters ohne framing nicht erfassen würde.” Trans. Richard McClelland.  Cf. Zintzen, “The Trap: Body and Building,” 188–191.

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inspiration from the latest architecture, and its spatial solutions and material arrangements: “Or was it perhaps her intense exploration of the new architecture itself which enriched Spiluttini’s photographic language, considering the diversity of materials used, the varied surfaces, the conscious integration of a building in a given landscape [. . .]?”41 The transfer of architectural spatial themes to the field of landscape photography – in the sense of a predetermination preceding the photographic process and realized in that process – is not visible as such in the resulting image: it is a characteristic of the photographic ‘reality effect’ (Roland Barthes) that neither the concept nor the technical and situational circumstances of the photographic moment are recognizable as clear traces in the result.42 As explained above in connection with the equipment of the large-format camera, photography is a medium whose dispositif is hardly perceptible on the part of the reception. In other words, photography (unlike film, painting, literature) is the art that most strongly conceals the trace of its being made (poiesis) or its techné character behind the supposedly obvious. Or, as Roland Barthes states: “It is not impossible to perceive the photographic signifier (certain professionals do so), but it requires a secondary action of knowledge or of reflection.”43 My remarks on the various contexts of Spiluttini’s photography represent such a secondary maneuver to point out the hidden medial traces of the photographic in the photographed. This applies not only to the medial implications, but also to the represented subject: The repetition / re-presentation / re-cording of the visible that photography realizes on the level of the object (by showing the visible – i.e., by making the visible accessible to perception) quickly comes under suspicion of tautology.44 However, if one places Barthes’s diagnosis not at the end of a process of analysis or thought, but at its starting point, this assumption becomes epistemologically fruitful: the question of what the non-tautological – the significant, the illuminating – consists of in a photograph enables a distinction to be made between model and exposition and thus an assessment of what is specifically significant in a photograph. It is striking how much space and its design are at the center of Spiluttini’s photographic explorations, how photography investigates the relationship of geometric solids in space, how cubic tensions and relationships define the actual object (‘le sujet’) and determine the framing of the image accordingly. Margherita

 Monika Faber, “The Stillness of the Object,” in Margherita Spiluttini, Räumlich/spacious. Fotografie/Photography (Vienna/Salzburg: AzW/Fotohof, 2007), Exhibition Catalogue, 11.  Cf. Matjan, “Wenn Fotos nicht lügen können,” 184–186; Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (Hill and Wang: New York, 1981).  Barthes, Camera Lucida, 5.  Barthes, Camera Lucida.

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Spiluttini’s photographs show in detail the Alps, which are physically and photographically impregnable in their totality, as something that could be described, with Ernst von Glasersfeld, as situations and traces of ‘viability’: viable/practical glimpses of the unmanageable, so to speak.

Contexts Neues Bauen in den Alpen/New Alpine Architecture In the following I will briefly discuss the historical moment in which the portfolio Nach der Natur was created: the photographs in this portfolio were taken between 1992 and 2002, mostly in the context of trips to commissioned locations in Austria and Switzerland. During this time, the style of regional and Alpine construction was scrutinized in advanced architecture. The contest Neues Bauen in den Alpen (‘New Architecture in the Alps’), held between 1992 and 2006, is an indication and has become the catchphrase for the move away from the backwardlooking Alpine form inventory of the so-called “rustic,” in favor of a decided modernity of discreet and organic forms that takes into account the surrounding landscape. A signature of this committed Alpine modernity, as well as a fresh conception of regionalism,45 is the choice of materials and the conscious extrapolation of the material aesthetics within the framework of this architecture: regional materials such as wood, glass, quarry stone as well as the recently rediscovered fair-faced concrete are used. The intention is to create an alternative to Alpine kitsch, to “dirndl architecture,” and to superficial prettiness. The contest was announced four times (1992, 1995, 1999, 2006) and hundreds of projects from Austria, Switzerland, Slovenia, and Liechtenstein were submitted. The award-winning projects included the Parkhotel in Hall/Tyrol by the Viennese architectural duo Henke & Schreieck (2006), Peter Zumthor’s Therme Vals (Graubünden, 1999), and Jürg Conzett’s Traversinersteg near the Graubünden Viamala Gorge (1999). Margherita Spiluttini has documented many of these buildings. With a tamed vocabulary of forms, natural materials, and clear and organic lines, their construction replaces the excitedly extravagant formal and material experiments of postmodernism: after the postmodern deconstruction of traditional forms and

 Cf. Friedrich Achleitner’s writings on a renewed regional consciousness in architecture: Friedrich Achleitner, Region ein Konstrukt? Regionalismus eine Pleite? (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1997); Friedrich Achleitner, “Bauen in den Alpen – vor und nach Edoardo Gellner,” in Neues Bauen in den Alpen. Architekturpreis 1999, ed. Christoph Mayr Fingerle (Basel: Birkhäuser, 2000), 207.

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materials in the sense of a reflection on the mediality of architecture, this new, post-postmodernist architecture returns to some principles of clarity, material aptness, practicality, and the transparency of classical modernism. The ecological concept, which has since been revived, and the conscious dialogue with the surrounding space, that is, the landscape, influence construction and design.

Deconstruction of ‘the Alps’ in discourse, art and cultural studies In its self-reflection architecture carried out a process that had also shaped the reception and reflection of the ‘Alpine Syndrome’ in art and cultural studies since the 1960s. With a view to the ideologically highly “contaminated” character of the Alps,46 Wolfgang Kos, curator of the pioneering exhibition Alpenblick, states that this motif was largely avoided and left out by the innovative art of the 1960s and 1970s; Kos even speaks of an “Alpine block.”47 According to Kos, it was only through postmodernism and its deconstructions and media reflections that the terrain of the Alps was critically and reflexively reopened. Since the late 1970s, the motif or theme of the Alps has been taken up again, but now reflected upon as a topos, as a medium, and as an ideologically fabricated subject. The exhibition Alpenblick can be seen as a paradigm for the revision of the Alpine motif in cultural studies of the 1990s and early noughties: during this time, the surveys and books by Rainer Amstädter (1996), Christian Rapp (1997), Anton Holzer (1997), Georg Rigele (1998), and Bernhard Tschofen (1999) examined the identification of Austria with the Alps.48 They identified the construct ‘Austria = Alps’ as historically developed during the First Republic and ideologically instrumentalized by the Ständestaat and by the National Socialist regime. The creation and first presentation of Spiluttini’s Alpine pictures thus coincided with the era of a scientific and artistic revision of the subject, which made possible an alternative approach to the subject/motif.

 Kos, “Alpenblick Revisited,” 20; Wolfgang Kos, “Die Neutralisierung der Landschaft,” in Ist es hier schön. Landschaft nach der ökologischen Krise, ed. Anton Holzer (Vienna: Turia und Kant, 2000), 13.  Wolfgang Kos, “Alpenblick Revisited – Ein Bilderverbot und seine Erosion,” in Alpenblick – Die zeitgenössische Kunst und das Alpine, ed. Wolfgang Kos (Exhibition catalogue, Vienna: Kunsthalle Wien, 1997), 20.  Rainer Amstädter, Der Alpinismus. Kultur ‒ Organisation ‒ Politik (Vienna: WUV, 1996); Christian Rapp, Höhenrausch. Der deutsche Bergfilm (Vienna: Sonderzahl, 1997); Holzer, Die Bewaffnung des Auges; Rigele, Die Großglockner-Hochalpenstraße; Tschofen, Berg Kultur Moderne.

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My assumption is that Margherita Spiluttini’s Nach der Natur is to be seen on the one hand in the context of new architectural trends and against the background of architectural problems of space. On the other hand, this portfolio, with its specific phrasing of the Alpine subject matter, must be viewed in connection with broader discursive change in art, literature, and cultural studies. The phase of the grim criticism of the Alps and ‘Heimat’ of the 1960s was succeeded by a period of latency that lasted until the postmodern medial reflections and deconstructions of the 1980s and the critical and systematic cultural-scientific revision during the 1990s and 2000s led to a kind of ‘ballast shedding’ and enabled new explorations.

“Konstruktion” and landscape Spiluttini’s photography undoubtedly represents such a new exploration of the Alps. The twofold ambiguous German title, Nach der Natur. Konstruktionen der Landschaft refers to the overdetermination of the approach and suggests a nonnaïve modus operandi: Konstruktionen der Landschaft alludes on the one hand to the pictured technical-constructive-architectural subjects (bridges, roads, dams). On the other hand, the photographic images are in turn identified as ‘constructions’ (composition, image detail, framing) and thus indexed as non-identical with the nature of the landscape. Finally, the subtitle Konstruktionen der Landschaft, attached like a genre designation, indicates a constructivist understanding of ‘landscape’: ‘landscape’ is itself something technically, socially, and perceptually constructed.49

Conclusion Spiluttini’s photography examines and extrapolates the concrete spatial and material constructedness of Alpine scenarios: mountains, valleys, roads, bridges, and reservoirs come into view as complex spatial arrangements; they are represented as textures and aggregates. The compositional calculation applies to the  Cf. Matthias Stremlow, “Nieder mit den Alpen, freie Sicht aufs Berggebiet?” in Alpensichten, ed. Nationales Forschungsprogramm 48 ‘Landschaften und Lebensräume der Alpen’/Schweizerischer Nationalfonds (Bern: SNF, 2005), 2–4; Olaf Kühne, “Grundzüge einer konstruktivistischen Landschaftstheorie und ihre Konsequenzen für die räumliche Planung,” Raumforschung und Raumordnung/Spatial Research and Planning 67.5 (2009), 395–404; Olaf Kühne, “Sozialkonstruktivistische Landschaftstheorie,” in Handbuch Landschaft, ed. Olaf Kühne, Florian Weber, Karsten Berr et al. (Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2019), 69–79; Hanisch, Landschaft und Identität, 109–111.

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landscape lines and their correspondence with technical buildings. Harmonies and tensions become visible (cf. Fig. 3: Margherita Spiluttini: Furkapassstraße, Switzerland, 2001).

Fig. 3: Margherita Spiluttini, Furkapassstraße (Uri/Valais, Switzerland), c. 2001.50

These photographs show something strange and wild: a hybrid of nature and culture that challenges familiar orders. Spiluttini’s photographs show forces and counterforces (dams), bring dynamics and precarious balances into the picture (bridges), discover surprising brutalist forms (vent “cathedrals” and road galleries) and extrapolate the vectorial directionality of road constructions amidst the static landscape space (high Alpine roads). Spiluttini’s image conception operates beyond the dialectics of ‘nature’ and ‘culture’, ‘urbanity’ and ‘wilderness’, ‘built’ and ‘becoming’; the principles of natura naturans (Spinoza) and cultura culturans prove to be superimposed and inseparably interwoven in the era of post-postmodernism. Ultimately, the photographs of the series Nach der Natur tear the Alpine motifs out of national contextualizations and in this way withdraw the spatial situations from the usual claims of ownership and interpretation. A different way of seeing is always the prerequisite for a different way of understanding.

 Spiluttini, Nach der Natur/After Nature, 16.

Part 2: Desire and the Alps

Johannes Wankhammer

After the Mountain Sublime: Erosion and Catastrophe in Max Frisch’s Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän (Man in the Holocene, 1979) Introductory remarks It can be difficult not to see mountains as sublime or beautiful. On a clear day, the panorama of Alpine peaks visible from a summit or the crest of a mountain pass inspires profound awe in its imposing vastness, while the green pastures usually traversed when ascending to the top – with their suggestive harmony of archaic wooden structures and rolling slopes – tend to strike the eye as an example of beautiful nature. Although aesthetic responses to mountainous landscapes may seem to occur spontaneously, there is nothing natural about seeing mountains as sublime or beautiful nature. For most of recorded history, the Alps struck the eye quite differently: before the middle of the eighteenth century, observers typically saw their towering peaks as misshapen, ugly, and frightening, the marks of a fallen nature, while Alpine agriculture’s primordialism appeared primitive and uncivilized.1 Wealthy travelers sometimes had themselves blindfolded to avoid seeing the (to them) quite obviously ugly and terrifying mountains while crossing Alpine passes into Italy on their grand tours.2 As late as 1739, the art historian Horace Walpole observed nothing but “uncouth rocks” when crossing the Alps, exclaiming in a letter to a friend: “I hope I shall never see them again!”3 Even though the modern sensibility for Alpine splendor is second nature to most contemporary observers, it only became a widespread phenomenon in the wake of the aestheticization of mountains from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards. As the German intellectual historian Joachim Ritter has shown in a classic study, the new aesthetic sensibility for beautiful and sublime nature in the

 For an overview of changing Alpine imaginaries, in addition to the introduction to this volume, see the editors Sean Ireton and Caroline Schaumann’s introduction to Heights of Reflection Mountains in the German Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2012), 1–19.  See Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit (New York: Vintage, 2004), 145.  Horace Walpole, The Letters of Horace Walpole, Fourth Earl of Orford, ed. Peter Cunningham, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: J. Grant, 1906), 28. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111150536-006

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eighteenth century crystallized around the concept of “landscape.” Introducing his study with what is sometimes considered the first instance of modern mountaineering – Petrarch’s ascent to Mt. Ventoux for no other reason than to enjoy the view from the top as an anticipation of modern landscape aesthetics – Ritter argues that nature becomes landscape when a piece of countryside is regarded independently of all instrumental concerns, simply for how it strikes the subject’s gaze as an instance of nature at large: “Landscape is nature that reveals itself aesthetically in the view of a sensing and feeling observer.”4 Ritter’s account makes clear how thoroughly historically mediated aesthetic reactions to sublime or beautiful nature are despite their semblance of immediacy. In the historical dialectic he proposes, the aesthetic sensibility for landscapes “compensated” for the scientific objectification of nature; an objectification that, in turn, sustained the modern ideal of freedom as unfettered (individual or collective) self-determination. In the aesthetic appreciation of landscape, what the natural world forfeited through mechanistic science – its quality as a living and harmonious whole – is restituted in the medium of subjective feeling. Whatever “life” and “unity” the non-human world acquired in its aesthetic reanimation as landscape is thus lent to it by the sentimental subject. This is as obvious in landscape painting and nature poetry, which shaped and disseminated this new aesthetic sensibility in the eighteenth century, as in contemporaneous landscape gardens, which carefully arranged scenic elements around an observer’s viewpoint for maximum emotional impact. Nature here seems alive and harmonious only as picturesque tableau presented to an idealized observer’s gaze. This is true even for the sublime landscapes eighteenth-century observers began to see in mountains: the thrill experienced in view of vast and unshapely phenomena confers even onto disharmonious nature a second-order unity of subjective feeling.5 When modern Europeans began to venture into the mountains from the late eighteenth century onwards, what they found there was above all – themselves.6  Joachim Ritter, “Landschaft: Zur Funktion des ästhetischen in der modernen Gesellschaft,” in Subjektivität: sechs Aufsätze (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1989), 150 (my translation).  The account of the sublime Kant developed with reference to “shapeless mountain masses” (“ungestalte Gebirgsmassen”) distills the logic of this experience: the inability to unify a manifold of perception (the breakdown of the sensible faculties of imagination and intuition) is experienced as pleasurable because it discovers a supersensible unity in the subject that transcends all sensory manifolds; see Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, ed. Heiner Klemme (Hamburg: Meiner, 2006), 109‒127 (§§24‒29), here: 121 (§26).  For the historical nexus between mountaineering and individual self-constitution in this context, see Leonie Silber, “‘Die Gesteine brauchen sein Gedächtnis nicht’: über die Erosion von Berg, Selbst und Erinnerung bei Max Frisch und Brigitte Kronauer,” in Das Erschreiben der

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Max Frisch’s late prose narrative Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän (1979, English as Man in the Holocene) tells a rather different kind of story about mountainous terrain. In his decade-long concern with how to “narrate a valley”7 (the Swiss Onsernone valley where the story takes place) in the context of the geological deep time evoked in the story’s title, Frisch developed narrative forms that challenge the modern aestheticization of nature exemplified in the landscape schema as much as modern prose narrative’s tendency to relegate more-thanhuman nature to the timeless background of human story worlds. The most salient feature of Frisch’s text is its reproduction of facsimiles from an encyclopedia and other reference works, which turns the text into an intermedial collage of fictional narrative and snippets from various genres of non-fiction recalling (among other topics) the valley’s natural and human histories. The plot, by contrast, is relatively sparse: a 73-year-old man addressed as Herr Geiser finds himself alone in his house in the Southern-Swiss canton of Ticino during an extended spell of bad weather, which blocks the only access road to the valley. It keeps raining and raining – an early working title of the narrative was Regen (“rain”), another, suggestively, Klima (“climate”) – and although there is only minor flooding in the house’s basement, the text creates an increasing sense that the oppressive atmosphere outside infiltrates the old man’s house. Geiser worries about landslides and seems to grow increasingly forgetful, beginning to tape little notes and cut-outs from an encyclopedia and other factual texts to the walls of his house as memory aids (this is the diegetic motivation for the facsimiles interspersed with the printed text). Determined to break out of his isolation, he briefly undertakes a strenuous hike over a mountain pass into a neighboring valley, only to turn back on a whim with the goal already in sight. At several junctures in the text, the memory loss grows noticeably more severe before the protagonist finally seems to suffer a debilitating stroke. In a concluding panorama, the valley appears unchanged, but Geiser has disappeared from the story. After its publication in 1979, the text was widely read and (I would argue) misread as an autobiographical reflection on aging by the author Frisch, who happened to also own a house in the Swiss valley where the narrative is set. More recently, however, and especially in the past five years, new readings have emerged that situate the story in a context it predates by several decades but

Berge: Die Alpen in der deutschsprachigen Literatur, ed. Johann Georg Lughofer (Innsbruck: Innsbruck UP, 2014), 220–25.  As Kiley M. Kost has recently pointed out, this is how Max Frisch characterized the goal of his text in a letter to Uwe Johnson (“ein Tal zu erzählen”); “Narrating a Valley in Max Frisch’s Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän: Material Agency, Rain, and the Geologic Past,” Humanities 10.1 (March 4, 2021): 1.

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which Frisch’s text seems nevertheless predestined to address: problems of representation posed by epistemological and ontological quandaries that have emerged in an age geologists propose to call the “Anthropocene” – an age in which human activity has been recognized as a dominant force in shaping the planet’s climatic and ecological systems.8 In dialog with these eco-critical re-readings, I will recover Frisch’s text as a pioneering exploration of modes of writing that transcend literature’s traditional focus on the human subject, consciously break with aestheticizing conventions for representing mountainous terrain, and disrupt familiar models for organizing narrative time. Frisch’s brief narrative from the 1970s, I will argue, offers an astonishingly prescient and largely untapped exploration of possibilities for narrating entanglements between human and more-than-human worlds, whose boundary lines have become epistemically fuzzy – in some respects, as fuzzy as they were before nature was doubly externalized in modernity as an object of aesthetic contemplation and scientific research to secure what turned out to be a rather illusory ideal of human freedom.

From Landschaft to Gelände: Frisch’s poetological program Frisch’s Alpine narrative is characterized by a complete absence of landscape in both word and concept. The word Landschaft occurs a single time in the text, in a paper clipping that reproduces the discourse of tourist brochures in praising what the English translation renders as the “remarkable scenic beauty [Landschaftsreize] of the Alps.”9 The text does, however, frequently characterize Alpine terrain by a different collective noun derived from the same stem: the word

 These recent re-readings include the articles repeatedly referenced below by: Oliver Völker, “‘Che tempo, che tempo’: Geology and Environment in Max Frisch’s Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän,” On_Culture: The Open Journal for the Study of Culture, 2 (2016): 1‒21. http://geb.uni-giessen. de/geb/volltexte/2016/12356/; Bernhard Malkmus, “‘Man in the Anthropocene’: Max Frisch’s Environmental History,” PMLA 132.1 (January 2017): 71‒85; Timothy Attanucci, “Wer hat Angst vor der Geologie? Zum Schicksal der ‘geologischen Kränkung’ am Beispiel von Willem Frederik Hermans, Max Frisch und Peter Handke,” literatur für leser, 39.1 (2016): 9‒24; and Kiley Kost, “Narrating a Valley” (2021).  Max Frisch, Man in the Holocene: A Story, trans. Geoffrey Skelton (Champain and London: Dalkey Archive Press, 2007), 37; Max Frisch, Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän: Eine Erzählung, 22nd edition (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2018), 50. This is also the only instance where categories from classical nature aesthetics are evoked in the text (Reize or aesthetic charms in the German text and “beauty” in the translation).

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Gelände (usually translated in the English version as “the grounds”), which occurs in the text with leitmotif-like consistency.10 The word choice alone suggests a shift in emphasis. While one stands before a landscape as an uninvolved observer, one typically finds oneself im Gelände; in the middle of a terrain that, especially in an Alpine context, carries associations of rugged unwieldiness. Similar to the parallel formation Gebirge (“mountains”), Gelände – a grammatically singular noun pointing to an indefinite plural – evokes a collective without clear boundaries and contrasts markedly with aesthetic landscapes framed and unified by a subjective gaze. What is more, Frisch’s German term (which also translates the English “terrain”) points to geology and topography rather than art and aesthetics as paradigmatic contexts of usage. The following programmatic passage indicates what is at stake in Frisch’s literary re-conception of nature as Gelände: (Novels are no use at all on days like these, they deal with people and their relationships, with themselves and others, fathers and mothers and daughter or sons, lovers, etc., with individual souls, usually unhappy ones, with society, etc., as if the place [Gelände] for these things were assured, the earth for all time earth, the sea level fixed for all time.)11

Diegetically, the passage is motivated as the protagonist Geiser’s explanation for why he prefers encyclopedias and other non-fiction over novels in the meteorological state of exception in which he finds himself. As a reference to the uses of literature within a literary text, however, the passage clearly also serves as a meta-poetological statement that frames Frisch’s narrative project as a whole. Classical novels are unsuitable to the task at hand because they tell exclusively of human affairs, of family romances and social dramas, while immobilizing the non-human world as a static background against which such human stories unfold. As a poetological statement, the passage advances a deep critique of the humanistic bias of the novel form. In fact, “bias” may not be strong enough a word for what is at stake here: the point of Frisch’s critique is that the immobilization of the other-than-human world is constitutive for the way novels – and perhaps traditional narrative forms more generally – narrate the unfolding of events in time. The novel form and its entire representational arsenal are premised on an implicit “as if” – “as if the place for [human stories] were assured, the earth for  In the critical passage discussed below, Gelände is, however, rendered as “place” rather than “grounds.” The English translation also necessarily misses resonances between Gelände (terrain) and Geländer (railings), a word that similarly occurs with unusual frequency to describe the railings of a bridge over a creek, the iron guardrails of a mountain road, or the handrails of a staircase. Geländer are meant to protect precisely against the vagaries of Gelände but have a tendency to break down in the story – at its conclusion, the handrails of the staircase have been conspicuously removed; Frisch, Man in the Holocene, 29, 30, 44, 59, 60, etc.; 92, 107.  Frisch, Man in the Holocene, 8.

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all time earth, the sea level fixed for all time.” That nature can be ignored as the static background of human action is the fictional premise of narrative fiction. Within the text’s diegesis, the claim that novels are unsuitable “on days like these” refers to the calamitous weather permeating the story world; yet Frisch’s discontent with the novel form resonates all the more urgently in days that are, like our own, haunted by a looming climate catastrophe on a global scale. In putting the finger on a structural blind spot of narrative fiction, Frisch strikingly anticipates contemporary critiques of the novel form by writers and scholars who reimagine the place of literature in the age of anthropogenic climate change. “The institution of the novel,” Timothy Clark writes, suffers from an “anthropocentric delusion” that pervades the very “conventions of plotting, characterization and setting in the novel.”12 Yet Frisch’s text is striking not only as an early critique of conventional narrative’s inadequacy when it comes to representing non-human worlds and timescales but also as an experiment with representational forms that try to do justice to the entanglement of human life with dynamic processes in the non-human world.13 At the diegetic level, Frisch’s narrative tends to invert the traditional setup of narrative fiction by immobilizing the human world and setting the non-human world in motion. Recent ecocritical re-readings have seized above all on this inversion of human figure and non-human background: Oliver Völker explores Frisch’s text “as an engagement with exactly those aspects and rhythms of nature that are normally conceived as the timeless background of human history,”14 while Kiley Kost points out that “the background element of rain becomes foregrounded, and the natural formations of the valley, including glaciers, that are assumed to be

 Timothy Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept (London: Bloomsbury, 2015), 191. The definition of literature as a representation of “human action” has deep roots in Western poetics, harking back to Aristotle’s definition of poetic forms as mimesis of human action and reinforced by the Romantic focus on subjective experience and on the schema of the novel as a Bildungsroman charting individual development. For an overview of recent debates on literature and the novel form in the Anthropocene, see John Parham’s introduction and Astrid Bracke’s chapter on the novel in The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Anthropocene (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2021), 1–33; 88–101.  In eco-critically engaged scholarship, it has become commonplace and indeed decorous to emphasize the “agency” of non-human entities and forces. What sometimes functions as a salutary corrective to anthropocentrism can, however, have (eco-)ethically dubious consequences: agency without responsibility is a rather hollow concept; and indiscriminately ascribing it to forces that cannot answer for the effects they produce may end up minimizing the responsibility humans do bear for ecological catastrophes, precisely because they possess “agency” in a quite different sense than chemical agents or geological forces.  Oliver Völker, “‘Che tempo, che tempo’, 4.

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static are revealed to be dynamic.”15 In the construction of the text’s story world, this inversion is often quite literal. With a few exceptions – including his anticlimactic escape-attempt – the protagonist Geiser stays put in his house for the entire duration of the narrative. Time itself seems to have come to a standstill: the clocks of both churches in the valley have stopped working and Geiser is so overcome by a feeling of stasis that he obsessively checks his watch to make sure that time is, against appearances, still moving forward. Meanwhile, the terrain surrounding the house is – or threatens to be – on the move. Following the ceaseless rain, a small landslide has destroyed a dry wall Geiser erected to protect his garden, falling rocks are blocking the only road into the valley, and Geiser continues to worry that the entire slope of the mountain will eventually come down – that “the whole mountain could begin to slide, burying the village for all time.”16 A terrain usually taken for granted as setting is asserting itself as an active and – measured by its effect on human structures – potentially destructive force. Yet such diegetic reversal is less important for Frisch’s narration of more-than-human dynamics than his formal experiments with narrative techniques.

Subverting nature aesthetics Max Frisch was somewhat of a specialist for exposing human self-deception from within the perspectives of his characters. The widely read novel Homo faber (1957), for instance, exhibits the illusion of technocratic control over life by inhabiting the perspective of a technocrat; and already Frisch’s breakthrough-novel Stiller (1954) opens with the first-person narrator’s assurance that “I’m not Stiller”– a claim then gradually undermined by his own narration.17 In this respect, Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän, though it departs from Frisch’s lifelong novelistic concern with the fragility of personal identity, remains a quintessential Frisch text. What has changed

 Kost, “Narrating a Valley,” 2. Both Völker and Kost also explore formal aspects of this reversal.  Frisch, Man in the Holocene, 4.  Translated into English as Homo Faber (1959) and I’m Not Stiller (1958) respectively. Many of Frisch’s plays also dramatize instances of individual or collective self-deception (the political parable Biedermann und die Brandstifter (The Fire Raisers, 1958), for instance, showcases the disastrous rationalizations that lead conservative elites to make a devil’s pact with prototypical fascists). While Frisch’s plays challenge the audience to “think through” the problems dramatized on stage, they do not imply ready-made solutions. With allusion to his one-time mentor Brecht, Frisch therefore famously characterized his own plays as “Lehrstücke ohne Lehre” – didactic plays without a lesson.

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is the scale of the self-deception. At stake is no longer the illusory construction of individual identities – the little lies we tell ourselves about ourselves – but precisely the great “anthropocentric delusion” sedimented in the conventions of modern narrative and modern architectures of knowledge.18 As I demonstrate next, the complex narrative setup of Man in the Holocene subverts traditional narrative’s anthropocentric a priori in the counterpoint between the main text’s perspectival narration and a montage technique that interrupts, thwarts, and comments on the flow of individual consciousness with snippets of non-fiction (Fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Double page with collage elements from the German text (Frisch, Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän, 48–49).

The main text of the narrative consistently follows the protagonist’s observations and thoughts in a form of free indirect discourse that sometimes approaches the associative quality of stream of consciousness, albeit one narrated in the third

 Clark, Ecocriticism on the Edge, 191.

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person. While the narrative voice thus remains focalized through a single human consciousness – we are “inside” the character’s head – the third person and formal reference to the protagonist as Herr Geiser establish an objectifying distance: we observe the character’s consciousness closely, but dispassionately. In a technique familiar from Frisch’s earlier prose works, the protagonist’s fears and worries are represented indirectly, by way of the character’s reassurance of what is definitely not the case: “A lake, the color of brown clay, gradually filling the valley . . . its water level rising day by day and also during the nights, joining up with the rising lakes in the other valleys until the Alps become an archipelago [. . .] – impossible to imagine that [ist undenkbar].”19 Geiser’s assurance to himself that another great flood is impossible both renders this scenario present (much like a proverbial elephant one is told not to imagine) and exposes what fears the protagonist’s conscious mind must work to banish. True, it is not rational to think that a persistent rain front will turn the Alps into islands: but the disconcerting fact that the sea levels have – as Geiser’s geological clippings inform him – risen before and could well rise again, that a terrain that seemed static is in fact always on the move, is precisely the kind of vision that haunts the old man’s thoughts. Geiser’s diluvian nightmares are somewhat exceptional in directly referring to an Alpine terrain that rarely becomes thematic despite its visceral presence throughout the story. For a text that sets out to “narrate a valley,” the main text offers strikingly little representation of non-human nature. There is, as Bernhard Malkmus has observed, “not a single description of rock formations or Alpine landscapes in Frisch’s text outside the framework of an imminent deluge, except in Herr Geiser’s flashbacks to his Icelandic trip and to his youthful and precarious climb to the top of the Matterhorn with his brother.”20 Even the omnipresent weather is for the most part represented indirectly, by way of Geiser’s attempts to classify meteorological phenomena: “in the course of a single night, unable to sleep, one can distinguish at least nine types of thunder: 1. The simple thunder crack. 2. Stuttering or tottering thunder: . . . 3. Echo thunder” – etc.21 This is a  Frisch, Man in the Holocene, 21; for other instances of this device, see 12, 33, 56, etc. Malkmus also discusses this example but reads it (only) as the text’s “post-modern anxiety about climate change” rather than (also and initially) as a representation of the main character’s psychic defense mechanism; “‘Man in the Anthropocene’”: 75.  As the only instance of a more traditional genre of mountain writing in the text, the Matterhorn episode differs markedly in tense and style, and appears like an extended citation that subverts the heroizing tendency of mountaineering stories with a decidedly anti-heroic twist (fancying themselves conquerors of the mountain, the brothers are portrayed as amateurs who needlessly endanger themselves and others). On this point, see Timothy Attanucci, “Wer hat Angst vor der Geologie?’: 18.  Frisch, Man in the Holocene, 5; for a similar inventory of various kinds of rain, see 42.

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description not of nature, but of the process by which a human mind worried about losing its grip on things tries to classify and order natural phenomena. Natural processes rather enter the text in the objectifying language of cutouts from a Brockhaus lexicon (a German equivalent to the Encyclopædia Britannica) and other non-fictional texts. The factual snippets inserted into the narrative confront the text with a scientific discourse largely banished from literary representations of mountains after long-intertwined geological and poetic explorations of Alpine terrain parted ways with the autonomization of literature and art around 1800. Frisch’s intermedia collage of paper clippings, notes, and text thus integrates a non-aesthetic element to portray developments that unfold in geological deep time and resist phenomenalization on a human scale. Geiser cuts out (and the text reproduces) text passages on various topics of natural history, such as lightening, rock formations, geological timescales, extinct animals, continental drift, or climate charts. Together with historical records he collects about avalanches, landslides, and floods, they recount how forces of erosion have shaped the valley and the surface of the earth more generally, affording unusual narrative energy to natural processes and emphasizing again that the world of human stories and histories is built on shifting grounds: “If the Arctic Ice were to melt,” Geiser concludes, “New York would be under water.”22 In effect, this bricolage of scientific clippings and perspectival narrative turns the logic of classical nature aesthetics on its head. Rather than expanding literary writing to the non-human sphere in an effort to animate nature in the medium of subjective feeling, the main text restricts itself to the seemingly most human of human qualities – to what transpires in the protagonist’s consciousness. Vice versa, the natural world is portrayed in decisively non-literary terms, by the very scientific discourse against which aestheticizing depictions of landscapes originally emerged. Initially, this inversion of the landscape schema seems to sharpen the contrast between human and natural worlds; between Geiser’s fading consciousness and the unfathomable spaces and scales of geological erosion described in his clippings. At these very extremes, however, the two emerge again in their inextricable entanglement. By inhabiting a mind struggling with its own cognitive decline, with memory loss, and increasing incoherence of thought, the text dramatizes the uncanny experience of a consciousness that is no longer fully master in its own house, not because it is besieged by the forces of the unconscious but because its material substrate is slowly caving in. Geiser’s halting stream of consciousness displays the effects of a corrosive material force at work within the human mind – something like the “hardening of the arteries in the

 Frisch, Man in the Holocene, 52, 79.

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brain”23 by which one paper clipping explains memory loss. Conversely, the omission of all anthropomorphic nature description in favor of popular-scientific discourse makes the formative effects of natural erosion conceivable as an agentic process – a kind of “labour” not entirely unlike the work by which humans transform the world. A cut-out from a geological textbook, for instance, evokes the “work of shaping and displacing” by which natural forces like water, wind, and frost form the surface of the earth; a Brockhaus entry explores the “gouging and denuding action [Arbeit] of flowing water” which carves out mountain valleys and remains legible in the Alpine terrain.24 In the innermost crevices of the human mind, the narrative thus hits upon an inhuman force; in the supposedly hard scientific facts of encyclopedias, natural forces take on an active and anthropomorphic quality. In Frisch’s text, it is the very refusal to aestheticize mountains that ends up revealing an uncanny kinship with them. By narrating the internal erosion of subjective interiority, the text accomplishes what landscape aesthetics and nature writing aspired to but hardly achieved: something like a subjective experience of the non-human – a literary representation of what erosive processes feel like “from within.” What the text performs is not unlike what Adorno and Horkheimer, following Walter Benjamin, called “remembrance of nature within the subject”25 – yet one that does not presage reconciliation, at least not of a harmonistic kind, but sharpens an awareness for the fragility of a human life entangled with natural forces. Yet Frisch’s narrative of erosion within and outside the subject also achieves a new representation of mountainous terrain. No longer either inert rock or occasion for a subject’s aesthetic experiences, mountains rather come into view as markers of processes of erosion that unfold so slowly that they appear petrified in time, but whose force can make itself felt in sudden catastrophic eruptions. Mountains “stand out” as reminders of the active force of a geological erosion smoothed over by sediment and vegetation in flat terrain; they interrupt the flat surface much like the (etymologically related) montage elements disrupt the narrative flow of human consciousness. Rather than prioritizing either the human narrative perspective or the scientific intertext, the text therefore invites a reading as a carefully composed whole in which the two strands modify and comment on each other. This requires, above all, avoiding personalizing readings that explain the paper clippings either by the aging author Frisch or the aging protagonist Geiser’s motivations and  Frisch, Man in the Holocene, 39.  Frisch, Man in the Holocene, 10, 107.  Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2002), 32.

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reduce the natural history of erosion they portray to a human, all-too-human desire for knowledge, one that ultimately proves as futile as Geiser’s failing attempt to make sense of things. Nor is it warranted to prioritize the scientific clippings as the authoritative account of what happens to the human in the story and to human life more generally, as some recent eco-critical readings have tended to do.26 The geologization of the human mind and the humanization of science performed by the text rather keep each other in abeyance without one strand discrediting the other. Not only are the text’s clippings carefully arranged by an authorial “collage arranger” who comments on Geiser’s fate “with a mixture of empathy and irony”;27 the main narrative itself seems carefully composed from fragments of consciousness that often repeat with motivic regularity rather than merely mimicking the wanderings of a human mind. Both strands of text betray the presence of an implied author figure who structures the text as an overarching narrative of erosion and its characteristic temporality, as the following section details.

Gradually, then all at once: Erosion and catastrophe The parallelism between the geological erosion shaping the valley and the neurological erosion at work in the protagonist’s mind is introduced early in the text, immediately after “erosion” first appears in the main text and the clippings: It was not to drink schnapps, but to buy matches, a reserve of matches, that Geiser had walked to the next village, and in the tavern he forgot to buy the matches. Obviously, brain cells are ceasing to function. More serious than the collapse of a dry-stone wall would be a crack across the grounds [Riß durchs Gelände], narrow at first, no broader than a hand, but a crack— (That is the way landslides begin, cracks appearing noiselessly, not widening, or hardly at all, for weeks on end, until suddenly, when one is least expecting it, the whole slope below the crack begins to slide, carrying even forests and all else that is not firm rock down with it.)28

 The former approach was long prevalent and has recently been endorsed by Attanucci, “Wer hat Angst vor der Geologie?”; the second is most clearly exemplified by Kost, who argues that the sequence of clippings explains what truly happened to Geiser – namely that he suffered a brain embolism caused by the “material agency” of storm and rain; Kost, “Narrating a Valley,” 6.  Malkmus, “‘Man in the Anthropocene,’” 73.  Frisch, Man in the Holocene, 32–33.

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In another suggestive parenthetical (after the statement on the inadequacy of novels), the passage links the leitmotif of the landslide with a counterintuitive temporal logic – one in which an apparent lack of events is only the silent prelude to catastrophe. An initial rupture emerges imperceptibly and appears to remain unchanged for the longest time until suddenly – once the force dragging on the slope has reached a critical mass and a tipping point is reached – the entire formation collapses. First imperceptibly and slowly, then all at once: this is how catastrophes unfold. Not, to be sure, the misfortunes of classical human drama from which the term “catastrophe” is derived (the resolution of a plot arch with the protagonist’s downfall) but the catastrophic collapses of the kinds of complex systems with which the text is concerned: it is how slow erosion precipitates natural disasters, how ecosystems collapse, how climate changes dramatically and irreversibly, and how the brain’s neurological network breaks down gradually, then all at once.29 In fact, the temporality of gradual erosion and sudden collapse organizes the narrative time of the text. Extended periods in which nothing much seems to happen are punctuated by sudden “slides” in the protagonist’s cognitive deterioration, culminating in the final catastrophe of his apparent stroke. Initial memory problems and “cracks” in the protagonist’s mind appear early on (in the context of the passage above) but remain minor and do not change noticeably until about the middle of the text. “Erosion,” the text notes, “is a slow process.”30 A first shift takes place after the Brockhaus entry on “man,” evocatively placed in the center of the text, which celebrates human exceptionalism but is immediately followed and undermined by what follows in the main text, beginning with a declaration that “there have been landslides.”31 This refers, in the first instance, to landslides that allegedly occurred at the end of the valley, where a landslide shifted the grounds, buried a lumbermill, and changed the course of a stream – a miniature instance of the erosion discussed in Geiser’s geological clippings. Yet as the narrative shows rather than tells, something has shifted in Geiser’s mind as well:

 On the “tipping point” metaphor as a prominent device in the theory-formation and communication of recent climate science, see Sandra van der Hel, Iina Hellsten, and Gerard Steen, “Tipping Points and Climate Change: Metaphor Between Science and the Media,” in Environmental Communication 12.5 (2018): 605–20. While the temporality of erosion in Frisch’s text anticipates this schema, it can also be read as combining models for explaining geological history dating back to the eighteenth century – a “catastrophism” that claimed the earth’s surface was shaped by abrupt, cataclysmic events and a “uniformitarianism” that instead assumed slow and gradual change.  Frisch, Man in the Holocene, 48.  Frisch, Man in the Holocene, 54, translation modified. (The translation specifies the indeterminate “Es sind Hänge gerutscht” as “there have been some landslides,” which tends to narrow the reference to the minor landslides that occurred in the valley and to obscure the implied parallelism with the protagonist’s own cognitive “slides.”).

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“there is Geiser, candle in hand, unable to remember why he has his hat on.”32 He intermittently “remembers why he has his hat on: he meant to go to the post office. No point in the hat; he had forgotten that the highway is blocked and no mail is getting through. There is no point in the candle, either, since the power is on again.”33 That some neurological event is causing Geiser’s memory problems and disorientation (perhaps a “mini-stroke” or transient ischemic attack prefiguring the narrative’s final event) is implied by an accompanying headache – “not raging, just irritating,”34 Geiser ominously assures himself. Geiser’s state then remains relatively constant until his final “fall” (again accompanied by references to “landslides” and “damage down in the valley”), which a combination of symptoms (lateral paralysis and numbness, problems with thought and speech) and a paper clipping identify as a debilitating stroke35 – the final systemic collapse. Although Frisch’s text is a narrative about a human, it is not a classically human narrative. The unfolding of events in time follows neither the linear time of human history and progress, nor the temporal arch of conventional narrative (modeled on the logic of human action and interaction from the “inciting incident” of a conflict to its final resolution). Nor does it, however, reflect the cyclical temporality traditionally attributed to nature. Emphasizing how montage technique and paratactical structures interrupt narrative succession and bring linear time to a near-standstill, Oliver Völker has argued that Frisch’s text enacts a defamiliarizing “aesthetics of slowness” that “opens up a perspective on the slow timescale of natural cycles.”36 This misses the point that the slowness at stake is cumulative and anything but circular. The text sensitizes readers less to cyclical slowness than to a counterintuitive temporality in which slow erosion incubates rapid and irreversible change – the very temporal structure necessary to conceive and confront environmental catastrophes that unfold by the logic of tipping points and sudden collapse. In this precise sense, the text as a whole can be read as a record of erosion. Recent scholarship is split over whether Frisch’s use of montage technique “turns the logic of a linear sequence of narrated events into the spatial array of different textual or pictorial pieces” or whether the “clippings [. . .] produce a narrative in

 Frisch, Man in the Holocene, 56.  Frisch, Man in the Holocene, 56.  Frisch, Man in the Holocene, 58.  Frisch, Man in the Holocene, 94–95, 109.  Völker, “Che tempo, che tempo,” 14. This characterization evokes Rob Nixon’s work on the “slow violence” of environmental degradation.

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their own right” through their sequential arrangement in the text.37 The full story emerges when combining these perspectives. Frisch’s intermedial bricolage does tend to break up narrative time and to spatialize the text; yet the segmented layers of text themselves then demand to be read as a spatial record of time. In an analogy with rock formations strongly suggested by the text itself – one clipping explains that geological strata must be read as “descriptions of time” that “reflect periods of the earth’s history” in spatial form – the text as a whole can be deciphered like a geological record.38 Just as layers of sediment mark periods of gradual accumulation between cataclysmic events in earth history, the text documents intersecting human and more-than-human temporalities of erosion and catastrophe.

In conclusion: Fragile entanglements Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän tells the story of a human being who is subject to erosion, yet it does not directly represent humanity as a subject of erosion – as an active geological force that shapes the world as thoroughly as water, wind, and weather. While the text strikingly anticipates the insufficiency of traditional narrative and epistemic forms when it comes to representing the repressed entanglement of human with non-human worlds, it does not foreground the fact that would inspire geologists to suggest replacing the “Holocene” of Frisch’s title with the epoch of the “Anthropocene” to account for the formative human influence on the earth’s systems in the geological present. By the end of the book, Geiser will have vanished, disappeared into the valley and, as the final panorama suggests, nothing will have changed. If Geiser is the paradigmatic human figure of the story, he exemplifies a humanity that will leave no traces in the fossil record.39 Yet with regard to the question of who truly acts or matters in the enmeshment of human and non-human worlds which the present moment compels us to confront, both Frisch’s story and the Anthropocene discussion are less clearcut than they may appear. It remains undecided how the transformation of humans into a geologically active force is to be interpreted: does it imply a promotion

 For this representative exchange see Völker, “Che tempo, che tempo,” 12; Kost, “Narrating a Valley,” 12.  Frisch, Man in the Holocene, 35. The analogy between Frisch’s text and geological sediment has been noted in the scholarship (cf. Völker, “Che tempo, che tempo,” 13; Kost, “Narrating a Valley,” 12) but it is critical to note that it is not merely based on vague resemblance but on the specific way Frisch’s intermedial collage demands to be read as a spatialized temporal process.  It is therefore questionable whether Geiser can indeed be read without qualification as an “Everyman of the Anthropocene,” as Malkmus suggests; “‘Man in the Anthropocene,’” 83.

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of collective human agency to a planetary scale – or rather the reduction of whatever looked like human agency to another a-subjective geological force? Frisch’s text is refreshingly free from the pathos of many attempts to grapple with questions posed by the new geological present; from the pathos of collective heroism as well as that of heroic resignation. The overall effect of the text is rather to highlight the fragility of human life in its complex entanglement with and reliance on morethan-human forces.

Fig. 2: Part of the final collage of paper clippings (Frisch, Der Mensch erscheint im Holozän, 140–141).

The concluding collage of paper clippings, whose function as an interpretive key to the text Timothy Attanucci has pointed out, offers a final comment on the topics whose complex interconnection the narrative explores (Fig. 2): a clipping on natural history (a dictionary entry on “erosion”) is followed by others on eschatology (concerned with the ultimate fate of individuals and the world), human history (Roman settlements in the Southern Alps), and physiology (the terminal entry on stroke). Only one topic is represented by two clippings – the comparatively marginal question of the valley’s chestnut trees and their blight, which had

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occupied Geiser throughout the text. Chestnut trees, the clipping explains, do not grow naturally in the area but were transplanted in antiquity from Asia Minor first to Greece, then to Rome and finally to the Southern slopes of the Alps. We learn that the parasitical fungus that threatens to extinguish them followed humans in the opposite direction, first appearing in New York City in 1904,40 then crossing the Atlantic with American troops during the second world war. In the catastrophe befalling the chestnut trees, the final collage displays the complex interfusion of natural and human histories in their incongruent timescales (the spread of ancient civilization, twentieth-century globalization, but also geological time – chestnut transplants thrived so well in the area because heat-loving species still have not completed the process of recolonizing the European continent after the last ice age). In the case of such a hypercomplex phenomenon, the question of agency becomes moot when asking after who or what ‘brought it about’ – agency would have to be attributed to so many entities as to lose its meaning. Yet the problem of agency does impose itself when it comes to responding to the question with which the paper clippings break off after noting that no remedies have yet been found to deal with the invasive fungus: “Are we facing the destruction of all the chestnut trees in Ticino?”41 The question of agency suggestively arises here as a matter of responsibility – as the human ability to formulate and respond to the question of how to act in the face of challenges produced by the increasingly pervasive interlinkage of human and non-human worlds. The labor of imagining new narrative forms that make it possible to understand and experience phenomena at the intersection of human and non-human scales will be part of answering this call; but this does not mean that catastrophe is reducible to a problem of narratability or to the rhetoric of catastrophe. The remaining paper clipping in the final collage deals with the question of “coherence” but pointedly concludes with a meaning of the term that exceeds human psychology or narrative: “Principle of coherence: phil., principle of the connection between all existing things.”42 Frisch’s writerly effort begins to develop forms of narrative

 We know today that the fungus was introduced from Asia and had already traveled half-way around the globe before first registering in New York as an invasive species.  Frisch, Man in the Holocene, 108.  Frisch, Man in the Holocene, 108. In a contrasting reading, Attanucci links the question of coherence to that of narrative continuity and suggests that Frisch’s text concludes on the skeptical beat that only human worlds are susceptible to coherent narration: “Nur was zwischen ‘Erosion’ und ‘Schlaganfall’ geschieht, lässt sich erzählen, ist ‘kohärent’”; Attanucci, “Wer hat Angst vor der Geologie?” 18, see also 15.

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coherence that do justice to this more-than-human coherence of things. At stake is not merely a critical self-reflection of the rhetoric of catastrophe, but the project of finding a new literary rhetoric for imagining, grappling with, and, perhaps, mitigating human and larger-than-human catastrophes that build slowly, then precipitate dramatically and all at once.

Richard McClelland

God da Tamangur: An Alpine Landscape of Longing and Loss Introduction The God da Tamangur lies at the far end of the Val S-charl in Switzerland’s Alpine Grisons, close to the border with Italy. An ancient zone of forest and moorland located between 2000 and 2250 meters above sea level, the God da Tamangur (literally “the wood back there”) is dominated by Swiss stone pines, though there are scattered examples of juniper and larch. It is the stone pines, some of which are up to eight hundred years old, that make this landscape truly remarkable: this is not the stunted, gnarled growth that one might expect of the alpine zone, but tall, often straight, specimens. Now part of a nature reserve in which flora and fauna are left to grow unhindered, the God da Tamangur is more than just a forest: within the Rumantschia, the Romansh linguistic and cultural zone, Tamangur functions as a lieux de mémoire, an arboreal touchstone for the self-conceptualization of the Romansh people, their language, and their culture – a fact highlighted in official tourist information about the area.1 That the forest functions in this way within the broader collective consciousness of the Romansh people is in part a result of the publication of the poem ‘Tamangur’ by Engadine poet Peider Lansel (1863‒1943) in 1923.2 Lansel’s poem opens with a romantically tinged description of the forest that highlights its geographical isolation at the “furthest end of the S-charl valley” (l. 1). This isolation is, however, also temporal: Tamangur is not only “extremely aged” (l. 4), the “final remainder” (l. 6) of a much larger presence, but it also clings, on an eastern slope, “on the descent to tomorrow” (l. 2), as though its very existence may cease. Through this image of precarity, Lansel emphasizes the diminution of Tamangur over time: though it has survived lightning strikes and centuries of snow, it has

 See, for example: My Switzerland, Jakobsweg Graubünden, accessed 15 September 2021, https:// www.myswitzerland.com/en-gb/experiences/route/jakobsweg-graubuenden-2/.  Unless stated otherwise, all translations into English are my own. Lansel’s poem was included in the out-of-print English anthology The Curly-Horned Cow. Anthology of Swiss-Romansh Literature, ed. by Reto R. Bezzola (London: Peter Owen, 1971). “Tamangur” was translated into English from the Romansh idiom Ladin by Elizabeth Maxfield-Miller (pp. 18‒19). An abridged version of the original is included in Bezzola’s anthology (p. 204); the full original can be accessed online: Peider Lansel, Lyrik, accessed 10 September 2021 http://www.peiderlansel.ch/lyrik.html. Further references to this poem will be made in the text. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111150536-007

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fallen at the hands of men who are “voracious” in their quest to “destroy” the forest (l. 13). This act of destruction through deforestation triggers secondary (natural) catastrophe: avalanches, mudflows (l. 15), and the depletion of air quality (l. 16). The few remaining pines, anthropomorphized as brave soldiers falling on the battlefield (l. 20‒21), can only survive through direct intervention: the effects of anthropogenic climate change can only be stopped by man. Lansel does not limit himself to four stanzas of environmental lament, however. In the second half of the poem, Tamangur functions as a foil for the Romansh people. If modernity has precipitated ecological destruction in and of the forest, then in anthropological terms it has also resulted in the destruction of linguistic and cultural heritage through the concomitant dispersal of the population, urbanization, and the encroachment of German into the Romansh-speaking lands – a process that dates back to at least the Reformation.3 Lansel draws a clear parallel between the proud but dying Alpine forest and the Romansh language and culture of his forebears. It is possible to read the ultimate conclusions of the poem in terms that relate the subjugation of nature to man, in so far as Lansel’s final injunction emphasizes the need to save the language rather than the forest: “unite, my countrymen! With our love we must deliver our language from the same fate as Tamangur” (l. 41‒42).4 What is important for my discussion in this chapter, however, is that Lansel’s emphasis transforms the God da Tamangur as a topographical place into a symbolic space in modern Romansh literature and culture. What is more, the popularity of Lansel’s poem and its circulation in the other of Switzerland’s four national languages (German, French and Italian) and, indeed, in English translation, means that the God da Tamangur functions as a landscape that is marked by, or rather is encountered primarily through, literature – a point I return to below. In this chapter I explore two contemporary texts that depict engagements with the God da Tamangur: the Engadine poet Leta Semadeni’s (born Scuol, Switzerland, 1944) novel Tamangur (2015) and the short story ‘Tamangur’ from the collection Buch gegen das Verschwinden (2015) by the German poet and writer Ulrike Almut Sandig (born Großenhain, Saxony, 1979). Semadeni’s Tamangur is the poet’s first major prose work and the first piece by her to be written and published in German. The text explores the relationship between a recently widowed grandmother (die Großmutter) and her granddaughter (das Kind), as they negotiate life after the

 See, e.g., Robert Henry Billigmeier, A Crisis in Swiss Pluralism (The Hague: Mouton, 1979 [reprint Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016]).  In ecocritical terms the subjugation of nature to the needs of man is a process that dates to the rise of reason and the dawn of the Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. See: Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (London and New York: Routledge, 1993).

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death of the husband/grandfather (der Großvater). The grandfather was a hunter and expert storyteller; after death he is said to have journeyed to Tamangur, the “hunters’ paradise.”5 Along with the village in which the Großmutter and the Kind live and the river that flows through the valley, Tamangur features in the novel as part of a broader symbolic landscape that is marked by loss, grief, and mourning and is populated by the memory of the departed. In Sandig’s text the God da Tamangur exerts a similar hold on the narrative, which follows the German protagonist Eva on a journey by car and on foot to the forest, after she is compelled to make a pilgrimage there by a strange bilingual text – this is, in fact, Lansel’s poem – pasted to the wall of an inn on the shores of Lake Constance.6 Undertaking the journey in November, Eva and her guide Arno, an older Swiss with an intimate knowledge of the landscape, are thrown off course by a surprise snowstorm; Eva makes her way back to the car and is taken to hospital, but all trace of Arno disappears. This disappearance places doubt over their journey to the edge of Tamangur and raises questions about the reliability of the narrative as a whole. In what follows I look briefly at how literary depictions of Tamangur can be understood in terms of space, before analyzing Semadeni’s and Sandig’s texts in turn. As I demonstrate, these literary engagements with Alpine space both affirm and undermine the conventions of ‘Alpine literature,’ as explored in this volume and elsewhere. On the one hand, Semadeni’s text speaks of the intimate relationship between memory and Alpine space as experienced by individuals who live and die in the mountains. On the other hand, though Sandig’s story features an outsider driven by desire into the Alps, Eva is not a traditional Alpinist. As Martina Kopf argues, the “will to conquer” the Alpine peak is a major motivating factor behind Alpinism and its representation in literature.7 That Tamangur is located at a lower elevation means that it is not the typical destination of the Alpinist. As I demonstrate, however, the “urge to move” and the “desire to savor the panorama from above” that Kopf identifies are still major features of this narrative.8

 Leta Semadeni, Tamangur (Zurich: Rotpunktverlag, 2015), 22.  Ulrike Almut Sandig, “Tamangur,” in Buch gegen das Verschwinden (Frankfurt am Main: Schöffling & Co., 2015), 149‒150.  Martina Kopf, Alpinismus – Andinismus. Gebirgslandschaften in europäischer und lateinamerikanischer Literatur (Heidelberg: J. B. Metzler, 2016), 11.  Kopf, Alpinismus – Andinismus, 11.

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The God da Tamangur as concrete and representational space The God da Tamangur exists as a physical environment located in real geographic space. What is more, historical engagement with the forest has had a primarily economic motivation: as reflected in Lansel’s poem, it is the apparent use of its timber that has precipitated its destruction. For mankind, Tamangur exists “out there” as an entity that can be exploited for profit. One can recognize here a modernist view of space as an essentially neutral backdrop for human activity. This premise has, however, been questioned in recent decades as part of the so-called “spatial” or “topographical” turn, which explores space as a major vector of human experience.9 A key part of this understanding is the recognition that space should be understood not merely as an exploitable external reality, but rather as a category that is not only ontologically dependent on the cognition of the subject for its coming-into-being, but which is also a product of social relations.10 This happens in multiple ways, as exemplified by Henri Lefèbvre’s tripartite model of space and spatial practice, which delineates the relationship between concrete space and man and how this is affected and effected by discourse.11 Lefèbvre first identifies “spatial practice,” the dialectical “secret[ion]” of space by a society via engagement with physical space itself as individuals go about their daily lives.12 Second, “representations of space,” which relates to space as it is “conceived” in an abstract way by individuals such as town planners and scientists.13 And third, “representational spaces,” or space as a lived experience that is dependent on the images and symbols that we use to conceive of space itself.14 It is this third category that is of most value for this discussion, since it relates not only to the mediation of concrete space at a symbolic level, but also to how this in turn affects one’s engagement with concrete space itself as part of a symbiotic process. As Lefèbvre argues, “[representational space] is the dominated – and hence passively

 Barney Warf and Santa Arias, “Introduction: the reinsertion of space into the social sciences and humanities,” in The Spatial Turn. Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Barney Warf and Santa Arias (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), 12.  Warf and Arias, “Introduction,” 4.  Henri Lefèbvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1991).  Lefèbvre, The Production of Space, 38 (emphasis original).  Lefèbvre, The Production of Space, 38.  Lefèbvre, The Production of Space, 39.

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experienced – space which the imagination seeks to change and appropriate. It overlays physical space, making symbolic use of its objects.”15 As a cultural product, literature functions as a means by which understandings of space are examined and explored. In Lefebvre’s terms, literature contributes to the field of images and symbols that constitute and produce “representational space.” At the same time, space in literature functions in a second way, in the sense that space is also produced within texts and negotiated by protagonists. As Birgit Neumann argues, space in literature is not only poetically and semantically created, but also often functions as a surface onto which emotions or signifiers of cultural representations might be projected.16 That is, literary depictions of space must be understood in terms of both the cultures that produce them and the values that they encode. At a textual level, this process of creation and projection is shaped by the narrative perspective of the text and the relationship of the protagonists to the spaces they occupy.17 As Neumann outlines, the choice of an internal narrator over an external, heterodiegetic one essentially limits space to that experienced by the focalizing narrator; within such texts, spaces should be understood as the presentation of subjectively experienced space.18 Though Sandig and Semadeni’s texts differ in form, they both feature third-person narratives that are tied to a specific character: Eva and das Kind, respectively. What is important, however, is that both narratives are limited to the knowledge of the protagonist, which essentially reveals space in a subjective way despite any potential distance between narrator and protagonist. In Semadeni’s text the knowledge of das Kind is layered with stories and fairy tales as told by the grandmother and the now-deceased grandfather; the spatial complexes of the narrative are fictionalized even within the narrative itself, and all experiences of space within the text are highly symbolic. In Sandig’s text, the narrative is marked throughout by doubt, both in relation to what Eva knows of the landscapes through which she is travelling and her recounting of this after the fact. As such, space in this text not only refutes Eva’s assumed knowledge – and in turn our own understandings of Alpine space as readers – but is also consistently unstable. Literary engagements with space serve a further function outside of the texts in which they feature. Indeed, there is a complex interaction between the real or concrete space of the God da Tamangur as it exists in Switzerland and the space of representation as manifest in literary depictions of the forest. As Jörg Dünne

 Lefèbvre, The Production of Space, 39.  Birgit Neumann, “Raum und Erzählung,” in Handbuch Literatur und Raum, ed. Jörg Dünne and Andreas Mahler (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 98.  Neumann, “Raum und Erzählung,” 99.  Neumann, “Raum und Erzählung,” 99.

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and Andreas Mahler highlight, this has a positive, productive value because of the very nature of literary communication itself: literature offers the possibility of opening up heterogenous imaginative or conceptual spaces that offer variations on or alternatives to actual, accessible spaces.19 This reality is not afforded by other modes of cultural production, which have a fundamentally different relationship to space.20 What is more, and as mentioned above, these representations in turn then affect the reader’s material engagement with concrete space. In some cases, this precipitates further literary representations of space, a process that results in endless movement between concrete and representational space.21 This pattern is identifiable in Sandig’s ‘Tamangur’. Eva is compelled to visit the wood because of a chance encounter with Lansel’s poem; after her recovery and return to Germany, she in turn codifies her experience both through the photographs that serve as uneasy reminders of her failed journey to the forest (173) and through the act of narration, by which the experience becomes increasingly “thought up [ausgedacht],” before eventually transforming into a “story” (172). In turn, within the framework of Sandig’s text, Eva’s narrating of her experience will color the potential future engagements of her friends with Tamangur. By extension, Sandig’s text itself (and indeed Semadeni’s and Lansel’s) will color the reader’s relationship to the forest as both a consumer of literature and “user” of space. Space also plays a role in the constitution of collective identities, insofar as cultural memory of the past is anchored within the physical, concrete environment.22 Though this is most often the case in urban environments, in which the palimpsestic cityscape contains the traces of past epochs and asserts their presence in the present, natural landscapes can also function in a similar way.23 That cultural memory is tied to spatial dynamics has precedent. In his influential study of French cultural memory, Pierre Nora asserts the centrality of lieux de mémoire, sites “where memory crystallizes and secretes itself.”24 Lieux de mémoire emerge as a result of modernity’s sense of disconnection with the past: Nora notes that the same perceived rupture in time that precipitated the rise of history and the privileging of

 Jörg Dünne and Andreas Mahler, “Einleitung,” in Handbuch Literatur und Raum, ed. Jörg Dünne and Andreas Mahler (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 4.  Dünne and Mahler, “Einleitung,” 4.  Dünne and Mahler, “Einleitung,” 4.  Nicolas Pethes, “Mnemotop,” in Handbuch Literatur und Raum, ed. Jörg Dünne and Andreas Mahler (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 196.  Nicolas Pethes, “Mnemotop,” 196.  Pierre Nora, “Between Memory and History: Les Lieux de Mémoire,” Representations 26 (1989): 7.

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time over space also resulted in the proliferation of lieux de mémoire.25 For Nora, this is because our lived connections with milieux de mémoire, “real environments of memory,” have been broken by the modernizing forces of industrialization and urbanization, a process that has accelerated in the period of postmodernity.26 The connection between memory and space is developed further by Jan Assmann, who states that any group seeking to consolidate itself as such must endeavor to create and secure locations that not only function as venues for collective interaction, but which also in turn actually become collective symbols of identity and markers of memory.27 As Assmann states, “memory needs spaces, it pulls towards spatialization.”28 Scattered in the remote Alpine valleys of Grisons, with a culture and language that is marked by plurality, the Romansh people have in the God da Tamangur a lieux de mémoire that contributes to the shaping of their collective identity as a nation. This happens at a concrete level because the forest itself serves as a marker of collectivized memory in lieu of any significant man-made sites of memory. Indeed, as Pethes emphasizes, in Assmann’s argument collective memory is not merely oriented towards specific sites in which historically significant events – for that group – have taken place; rather, collective memory “codes” geographical spaces in a way that is independent of both actual concrete remains of the past and institutions that seek to determine the shape of discourse.29 Indeed, the forest itself does not contain any concrete markers of the Romansh past – it is not the site of a significant battle or event in the history of the nation –, but rather it has, thanks to Lansel’s poem, nonetheless sedimented as a site of collective memory. What is more, this process also takes place at a symbolic level. As Nora outlines, lieux de mémoire do not necessarily have to be concrete, but can indeed also be symbolic, insofar as memory “takes root” not only “in the concrete, in spaces” but also in “gestures, images and objects.”30 Literature undoubtedly functions in such a way, and one can see how Lansel’s text is a key contributor to the transformation of the forest into a site of collective memory. As I outline below, that the God da Tamangur functions  Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 7.  Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 7.  Jan Assmann, “Das kollektive Gedächtnis zwischen Körper und Schrift. Zur Gedächtnis von Maurice Halbwachs,” in Erinnerung und Gesellschaft. Mémoire et Société. Hommage à Maurice Halbwachs (1877‒1945), ed. Hermann Krapoth and Denis Laborde (Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2005), 79.  “Das Gedächtnis braucht Orte, tendiert zur Verräumlichung.” Assmann, “Das kollektive Gedächtnis,” 79.  Jan Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis: Schrift, Erinnerung und politische Identität in frühen Hochkulturen (Munich: Beck, 1992), 60. Quoted in Pethes, “Mnemotop,” 197.  Nora, “Between Memory and History,” 9.

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in this way is a key factor of Semadeni’s text, in which the collective memory of the family is tied directly to a symbolic understanding of the forest and Alpine space more generally.

Leta Semadeni’s Tamangur As outlined above, whilst Sandig’s narrative is marked by patterns of ascent and descent to and from Tamangur, in Semadeni’s novel there is no concrete engagement with the forest in the sense that the protagonists do not journey there physically. Rather, it features as part of a broader symbolic landscape of memory and loss that is centered on the isolated, unnamed Alpine “Dorf” in which the protagonist lives with her grandmother after the death of the grandfather. What is more, this symbolic landscape is layered over the concrete spaces that surround the village and which exert an influence over it. As we are told, the village is a tiny “speck on the map” that “ends where it begins” (10). The landscape surrounding the village encroaches upon it, with the result that it is not a welcoming place but is rather one “filled with shadows far below the mountain-tops” (9). This interplay of light and shadow, triggered by the “concrete” landscape around the village, affects the protagonists by bridging the gap between their everyday experience and the memory that imbues the world around them: When the mountain’s shadow slices the house in two, the grandmother dislikes the village and thinks of the grandfather. The village tightens in times of darkness, she says. Memory lays about the place like a sleeping animal and blocks one’s way. (20)

The absence of direct sunlight precipitates an emotional and psychological claustrophobia in the grandmother. The shadow acts as a trigger of memory and a reminder of the loss that the grandmother has experienced; she is unable to move forward in any sense as a result of the irruption of memory into the present. In turn, the interplay of light and shadow and its effect on the inhabitants of the village plays a key role in the child’s understanding of the grandmother’s emotional world and motivations. Her heart is described in sylvan terms as “a large forest with dense undergrowth, with trees stretching to the sky, trees close to the ground and many bushes” (12). The child is able, or feels she is able, to enter this emotional forest. This movement is not free, however, but is in fact dependent on the light. The experience is either one of “walking” in the “glades” that open when the grandmother is in a good mood, or one of getting lost within the dark sections of “undergrowth” into which the child is chased when the grandmother is in a bad mood. Here the wooded landscape becomes a means for

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the child to understand the complex emotions of the mourning grandmother; the landscape around the village allows her to negotiate difficult emotional terrain. It is important to note, however, that this emotional woodland is not Tamangur, but rather a more generic forest landscape. Within Semadeni’s text, the God da Tamangur performs a specific role as a realm of the dead that is cut off from the living and their experiences. In the topography of Semadeni’s Tamangur, the village occupies a middle position between the unnamed river which flows “thick and glossy towards the border” (9) and Tamangur as a symbolic realm of the dead populated by deceased hunters (8).31 Tamangur as a symbolic realm is positioned not just beyond the village, but is projected high above it in the mountains that surround the settlement: “whenever [the grandmother] thinks about [the grandfather] in Tamangur, she looks up and has this look on her face [. . .]. Tamangur must be up there, the child thinks. But you can’t see the people who are up there” (21). Here, the position of the actual God da Tamangur high above the villages of the Engadin takes on a symbolic value in its association with the afterlife, which, in the Christian tradition at least, is projected up and out, or above, of the individual: into the heavens in both a literal and metaphorical sense. In this way, Semandeni alludes to the geographical and temporal liminality of the forest as emphasized in the opening lines of Lansel’s poem by placing it in a space beyond the here and now, a point that I return to below. Located below the Dorf, the river acts as a conduit in multiple ways. On the one hand it facilitates movement between the village and the outside world because it flows across the border into Austria and on to the Black Sea. In the novel, the shopping trips that the grandmother and the child undertake when the former is in a good mood always happen in Austria (67f.). This journey into the light, then, involves moving down to the level of the river and beyond the immediate landscape surrounding the village, away from the darkness that periodically characterizes the village and away from both Tamangur itself and the loss that it encapsulates. At the same time, the river also plays a role in the wider landscape of death within the novel because it represents a route of escape or even disposal within the village for “everything that does not have a place in the village” (106), as the grandmother explains. It is possible to read this movement of people out of the village in multiple ways. In one sense it relates to those who have left the village for economic security elsewhere, the so-called “Randulinas” (lit. “swallows”)

 Though the river is unnamed in Semadeni’s text, the proximity to Tamangur and the fact that it flows across the border means one can presume that this is the Inn.

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of Romansh tradition, including the child’s parents (35).32 The river can also be understood as a conduit for the dead, however: at several points in the novel, the river is described as the route taken by the child’s younger brother, who is said to have transformed, like a character in a fairy tale, into a fish and journeyed to the Black Sea (42; 54). As readers we never learn whether his departure from the village is narrated to the child in this way to explain an untimely death or a tragic accident in the river itself in terms she might understand. Whatever the truth might be, both the fate of the brother and the river as a physical feature become part of the same symbolic, memorial landscape and its narration to the child. The simultaneous proximity and distance between the living and the dead in Semadeni’s novel permeate its geographical and emotional landscapes with a sense of longing and desire for the absent Other. In this way, Semadeni’s Tamangur can be connected to broader cultural representations of Alpine space. As Veronica Della Dora states in relation to mountains generally, their “cultural history is largely the history of our relationship with the natural and supernatural Other.”33 Similarly, Thomas Simpson describes the Alps as “multivalent [. . .] spaces of otherness.”34 And, as Leonie Silber states, a major modern topos of Alpine literature posits the mountains as sites of Otherness in opposition to society, culture, and history.35 Within Semadeni’s novel, death functions as the ultimate, unknowable Other; as the novel’s realm of the dead, Tamangur is presented as a space of unattainable Otherness that develops through the individual’s imaginative longing for this space. This understanding of Tamangur features throughout the narrative. At one point, the grandmother is said to “love longing” to such an extent that she “nourishes and cultivates” it (31), a metaphor of growth that links to the previous presentation of the grandmother’s emotional world in sylvan terms. Throughout the text there is, however, a very real sense that such longing cannot be satiated: despite saying that she longs to be transported to Tamangur to be reunited with her dead husband, the grandmother also states: “Tamangur is the destination that one does not really want to reach [. . .]. Paradise is hard to bear when one is yet to die.” (32). Tamangur functions in Semadeni’s novel, then, as a space of longing for a reunion that cannot be achieved in this life. Journeying to Tamangur as it exists

 See Angelika Overath, ‘Randulinas and Randulins’ in Angelika Overath, Gebrauchsanweisung für das Engadin (Munich and Berlin: Piper, 2016), 193‒195.  Veronica Della Dora, Mountain: Nature and Culture (London: Reaktion Books, 2016), 7.  Thomas Simpson, “Modern Mountains from the Enlightenment to the Anthropocene,” The Historical Journal 62.2 (2019): 555.  Leonie Silber, Poetische Berge. Alpinismus und Literatur nach 2000 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2019), 106.

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within this literary topography would entail the ultimate transformation of the living into the dead. As a result of this insurmountable barrier, within the narrative Tamangur can only ever be understood in earthly terms, and as such it is described in terms of lack: though it is the “hunters’ paradise” (8; 22), it is also described in terms of boredom when compared to this life. Natural phenomena such as avalanches, thunderstorms, and lightning strikes are explained to the child, for example, as the grandfather releasing his pent-up frustration at being trapped in Tamangur (22). As the grandmother explains: “There are no chamois there [. . .]. In Tamangur there are no choughs, no Sundays, no Christmases, no roast dinners, no Easter Bunny, no holidays” (22). In this understanding, Tamangur lacks all those earthly things that make this life worthwhile for the child and the grandmother in the absence of the grandfather himself. The grandmother continues: “It [that is, both Tamangur and being there] is as though . . . .”36 In Semadeni’s novel, Tamangur is established as a subjunctive zone of speculation that is limited by the fact that we cannot know objectively what life after death will be like without being dead ourselves. In this way Tamangur, as a feature of the symbolic landscape of memory within the text as the realm of the dead, represents on the one hand loss and lack, but on the other a deep longing that is only overcome at the very end of the novel. The grandmother, dying in hospital at the age of ninety-three, is visited by “the young woman” (143), the child who is now an adult, and, after death travels to Tamangur where she is, we assume, reunited with her husband.

Ulrike Almut Sandig’s ‘Tamangur’ In contrast to Semadeni’s Tamangur, in which the forest does not feature in a concrete way, the God da Tamangur features in Sandig’s short story as the real, topographical point of longing to which the protagonist Eva, guided by the Swiss Arno, journeys in the course of the narrative. As outlined above, Lansel’s poem precipitates Eva’s desire to visit the forest. Having encountered the text pinned to the wall of an inn on the shores of Lake Constance, she is seized by wanderlust to journey to Tamangur (149f), despite never having heard of it and knowing nothing about it. Or so we are led to believe: Sandig weaves threads of doubt and uncertainty throughout her narrative and we are later told that Eva’s literary trigger is apparently “absolutely not” why she wants to journey to the forest, but rather “a reasonable explanation” (150). Whatever the true grounds of Eva’s motivation (and as  “Es ist als ob [. . .].” Leta Semadeni, Tamangur, 22.

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readers we never actually learn what this is), what is clear is that Eva knows absolutely nothing about the forest and the wider landscape in which it is situated in real terms. What little knowledge she does possess comes primarily from books; throughout the text this codified relationship to the Alpine landscape stands in direct contrast to Arno’s lived experience of the terrain. What is more, it also results in a series of expectations on Eva’s part that are consistently undermined by her embodied, unmediated encounter with the landscape whilst journeying through it. Indeed, Arno’s admonishment, “you know absolutely nothing about Tamangur” (140) echoes throughout the text. Even at the end of the text it is unclear whether Eva’s knowledge of Tamangur and its environs has altered. As the text reaches its climax (the unexpected snowstorm), it is possible that the conceptual gap between knowledge and experience actually widens. This is tied to the fact that the landscape itself, or rather Eva’s projected understanding of it, becomes increasingly strange as the narrative progresses. The winter has had a transformative effect on the landscape: deep snow covers the road and branches hang low because of heavy icicles (143). This effect, however, extends beyond the blanketing of the terrain by the snow and the elision of difference that this entails. For Eva, the changed landscape has an almost magical effect: a nearby waterfall that has frozen solid appears to Eva “like a transparent human” (143), suggesting an effort to read the landscape in terms that Eva understands. The conditions mean that Eva is quickly out of her depth both literally – she has expected the entire endeavor to be “easier” than it really is (143) – and in a metaphorical sense: the landscape appears to be as alien to her as she is to it: “no movements in the snow, no chamois or whatever one might imagine, when one has no clue about the mountains; no strange Alpine birds in the air, not even a single cloud in the sky” (145). This profound lack of understanding continues throughout the text. Eva is unable to read the landscape around her: not only does she fail to notice the small stream that they have been following during their ascent (148), but she is unable to identify the animal prints and tracks that she does eventually spot (153). This reaches a climax as the pair approach the edge of the forest, which again defies Eva’s expectations: “The trees were grouped closer together and took on strange shapes. Shouldn’t they get smaller at this altitude? Eva asked herself [. . .]. That’s what she had read” (153f). That Eva’s embodied experience of the Alpine landscape consistently undermines her expectations in this way links to broader spatial dynamics and the mediation of Alpine space in and through literature. That is, the literary complex that surrounds the Alps as a concrete space (or in Lefebvre’s terms Alpine “representational space”) is so dense that our engagements with the Alps is always already filtered by literature. This dates back centuries: even Petrarch’s famous ascent of Mont Ventoux in April 1336, as described by him in a letter of around

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1350, features the poet reading Augustine on the mountain as a means of understanding his embodied experience.37 Leonie Silber explores the prevalence of this trope in contemporary Alpine literature in Poetische Berge (2019). As she argues, literary codification of the Alps is so dense that one can only engage with the mountain range in a way that is marked with literary pre-engagement.38 Here, “codified” should be understood both in the sense that piles or even mountains of literary and non-literary texts have been written on the Alps and that they have been mapped and indexed extensively. This process is easy to identify in Sandig’s text, from Lansel’s poem and Eva’s book-based knowledge of Tamangur and expectations of Alpine space more generally, through to the fact that Arno and Eva follow first a bridleway – a pre-determined, official route through the landscape that appears on maps and is clearly sign-posted – and then a loipe, a crosscountry skiing track that functions as a trace in the pristine Alpine landscape, a sign that they are not the first to engage with this specific Alpine space (even since the last snowfall). As Silber continues, contemporary literature posits Alpine space, and indeed the Alps themselves, as intertextual constructs that are shaped by the reverberations of their literary forebears.39 It is clear in Sandig’s text that this is the case, but the reliability of such mediated knowledge and experience is brought into question throughout. Indeed, as the reader experiences, Eva’s knowledge proves to be fundamentally lacking when she is faced with the landscape in real terms. In this sense, Eva stands in direct contrast to Arno, the Swiss guide who leads her up to the edge of the God da Tamangur. Prior to undertaking the journey to Tamangur, Eva and Arno do not know each other. Following Arno’s disappearance in the snowstorm, Eva’s memory of him proves to be at best fragile and at worst based primarily on conjecture: not only does she not remember his eye color or face, but even his name is revealed at the very start of the (retrospective) narrative as a guess: “Let’s call the acquaintance Arno, because it’s not unusual for a sixty-year-old man to be called Arno in Switzerland” (137). What is clear, however, is that Arno has an intimate knowledge of the landscape that stands in stark contrast to Eva’s: he not only translates a sign from Romansh into German for her (142), but also seeks to induct her into an experiential state of knowledge by naming the mountains they pass on their journey (140). Eva is, however, unable to remember the “difficult words” even as he speaks them to her. That Arno knows the landscape in such an intimate way is a reality that Eva struggles to  Petrarch, “The Ascent of Mont Ventoux,” in The Italian Renaissance: The Essential Sources, ed. Kenneth Gouwens (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 31.  Silber, Poetische Berge, 27.  Silber, Poetische Berge, 27.

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process; she sees his knowledge as a super- or even non-human ability and imagines that he is able to hear imperceptible sounds from the next valley or far-away traffic that she, an outsider unacquainted with the landscape, cannot hear (146f). Even his movement through the landscape comes across as strange and machinelike to her (147). There are a number of real-life and literary forebears of this guide/guided relationship, from Tenzing Norgay guiding Edmund Hillary in their summiting of Mount Everest in 1953, through to Dante’s poet being guided through the layers of hell by Virgil, who provides extensive exegesis on what is being experienced. In Sandig’s text, however, the most compelling aspect of this relationship is that it does not survive to the end of the narrative. Having made it to the edge of Tamangur, Eva and Arno turn back but are met with a snowstorm that knocks her momentarily unconscious (160), a blank space in the narrative that is marked by a caesura in the text itself. When she is rescued by the emergency services, Arno is nowhere to be seen and the only trace of him that remains is on the photographs that she has taken – yet even these seem unreal to people who view them. A realistic reading of the text might suppose in this instance that Arno has merely been unlucky and that his body will be found when the snow melts the following spring. If we consider the narrative doubt that is placed around his existence from the start of the text and Eva’s response to his localized knowledge, however, an alternative opens. In Arno we have a figure who is local to the landscape but who is subsumed back into it when the almost magical spell it has cast over the outsider Eva is broken, in this case by the storm. It is therefore possible to see in Arno the character of the Wild or Green Man of the forests, a figure from European folklore whose roots as protector of forests and embodiment of the natural world can be traced back to the Roman Silvanus.40 As I have stated above, the potential primary motivation for Eva’s exploration of the Alpine landscape is her encounter with Lansel’s poem, a feature of the text that mirrors the inherent intertextuality of Alpine space, as Silber demonstrates. At the same time, however, Eva’s desire to reach Tamangur is underpinned by the same motivating factors that have long guided mountaineering and Alpine exploration more generally, both in literature and in real life. As Martina Kopf outlines, the tripartite drive of the Alpinist can be understood in terms of a “urge to move,” a “will to conquer,” and the “desire to savor the [Alpine] panorama from above.”41 Though there is a slight difference here, in so far as the  For a discussion of the Green Man in European folklore and culture, please see: William Anderson, Green Man: The Archetype of our Oneness with the Earth (London: Harper Collins, 1990); Nina Lyon, Uprooted. On the Trail of the Green Man (London: Faber and Faber, 2016).  Kopf, Alpinismus – Andinismus, 11.

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drive in Sandig’s text is to a high Alpine forest rather than the neighboring Alpine peaks themselves, these traits are identifiable in Eva’s motivation to reach Tamangur. After the pair have pushed forward through increasingly deep snow, they turn off from the loipe to cross an untouched snowfield (153) and eventually stop to observe both a lizard-like cloud in the valley far below them and the expanse of white snow behind them when they reach the edge of the forest itself (155). Ultimately, however, the end goal of ‘conquest’ is denied to Eva. Having fought their way through snowy terrain, she and Arno reach the edge of Tamangur as if by chance: “And then they were at the edge of a large, dark forest” (155). Surrounded by an expansive stillness in which no sound can be heard, the pair stand at the very edge of their destination. The forest is presented as an almost otherworldly space in which normality does not occur, an experience emphasized by the fact that, on the meadow below them, time had seemingly stopped (155). In Sandig’s description of the forest, observed by Eva as if it were a painting, one can hear faint echoes of Lansel’s poem, of Tamangur occupying space marked by geographic and temporal liminality: The mountain pines stood tightly together. Their crowns stretched motionless into the icyblue sky, their boughs hung down heavily and sank into the snow. The forest floor was cluttered with dead matter and regrowth. It was impenetrable. (156)

Again, literary expectation is confounded by lived reality: the desired destination cannot be reached but merely observed from its edge and understood from a distance. Eva cracks a joke, blaming “Jack Frost” in an effort to hide her “disappointment” at the situation (156). That she is denied entry into Tamangur in this way means that she cannot know the forest in any truly intimate sense; the draw it has exerted upon Eva cannot be realized through enactment. This position on the edge of potentially true knowledge transforms what is knowable and known to Eva into something other. That is, Eva’s primarily literary understanding of the world is revealed to her as fundamentally false: this is exemplified by her own voice, which seems suddenly “artificial”, as though she were within the hermetic space of a recording studio, separate from the world she occupies (156). Eva’s bodily experience appears as though it is fictional; her previous understanding of the world appears ungrounded when faced with the reality and experience of Alpine space. This does not, however, precipitate a Damascene conversion in Eva’s understanding. Denied entry to the forest and after taking some photographs to record the moment, the pair begins to re-trace their route down the mountain, only to be hit by the snowstorm that causes Arno’s ultimate disappearance. This event prevents any further engagement with the forest at that moment in time from taking place. What is more, Arno’s disappearance potentially points to this being denied

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in the future: in the absence of her guide, Eva may never know Tamangur (or Alpine space more generally) in any true sense. After her rescue and during her recuperation in hospital, Eva continues to be drawn to the mountains. Her experience of them, however, continues to be filtered in and through other media. One of her final acts as a patient is to take her camera and, pointing it through a gap in the window, zoom in on the mountain peaks surrounding her: The black contours of the krummholz-band appeared on the camera’s display, that zone in which the trees become smaller and more buckled before vanishing at the tree line. The bald cliff-faces above raised themselves out of the background, sharp and dark. But the higher snowfields seemed to merge into the colorless clouds, and Eva could not tell where the mountains ended and the sky began. (169)

What is notable here is that, when viewed through her camera and therefore available to Eva in a mediated way and at a remove from reality, the landscape conforms to her literary or book-based expectations: the trees in the subalpine treeline are in fact smaller and more buckled, a reality not reflected in her embodied experience en route to the edge of Tamangur. Likewise, when Eva drives away from the hospital in which she has recuperated, she is able to view and comprehend the landscape around her, but only because this is mediated through her windshield (171). An intimate, unmediated, and embodied understanding of Alpine space is denied.

Conclusion Sandig’s ‘Tamangur’ is part of a wider collection of short stories, Buch gegen das Verschwinden, which centers on the question of disappearance as an on-going process with an open outcome, as Elizabeth Boa outlines.42 The sites that Sandig chooses, Boa demonstrates, are often peripheral and/or liminal, occupying zones at the border of the extant, constantly threatening to disappear. The question arises, then, as to why the God da Tamangur has been chosen as one of these peripheral spaces. In one sense, the theme of disappearance is one that has been explored repeatedly in relation to this specific Alpine space. In Lansel’s poem, the forest is a remainder of another time, clinging to the “descent into tomorrow” as a marker of Romansh identity. In Semadeni’s novel, Tamangur is a symbolic realm of the dead, the “hunters’ paradise” at the center of a broader memorial

 Elizabeth Boa, “Time and Space in Ulrike Almut Sandig’s Buch gegen das Verschwinden: An Ecological Reading,” in Oxford German Studies 47.3 (2018): 366‒379.

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landscape that cannot be comprehended or accessed by the living. And in Sandig’s text we encounter the forest as the site of unrealizable experience and questioned knowledge. Taking a step back from these texts and their exploration of Alpine space, we can consider how they codify the space of Tamangur through their circulation as literary texts. It is possible, then, that our engagements with this peripheral site in the mountains will be shaped by our experiences of Lansel, Semadeni, and Sandig’s texts. In her study of contemporary German-language Alpine literature, Silber argues effectively that journeys into the mountains present the Alps as zones of precarity, dispossession of the self, and disappearance.43 Though the texts explored here do not fulfil all of these criteria at all times, it is clear that contemporary literary engagements with Tamangur as Alpine space are permeated by disappearance, longing, and loss. As is Alpine space itself.

 Silber, Poetische Berge, 217.

Peter Arnds

Walking Away, Going Astray in Alpine Spaces: Homeric Wanderings in Peter Stamm’s Weit über das Land (To the Back of Beyond, 2016) Introduction The dream of the disappearing self and the transformation of one’s identity is the stuff of much travel writing. It is a dream of spontaneous departures, followed by completely random travel, of just walking out on everything without ever looking back. Most travel literature, however, does not fit this picture for the fact that most journeys tend to be planned, organized, especially in view of the impetus to write about them. Homer’s Odyssey may initially strike us as an exception in that Odysseus’s travels are described as random wanderings, as erroneous travel. In the end, however, the Odyssey too eludes randomness and accidentality, as Odysseus is being steered by the Gods and his travels and travails serve the purpose of progressively constructing the hero’s self. And Odysseus looks back, his journey never losing sight of its telos, the idea of nostos, his return home to Penelope, whom he keeps waiting for twenty years. The German description of the Odyssey as the Irrfahrten des Odysseus (the errant wanderings of Odysseus), reflects the apparently random character of his voyage across the Mediterranean, something Primo Levi then famously drew on in La Tregua (The Truce, 1963), about his slow return journey home to Torino after his harrowing year in Auschwitz. While such randomness characterizes all travel as unforeseeable adventure, many narratives are planned around unique angles. This may imply the oddity of the route chosen, its hidden dangers or other challenges, such as the form of slow travel itself. Walking away from a failed marriage and a failed career, the Native-American writer William Least Heat-Moon, for example, wrote about traveling the small forgotten roads of America, the blue highways as he calls them. Displaying a maximum of male bravado the Scottish author Rory Stewart wrote about the uniqueness of walking through war-torn Afghanistan, and the German journalist Wolfgang Büscher slowly followed the periphery of Germany, walked from Berlin to Moscow, or down the middle of the U.S. The purpose was to showcase a new kind of trip that nobody had ever written about, such as a walk from North Dakota to Mexico. It is the unique angle in

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travel writing that makes it non-random, and yet randomness and uniqueness also go well together. Random departures in particular, especially those undertaken on foot, and which then result in a high degree of resilience in walking for unusual stretches of time, are few and far between in contemporary travel writing. In travel fiction, Peter Stamm’s Weit über das Land (2016, To the Back of Beyond, trans. Michael Hofmann, 2017) is one such text and so is British novelist Rachel Joyce’s The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (2012). Their protagonists follow a spontaneous impulse to leave their domestic environment and just keep on walking. But they differ in that in one there seems to be no apparent purpose to the long-distance walk, while in the other there is. Once he starts walking, Stamm’s protagonist Thomas does not return to his wife Astrid for 20-odd years, and the direction and purpose of his walk are not clear. Harold Fry, too, spontaneously decides to keep walking, although he initially just sets out to post a letter from the nearest postbox in his South Devonshire hometown. Completely unprepared, he keeps walking in his yacht shoes, without a mobile phone or maps, getting more sore but also happier with each day of walking. He walks all the way up to Berwick-onTweed for the purpose of saving a friend he has not seen for twenty years from dying from cancer. Werner Herzog had already tried this before him by walking from Munich to Paris in inclement winter weather, an experience he recounts in Of Walking in Ice (1978). It was a long-distance walk likewise undertaken to save a friend from dying, Lotte Eisner, film maker and critic. Unlike Joyce’s protagonist Harold Fry, Herzog, however, did succeed. Such departures and spontaneous but excessively long foot journeys contrast with the planned adventure trip: literary hikes such as Rory Stewart’s The Places in Between (2004) about his 2002 solo walk from Herat to Kabul, or Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (2012) about her hike along the Pacific Crest Trail, the male hikers she meets along the way describing her as “the only girl in the woods.” Or indeed “the only white girl in the outback,” Robyn Davidson, whose travelogue Tracks (1980) records her journey in 1978 from Alice Springs to the Indian Ocean in the company of four camels, a dog, and, for a good stretch, a photographer of the National Geographic. They are women traveling and writing about wilderness spaces, so that this sort of travel writing is also highly gendered by showing women conquering a space traditionally claimed by male explorers. Gender, the transformation of identity, resistance, resilience, and randomness are central features in Peter Stamm’s Weit über das Land. Like Homer’s Mediterranean spaces, the Swiss Alps function as a psychogeographical space for Thomas, who one day just gets up and walks out on his wife and family, saunters off into the mountains, and does not return for twenty years. Such sauntering at the expense of social responsibility, in particular the male protagonist’s escape

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from his wife and children into the mountain world, have their literary antecedents also in at least two nineteenth-century classics, Washington Irving’s Rip van Winkle (1819) and Ludwig Tieck’s fairy-tale novella Der Runenberg (Rune Mountain, 1804). These four texts in world literature feature what Leslie Fiedler once described as men “on the run, harried into the forest and out to sea, down the river or into combat – anywhere to avoid ‘civilization’ [. . .] and responsibility.”1 They are men whose commitment, as Judith Fetterley has shown brilliantly by way of her analysis of Irving’s classic Rip Van Winkle, “is to pleasure and play” alone.2 While there is undeniably a rich intertextuality between Peter Stamm’s tale and those by Irving and Tieck, this chapter will focus on the psychogeography of the journey of Stamm’s protagonist via several cultural theories – by Ernst Jünger, Giorgio Agamben, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Johan Huizinga – to explore its intertextual interaction with Homer’s Odyssey, specifically how it deconstructs the idea of nostos (home) so central to Odysseus’s journey in the context of the protagonist’s resistance to what he calls the “eingespielte Welt,”3 the well-adapted Swiss world. My focus is specifically also on the topography in this book and how it reflects the psychogeography of the novel’s anti-hero. An understanding of this psychogeography can be approached by way of several ideas and theorizations: first, escape from and resistance to social expectations – Thomas’s hike through endless forests and into the vertical spaces of the Alps is an act of resistance to petrified conditions in Switzerland, an environment that has the strict order of the national game. As Huizinga tells us, games and the homo ludens are subjected to strict order, something Thomas tries to elude.4 He becomes a solitary player, a homo ludens whose escape to the forested Alpine world blends the romantic concept of Waldeinsamkeit (woodland solitude) with Ernst Jünger’s idea of the Waldgang (the forest passage).5 Second, resilience. Thomas’s resilience is closely tied to space, time, and emotions such as happiness; he abandons the human community and specifically Swiss community with the family as its smallest communal entity into the state of nature, a moment that can be explored through the work of Giorgio Agamben, his concepts of nuda vita (bare  Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Meridian World, 1962), xx‒xxi.  Judith Fetterley, “‘Introduction: On the Politics of Literature’ and ‘Palpable Designs: An American Dream: Rip Van Winkle’”, in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, ed. Robyn R. Warhol and Diane Price Herndl (New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1991), 492‒509.  Peter Stamm, Weit über das Land (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 2016), 149. Further references to Stamm’s novel will be made in the main body of the text.  Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens. A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Tacoma, WA: Angelico Press, 2016), 10.  Ernst Jünger, Der Waldgang (Stuttgart: Klett, 2000).

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life) and the homo sacer, humans cursed by and set apart from the community; resilience, however, is also displayed by his wife Astrid, who like Homer’s Penelope, waits patiently for twenty years for Thomas’s return. Third, time and space. Thomas’s extended hike is rhizomatic, labyrinthine. It leads him from striated time and space to what Deleuze and Guattari have called smooth space and what I want to call smooth time; it is an experience that expands his consciousness, results in the fragmentation of what Nietzsche, likewise an avid Alpinist,6 calls the principium individuationis and may even lead to moments of happiness. Although the Swiss Alps, from where Thomas does not stray until the final phase of his twenty-year hike, are part of the topos of Switzerland as national fortress, Stamm opens this space especially through his intertextuality with Homer’s Odyssey and Odysseus’s wandering in cosmopolitan Mediterranean spaces. So that fourth, related to the rhizomatic hike in smooth space and smooth time, Stamm’s novel plays with the idea of randomness, with Odysseus’s apparent Irrfahrt. A reading of Stamm vis à vis Homer reveals how the Swiss Alps become not only an intertextual but also a transcultural space.

Escape, resistance, Waldgang In his attempt to break from the “eingespielte Welt” of Swiss Erstarrungen (petrifications), its sense of order, and its shame structures, which shame those who elude the grasp of reason and duties, Thomas first resorts to the forest before ascending into higher elevations. It is a phase in which the Romantics’ Waldeinsamkeit as displayed by Ludwig Tieck, for example, in his Phantasus novellas Der blonde Eckbert (Eckbert the Blonde, 1797) and Der Runenberg (Rune Mountain, 1804) merges with Ernst Jünger’s Waldgänger. Jünger developed this concept in his famous essay from 1951 in memory of the Nazi years. By Waldgänger he identifies the individualist who is resisting any type of regime and who, if discovered, may get singled out and destroyed by it. The Waldgänger is, in a broad sense, an anarchist, someone whose mental freedom yields a maximum of resistance against official governance. Thomas’s 20-year walk reflects this idea, as he eludes the grip of the nation-state with its communal nucleus of the family and the idea of home tied to both. The one who walks the way Thomas does no longer has a home and has become alien to ownership tied to sessility. He or she also engages in the act of

 Cf. Mark Edmund Bolland, Nietzsche and Mountains. Dissertation. Durham University. 1996. http://etheses.dur.ac.uk/1579/1/1579.pdf?EThOS%20(BL); Frédéric Gros, A Philosophy of Walking. (London: verso, 2015), 11‒29.

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slowing down. The last two hundred years have increasingly forced us into acceleration. Thanks to writers like Shane O’Mara and his recent book In Praise of Walking (2019) as well as our recent period of confinement during the Covid-19 pandemic we are now rediscovering the benefits of walking for both our physical and mental health.7 Moreover, walking has a long tradition of resistance. In various parts of the world the restrictions that came with the pandemic have met with a great deal of dissent and civil disobedience. In places like Dublin, where the radius in straying from one’s home was 2km and then became 5km, and in many other cities, urban walking at the height of virus activity represented an act of dissent and of excarceration. Such excarceration arising from the act of walking has its literary antecedents, especially in Romanticism. To William Blake, for example, walking through London at night represented such an individualist act of excarceration, its purpose to evade the stifling order of the administered city, to resist its commercial organization, and to slip free from its mind-forged manacles.8 There is a moment of resistance in the very act of walking the streets, as the word “to stray” and “street” are etymologically linked. “To stray” is derived from Latin “strata” for “street,” past participle of “sternere” for “to pave over,” so that streets hold within their etymology both the act of organizing cities and other spaces by way of an administrative striation as well as unchartering those spaces. While, as Beaumont argues, the act of walking, especially for the Romantics, “inscribed a coded rebellion against the culture of agrarian and industrial capitalism onto the material surfaces of the city and the countryside – the streets, the roads, the footpaths – and their social relations,”9 strolling the streets will always remain a kind of vagabondage. This is indicated also by the linguistic connection between “to stroll” and the German word Strolch, the vagabond who performs some kind of act of trespassing. Thomas clearly also excarcerates himself in the act of leaving home and by continuing to walk. Although he tends to avoid streets as the striation of the civilized world and ends up spending much of his time in Alpine wilderness, his journey can also be characterized as vagabondage. To escape the Swiss “model landscape” (Stamm 113), Thomas walks aimlessly through forests, then on to higher elevations, up to the Alpine meadows just below the mountain peaks, but in this vertical topography he also falls into a crevasse, a pivotal scene of mythical and psychic significance. As much as the urban flâneur became a figure of subversion and resistance to authority to the early French Situationists of the 1950s, Thomas as homo viator partakes of such resistance. Merlin Coverley argues that “walking becomes bound  Shane O’Mara, In Praise of Walking (London: Penguin 2019).  Matthew Beaumont, Night Walking. A Nocturnal History of London (London: verso, 2016), 293‒295.  Beaumont, Night Walking, 229.

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up with psychogeography’s characteristic political opposition to authority” and tries to “overcome the processes of banalization by which the everyday experience of our surroundings becomes one of drab monotony.”10 Urban flâneurism was a reaction to the malaise of modernism, a form of resistance to urban pressures, to heighten a mindfulness threatened by growing urbanity, its drabness and monotony but also its pressures on the body and mind, in a way to cherish also a memory of blissful pre-industrialized times. Although Thomas’s true motivations remain unclear – Stamm tends to avoid all psychological explanations, – the reader cannot help but suspect that it is precisely this drab monotony and the banality of life Thomas seeks to run away from, slipping away from his wife Astrid’s voice of reason (Stamm 22), straying while estranging her from the quotidian world. His resistance to civil duties brings him to a point where he seems to regress to his origins, to a kind of child-like state of innocence in the state of nature, as he “rolled up like a small child” (p. 64). In moments of a complete union with the natural world Thomas even strips naked, dipping himself into ice-cold mountain streams, where he softens his bread, and “naked as he was, lay down in the sunshine” (Stamm 75). Assuming features of the wild man archetype, he discovers a sense of freedom hitherto unknown to him, free from the social contract, a freedom, however, that also leaves him vulnerable to the forces of nature. Nature holds a strange tension for Thomas between peace and the loss of peace associated with his selfabandonment from the human community. It is the kind of freedom that Frederic Gros has associated with long distance walking in his Philosophy of Walking: During long cross-country wanders, you do glimpse that freedom of pure renunciation. When you walk for a long time, there comes a moment when you no longer know how many hours have passed, or how many more will be needed to get there; you feel on your shoulders the weight of the bare necessities, you tell yourself that’s quite enough – that really nothing more is needed to keep body and soul together – and you feel you could carry on like this for days, for centuries. You can hardly remember where you are going or why; that is as meaningless as your history, or what the time is. And you feel free, because whenever you remember the former signs of your commitments in hell – name, age, profession, CV – it all seems absolutely derisory, minuscule, insubstantial.11

 Merlin Coverley, Psychogeography (London: Pocket Essentials, 2010), 12‒13.  Gros, A Philosophy of Walking, 9.

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Homo sacer’s resilience in the state of nature It is this kind of freedom that requires a maximum of resilience. To put it philosophically, Thomas aspires to a Rousseauan style return to nature, to a relinquishment of what Claude Lévi-Strauss in his 1964 study of Amerindian mythology called the “cooked” of culture for an embrace of the “raw” of nature, and to the relinquishment of his political life, a life tied to the polis.12 A number of theories that can be related to Thomas’ extended walk come to mind, but the idea of a sort of self-abandonment in the state of nature seems prevalent and implies a passage from resistance – as his wife and a police officer are trying to track him down – to the resilience of keeping up his lifestyle until he reaches retirement age. The Alpine topography is emblematic for resistance not in the traditional sense of the fortress Switzerland against the world outside but to conditions within. It is closely tied to the resilience of roaming within Swiss national space without really being a part of the community, whether imagined at large or real like the family nucleus: “Now he was painfully aware that he no longer belonged to the community, that he was an alien body in this small and well-adapted world [eingespitelte Welt],” (Stamm 149).13 He tries to resist this “eingespielte Welt,” although it is precisely the loss of peace and comfort that that world offers its citizens that he now becomes painfully aware of. In that sense he bears features of the Friedlos whom Agamben discusses in his Homo Sacer book,14 the man without peace who in order to survive needs a maximum of resilience outside the umfriedete (walled-in, enclosed) polis. One may wonder why Thomas chooses to live like this. The text does not reveal his true motivations. The reader is left to suspect that he is looking for a deeper sense of life by shedding all trappings of civilization and the comforts that come with family life. As he travels through small communities, he listens to the people talking about money, property, and investments, “but never about anything essential” (Stamm 73). In walking away from money, property, investments he is giving up all ownership. Walking, sauntering (a word derived from sans terre), is an act inherently opposed to ownership. In theoretical terms, sauntering as a detachment from the soil celebrates rhizomatic, non-arborescent navigation, nomadic detachment from the idea of a fixed nostos tied to the soil. Ownership

 Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, trans. Doreen Weightman and John Weightman (New York: Harper & Row, 1969).  “Jetzt emfand er schmerzhaft, dass er nicht mehr zur Gemeinschaft gehörte, dass er ein Fremdkörper war in dieser kleinen, eingespielten Welt.” All translations of Stamm are my own.  Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 1995), 63.

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comes with sessility, and those who are sedentary can be more easily controlled by the polis, the community, the state. “It is easier,” Kagge argues, “for governments and societies to control as long as we are sitting down.”15 Giving up that sessility and opting for a life of walking implies eluding those forms of control, but also radically changing one’s pace of life and sense of time, space, and identity. Being driven forward Thomas falls into the monotony of slow but steady walking, allowing him to forget himself, to abandon himself. His self-abandonment to the state of nature turns out to be very different from Agamben’s version of the outlaw who is vogelfrei, wolfsfrei, friedlos, as free as birds or wolves but free without peace (frei ohne Friede) as he can be killed by anyone with impunity. Heidegger preceded Agamben by arguing that having no home, no dwelling as he calls it, means having no peace.16 Friede (peace), he says, contains the old German root das Frye, freedom, and being free means being preserved from harm and danger, that is, being taken-care-of (geschont). The fundamental character of good dwelling is this caring-for.17 By contrast, in the tradition of Romantic adorations of nature his freedom from the ordered world below, in spite of denying him the care that comes with home, offers Thomas moments of pure bliss and happiness, experiences of an expanded, a literally – as he ascends into Alpine space – heightened consciousness. This process of individuation based on isolated individualism is closely tied to the topography which becomes a part of his psychogeography. It is tied to the verticality of the landscape, to its elevations and depths, and while the solitude of the forest may trigger bliss among the Romantics, Thomas experiences this primarily in his winter-long seclusion in an isolated mountain cabin just below the peaks, but he also experiences it in his resilience emerging from the act of walking in which the striation of time and space dissolves, past, present, and future merge into one, and distance becomes irrelevant: “He felt as if he were permanently living in the present, as if there was no past or future” (Stamm 134). His growth of consciousness is commensurate with his hike into higher Alpine elevations. It involves a sort of Jungian form of rebirth as he is exiting his marriage and becoming more and more one with nature, even to the point of shedding his clothes (Stamm 156). This experience of, quite literally, a nuda vita in the state of nature differs substantially from Agamben’s ominous concept of bare life as biopolitical dehumanization. The fragmentation of Thomas’s subjectivity as a form of intoxication with his natural environment breaking through all forms of Rousseauan style maladies of the civilized,  Erling Kagge, Walking. One Step at a Time, trans. Becky Crook (London: Penguin, 2019), 90.  Martin Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2000), 150‒151.  Heidegger, Vorträge und Aufsätze, 148, 150‒151.

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political world (the polis) reaches its climax in the realm of mountain peaks as an apt reflection of that psychic climax. Specifically, this happens in his near-death and out-of-body experience associated with his fall into a crevasse, Thomas’s descent into Hades: “It seemed to him as if he was looking down from far above at his immobile body that just lay there, covered in snow and with an unnatural smile distorting his rigid face, the smile of a dead man” (Stamm 173).18 His vision of death coincides with Astrid’s self-consolation that “his death was the simplest solution” (Stamm 175). Being dead to his wife and family is a motif that on the one hand recalls a Romantic tale such as Ludwig Tieck’s Der Runenberg (Rune Mountain, 1802), where Christian runs off into the mountain world after telling his wife Elisabeth to just consider him as dead. The notion of being dead to the community, however, also evokes the homo sacer, considered to be already dead by the community he leaves, “exbannitus ad mortem de sua civitate debet haberi pro mortuo; whoever is banned from his city on pain of death must be considered as dead.”19 Being dead to the community, the homo sacer is in a liminal space between the gods and humans, but also between the human and the animal, the vargr as wolf and outlaw. In Thomas’s case, the death of his former self also coincides with the notion of becoming animal, especially as he tries to hibernate in a secluded high Alpine cabin, where he obtains the absurd feeling that “he could survive the winter even without supplies if he just stayed inconspicuous and quiet like the animals that lingered around in these parts” (Stamm 179). His humanimality, as it were, constitutes a mythical dimension in this novel, as part of that key mythical subtext, Homer’s Odyssey, whose hero travels in a liminal realm between the gods and humans, and the human and the animal.

Rhizomatic wanderings in smooth space: Odysseus’s Irrfahrt and Thomas’s Irrgang In what is one of the key subtexts in his novel Stamm draws on the Homeric concept of the Irrfahrt, Odysseus’s random, “errant,” wanderings for which Dante famously sends him to Hell. One may wonder why the Italian poet condemns Odysseus to Hell’s lower circles. Katherine Christy has argued that Dante completely separates Odysseus from the Christian divine, while in the Greek epic with its multiple deities  “Es war ihm, als blicke er von weit oben hinunter auf den unbeweglichen Körper, der da lag, mit Schnee bedeckt und mit einem unnatürlichen Lächeln im erstarrten Gesicht, dem Lächeln eines Toten.”  Agamben, Homo sacer, 63.

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he finds himself in a permanent tension between the wrath of a god like Poseidon versus being helped by goddesses like Circe and Athena.20 Odysseus has been explicitly condemned to the circle of the fraudulent because of his cunning deceit involving the conquest of Troy, the city of the gods, but also because of his travel to forbidden territory: he thus pushes against the boundaries of mortality, seeking out knowledge reserved for the gods alone. It is his exploration into unchartered terrain, where “no one” (as Odysseus calls himself to the Cyclops Polyphemus) lives, that partly ties Odysseus to Stamm’s character Thomas, his attempt to escape the striation of the nation state into high Alpine space, where also no-one lives as is evidenced by the empty cabin he finds and by his urge to hibernate there withdrawing from the world below like an animal. Thomas’s own Irrgang is based loosely on Homer’s Odyssey. Astrid resembles Penelope. Both wives, in the words of Homer, “have schooled [their] heart[s] to patience”21 as they are waiting for their husbands, suspected by everybody else to be dead, and both display formidable resilience in resisting other men. While every single suitor in Ithaca wants to get married to Penelope, Astrid resists the advances of the police inspector she initially involves to find her husband. Stamm also draws on Penelope’s sadness, her silent mourning the loss of Odysseus, and her solitude in her “bed of sorrows”22 when he writes of Astrid: “but at night in bed, when she was not able to sleep, she thought of Thomas and was certain he was not dead” (p. 188). Astrid displays the kind of resistance to any suitor and resilience in waiting that Penelope does, although the latter employs more cunning – in this she resembles her husband – by secretly unravelling at night the web she weaves for Laertes during the day, as finishing the shroud would entail her consent to get remarried. One of the closest parallels between Odysseus and Thomas can be constructed via the paradigm of the homo sacer, who is dead to the community. While Thomas’s name ends up being deleted from the list of wanted persons, as he is believed to be dead by everyone except Astrid, Circe says of Odysseus’s audacious descent into the House of Hades, that “while other men die once, you will die twice.”23 Thomas’s awareness that he no longer belongs to the community (p. 149), even his fear that hunters might track him down like some game (p. 183), thus breaking the ban he finds himself in (ibid.), tallies with the status of Odysseus as homo sacer. Odysseus

 Katherine Christy, “Ulysses in Hell,” The Scarlet Review, accessed 10 November 2022, https://scarletreview.camden.rutgers.edu/archive/2017edition/ulyssesinhell.html.  Homer, The Odyssey, trans. E.V. Rieu with an introduction by Peter Jones (London: Penguin, 2003), 144.  Homer, The Odyssey, 225.  Homer, The Odyssey, 157.

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is constantly at the mercy of the gods, and indeed the line between his mortality and divinity is persistently blurred. This is the nature of the homo sacer, who is set aside from the community and “already with the Gods,” sacrum in the sense of “destined to the Gods” (“what is sacer is already possessed by the gods and is originarily and in a special way possessed by the gods of the underworld”).24 The perceived death of the homo sacer while still being alive reflects that status of the sacratio. This obliteration of identity concurs with the homo sacer’s self-concealment and even self-effacement in exile. Thomas’s disappearance outside of the striated, “eingespielte” Welt in uncivilized terrain echoes with Odysseus’s repeated concealment of identity to the point of disappearance. It is a concealment facilitated by Calypso whose very name implies that idea and who holds him in exile for seven years, the traditional timeframe in myth in which humans turn into animals (werewolf myths for example). Assisted by Athene, Odysseus is, however, also the master of many disguises – he returns as an old beggar and vagabond to Ithaca – and he completely effaces his own identity by fooling the Cyclops and giving him the wrong name of “no one,” metis in Greek,25 meaning “wily scheme or resourcefulness.” The cunning and resourcefulness of Odysseus recur in Thomas’s own ruses to escape the nostos, his home. In this detail he differs from Odysseus whose only aim is to return home. When he does return home, Odysseus, the homo sacer, whom Agamben relates to the Germanic friedlos and vargr i veum, becomes just that – a “wolf in the sanctuary,” aptly represented in Odysseus’s defeat of the suitors. The idea, however, of Odysseus’s rightful place at home destabilizes his role as homo sacer and marks the suitors themselves as outlaws and wolves in the sanctuary, as for several years they have been abusing the Greek notion of xenia, the law of hospitality. As Belfiore has pointed out, the xenos is poised in a tension between “outsider” and “guest” with the custom of hospitality aiming to turn the former into the latter.26 As wolves in the sanctuary the suitors in the Odyssey never arrive at the status of xenos as guest, but instead remain forever the metaphorical wolves in which the ancient Germanic tradition sees the friedlos. The suitors’ persistent status in the state of war then also necessitates the ending of the epos, Odysseus being the only one who can defeat them. He can do so due to his own position as homo sacer, finding himself in extreme tension between the home and the world outside, between the potential host and being hostile. This  Agamben, Homo sacer, 47‒48.  Homer, The Odyssey, 121.  Elizabeth Belfiore, “Xenia in Sophocles’ Philoctetes,” in The Classical Journal 89.2 (Dec 1993 – Jan 1994): 115.

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creates the kind of symmetry between Odysseus and the suitors that Agamben has identified for the sovereign and the homo sacer, both of them outlaws.27 We observe the abuse of xenia elsewhere in the Odyssey, most prominently perhaps in the Cyclops episode where Polyphemus, instead of giving food and shelter to Odysseus’s crew, starts devouring them. The “lawless”28 Cyclops partakes of the uncivilized wild-man archetype, a faint echo of which the reader of Stamm’s novel may sense in Thomas’s own self-abandonment from all civic laws and culture to the point that the cabin he inhabits in high Alpine terrain becomes somewhat reminiscent of the Cyclops’ cave. Although Polyphemus is the son of the god Poseidon, who henceforth haunts Odysseus’ journey, due to his cannibalism he finds himself in that grey zone between the human and the animal, a liminality that, as we have seen, also characterizes Thomas’s withdrawal into the secluded cabin where he wants to hibernate “wie die Tiere,” just like the animals around him (Stamm 179). While he may share lawlessness, the loss of culture, and a certain humanimality with the Cyclops, Thomas in this episode also, like Odysseus, trespasses into someone else’s abode thus challenging the law of xenia.29 There is also the question of folly or idiocy that ties Thomas to the Odyssey. While the Cyclops in his lack of culture is a fool or idiot in the Aristotelian sense of someone outside the polis, who in his lawlessness does not hold any political office,30 so is Thomas in his self-distancing from the civilized world. His hike as physical displacement, as Irrgang from the perspective of the community he leaves behind also suggests a kind of mental displacement literally bordering on Verrücktheit (madness). Although Odysseus travels randomly across the Mediterranean, his Irrfahrten, those apparently random wanderings, are, however, part of a progressive realization of the self.31 Everything Odysseus undertakes is determined by destiny and has the function to shape his character, while taking him back to his beginnings. This is very different for Thomas who undergoes no Bildung (education or formation) in the classical German sense, so that his wanderings may strike us as folly rather than personal growth. His sojourn outside law and all culture, at least as long as he travels in Swiss Alpine spaces, is reminiscent of the Cyclops’s lawlessness and lack of culture rather than the determinacy of Odysseus’s wanderings. Accordingly, Thomas’s travel eventually loses itself in vague landscapes, in

 Agamben, Homo sacer, 62.  Homer, The Odyssey, 113.  Cf. Jones, xxiv, in Homer, The Odyssey.  Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Christopher Kirwan (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 8.  Paul Ricœur. “Narrative Funktion und menschliche Zeiterfahrung,” trans. Iris Radisch, in Romantik – Literatur und Philsophie, ed. Volker Bohn (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987), 72‒74.

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“ungefähre[n] Landschaften” (virgin landscpes), much like Katherine’s travel in Stamm’s second novel entitled Ungefähre Landschaften (Unformed Landscape, 2001). As Susanne Kaul has so persuasively argued they are landscapes that reflect the inherent lack of direction and teleology that would be typical of all processes of determinism and Bildung, that such a landscape “contains nothing resembling a marked path.”32 Thomas’ aimless drifting through the Swiss Alps, often off track, as well as the nebulousness of the psychological impetus to wander for twenty years, speak of the kind of indeterminacy, fragmentation, and heterogeneity of life, the complete absence of its purported unity of action, that the philosopher Rüdiger Bittner has outlined in his work. There is nothing like the “true self,” Bittner claims, but a kind of freedom that sets us completely afloat: There is nothing in us or about us to guide us. [. . .] We are afloat, with nothing in the order of things, not even we ourselves, calling for one kind of action and repudiating another. No doubt we can act wisely and stupidly, kindly and viciously, faithfully and treacherously, and in so many other ways. Yet no such action or omission is owed to anyone or anything, not even to ourselves. [. . .] In this sense we are free.33

It is this sort of freedom of the homo sacer, whose fate is undetermined, that sets Thomas apart from Odysseus. While The Odyssey reflects Aristotle’s principle in his Poetics of the unity of action,34 with Odysseus subjecting all his actions to the one purpose of going home, this idea of nostos comes to Thomas rather spontaneously one day after twenty years, at the moment when he is performing some menial job and his boss calls him a “damn idiot” (“verdammter Idiot,” Stamm p. 220). It causes Thomas’s sudden fatigue with his life on the road, first driven through the Alps, then in later years all around Europe, and he decides impulsively to make his way back home, a decision that is described as being as abrupt as the clouds in the sky after a downpour: “it seemed to Thomas as if the rain let up and the clouds were breaking through, as if he were falling into the sky, into the glistening light” (Stamm 221). Perhaps one of the closest parallels with the Odyssey appears then in Stamm’s final, highly moving scene. It is the moment when the hero returns, but unlike Thomas’s sudden reappearance that of Odysseus is noted only by his old hunting dog Argus:

 Susanne Kaul, “Travelling in Uncharted Territories. The ›Ungefähre Landschaft‹ as a Metaphor for the Self,” in KulturPoetik 4.2 (2004): 193.  Rüdiger Bittner, “Autonomy and Then,” in Philosophical Explorations 5 (2002): 227.  Rüdiger Bittner, “One Action,” in Essays on Aristotle’s Poetics, ed. Amély Rorty (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997), 97‒110.

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There, full of vermin, lay Argus the hound. But directly he became aware of Odysseus’ presence, he wagged his tail and dropped his ears [my italics], though he lacked the strength now to come nearer to his master. Odysseus turned his eyes away, and [. . .] brushed away a tear.35

Stamm, too, moves an aged dog onto the stage: Her dog, an old labrador, came trotting into the kitchen, sniffing around his empty bowl. Astrid saw him raise his head and prick his ears [my italics], even before she had become aware of the sound of the garden gate. It was then that she knew that he had come back. (Stamm 222)36

A certain symmetry exists between Odysseus, returning in the guise of a beggar whose “body is covered with filthy rags,”37 and his vermin-ridden dog, both of them cast aside by the community, in exile, filled with what Robert Burton in his 1621 book Anatomy of Melancholy called “canine melancholy.”38 The same pertains to Thomas and his own synergy with dogs, not so much the one at home but the one he travels with for a period, “a vagabond like himself.” (Stamm 218‒219).39 The presence of these canines underlines the status of vagabondage (Streuner) for both protagonists, the word “streunen” in Stamm’s novel being derived from Middle High German striunen, meaning “to roam around sniffing for something, exploring something in a suspicious manner.”40 The Streuner as dog/vagabond that ties Odysseus to Thomas and the concept of Burton’s melancholia canina have a variant in Walter Benjamin’s dog as melancholic, the Nasutulo in the The Origin of German Tragic Drama,41 who, his nose close to the ground, runs away from his past, and for whom forgetting is a productive process. There are other echoes of Homer: temptation and the danger of forgetting accompany both travelers; the Sirens episode is faintly redrawn as Thomas visits a brothel and just settles for a drink; the Lotus Eaters and the motif of forgetting why one travels resound in Thomas forgetting himself while walking; and in

 Homer, The Odyssey, 230.  “Ihr Hund, ein alter Labrador, kam in die Küche getrottet und schnüffelte an seinem leeren Futternapf herum. Astrid sah, wie er den Kopf hob und die Ohren spitzte [my italics], noch bevor sie das Quietschen des Gartentors bewusst wahrgenommen hatte. Da wusste sie, er war wieder da.”  Homer, The Odyssey, 231.  Angus Gowland, The Worlds of Renaissance Melancholy. Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 18.  “einen Streuner wie er”; Stamm, 218‒219.  “Schnuppernd umherstreifen, auf neugierige oder verdächtige Weise nach etwas forschen.” DWDS, “Streuner,” accessed 10 September 2022, https://www.dwds.de/wb/Streuner.  Walter Benjamin, Abhandlungen. Gesammelte Schriften, vol.I.1. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 330.

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Book XI, Odysseus visits the Land of the Dead, a chapter that faintly reverberates in Thomas’s near-death and out-of-body experience as he falls into a crevasse. When Odysseus visits the underworld, he becomes acutely aware of the passage of time, especially as the prophet Tiresias predicts the future for him. Odysseus, however, readily accepts the misery of mortality while rejecting the promise of immortality that Calypso makes him. His only goal is to be able to return home one day. This is very different for Thomas, who sheds the idea of a homecoming until, after twenty years of wandering, he has finally had enough. Unlike Odysseus he seems to aspire to glimpses of immortality which are closely tied to the Alpine terrain, the eternal allure of the mountain world reflecting Stamm’s indebtedness to Romantic ideals. Thomas seems to elude the dictates of time and discovers an eternal present as long as he walks in a world void of people, “durch eine menschenleere Welt” (Stamm 61). Like Odysseus’s comrades who eat from the lotus blossoms and “forget all thoughts of return,”42 Thomas “had completely forgotten himself” (Stamm 149), but he knows that he will not return home (Stamm 156). It is in particular walking in its slowness and its links with time and emotion that the text explores. Time, as long as he keeps walking, is stretched to infinity in accordance with Erling Kagge’s argument in Walking. One Step at a Time43 that the slowness inherent to walking has the tendency to expand time rather than collapse it, thus seemingly prolonging life. In his ascent into the mountain world Thomas’s “slow walk he had got used to in the mountains and that he could keep up for hours” (Stamm 133) has the potential for permanency. Now and again he thinks time itself has changed for him in that he is walking backward in time (Stamm 152) or in slow motion (Stamm 153) and as if in a labyrinth, “caught in a maze of rocks” (Stamm 153). It is this image of the labyrinthine and the lack of direction and teleology that renders Thomas’s journey highly rhizomatic. The rhizome as Deleuze and Guattari describe it is characterized by a lack of linearity and is ambivalent in its capacity to offer lines of flight. As an image of entanglement, it is open-ended, anti-genealogical, anti-hierarchical, and anti-teleological. Its subterranean but easily eradicable roots of tubers and bulbs make it the classical image of nomadic wandering.44 Arborescence, on the other hand, indicates structure, organization, teleology, purpose, the deep roots of trees, and genealogies. Although much of Thomas’s travel can be characterized as rhizomatic according to this theory, his spontaneous return to Astrid has a certain arborescent quality, as it takes him back to the beginnings. Rather than  Homer, The Odyssey, 112.  Kagge, Walking, 17.  Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: Minnesota UP, 1987), 6.

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offering a clear-cut dialectic, the rhizome and arborescence often also supplement each other according to Deleuze and Guattari, who have argued that “there are knots of arborescence in rhizomes.”45 On the other hand, I would argue that Odysseus’s unity of purpose to regain the nostos as well as the predetermination of his journey which is largely directed by Gods make it more arborescent than that of Thomas, although as Irrfahrt with its potential of losing the nostos to the forces of lethe (as in the Circe and Lotus Eaters episodes) the Odyssey also has rhizomatic qualities. Since the rhizome lacks linear direction but is open-ended, offering countless lines of flight that crisscross like a skein of spaghetti, it has a relationship with both time and space. To Thomas walking the rhizomatic trails of the Alps creates the impression of a permanent presence. He walks in smooth time, time that has lost its contours and striation, which in its faculty of blotting out the past makes Thomas as oblivious to returning home as the Lotus Eaters in the Odyssey. As a place the Alps constitute what Deleuze and Guattari have defined as smooth space,46 nomadic, non-civic space, including landscapes like the desert, the sea, the sky, or a sweep of forest. Striated space, on the other hand, shows more arborescence and tends to be urban space that has lost its smooth surface and is striated by straight vertical and horizontal lines. Striated space contains unnatural boundaries, borders, it is the space of the nation-state. While the smooth space tolerates the rhizome as web, it is the straight lines of the fabric that striate space. Being outside the polis as city and ignoring the borders of the nation state, smooth space loses its political features, it is a place off the grid, a non-place from the perspective of political life within the community. Nonetheless at the personal level, as we have seen, it can be a more meaningful place, a place of heightened consciousness, the lack of striation providing Thomas with the happiness of the nomad. It is a place also that reflects Johan Huizinga’s description of the playground in “its spatial separation from ordinary life’,47 making Thomas not only a homo sacer but also a homo ludens, a solitary player who creates his very own “verspielte Welt” (playful world). This Alpine playground of his is a “sacred spot,”48 sacred here too in the sense of sacer as in the homo sacer, meaning “set apart” rather than holy. While to the homo sacer, however, such sacratio implies a curse, to the homo ludens it is bliss, ecstasy, happiness. We see this clearly in Thomas’s sojourn in the Alps as an ecstatic playground, and yet his heightened sensations may not be void of irony.

   

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 20. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 474‒501. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 19. Huizinga, Homo Ludens, 19.

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The irony lies in the fact that it is a space in which male self-centeredness and reckless egotism reign supreme. In the case of Thomas, who refuses to return home, that playground and the time he spends in it, rather than being transient matters, obtain the status of permanency. By hanging on to his life in the state of nature for all those years Thomas aspires to a permanent state of exception, a permanent carnival, as it were, in the Bakhtinian sense. With Odysseus this is slightly different. He never loses sight of his goal to return to Ithaca and his entire voyage is steered by the Gods and fate, although from the perspective of Penelope he gets his twenty years of playing around too. As Rebecca Solnit so succinctly put it in Wanderlust (2001): Homer’s Odysseus travels the world and sleeps around. Odysseus’s wife Penelope stays dutifully at home, rebuffing the suitors she lacks the authority to reject outright [due to the law of xenia and her position as woman]. Travel, whether local or global, has remained a largely masculine prerogative ever since, with women often the destination, the prize, or keepers of the hearth.49

Conclusion As states of nature both Homer’s Mediterranean and Stamm’s Alps are highly gendered spaces. They are masculine spaces, contrasting with that time-worn binary of the raw (nature/feminine) versus the cooked (culture/masculine). Thomas’ Irrgang transforms him from domesticated species to wild man archetype, even at times a naked quasi-animal. The world of Alpine peaks that he climbs into are an apt metaphor for the climax of male desire, satisfying phallocentric aspirations of conquest. That Thomas’s wife takes him back after twenty years once again stems from a vision based on male self-centeredness. Solnit is right when she says that in male travel women have often been “the destination, the prize, the keepers of the hearth”: perhaps in the end Astrid is the only destination in Thomas’s meandering labyrinthine walk. While Stamm may differ from Homer in his subtle use of irony regarding the wife’s patience as keeper of the hearth, in regard of their malecentered perspectives not much is different between Stamm and Homer. And while Dante places Odysseus in Hell for seeking forbidden territory, Thomas’s selfish sojourn in the Alpine world may be just as sinful – an Irrgang indeed – if we listen to Robert Macfarlane who reminds us that in the Christian imagination of the seventeenth century, in texts like Thomas Burnet’s The Sacred Theory of the Earth (1681),

 Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust. A History of Walking (London: Granta, 2014), 235.

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mountains as the residue left behind when the Great Flood receded “were, in fact, gigantic souvenirs of humanity’s sinfulness.”50 The question of fidelity and infidelity is a parallel between the two texts with which I want to end this critical perambulation. Both Odysseus and Thomas sleep with other women while their wives are faithfully waiting for them, their infidelity being relegated purely to thought at occasional weak moments in their marathon wait. James Joyce, the other author who famously played with Homer’s Odyssey in the context of walking had, as we may remember, turned this constellation on its head by making Leopold Bloom the cuckolded husband on whom Molly Bloom (his Penelope) cheats with Blazes Boylan. There has been some debate about the Joycean “oxymoron of fidelity,” that is, the question whether Joyce was being ironic by bestowing upon Molly what for millennia had been a male prerogative (Doherty)51 or whether Penelope is actually not all that dissimilar from Molly Bloom (Ames).52 In either case, Stamm is a lot less adventurous with his Penelope/Astrid who gets short shrift in this novel about a man going astray in the mountain world.

 Robert Macfarlane, Mountains of the Mind. A History of a Fascination. (London: Granta, 2008), 27.  Doherty, Lillian E., “Joyce’s Penelope and Homer’s: Feminist Reconsiderations,” Classical and Modern Literature 10 (1990): 343‒349.  Keri Elizabeth Ames, “The Oxymoron of Fidelity in Homer’s ‘Odyssey’ and Joyce’s ‘Ulysses’,” Joyce Studies Annual 14 (2003): 132‒174.

Part 3: Into the Alps

Veronika Hofeneder

Crevasses and Magic Mountains: Alpine Discourse in Vicki Baum’s Marion lebt (Marion Alive, 1942) Vicki Baum’s novel Marion Alive was published simultaneously in 1942 in an English edition by the New York publishing house Doubleday and in German translation by the Stockholm-based publisher Bermann-Fischer, which published works by German authors in exile. Marion Alive is the second text that the best-selling author, who had emigrated to the USA in 1932, wrote entirely in English, after The Ship and the Shore a year previously. The novel sets the life story of Marion Sprague against the backdrop of European political developments in the first half of the twentieth century. Baum centers her story on a strong female protagonist, a pattern she had followed in her earlier successful texts, including stud. chem. Helene Willfüer (1928; Helene 1932), which provoked controversy and high sales figures because of its handling of abortion, and the novel Die Karriere der Doris Hart (1936; Career, 1936), which tells the life story of an ambitious opera singer. Contemporary critics, however, were more interested in the autobiographical parallels that are supposedly evident in the text – a tendency that Vicki Baum, who was au fait with marketing strategies, played to her advantage – and read Marion lebt above all else as an easy read that was, in a technical sense, perfectly formed: “Vicki Baum is one of the few novelists who can write with one eye on the market and still turn out a solid, intelligent book. None of her works can be called outstanding from a literary point of view but all of them are exceptionally entertaining.”1 That this kind of reception of Baum’s texts falls, in the most part, short, has since been addressed in numerous studies by scholars including Nicole Nottelmann, Julia Bertschik, Andrea Capovilla, Gustav Frank and Stefan Scherer, as well as in my own publications.2  Marianne Hauser, “A Woman’s Story,” New York Times (25 January 1942); cf. Nicole Nottelmann, Die Karrieren der Vicki Baum. Eine Biographie (Cologne: KiWi, 2007), 278–281.  See esp. Julia Bertschik, “Die Ironie hinter der Fassade. Vicki Baums neusachliche Komödie aus dem Schönheitssalon ‘Pariser Platz 13’ (1930),” in Pariser Platz 13. Eine Komödie aus dem Schönheitssalon und andere Texte über Kosmetik, Alter und Mode, Vicki Baum, ed. Julia Bertschik, 2nd ed. (Berlin: AvivA, 2012), 192–216; Julia Bertschik, “Kolportageliteratur mit Hintergründen. Zur Problematik literarischer Wertung am Beispiel von Vicki Baum,” in Im Schatten der Literaturgeschichte. Autoren, die keiner mehr kennt? Plädoyer gegen das Vergessen, ed. Jattie Enklaar and Hans Ester (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005), 193–208; Julia Bertschik, “Vicki Baum und die luminose Konstruktion der ‘goldenen zwanziger Jahre’ in der Zeitschrift Die Dame. Ein Beitrag zum transnationalen Literatursystem der Weimarer Republik,” in Lifestyle – Mode – https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111150536-009

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The evaluation of the intra- and extratextual contexts of Baum’s texts, as well as a consideration of the mechanics of the publishing industry and of mass and popular culture, especially that of the Weimar Republic (1918–1933), illustrate that, in her texts, Baum subtly exposes precisely those pulp fiction tendencies that have long dominated previous critical reception of her work. What is more, her combination of multiple different representative characterizations and narrative techniques that are typical of the time – which range from New Objectivity-style representations of the metropolis through crime fiction to melodrama3 –, as well as her integration of different forms of knowledge – which includes literary, popular, and pop-cultural, anthropological, sociological or psychological ways of knowing –, can be seen as characteristic of the modus operandi of a “synthetic Modernism,” as identified by Gustav Frank and Stefan Scherer in their poetological classification of Vicki Baum.4 This synthetic Modernist style is most apparent in the depiction of the Alps in Marion lebt. The mountains, specifically the Swiss, German, and Austrian Alps, are not only frequently the setting of the narrative that spans four decades, but

Unterhaltung oder doch etwas mehr? Die andere Seite der Schriftstellerin Vicki Baum (1888–1960), ed. Susanne Blumesberger and Jana Mikota (Vienna: Praesens, 2013), 13–36; Andrea Capovilla, Entwürfe weiblicher Identität in der Moderne: Milena Jesenská, Vicki Baum, Gina Kaus, Alice Rühle-Gerstel. Studien zu Leben und Werk (Oldenburg: Igel, 2004); Andrea Capovilla, “Kosmopolitisches Heimweh. Anregungen zu einer neuen Lektüre Vicki Baums,” in Cosmopolitans in the Modern World. Studies on a Theme in German and Austrian Literary Culture, ed. Suzanne Kirkbright (Munich: iudicium, 2000), 113–126; Gustav Frank and Stefan Scherer, “Umrisse einer Poetik der Globalen Synthese,” in TEXT+KRITIK. Zeitschrift für Literatur: Vicki Baum, ed. Julia Bertschik, Gustav Frank, Veronika Hofeneder, and Werner Jung (Munich: Text+Kritik, 2022), 71‒80; Veronika Hofeneder, “Die Feuilletonistin Vicki Baum,” in Makkaroni in der Dämmerung. Feuilletons. Vicki Baum, ed. Veronika Hofeneder, 2nd ed. (Vienna: Edition Atelier, 2019), 7–22; Veronika Hofeneder, “Die Medienarbeiterin – Vicki Baum und die Presse,” in TEXT+KRITIK. Zeitschrift für Literatur: Vicki Baum, ed. Julia Bertschik, Gustav Frank, Veronika Hofeneder, and Werner Jung (Munich: Text+Kritik, 2022), 20‒27; Veronika Hofeneder, “Vom Schreiben, Tanzen, Musizieren – Vicki Baums feuilletonistische Betrachtungen künstlerischer Ausdrucksformen,” in Feuilleton. Schreiben an der Schnittstelle zwischen Journalismus und Literatur, ed. Hildegard Kernmayer and Simone Jung (Bielefeld: transcript, 2017), 217–236; Nicole Nottelmann, Strategien des Erfolges. Narratologische Analysen exemplarischer Romane Vicki Baums (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002).  Cf. Nottelmann, Strategien des Erfolges, 140–195; Sabina Becker, “Großstädtische Metamorphosen. Vicki Baums Roman Menschen im Hotel,” in Jahrbuch zur Literatur der Weimarer Republik 5 (1999/ 2000), 167‒194.  “Synthetische Moderne.” Cf. Gustav Frank and Stefan Scherer, “Textur der Synthetischen Moderne (1925–1955). (Döblin, Lampe, Fallada, Langgässer, Koeppen),” in Poetologien deutschsprachiger Literatur 1930–1960. Kontinuitäten jenseits des Politischen, ed. Moritz Baßler, Hubert Roland, and Jörg Schuster (Berlin and Boston: de Gruyter, 2016), 77–104. Most recently: Gustav Frank and Stefan Scherer, “Umrisse einer Poetik der Globalen Synthese.”

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their portrayal in the text also encompasses a broad spectrum of literary depictions of the Alps, ranging from the locus amoenus, through Alpine sanitoriums as a space of healing and the Alps as a place of retreat, to the Alps as a site of athletic competition. In precisely these early decades of the twentieth century, perceptions and literary representations of the Alps underwent massive change, shifting from purely positive depictions of the sublime and the idyllic, to their being coopted primarily within negatively associated nationalist and National Socialist ideologies.5 In this chapter I draw on Henri Lefèbvre’s understanding of space as the consequence and effect of societal relations.6 In this understanding, space does not exist as separate from human experience or comprehension, but rather is an historically and culturally constituted product.7 As a cultural product, (literary) texts are part of this broader process and therefore contribute to the construction of space. As such, the spatial configuration ‘the Alps’ is both a literary product and historically contingent since literature and space are always already positioned against each other in a shifting way. Baum’s novel consists of a frame narrative and a main narrative, and the mountains play an important role in both. Their presence is especially spectacular in the frame narrative, in which the protagonist embarks on a mountain hike in the Swiss Alps only to fall into a crevasse, a crisis that triggers a consideration of her life story. This is shaped by a strong relationship to Alpine space: Marion loves the mountains and is an enthusiastic climber and skier. Born and raised in fin de siècle Vienna, Marion moves to Germany before the First World War where she marries and has children. After the death of her husband, she moves her family to the Bavarian Alps because of the poor health of her youngest son; he suffers from suspected tuberculosis. This Alpine idyll is fractured by the political rise of the National Socialists; Marion moves to Berlin and becomes a toy maker, drawing on the rustic whittling she had taken up in the lonely mountains. On a business trip to communist Russia, she meets and falls in love with an American businessman. She eventually settles in the USA with him and their respective sons. She returns to Germany only after the death of her husband, when her son

 There is a broad range of literature on this topic, but see in particular: Judith Beniston, Jon Hughes, and Robert Vilain, eds., “Austria and the Alps.” Special issue, Austrian Studies 18 (2010); Kathrin Geist, Berg-Sehn-Sucht. Der Alpenraum in der deutschsprachigen Literatur (Paderborn: Fink, 2018); Johann Georg Lughofer, ed., Das Erschreiben der Berge. Die Alpen in der deutschsprachigen Literatur (Innsbruck: Innsbruck University Press, 2014).  Henri Lefèbvre, La production de l’espace (Paris: Éd. Anthropos, 2000).  Cf. Jörg Dünne, Sabine Friedrich, and Kirsten Kramer, “Vorwort,” in Theatralität und Räumlichkeit. Raumordnungen und Raumpraktiken im theatralen Mediendispositiv, ed. Jörg Dünne (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2009), 9–14, esp. 9.

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Michael is a student in Heidelberg. When his tuberculosis worsens, she returns to Vienna to search for a specialist and Michael begins a stay at a sanatorium on the Semmering. The start of the Second World War means that the Jewish specialist is no longer permitted to practice medicine and, together with Michael, Marion follows him to Switzerland: the site of the narrative present in June 1940.8

Sighting the mountain The novel begins in Staufen, a fictional, “out-of-the-way Swiss hamlet,”9 in the canton Valais. Christoph Lankersham (in the English version of the novel Christopher), an English friend of Michael’s, also lives in the village and like Marion, he is an enthusiastic mountaineer. It is from his perspective that the contemporary panorama of the mountains is presented to the reader in a classic, post-card style: He looked to the mountain range across the lake: The Grauhorn, the Brothers, the Arlistock. They were his best friends. He knew every fold of them, every glen and slope, every glacier and ridge. They still wore their old-fashioned flannel nightcaps of clouds around their white heads, but their flanks were clearly etched into the scintillating morning air. (MA 4)

Clouds, snow, shimmering light, and sharp contours: this first impression of the Alpine setting is highly visual. This stands in direct contrast to Michael, whose tuberculosis threatens to turn him blind. Images of friendship and camaraderie are evoked simultaneously, a central and traditional marker of Alpine discourse. What is more, the mountains are not described as distant and impenetrable, but rather as a familiar landscape, whose peculiarities are well known. Here, both mountain and man are presented as equal and worthy partners. Christoph wants to undertake one final hike on the nearby Grauhorn glacier before he must return to England to be conscripted into the army. He invites Marion to accompany him. She initially hesitates out of embarrassment and hidden love: she does not and will not take as serious the advances of a man fifteen years

 This combination of a love story and clinical story in an Alpine setting was already a feature of Baum’s novella Das Joch (1922). In this text the distribution of roles follows a much more traditional pattern, however, and the text ends distinctly more dramatically: the male protagonist falls to his death whilst attempting the first ascent of an Alpine crag, whilst the woman, ill in hospital and married to another man, awaits his return. Vicki Baum, “Das Joch,” (“The Ridge”) in Die andern Tage [The Other Days]. Novellen, Vicki Baum (Berlin and Leipzig: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1922), 65–148.  Vicki Baum, Marion Alive (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1942), 3. Further references to this edition will be made in the main body of the text with the reference ‘MA’.

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her junior. After a little consideration she does eventually follow him, albeit several hours later, and so her journey into the mountains is motivated as hunting for the man. Initially agitated, she is quickly restored to an equilibrium thanks to “the healing powers of a stiff walk” (MA 81): “[a]nd so, being very sad and unhappy, Marion also had a lot of fun as she marched up that trail to get over her sudden farewell to Christopher Lankersham” (ibid.). The positively connoted act of walking, which functions here as a means of healing, as well as Marion’s love of the mountains, stand in direct contrast to the later fall into the glacial crevasse – a direct result of this lived-out passion.

Ascent and fall From the moment that Marion sets out, this ostensibly beautiful and spectacular Alpine landscape also shows its other, threatening side. The first site that Marion reaches is the lake that separates the wild mountains and the difficult-to-access glacier from the safety and civilization of the village; Marion must not only cross this but must do so using a rowing boat because Christoph has already taken the motorboat. The local boatman – here one can see allusions to Charon, the ferryman who transports the dead into the Greek underworld – recognizes immediately that she is in pursuit of the younger Englishman and cautions her to consider her steps10 and potentially to wait for a mountain guide who is planning the same hike with two tourists: “In the mountains it’s easy, easy and steady, steady,” (MA 240). Marion rejects this advice, however, and sets out at speed. During her ascent she loses her breath repeatedly but does not allow herself a break and cannot enjoy the pleasure of scaling the mountain because of her irritation that she has not caught up with Christoph. In principle the hike on the Grauhorn glacier is easy. Christoph even refers to it as “a little before-dinner promenade” (MA 280), that is popular with guides and Sunday day-trippers because it allows the latter to boast of having climbed a glacier when they are back at home. Marion manages to complete the first part of the crossing solo because of her good condition and fitness, as well as the visible tracks of walkers who had been there ahead of her. Yet the higher she climbs, the

 In the narrative, Christoph’s steady pace whilst walking makes him supposedly matchless and means that he can overcome any obstacles. Vicki Baum, herself familiar with music, compares mountaineering with music-making; Michael’s movements when walking evoke the movements of the virtuoso violinist Jascha Heifetz (1901–1987), who was famous for his style of playing, in which only made the most necessary movements with his body (cf. MA 280).

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more prevalent the signs of threat become: “But where the shade of the mountain ended, pinnacles and ridges of ice rose up, with narrow crevasses between them, and to bend over and peer down into their unreal green-and-blue crystal depth was not without risk.” (MA 282). With the loss of her self-assurance, even Marion’s steps become unsure, and she slips repeatedly. What is more, the sunlight becomes too bright on the snowfield, and she realizes that she has forgotten her snow goggles. The previously beautiful mountain landscape transforms into an eerie and terrifying space that begins to affect Marion physically: “To Marion’s eyes, blinded by the merciless radiance of the glacier, the sky seemed almost black, and the snow up there not white but of an unreal flamingo pink. Even as she closed her eyes once more this pink remained inside of her lids and she felt the pulse heavily in them.” (MA 283) Blinded by the sun, Marion loses her way and no longer knows where the fragile sections of ice are located; the inevitable happens when she is crossing a thin bridge of ice: “She felt herself break through. Dropping as through a trap door, she groped for some hold; ice splintered under her fingers, she was still sliding, dropping; something cold and white like snow gushed around her face, and there was a burning pain everywhere.” (MA 323) After the initial shock she is able to regain control of her nerves. She calms down somewhat and takes stock of her situation, which in her mind could be worse given the circumstances, since her cigarettes and lighter have survived the fall unscathed. She believes the likelihood of her being rescued are relatively high; after all, she reasons, people know that she is out hiking and there are other walkers out on the glacier. Thanks to her emergency provisions – as well as the cigarettes she has chocolate and schnapps – and her pragmatism, which is repeatedly emphasized in the narrative, she is even able to see some positive aspects to her current situation and wonders at the singular beauty of her “palace of ice” (MA 325): “It was funny – and it was one-hundred-per-cent Marion – that the first thing she thought was: How beautiful. How unbelievably, unreally beautiful!” (MA 323). As a reader, one experiences relatively little about Marion’s fascinating new surroundings. Other than a comparison to the ice palace of the Snow Queen from Hans Christian Andersen’s famous fairy tale (1845), which glitters like diamonds and emeralds, the description of the glacial crevasse remains soberly cool and is restricted to very few colors. Marion’s principle sensory experience is that of the cold, which she nonetheless seeks to counter with (gallows) humor: I just hope my fanny isn’t going to freeze to my throne. I wonder how Andersen’s Snow Queen handled this delicate problem. I’m cold now, but I’m not upset or unhappy and certainly not frightened. It’s natural to feel cold when you are down in a white, blue, green crevasse of ice. I’m one hundred and twenty pounds of frozen meat, have you any use for it? (MA 325)

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The longer that Marion remains in the crevasse, the more uncanny she finds her surroundings. Her watch has been stopped by the fall and so she must orient herself to the movement of the sun to tell the time. She gets caught up in thoughts about her grave and a potential memorial cross, and the cleft is steadily filled “with weird little sounds, with glassy sighs and a thin musical crackling here and there, and once or twice there was a loud detonation like a shot, amplified by the depths below” (MA 354). But even this existential crisis is met by Marion with optimism and a perception that can be read as a commentary on the contemporary geopolitical situation of the early 1940s: “In a way we are all stuck in a crevasse, the whole blasted humanity, and we don’t know exactly how we’ll get out again. But out we’ll get. We’ve got out every time so far; it’s just a matter of not giving up too easily” (MA 355).

Inside the mountain By sending her protagonist to a space inside the mountain rather than up to its peak, Baum harks back to the mountain discourse of Romanticism, which is not defined by an enlightened view up the mountain, but rather by a sensory and emotional view within the mountain, as illustrated by Ludwig Tieck in Der Runenberg (Rune Mountain, 1804).11 Here the inside of the mountain functions as a counter-symbol to the mountain peak, and realization is not achieved at a lofty height, but deep within the mountain itself. In such a limited space the focus is drawn to the self and to being, to one’s own existence. Though Marion perceives her surroundings as uncanny and at times as threatening, her senses are nonetheless sharpened, and she turns her gaze inwards by recalling her life and her perceptions. Overall, the spatial constellation of the novel is harmonious: though mountain and valley, nature and civilization, the Alps and the city are separated from one another, this is not a dialectical relationship. Rather, these heterogenous spaces coexist peacefully and equally in a reciprocal, mainly positive, exchange. This can already be seen in Marion’s passion for climbing and skiing, activities from which she continuously draws strength: “There is no joy so sharp and clear-cut as being on skis. The pleasures of dancing and flying and fighting combined; being happy, drunk with speed, free of weight” (MA 487). Here she pursues the conception of the Alps as a site of physical recuperation and healing. What is more, the treatment that Michael receives for tuberculosis meets expected contemporary standards and includes a rest cure at altitude and in the sun, as well  Cf. Geist, Berg-Sehn-Sucht, 21f. and 95–114.

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as a high consumption of dairy.12 Fittingly a copy of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (MA 477) sits on the bookshelves in the waiting room of the pulmonary specialist, and Michael spends time as an adult at a clinic on the Semmering, the Austrian ‘magic mountain’.13 After the death of her first husband in the First World War, Marion rents a house in the (again, fictional) Bavarian settlement Einsiedel because the pure mountain air is the best treatment for her son’s whooping cough. In Einsiedel she must prevail against the forces of nature and the idiosyncrasies of the Alpine village’s inhabitants: Nature was large and untamed in Einsiedel, and I felt pretty small and scared, alone with my two little boys in the dilapidated lonely house. [. . .] Trying to make myself over into a strong, unafraid mountain woman wasn’t a simple experience altogether. My first weeks were a struggle against four thousand mean, tough, invincible obstacles. (MA 319)

The locals also greet the incoming city-girl – not to mention single mother! – with veritable skepticism; that she allows her children to sleep outside in all weathers makes her highly suspicious to them. What is more, that Marion lacks the technical skills that are vital for survival in the village also hinders her integration into the Alpine society of villagers, who are described from her perspective more as figures from a woodcut rather than as unapproachable and disinterested:14 “The mountain people don’t like to talk and are not given to friendliness toward a foreigner. They were deaf and dumb and hostile. To them I seemed a half-wit. I didn’t know how to bake bread, how to kill a pig, make sausages, smoke ham” (MA 319). Fortunately, the vagabond Max Wilde appears in the narrative after a short period, a man who seemingly has a dubious past and who therefore tries to avoid contact with the police. Despite this, he “had taught her everything she knew about mountains and rock climbing and ice craft” (MA 326), as well as knowing how to carry out repairs to the house and its grounds. It is also he who teaches Marion how to whittle, the craft that forms the foundation of her future

 Susan Barton, Healthy Living in the Alps. The Origins of Winter Tourism in Switzerland, 1860–1914 (Manchester and New York: Manchester UP, 2008), esp. 6–18.  In the tourism industry, the Semmering Pass has been called “Zauberberg” (“Magic Mountain”) since the 1990s. Today the term refers specifically to the ski mountain Hirschenkogel and its gondola. Cf. Wolfgang Kos, Der Semmering. Eine exzentrische Landschaft (Salzburg and Vienna: Residenz, 2021), 293–296.  The depiction of individuals from other or foreign backgrounds is in Baum’s novel above all else extremely clichéd and, from a modern perspective, far from politically correct. For example, the Afro-German daughter of a friend of Marion is referred to as “Black Ignominy” (MA 320; original: “schwarze Schmach”, ML 355) throughout the novel and her African hair is seen in appealing contrast to the Bavarian dirndl dress.

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toy shop in Berlin. In spite of all discrepancies and distinctions between Alpine and urban space these are never shown as mutually exclusive, but rather as intertwined and even mutually fruitful: whittling, for example, which can be considered to be a typical Alpine occupation, is the basis of her business operations and affluence in Berlin. And Max Wilde, for whom there is no place within the regulations of civilization, is able to find a new meaning to life in Marion’s private convalescent home through his tasks around the house. The Alps are therefore also a space in which one encounters individuals that one would either not normally encounter or who one would seek to avoid, but from whom one can in the end profit.15 And so the always liberally inclined Marion grants asylum to her nephew Hellmuth, who is active in the Hitler Youth. Years later, and after he has made a career with the Nazis, he will intervene on behalf of Marion’s son Michael, who has acted in a way that is critical of the regime. Above all else, the Alps in Baum’s work refute any such nationalist monopolization. This is already evident in the fact that Baum’s settings are not restricted to a single nation state (e.g., ‘the Austrian Alps’), as is typical of contemporary depictions of the mountains in the 1930s and 40s, but appear rather as an inter- and transnational landscape.16 Marion stays in the Austrian, German, and Swiss Alps, and these are presented in a way that recognizes their topographical specificities, but which does not contribute to the formation of (national) identity. The Alps are a mountain range that traverses international borders and are open to all nations. And all genders. Marion does not take any notice of exclusive masculine claims on Alpine experience and mountaineering success. As an independent and self-assured woman, she quite naturally takes on the Alps as a site of emancipation and longing for all people. Baum only acknowledges the context of composition in the frame narrative, where she comments on the National Socialist reversion to patriarchal and national conceptualizations of alpinism: the Englishman Christoph and a Swiss mountain guide are very much on the same page in their dislike of German tourists. The inn keeper of a mountain hostel even describes them as “Nazi agents” (MA 435). This is the same mountain guide who is convinced of the natural dominance of men in the mountains and who considers Marion’s fall in a misogynistic way as part of a

 Here one can compare Baum’s essay Mein schönstes Reiseerlebnis, which was published in the Berliner Illustrierter Zeitung in 1928, and which describes an encounter with an injured vagrant on the Brennerstraße, a mountain pass between Austria and Italy, and appeals to humility and contentment. Vicki Baum, “Mein schönstes Reiseerlebnis,” in Makkaroni in der Dämmerung. Feuilletons. Vicki Baum, ed. Veronika Hofeneder (Vienna: Edition Atelier, 2018), 115–118.  On the transnationalism of the Alps see: Jon Hughes, “Austria and the Alps. Introduction,” Austrian Studies18 (2010): 4.

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broader pattern: “There should be a law against women running loose in the mountains. Not a season without one or another getting lost” (MA 436).

Conclusion Baum interweaves multiple threads of Alpine discourse in this novel and presents the Alps as a space with multiple potentialities. It is therefore possible to recognize her in this novel as a proponent of “Synthetic Modernism.” As I have argued, in her writing the Alps are not restricted to a single national space, but rather are presented as a landscape that extends across borders. In this transnational space, encounters with individuals that may have been problematic in other circumstances or in other places are not only possible but also result in positive outcomes. The mountains are no longer a sublime space that can only be comprehended at the expense of normal life, but are instead an equal partner that one knows and that one visits time and again, to recover, as a reward, to engage in physical challenges, to relax etc. The mountains are remote, of course – and this isolation is also their strength: one comes here to gain strength, to become healthy –, but they are also accessible: there are paths, via ferrate, cable cars, mountain huts, hotels, and sanatoriums. They are a stable space in which one enjoys spending time. And they are also of an equal status to the town: work is also possible here, as well as meaningful and profitable encounters with other individuals. In a potential antithesis to contemporary discourse on the Alps in the 1940s, which places summiting within a broader National Socialist mythos, Baum focusses here on the inside of the mountain. By defying such contemporary trends, Baum creates her own, synthetic Alpine discourse, which is consistently positive, transnational, and which leads to the uniting of different peoples [völkerverbindend] and which can be read as a political statement against the backdrop of the Second World War.

David Anderson

Dream, Nightmare and Alpine Fortifications in Christian Kracht’s Alternate History Novel Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten (2008) The place of the novel in Kracht’s career Christian Kracht was born in Saanen, Switzerland, in 1966; his breakthrough novel Faserland (1995) was hailed as a masterpiece of the ‘Popliteratur’ phenomenon.1 Reading something like a late twentieth-century Catcher in the Rye relocated to Europe, it follows an upper-class young man (the novel’s narrator) as he loafs through Germany, equally attentive to the brands and products that populate his fashion-conscious world as he is to irruptions of the unresolved past in banal exchanges with hoteliers, taxi drivers, or his numerous well-to-do friends. Like J. D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, this anonymous narrator bears an agonized relationship with the ideas of authenticity and pretentiousness, his obsession with exhibiting the former ever threatening to lapse into an exemplary performance of the latter. Faserland has been followed by a string of novels including 1979 (2001), Imperium (2012), and Die Toten (The Dead, 2016), as well as travel writing and essays. In 2021 Kracht published the long-awaited ‘follow-up’ to his first novel, Eurotrash, whose narrating protagonist is, or seems more certainly to be, the author; his name at least is ‘Christian Kracht’, and he mentions having written a novel called Faserland some twenty-five years ago. Beginning in Zurich, where Faserland ended, Eurotrash seems like the conscious closing of a loop, returning to a ‘pop’ form, now likely to be read simply as ‘autofiction’, in which there is only the faintest of lines between the narrator and the author and where a conversational but highly self-aware register predominates. Structured as a trip (by taxi) around  Faserland has not yet been translated into English. Any literal translation of its title as ‘Fibreland,’ ‘Filament-land,’ or ‘Thread-land’ might catch some of the German original’s allusions – to the idea of narrative ‘threads’ and to the narrator’s preoccupation with fashion and the superficial – but would overlook others: to the practice of ‘faseln’ or ‘rambling on,’ for example. Crucially, it would elide the way ‘Faserland’ sounds like a German mispronunciation of the English ‘Fatherland’ – pointing, perhaps, to a general suspicion about how Germany might still be seen in the Anglophone world in the 1990s, as well as referring specifically to Robert Harris’s eponymous 1992 alternate-history novel (see further discussion below). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111150536-010

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Switzerland with the narrator’s mother, it also adopts a structuring motif common to almost all Kracht’s literary works, linking up his novels and travel writing: the journey. The case has been made – by, for example, Frank Finlay in a 2013 article – that ‘Popliteratur’ is “a somewhat reductive interpretive lens” and “a problematically elastic term” and is not very helpful in understanding Kracht’s work. Yet even when we free him from this mooring, his third novel Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten (I’ll be here in sunshine and in shadow, 2008) can still seem like the odd one out.2 Its omission from the list of works given above is not without precedent: in the literary critic Ijoma Mangold’s review of Eurotrash for the weekly Die Zeit in March 2021, for example, this novel was conspicuously left out of an overview of Kracht’s career.3 In the subsequent episode of the podcast Mangold presents with fellow Zeit editor Lars Weisbrod, Die sogenannte Gegenwart (‘The so-called contemporary’), Weisbrod took Mangold to task for having, “as a representative of the German literary establishment, completely ignored the novel”: You mention every Kracht book, but not that one, because you just don’t know what to make of fantasy literature up there in your . . . I don’t know where you are! ‘Ivory tower’ isn’t right . . . realism tower!4

Interestingly, far from defending his move, Mangold unhesitatingly agreed with his colleague’s remark: “the observation,” he said, “that literary criticism struggles with the fantasy genre – I agree with that completely.” Taking up the issues sketched here, the present chapter shows how Kracht’s third novel does in fact link up closely with themes explored in his other work. Further, it examines how the novel’s particular fusion of high-brow literariness with a vast array of pop-cultural and even pulp ‘fantasy’ forms, references, and motifs, achieves a special and distinctive synthesis; one in which the overdetermined space of the Swiss Alps emerges as the center of a part-dreamlike, partnightmarish space where reality and fantasy are confounded together in an unsettling but highly contemporary way.

 Frank Finlay, “‘Surface is an illusion but so is depth’: the novels of Christian Kracht”, German Life and Letters 66.2 (2013): 215.  Ijoma Mangold, “Los geht’s ins Jenseits von Gut und Böse.” Die Zeit, 3 March 2021, accessed 21 March 2022. https://www.zeit.de/2021/10/eurotrash-christian-kracht-roman-nazi-familie.  Ijoma Mangold and Lars Weisbrod, ‘Endlich wieder Streit über Geschmack’, Die sogenannte Gegenwart, 8 March 2021. Zeit Online, 2021. https://www.zeit.de/kultur/2021-03/eurotrash-chris tian-kracht-roman-feuilleton-podcast. This and all subsequent translations are my own.

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An overview of the narrative Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten is certainly an unusual work, although in an English-language context the term ‘fantasy literature’ is a little misleading, since the text fits fairly neatly into the well-established subgenre of science fiction (or SF) known as ‘alternate history’. Its crucial moment of divergence from ‘real’ history is figured as Lenin’s failure to return to Russia from his Zurich exile in the Spring of 1917. In the novel’s version of events, this has led to a dystopian present of total war that has raged for ninety-six years in a decimated Europe where Switzerland, now a socialist republic, stands opposed to Germany and Britain, with each side entangled in complex global alliances. The exact details of how this all came to pass are not elaborated, but one crucial addition is the idea that Switzerland has gained substantial colonial holdings in Africa. In this supposedly benign imperial mission, enlightened Swiss principles of rationality and justice have apparently been propagated, with young African men raised up into the Swiss system as enthusiastic supporters of its professedly egalitarian values and staunch anti-racism. Only in the fourth chapter is it explicitly made clear that the narrator himself (who remains unnamed) is from ‘Swiss Africa’, born in Nyasaland or present-day Malawi. Early on, we learn that in the ‘SSR’ (‘Swiss Socialist Republic’) language has devolved to the point that communication is almost entirely oral; in contrast to Germany, where a “book- and writing-culture” has been preserved, literary culture is almost non-existent.5 The narrator, a “Parteikommissär,” is exceptional in a Swiss context in that he is literate; in a nod to the pulp form of the police procedural, he carries a notepad and initially, at least, makes ready use of it. As the novel unfolds, he leaves ‘Neu-Bern’ and, after a sexual encounter with a military officer named Favre who promptly dies in a grenade blast, pursues a mysterious figure named Brazhinsky, a disappeared Polish-Jewish shopkeeper. This Brazhinsky, so we learn via Favre, has achieved a state of “Satori,” which has to do with his being able to communicate “wirelessly” (40), through a kind of silent speech. In the novel’s snow-covered world, the strange, steampunk mix of advance and regression suggested here (as Julia Schöll puts it, the novel’s iconography is “simultaneously retrospective and prospective”6) is echoed by the way that key

 Christian Kracht, Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2008), 23 (page references henceforth given in brackets).  Julia Schöll, “Die Schweizer Matrix. Intertextuelle und intermediale Konstruktionen der Nation in Christian Krachts Roman Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten,” in Re-forming the Nation in Contemporary Literature and Film: The Patriotic Idea in Contemporary Germanlanguage Culture, ed. Julian Preece (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2014), 297.

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characters have plug sockets in their armpits, and there are unexplained “Sonden” or “probes” hovering in the air emitting strange songs that echo through the narrative, but at the same time there are zeppelins to be seen and long journeys on horseback to be made. This is an oddly kitsch rendition also reminiscent of SF classics like Star Wars or Dune, where the formal motifs of the Western are played out in intergalactic settings. In Kracht’s account, the sense of atemporality is elaborated by the idea that time has become purely mechanical, rather than natural: its passage has no real meaning after ninety-six years of total war: “the seasons disappeared, there was no longer any back and forth, no noticeable shift” (13). Johannes Birgfeld and Claude D. Conter calculate the narrative present at 2010 (1914 + 96), but it seems significant that this is not actually stated as such, echoing the ‘slowdown’ effect familiar from key SF works like H.G. Wells’s 1895 novel The Time Machine.7 Crucial too is that this mechanization of time is framed as a specifically Swiss phenomenon, playing on the association with watchmaking. A similar logic underpins Brazhinsky’s “smoke speech”: the idea that the Swiss should have moved away from written language is framed as a logical process of becoming distinct from the German foe. “Through a quirk of history we spoke the same language as our enemy” (43), the narrator reflects, but whereas this has always been written in High German, in spoken dialect it is distinctively Swiss. Against this background, the narrator’s journey to find Brazhinsky is one that seems both imaginary and real. Following a route that includes a strange encounter with a dwarfish figure named Uriel (who has mysteriously learned the narrator’s own mother tongue, Chewa, through an illegal Bible translation and sacrifices himself to save the narrator) the pursuit leads him from Neu-Bern, via Meiringen, to the Réduit (Redoubt), the elaborate complex of fortifications built into the Swiss Alps in the late nineteenth century and significantly expanded during the Second World War under General Henri Guisan. Yet although the Réduit is central to the Swiss national imaginary, “century-work of the Swiss; essence, feeding-ground and expression of our existence” (98), no-one there seems to do anything. It has no government and has all but seceded from the Swiss state; its occupants seem to have degenerated into a semi-unreal state of drug-induced torpor. The unspecified “wonder weapon” that is due to finally bring an end to the war is nowhere to be seen. The narrator’s observation that “other great peoples of history, like the Amexicans [a coinage of the novel] built pyramids; we dug tunnels” (49) is apt in the way that the Réduit becomes a symbol of both greatness and death. The narrator finds it to

 Johannes Birgfeld and Claude D. Conter, “Morgenröte des Post-Humanismus”, in Christian Kracht. Zu Leben und Werk, ed. Johannes Birgfeld and Claude D. Conter (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2009), 255.

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be overridden by “a fearsome and all-encompassing decadence of the spirit” (120); he also encounters yet more of the racism that, despite the SSR’s putative egalitarian principles, permeates the narrative – appearing subtly long before the narrator is explicitly stated to be Swiss-African and developing the sense of an unbridgeable contradictoriness at the heart of the Swiss idea. Disillusioned after finally meeting Brazhinsky (who himself ends up gruesomely putting out his own eyes) and after a severe German bombardment involving the deployment of hallucinogenic gas, the narrator escapes through the mountains’ southern side to discover a sun-drenched, springtime landscape where bizarre brickworks built like ships are scattered across the hillside. The change of seasons sees him breaking free of the denatured, artificial time of Switzerland and the Redoubt, and he witnesses a sudden shift in which “Time – Swiss time – had ceased to be” (143), making his way to Genoa to board a ship for Africa. In the course of this journey, as if things couldn’t get stranger, his eyes turn blue: not only the iris, but the whole eye, including retina and pupil. The final chapter presents a vision of the Swiss empire in tatters, its cities emptying out as the architect Le Corbusier (lightly disguised under his real name, Jeanneret) commits suicide. So much for the basic – and fantastical – trajectory of the narrative. Formally, most striking are its linear progression (excepting two chapters that form discrete retrospective accounts of the narrator’s youth in Africa and the arrival of the Swiss), its clipped expression and imagistic style, reading something like a shooting script as it focuses on clear, often violent set pieces. Central, too, is its wild allusiveness. References and allusions in the novel are both rarefied and pop-cultural. Julia Schöll notes Conrad, Jünger, Grimm, Friedrich Glauser, Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, “diverse comics und music,” the biblical apocalypse, African myths, fragments of Asian philosophies, Lord of the Rings, Mad Max, Apocalypse Now and The Matrix. The motif of the narrator’s eyes changing color might be seen as an allusion to Robert Schneider’s 1992 novel Schlafes Bruder (Brother of Sleep). Yet further references are mentioned on a now-deleted section of the English-language Wikipedia page that Birgfeld and Conter suspect the canny selfpublicist Kracht of having written himself (a curiosity if so, since the novel has not yet been translated).8 The novel’s title, a citation from the traditional Irish folk song ‘Danny Boy’, sits among these diverse, even scattered allusions, which add up to a bewildering quality somewhat at odds with the text’s fairly straightforward journey structure.

 Birgfeld and Conter, “Morgenröte des Post-Humanismus”, 260. See Wikipedia, “Talk:Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten,” Accessed November 2, 2022. https://en.wikipedia. org/wiki/Talk:Ich_werde_hier_sein_im_Sonnenschein_und_im_Schatten.

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Kracht’s adoption of the ‘alternate history’ genre Although Ijoma Mangold left Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten out of his précis of Kracht’s career, it does in fact exhibit links with his other work. These raise questions about the practice of sealing off ‘alternate history’ as a separate sub-literary or ‘pulp’ genre. In Faserland, for example, the narrator’s preoccupation with matters of style and fashion does indeed bubble over into what Finlay has called a “longing for a counter-factual, yet stable ‘Heimat’ had the National Socialists not perpetrated the Holocaust.”9 Perhaps the most famous sequence features the narrator in Heidelberg (“Old Heidelberg,” as he calls it in English, aping Holden Caulfield) indulging in a provocatively flippant fantasy about what Germany might have been like if the Third Reich had never existed. Seemingly prompted by the fact of Heidelberg actually being ‘Old’, having not been bombed because “the Americans wanted to make it their headquarters,” the narrator remarks that “it’s truly beautiful there in the Spring”: The trees are already green – while everywhere else in Germany everything is still ugly and grey – and the people sit in the sun in the Neckarauen. That’s really what it’s called – you’ve got to imagine it – no, even better, just say it out loud: ‘Neckarauen’. ‘Neckarauen’. It’s enough to drive you nuts, that word. That’s how Germany could be, if there’d been no war and the Jews hadn’t been gassed. Then Germany would be like the word ‘Neckarauen’.10

The sequence sets up this idea of nations as ideas for the novel’s final chapter in Zurich, in which the narrator buys a German newspaper, something he can finally justify to himself now that he is no longer actually in Germany. Switzerland, for him, is like a “part of Germany in which things aren’t quite so bad” (157); a place where – quite happily – it is as if Germany “were just an idea, a great machine on the other side of the border that moves about and produces things that nobody pays attention to” (155). In the closing scenes, as he floats out onto Lake Zurich, he imagines living in a cottage on the other side of the water with the film star Isabella Rossellini and what he would tell their children about Germany – thereby ‘explaining’ the narrative act that is Faserland itself. In a footnote to his account, Finlay remarks that “Faserland’s imaginings of what Germany might have been but for the War point to an early counterfactual dimension in Kracht’s work,” pointing out “the title’s phonetic allusion to Robert Harris’s thriller, Fatherland, whose own protagonist also finds transient relief from Germany on the shores of Lake Zürich.”11 He refrains from exploring this

 Finlay, “‘Surface is an illusion but so is depth’,” 217.  Christian Kracht, Faserland (Cologne: Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 1995), 88.  Finlay, “‘Surface is an illusion but so is depth’”, 217f.

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compelling thesis further, but reading Faserland with this in mind, it’s hard to avoid the impression that Kracht was thinking about Harris’s 1992 novel rather a lot. Set in an alternate 1960s in which Hitler’s Germany won the war and the protagonist, ‘Kriminalpolizei’ detective Xavier March, inadvertently uncovers a plot to murder the attendees of the Wannsee conference – and thereby, in connection with an emergent ‘détente’ between Germany and the US, to obscure all accountability for the Holocaust – Fatherland’s taut narrative represents the ‘final solution’ in the form of a detective thriller. Wantonly disregarding the question of whether such an enterprise might be considered to be in good taste, it is an exemplary case of profound and troubling content being situated in an unnervingly pulpy setting: page-turning narrative ‘pleasure’ made from the stuff of deep historical trauma. At its center, the noirish policeman March learns the truth of the Holocaust from an American journalist Charlie Maguire, with whom he travels to Zurich on what is effectively a romantic getaway centering on the consummation of their incipient romance. They stay at the Hotel Baur au Lac in Zurich – the same place Kracht’s narrator checks in at the end of Faserland. The idea that serious questions of historical representation and reckoning – imagining a Germany where “the Jews hadn’t been gassed” – might be approached through discordantly ‘low-brow’ forms clearly made an impression on Kracht, setting out a framework that he would return to in Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten. Here, other allusions play up his self-aware adoption of the ‘alternate history’ form. These include texts that are specifically mentioned as well as a more general use of certain aesthetics. For example, the novel’s Mad Max-style world of apocalyptic desolation could be linked to the wasted landscape depicted in Christoph Ransmayr’s 1995 novel Morbus Kitahara (The Dog King), which imagines a Europe ravaged by something equivalent to the ‘Morgenthau Plan’ after the Second World War. One other intriguingly subtle, but pointed allusion is to Philip K. Dick’s seminal work of alternate history, The Man in the High Castle (1962). Finlay notes a reference to Dick’s novel – in which Nazi Germany and Japan win the Second World War – that appears when the narrator arrives at the dwarf Uriel’s cabin in Kracht’s fifth chapter. Scoping the place out, he spots three books on the “wooden block that served as a dining and writing table” (68). The second of these is entitled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which is the title of a subversive novel within Dick’s novel, a text found circulating among its various characters that tells what appears itself to be an ‘alternate history’ in which Japan and Germany lost the war. In this somewhat dizzying conceit, Dick’s characters are haunted by the suggestion that they themselves are living inside an elaborate fiction they cannot comprehend. The narrative builds towards a meeting with the mysterious author of this novel-within-a-novel, ‘Hawthorne Abendsen’, but although ‘truth’ is cast into doubt,

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no clear ‘solution’ is supplied; Dick chooses instead to have his characters teeter on the edge of an apocalyptic revelation of their reality’s fundamental fraudulence. Exploring the appearance of Dick’s novel-within-a-novel in Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten produces some unexpected insights to Kracht’s prismatic narrative technique. One is revealed by the fact that there is actually an earlier reference to The Man in the High Castle than the presence of the book on the table. This is very subtly seeded into chapter IV, when the narrator is recounting his early experiences as a recruit in Nyasaland. Describing how a medical examination found his heart to be placed not on the left, but the right side of his chest, he notes how the military doctor recoiled so sharply that a grasshopper preserved in formaldehyde fell from the examination table, the valuable glass shattering on the floor of the hospital. (56)

A few pages later, the narrator is describing how he and his fellow recruits “heard constantly of the great Réduit, the Alpine fortress” (60). Reflecting on the unconquerable solidity and immeasurable extension of this space, whose underground railways could wrap twice around the globe, and which even at this early stage of their training is central to the cultivation of a distinctive Swiss identity, the narrator describes how “the idea of the hollowed-out Swiss massif attracted me in an almost daemonic way” (61). He enthuses about the appeal of “the brotherly struggle of the Swiss soviet people for a just world, free of racial hatred and exploitation” (61). At this point, however, his thoughts interrupt themselves: In my poisonous dreams I nevertheless often saw the glass with the grasshopper shattering and felt the chill of the stethoscope on the skin of my left breast . . .

The sequence forms a dreamlike performance of the title of Dick’s fictional novel: an actual grasshopper seems to ‘lie heavy’ on the narrator’s consciousness. Words become things in this imagistic rendering of Dick’s gnomic phrase, in a manner that is of a piece with Kracht’s literary style, where the narrator repeatedly describes overtly aestheticized scenes as ‘tableaux vivants.’ The way that the image interrupts his thoughts about the Réduit in particular also seems especially significant here, since the Réduit is later revealed as a disconcerting confection of dream and reality where a similar kind of anxiety sets in: a “hollowed out” space within which the very idea of “the Swiss soviet people” will itself be unmasked as brittle artifice. Although in some ways they are formally quite different – Kracht’s novel features an episodic narrative with some discrete analepses, while Dick’s follows multiple storylines from various perspectives – there are other respects in which the works bear striking similarities. One distinctive feature of Dick’s novel is the Japan-ization of America, where characters regularly consult the ‘I-Ching’ or ‘Book

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of Changes’ and know its ‘hexagrams’ from memory. A small number of sustained linguistic shifts such as the omission of articles and the practice of “grafting” rather than “giving” gifts introduces an anamorphic strangeness to what is essentially a familiar California noir setting. This technique finds its analogue in Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten through Kracht’s use of Chewa words such as “Mwanas” for children and of Russian terms like “Papierosy” for cigarette and “Werst” as a measure of distance. References to the Buddhist concepts of ‘Satori’ (comprehension, insight) and ‘Wu’ (awareness, consciousness) also appear in Kracht’s novel, and one character – Favre – is even found using the I-Ching, importing this fragment of ancient Chinese tradition by way of American pop culture. Another significant insight to Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten comes from looking more closely at the other books on the table in Uriel’s cabin. One of them, Butterflies – How to Catch, Prepare and Mount them, develops the entomological theme without bearing a clear link. The other is entitled The Reverend Keith Gleed’s Entomology of Canadian Insects. Keith Gleed was a pedophile priest at the school in Ontario, Canada, by whom Kracht – as he revealed in 2018, fully ten years after this novel’s publication – was abused as a schoolboy. As in the case of the grasshopper, Gleed in fact appears in the novel before this point, when the narrator is recollecting his early literary education by missionaries including the Canadian “Brother Keith” who took him out after classes to the caves at Chongoni “to show me the mysterious paintings there,” which so enraptured the young narrator “that I only much later and incidentally realized that the Father, standing behind me in the dim glow of an oil-lamp, was moaning softly as he pleasured himself” (55). The crimes of the real-life Keith Gleed were only exposed when former students came forward after none other than the British Prince Andrew, once an exchange student at the same school in Ontario, placed a memorial for him upon his death in 2008. That Kracht should have referred codedly to his experiences in this novel a full decade before publicly revealing them illustrates the way that he deploys pulp references and narratives to deal with serious and sometimes even traumatic themes. At the same time, the way that Gleed appears in two distinct variations – as in the case of the grasshopper – is apt to the novel’s processes of mirroring and recurrence that reach their apogee in the space of the Réduit later on.

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The overdetermination of the Alps as a space of enlightenment and decadence The Man in the High Castle also suggests a way of approaching Kracht’s novel in terms of the ideas of progress and decline, figuratively imagined as ascent and descent through the Alpine landscape. One of the key tropes in The Man in the High Castle is that there is no longer any “contemporary” American culture as such – the antiques dealer Robert Childan sells items of American popular culture to avid Japanese collectors who gather together objects without even necessarily knowing what they had been used for. Disney souvenirs or trading cards are regarded as antique fragments of an extinct society. This is one of the ways in which the text plays to an idea of postwar Western civilization as haunted by anxiety about its own perceived ‘decline’ – an anxiety that has been linked with the ‘alternate history’ genre more generally. In his compelling 2013 study Altered Pasts, for example, historian Richard Evans characterizes the “recent fashion for counterfactual history” as related both to the collapse of guiding “teleologies” such as communism, fascism, and socialism, and also to the “concept of progress” as having taken “a hard knock, removing certainty or even probability from the future”: In place of the optimism of the sixties generation came a new uncertainty, as threats like global warming, terrorism, pandemics, fundamentalist religion and much more besides, came to create a widespread sense of disorientation and anxiety. The growing disbelief in a knowable future encouraged speculation about the course history might have taken in the past, when it too seemed to be open-ended.12

Diagnosing the declinist atmospherics of Kracht’s novel, Kathleen Singles makes sense of its allusiveness by arguing that it depicts “the disintegration of Western civilization through its overabundance, or overdose we might say, of references” (267). If this is true, then Kracht’s borrowing of motifs from the ‘alternate history’ genre is certainly key. Yet this anxiety about decline is also specifically conveyed by way of his representation of the Alpine landscape, both in terms of its ‘dreamlike’ representation and the way that the mountain is rendered as a real and symbolic apex, a device around which the shift from ascent to descent, progress to decline is structured. Mountains certainly emerge as heavily overdetermined sites in other works by Kracht. In his 2001 novel 1979, for example, a narrative of personal decline – from the high-society parties of pre-revolutionary Iran to a Chinese prison camp – is structured around a mountain: Mount Kailash in Tibet, which the narrator

 Richard Evans, Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History (London: Abacus, 2014), 41.

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circumambulates before being arrested by Chinese police. His 2007 book Metan, a collaboration with Ingo Niermann, elaborates a vast and unwieldy conspiracy theory concerning a sentient body of methane permeating the world. A confection of global political scandals, eastern philosophies, and dubious etymologies, all staged around schoolboy jokes about flatulence, the text is structured around an ascent of Mount Kilimanjaro, developing a correspondence between the form of the mountain and a sense of humanity as having ‘peaked’. An ascent of Kilimanjaro also features in Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten: in chapter IV the narrator recounts his journey (when in training) to Kilimanjaro as part of an exercise “which was intended not only to simulate the atmospheric conditions of Switzerland, but also to bring us closer to the metaphysics of our new fatherland” (61–2). When the narrator finally arrives at the entrance to the Réduit in the novel’s eighth chapter, the moment is a kind of return to the primal scene of his ascent of Kilimanjaro and his first site of snow, as well as a long-awaited confrontation with the professed principles of a “just world” to which the recruits have subscribed. He notes how “I went step by step upwards, not without awe and a slight hesitancy; my years as an officer had scarcely prepared me for the grandeur of this moment” (98). In finally arriving at this site, the narrator is encountering not only physical, geological mountains, but also a whole “metaphysics,” a mythic structure that has shaped his entire existence. The idea of the Swiss Redoubt as a space with both a symbolic and real existence is not unprecedented. As Julia Schöll has pointed out, the location is both real – literally, concrete – and, to most Swiss, who have not experienced it directly, in a certain way ‘imaginary’. A site of crucial significance to the Swiss but which “most Swiss people have never seen,” it was begun in the nineteenth century and vastly extended during the Second World War, intended to ensure Swiss sovereignty by being theoretically impregnable and self-sustaining – even though a retreat into it would involve sacrificing the bulk of the population.13 This apparently absurd situation – a self-defeating fortress – has certain illuminating precedents in German literature and French theory. One example concerns W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001), where the wildly oversized character of certain civic architecture in Belgium is critiqued as the material manifestation of a mad will to expansion – reason that has lapsed into unreason. In Sebald’s presentation, the bombastic architecture manifests the purchase of “the idea only” as set out by Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness, whose depiction of colonial exploitation in the Congo is thematically in the background of Austerlitz just as it is structurally in that of Kracht’s novel, where the narrator maps onto the figure of Marlow and

 Schöll, “Die Schweizer Matrix,” 305.

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Brazhinsky that of Kurz. Sebald’s example of the fortifications of Antwerp, expanded until “the entire Belgian army would have been insufficient to garrison the fortifications” reveals the way that fortified landscapes can be seen to function as symbolic forms that have somehow irrupted into the real world: a very real and physical expression of irrational rationality.14 Another precedent is offered by the work of French cultural theorist Paul Virilio on the afterlives of Second World War fortifications, Bunker Archaeology, which began as an exhibition at the Museum of Decorative Arts in Paris from December 1975 to February 1976. Drawing on photographs taken from 1958 to 1963 of the ‘Atlantic Wall’, Virilio recounted his early encounters with these relics, whose German builders and occupants “had returned to their native hinterland, leaving behind, along with the work site, their tools and arms.”15 Explaining how the concrete spaces were for him initially only “an illustration of a story, the story of total war,” he described how “You could walk day after day along the seaside and never once lose sight of these concrete altars built to face the void of the oceanic horizon” – thereby discovering a space where “total war was revealed [. . .] in its mythic dimension.”16 Virilio’s interest in Albert Speer’s ‘theory of the value of ruins’ points towards Harris’s Fatherland, which dwells at length on its descriptions of what Speer’s Berlin would have looked like had it been realized. There’s a link to Faserland, too, in the opening scenes of which the narrator mentions how “I played, as a small boy, in the last German bunkers at Westerland” on the island of Sylt.17 The Swiss fortifications as they are depicted in Kracht’s third novel perhaps have their roots in these experiences. The SF-style appearance of the bunkers of the Atlantic Wall, meanwhile, scattered as they are across the beaches of western Europe, certainly suggest a link with Frank Herbert’s cult 1965 novel Dune, where the drug ‘melange’ or ‘spice’ provides heightened awareness, among other things. This could be a source not only for the use of drugs in the Réduit (the narrator’s consumption of psylocibin mushrooms, whereby Brazhinsky punningly shifts the ‘journey’ of the novel into a ‘trip’) but also for the otherwise unexplained phenomenon of the change in the narrator’s eye-color: one of the effects of ‘melange’ in Dune is that it changes the color of the eyes, turning them an unreal bright blue.

 W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Penguin, 2018), 22.  Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology, trans. George Collins (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994), 9.  Virilio, Bunker Archaeology, 11–12.  Kracht, Faserland, 18.

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The Swiss Redoubt as a nightmarish mirror world In her discussion of Kracht’s novel, Schöll draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s famous ‘theory of knowledge’, characterizing Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten as “a rhizomatic citation- and reference-network” ‒ adding that this is specifically true of the Réduit itself.18 As the narrator himself puts it: First simple shafts were driven into the rock, secured with tree trunks, then with iron columns, then tunnels were dug laterally, linking the original burrows with one another; a web of boreholes and parallel shafts grew up which terminated nowhere. (104)

The description of the space as a ‘rhizome’ is certainly evocative, but the application of this idea to the text as a whole may in fact be rather limiting. It obscures, for example, the more obvious link with the ideas of dream and nightmare and the ways that the text shows these to be smudged into reality. Dreaming, digression, and reflection are certainly all key to the narrative. Just as the representation of the ‘grasshopper’ reproduces something like the Freudian ‘dream work’ of compression and symbolic representation, so the narrator’s account is frequently inset with dreamlike mental drifting. The analeptic passages describing his childhood in Africa, for example, erupt into the ‘journey’ to the Réduit like daydreams superimposed onto the narrative present and placing its linear progression under stress: his memories of first seeing Kilimanjaro, on a training expedition, are layered onto the impressions of the Alps in the novel; later, before being saved by Uriel from the minefield, he remarks on “a half-hour of stillness, in which I was once again in Africa” (87). The Réduit itself is shown to be an empty center, a dreamlike space of inaction, an explicitly confected environment whose spaces are described early on as “perspectivally impossible” (103). The ascent of the mountain that takes place within the Réduit becomes a symbolic journey where space becomes gradually more “straight and exact” as well as “inorganic and sterile” so that “an architectural will could be made out, which built on itself” (104), documenting a ‘progress’ that is also a decline: a band of reliefs and paintings on the walls depicting the history of Switzerland steadily renounce “any pretension of representation that was true to nature” (122). The paintings by Nicholas Roerich in Brazhinsky’s room depict “nightmarish [alptraumhafte] Alpine landscapes” (116). Meanwhile, the narrator’s discussions with Brazhinsky reveal the space outside the Réduit as an imaginary construct. As in works like The Man in the High Castle as well as more recent SF classics like The Matrix (1999), the ‘known’ world is revealed to be a fiction, an ‘apocalyptic’

 Schöll, “Die Schweizer Matrix,” 293.

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revelation tempered by the later realization that Brazhinsky’s “smoke-speech” “could only project, not receive” (136) – hinting that everything we witness may indeed be part of one huge hallucinatory experience. The space of the Réduit also functions as a projection room in which motifs from elsewhere in Kracht’s oeuvre appear: on his medical rounds with Brazhinsky, the narrator meets a figure who has poisoned himself by means of excessive ‘gold therapy’. Reminiscent of the character of Christopher from 1979, he also wears a “waxed green jacket with matching checked lining” (116) – the distinctive Barbour jacket of Faserland’s narrator. The space also refers back to Robert Harris’s Fatherland: Kracht notes the way that its inhabitants’ breath condenses under the ceiling and falls as rain – a conspicuous feature of Albert Speer’s completed Volkshalle as it appears in Harris’s imagined 1960s Berlin (103). Meeting these intertextual echoes are countless internal mirrorings, which create the sense of an aestheticized, dreamlike construction. As in the case of the grasshopper and “Brother Keith,” motifs appear in one place only to reappear elsewhere in reflected or refracted form. The narrator notices moments like the mirror facing the door of his room in the Réduit in which he and Brazhinsky “found our outlines on entering framed” (110); later, his dreams of Africa in the narrative present mirror the dreams of the Réduit had while in Africa; later still he is taken by Brazhinsky to the balcony from which he sensed he was being watched as he first entered the Réduit (124). That the narrator’s heart is on the right side of his body, making of himself a kind of ‘mirror image’, renders him a part of this aesthetic system in which the interior of the Redoubt becomes a hall of mirrors. For all the idea of the ‘rhizome’ as a thing of endless extension, these inter- and intra-textual mirrorings suggest other, perhaps more useful applications of postmodernist theory. For example, Michel Foucault’s theorization of the ‘heterotopia’ uses the example of the space contained within mirrors as “at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal.”19 This suggests a reading of Kracht’s work as something more than a merely dilettantish project whose “pleasure in the play of surfaces [. . .] dissolves deeper meaning,” as Finlay sees it: instead, the concept of the space as both real and imaginary attends to a perception of contemporary reality as populated by diverse, discordant, kitsch, and even tasteless unrealities – experiences and ideas that are difficult to reconcile with the real but nevertheless a part of it.20 Taking a slightly different approach, the type and manner of Kracht’s mirrorings, and his borrowing of tropes from the alternate history genre, point to a variation on Jean-François Lyotard’s 1979 The Postmodern

 Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics 16.1 (1986): 24.  Finlay, “‘Surface is an illusion but so is depth’,” 230.

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Condition: A Report on Knowledge, so that the space evacuated by ‘grand narratives’ in the contemporary period might be filled not only with refined theoretical concepts but also by pulp fictions: the stuff of alternate history literature, cult science fiction films, steampunk style and popular song, all merged into a dizzying dream world that is both an absolutely unreal confection and an everyday, even banal, part of lived experience.

Conclusion The idea that contemporary reality can itself be haunted by diverse and sometimes crass daydreams or nightmares – where utopia and dystopia, traumatic experience and transcendental illumination are the very stuff of a ‘real’ whose obverse is contained within it – is central to Kracht’s aesthetic enterprise. A clue to this reading can be found in the novel’s final sentence, which as Conter and Birgfeld note is stolen from Louis Aragon’s 1931 poem “Front Rouge”: “And the blue eyes of our revolution burned with the necessary cruelty” (267). Aragon’s specific context – the scandal of his return from the USSR and the failure of his plan “to connect artistic and political avant-gardes”21 – is less important than the broader Surrealist insight concerning the fantastical, or ‘marvelous’, resolution of dream and reality that can just as easily vault into nightmare. If this is a kind of experience that strains at the limits of conventional literary realism, then Lars Weisbrod’s frustration with the “realism tower” of literary criticism is entirely justified, for it is Kracht’s provocatively non-realist representation of an ‘alternate’ world, a space hallucinated into being through a kaleidoscope of pop and pulp references, that is what makes his third novel so unnerving and compelling. That his representation of the Swiss Redoubt should form the centerpiece of this project reveals Kracht’s novel as a vital contribution to the Alpine imagination.

 Birgfeld and Conter, “Morgenröte des Post-Humanismus,” 267.

Rebecca Wismeg-Kammerlander

More than Romantic Scenery: The Contested Alpine Landscape in Raphaela Edelbauer’s Das flüssige Land (The Liquid Land, 2019) The Alps and the Austrian ‘brand’ The Alpine landscape and its vast mountain ranges have become a cornerstone of the national brand of Austria. It comes as no surprise then, that the mention of Austria commonly evokes thoughts and imagery of Viennese Kaffeehauskultur, of Habsburg grandeur, and – most prominently – of nature and the Alps in particular. As a core facet of the nation’s image, they are ubiquitous; they appear on posters, they are featured in adverts for the tourism industry and political parties alike, they serve as a backdrop for a plethora of Austrian and international films – from the Sissi series (1955‒1957) through The Sound of Music (1965) to the Piefke-Saga (1990‒1993) –, and, even in times of a global pandemic, they are portrayed as a site of escape and relaxation. Upholding this crucial function of the Alpine landscape despite travel restrictions and very limited mobility, the Austrian tourism board invited visitors on a virtual tour of mountains like the Großglockner,1 bringing this core facet of the brand into people’s living rooms. The latter in particular exemplifies the crucial role the mountains play in the Austrian imaginary: they are portrayed and understood as a site of escape and recovery, albeit only virtually. A closer look, however, reveals that this positive portrayal of the mountains and its use in Austrian narratives and cultural production must be called into question. The Austrian tourism industry, for example, played an inglorious role in the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic due to its unwillingness to make sacrifices to contain infection.2 Indeed, this instance is only the most recent manifestation of a problematic tendency in Austrian culture: the habit of using a romanticized idea of the Alpine landscape to distract from serious issues. The

 “#AustrianHomeStories: Experience Austria Virtually,” Austria. The official travel portal, accessed 15 September 2021, https://www.austria.info/en/virtual-austria.  Philipp Oltermann, “‘Everyone was drenched in the virus’: was this Austrian ski resort a Covid-19 ground zero?” The Guardian¸ 5 September 2020, accessed 15 September, 2021, https:// www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/05/everyone-was-drenched-in-the-virus-was-this-austrianski-resort-a-covid-19-ground-zero. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111150536-011

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relevance of this approach towards the Austrian landscape has been reaffirmed in recent years, since a number of young Austrian authors have added their voices to an existing canon of those who critically engage with romanticized ideas of the Alps fueled and circulated by the tourism industry in particular. One of the most recent contributions to this discourse is Raphaela Edelbauer’s 2019 debut novel Das flüssige Land (The Liquid Land, 2021) which – although written before the breakout of the pandemic and thus unaware of the dystopian role of said landscape in its development – draws a picture of the relationship between the individual, the nation, and the mountain landscape that is equally intriguing and devastating. Edelbauer’s text has been met with commercial success and critical acclaim, and it was shortlisted for both the German and the Austrian Book Prize in the year of its publication. The text’s polemical and poignant tone is most prominent in Edelbauer’s intricate and paradoxical portrayal of the landscape her protagonist Ruth navigates. Austria’s well-honed strategy of self-stylization offers fertile ground for Edelbauer’s criticism: the gloomy portrayal of the Alpine landscape in Das flüssige Land stands in stark contrast to the romanticized image that has become a defining factor of Austria’s self-stylization and marketing. Built on imagery of lakeside landscapes and snow-covered mountains,3 Austria has, to borrow a description coined by Robert Menasse, established a self-perception as a nature reserve and museum.4 This thoroughly positive portrayal, devoid of disruptive elements, has a long tradition in Austria’s tourism industry as well as in its nation-building5 and has been employed in its endeavours to suppress its Nazi past. In addition to the victimhood narrative, that is, Austria’s claim of having been the first victim of Nazi aggression rather than a perpetrator, the focus on the beautiful Alpine landscape has helped to diverge attention away from the nation’s guilt. Approaching the uncomplimentary role of Austria’s landscape from the angle of eco-criticism or looking at it in the light of Anthropocene discourse too brings glaring issues to the fore: as environmental scientist Erle C. Ellis and other critics engaged in debates around humanity’s impact on the earth argue, the idea of a pristine nature, unaffected by humans, is an illusion.6 This verdict alone scratches the shiny surface of Austria’s self-understanding as a nature reserve capable of offering just that.

 Johanna Rachinger, “Vorwort,” in Willkommen in Österreich, eine sommerliche Reise in Bildern, ed. Christian Maryška and Michael Pfundner (Vienna: Metroverlag, 2012), 8.  Robert Menasse, Das war Österreich. Gesammelte Essays zum Land ohne Eigenschaften (Vienna: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2005), 98.  Oliver Rathkolb, Die paradoxe Republik, Österreich 1945 bis 2015 (Vienna: Paul Zsolnay, 2015), 55.  Erle C. Ellis, Anthropocene. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2018), 1‒15.

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That this myth is still fundamental for the national brand of Austria – an image of the nation that is constructed through processes of consumer culture which range from deliberate marketing efforts through politics and popular culture to literature – becomes strikingly clear when taking a closer look at marketing material from different backgrounds that has been used in Austria in recent years. The campaign “Arrive and revive,” run by Austria’s national tourist office since the early 2010s, regularly employs images of undisturbed nature, often contrasted against grey and noisy cityscapes, to attract tourists. Highlighting the purity of the Alpine landscape, posters show visitors overlooking otherwise empty Alps, lush meadows, or mountainscapes under slogans such as “the nothing-can-spoil-thisview perfection,”7 “the around-me-only-green abundance,”8 or “the it’s-all-aboutperspective moment”9 alongside the campaign’s catchphrase “Austria – arrive and revive” (the German campaign used the less catchy claim “Österreich – ankommen und aufleben”). Video ads published on the tourism office’s YouTube channel “Holidays in Austria” follow city dwellers as they step out of their inhospitable surroundings to recover in Austria’s unspoilt nature, winning back their smiles.10 Far from the reality of mass-tourism that itself has had a lasting impact on the Austrian Alps and that has subsequently been debated in Anti-Heimatliteratur11 and film – most famously in Felix Mitterer’s Piefke Saga – the tourism industry distributes the image of an Alpine dream. In these engagements with Austrian Alpine space, the idyllic, dream-like vision of the Alps, the Alp-Traum promoted officially, if you like, quickly transforms into an Alptraum, a nightmare. A similar positively charged image of nature is, however, also addressed to an internal audience. This is particularly obvious when examining the role nature plays in political campaigns: before a plethora of scandals forced him to resign in 2021, former chancellor Sebastian Kurz (ÖVP), known for his focus on branding and visibility, had employed the Alps as a stage for his self-stylization as an

 “the Nothing-can-spoil-this-view perfection – Austria arrive and revive”, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, accessed 15 September 2021, https://onb.digital/result/11764CEF. (In German: “Die nichts stört den Blick Vollkommenheit,” https://onb.digital/result/11765F15.)  “the around-me-only-green abundance – Austria arrive and revive”, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, accessed 15 September 2021, https://onb.digital/result/11764D1E. (In German: “Die um mich nur Grün Geborgenheit,” https://onb.digital/result/11765BB2).  “the it’s-all-About-perspective Moment – Austria arrive and revive”, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, accessed 15 September 2021, https://onb.digital/result/1176512F. (In German: “Die hier kann ich Kraft schöpfen Ruhe,” https://onb.digital/result/11765F15).  Holidays in Austria on YouTube, accessed 15 September 2021 https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=iluOA-KG9zo and https://youtu.be/M_MIRhmI6Bg.  Klaus Zeyringer and Helmut Gollner, Eine Literaturgeschichte: Österreich seit 1650 (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2012), 673‒674.

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approachable leader with a sense of Austrianness by inviting followers on hikes in 2018.12 The far-right FPÖ chose to depict Herbert Kickl as a defender of the Heimat during the 2019 Nationalratswahl, showing him in front of a mountainscape next to the slogan “One who Protects our Homeland” (“Einer, der unsere Heimat schützt”).13 President Alexander Van der Bellen also relied on the mountains as a symbol of Austrianness in his 2016 election campaign, although more elegantly: unlike Kickl, whose stance and stern expression make him appear detached from the landscape that has been edited into the background, Van der Bellen’s leisurely posture and the natural lighting make him blend in with his Alpine surroundings. The slogan on his poster, “Serve Austria and not a Party,” (“Österreich dienen – und keiner Partei”)14 equates the landscape he is photographed in with Austria as a whole. This makes explicit what is implicit in all forms of advertising addressed above, namely that Austria and its Alpine landscape have become almost synonymous. Ernst Hanisch speaks of a golden myth of the Austrian landscape, a “Goldener Landschaftsmythos,”15 when referring to this romanticized view of Austria’s landscape that has a significant formative capacity and reaches an audience within and beyond Austria. Examining Das Österreichbuch, a book published in 1948 with the specific aim of bolstering Austrian nation-building in the post-war era, he finds that the landscape as depicted in the volume is intended to instil pride in Austrians, making nature a building block of nation-building and of an Austrian identity, while simultaneously stimulating tourism.16 Aware of the issues this myth is riddled with, a counter-concept emerged, driven not least by authors who called it into question. Here Hanisch speaks of a dark myth of the Austrian landscape, the “Schwarzer Landschaftsmythos.”17 This negative portrayal of the Austrian landscape gained traction when Austria’s complicity with the Nazi regime was unearthed in the wake of the Waldheim affair and became established not least through the genre of Anti-Heimatliteratur.18 Authors like Felix Mitterer,

 Der Standard, “Wandern mit Sebastian Kurz: Eine Heldeninszenierung in drei Akten,” accessed 15 September 2021, https://www.derstandard.de/story/2000084424147/wandern-mit-sebas tian-kurz-eine-heldeninszenierung-in-drei-akten.  FPÖ, “Herbert Kickl. Einer, der unsere Heimat schützt,” accessed 15 September 2021, https:// comrecon.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/4_FPOE-Einer-der-unsere-Heimat-schuetzt.jpg.  Die Grünen, “Alexander Van der Bellen. Österreich dienen – und keiner Partei,” accessed 15 September 2021, https://gruene.at/gfx?j=a65660db1dc25da30ced376d72915324.  Ernst Hanisch, Landschaft und Identität. Versuch einer österreichischen Erfahrungsgeschichte (Vienna: Böhlau 2019), 46.  Hanisch, Landschaft und Identität, 50. All translations from Edelbauer’s text are the author’s own unless stated otherwise.  Hanisch, Landschaft und Identität, 55‒66.  Hanisch, Landschaft und Identität, 67‒68.

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Josef Winkler, Michael Köhlmeier, Josef Haslinger, and Nobel laureates Peter Handke and Elfriede Jelinek have brought the dark sides of the Austrian Heimat and its landscape to the fore since the 1970s, an approach that is currently resurfacing in a plethora of literary works in the Austrian context. This depiction of damaged, doomed, and destroyed landscapes breaks with the idealized picture of tourism marketing and casts the Alps as a site of trauma, quite clearly turning the dream-like vision, the Alp-Traum, into a nightmare, an Alptraum, as suggested earlier.

The hollow landscape Edelbauer’s Das flüssige Land is a particularly striking example of a contemporary portrayal of the Alpine landscape that chimes with the “Schwarzer Landschaftsmythos” and follows in the footsteps of Austrian Anti-Heimatliteratur, connecting the Alps to the darkest chapters of Austria’s past and the nation’s overexploitation of nature. Here the mountains, forests, and meadows of the Wechselgebiet, a low-lying section of the Alps stretching across Styria and Lower Austria on the eastern fringe of the Austrian Alps, are depicted as a contested space, as a site of exploitation and trauma and thus emerge as much more than a romantic scenery. Edelbauer puts her protagonist in the middle of an idyllic landscape which soon reveals nightmarish facets and develops into a site of dystopia – going as far as taking it from Alptraum to Alptrauma. Following in the footsteps of Ruth, her protagonist, Edelbauer leads the reader into the heart of the Alpine landscape: leaving Vienna behind to organize her parents’ funeral, she embarks on a journey from the city to Groß-Einland, a fictional town that lies hidden among the mountains of the Wechselgebiet. Upon her arrival, which itself is the result of a traumatic event, the town appears as a perfect rendition of a postcard having come to life: a medieval market square nestled amongst the mountains and surrounded by forests. The sense of relief that overcomes her when she finally arrives after an exhausting and disoriented drive is palpable, a sensation that cannot last. What was supposed to be merely a short stay evolves into a residency and Ruth gets absorbed by the town and its population, with their strange rules and customs. An increasingly disturbed young woman eventually advances into the inner circles of those in power and learns about Groß-Einland’s tainted history and the enormous damage it has done to the mountain it is built on. Hollowed out and on the brink of collapse, the town stands on fragile ground. The hole that threatens to destroy it is the result of various instants of exploitation, ranging from silver mining in the Middle Ages through lime extraction in the

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nineteenth century to forced labour in the Nazi era, when the former mine became a site of the concentration camp Mauthausen. These episodes of the place’s history have left their mark long before Ruth’s arrival there. The failure to address and to revisit these periods in the town’s history appropriately – a dubious memorial plaque is erected,19 but an in-depth review of the past is made almost impossible, as Ruth’s struggle to learn more about the town’s past confirms20 – fuels the hole’s destabilising effect. Since this denialist approach takes its toll on the physical stability of the town, Groß-Einland serves as a polemical metaphor for the negative impact of Austria’s approach towards crucial facets of its history. Scrutinising the imagery of the national brand of Austria, Edelbauer describes the Alpine town and its landscape as a place of paradox and instability. Subsequently, the façade Ruth was so struck by when first setting foot into the town is unveiled to be the result of perpetual and increasingly desperate attempts by the town’s inhabitants to maintain this appearance. Constantly occupied with filling cracks and fixing damage to their houses and the roads,21 the townsfolk refuse to address the hole’s origins and structure, the issue that is literally undermining their entire existence, for much too long. Having passed a tipping point, the breakage becomes too vast and happens too quickly to be incrementally mitigated. Ruth realises that any ongoing attempts to maintain the town are doomed to fail and must come to the painful realisation that it is also too late for a sufficient confrontation of the town’s history. Austria’s deliberate suppression of its past has, like the town’s approach, appeared to fail: the Waldheim affair in the 1980s brought the country’s hidden past to light, forcing a confrontation with history that was long overdue and that has come at great cost for the country’s reputation and image.22 In a dystopian resumption of Austria’s approach to its past pre-Waldheim and thus picking up patterns that are increasingly visible in contemporary Austrian politics and culture, Groß-Einland’s fate can be read as a warning: further refusal to appropriately address traumatic episodes in history will lead to self-destruction. The only chance to avert this fate is a filler material Ruth, who has left behind a blossoming career as physicist, develops. Its application offers a chance to save Groß-Einland from being obliterated, however, its use would come at an enormous cost: the Alpine landscape would be destroyed. Injected into the hollow ground, the chemical

 Raphaela Edelbauer, Das flüssige Land (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2019), 64.  Edelbauer, Das flüssige Land, 88.  Edelbauer, Das flüssige Land, 61.  See: Anthony Bushell, Polemical Austria. The Rhetorics of National Identity: From Empire to the Second Republic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), 21, 227; Cornelius Lenguth, Waldheim und die Folgen: Der Parteipolitische Umgang mit dem Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2013).

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compounds of this last rescue device would stabilize the fragile shell on which the town rests, but it would suffocate flora and fauna, devastating the landscape.23 Furthermore, remnants of the town’s concealed past, still to be found in the hole, would also fall victim to this attempt at stabilising Groß-Einland, rendering an honest revision of its history impossible once and for all. Thus there is a cost to be borne if the town is to be saved: the town would lose its chance to confront history and the very landscape that makes Groß-Einland what it is would be destroyed in one swoop. Ruth finds herself in a conflict that epitomizes the seemingly irreconcilable tensions between Austria’s tainted history, its national brand, and the conservation of its nature, putting the Alpine landscape at the centre of the conflict. Seen through the lens of the protagonist, the contested Alpine landscape appears as a multi-facetted concept, oscillating between stunning beauty, intimidating power, and shocking ugliness. The discovery of a functional filler material after a lengthy period of research and some experiments on her own property in Groß-Einland forces Ruth to make an impactful choice: the salvation of the town as well as the fate of the Alpine landscape rest in her hands. At odds with the narratives prominent in Austrian self-stylization and tourism marketing, her stance towards the landscape is not clear-cut and positive. Her inability to continuously perceive her surroundings as a haven of natural beauty puts into question whether she will make the decision to save the landscape from its imminent destruction. It is thus crucial to examine her complex and fluctuating relationship with the mountains, forests, and meadows that surround her, to unravel the complex picture of the Alpine landscape that Edelbauer constructs. In Ruth’s experience the landscape emerges as a paradoxical entity, oscillating between extremes. When her parents’ untimely death forces her, a city dweller by choice, entangled in a stressful and demanding career in academia, to turn her back on Vienna and to head towards the Alps, her perception of the mountainscape is by no means positive. Breaking with the golden myth so often portrayed in tourism ads, Ruth is overwhelmed by the landscape and suffers a panic attack that leaves her shaken: Something that had hitherto held me in the world had been unhinged. The entire land rose beneath me; I rode the undulations of a liquid mass. My hands trembled in their grip around the steering wheel, and the contractions of my tensed body made the car lurch dangerously. I had to escape the hold the land had over me, and the fact that a lay-by was signaled just then was a sign from heaven.24

 Edelbauer, Das flüssige Land, 280.  Edelbauer, Das flüssige Land, 12‒13.

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In tune with the novel’s title, the mountainscape appears to liquefy and Ruth has an experience that is far from typical for the landscape she navigates. Feeling as if she were a vessel in a raging sea, out of control and at risk of sinking, she attempts to escape from its grasp. Turning the touristic imagery on its head, the Alps are described as uncanny and intimidating, while the lay-by, an ugly, dirty slab of concrete usually perceived as an abomination amidst the beauty of an otherwise unscathed landscape, emerges as a safe haven. The fact that this locality in the Alps, a place of transit that lacks historical meaning and identity – a nonplace in Augè’s sense25 – emerges as such a crucial location for Ruth speaks volumes. This dull space, devoid of any meaning and identity, is only capable of offering relief because it is the direct result of a human suppression of nature. Seeing the mountains, themselves products of natural processes capable of folding massive stone layers like paper, the sheer force of nature frightens Ruth; her feelings of weakness and powerlessness are only mitigated when she finds a spot in which this force has been conquered by a human hand. This motive of an ongoing struggle between the Alps and those who inhabit them is also a popular trope in Austrian literature that Edelbauer exaggerates in her own distinct way. Nevertheless, the perception of the Alpine landscape as a threat, resonating throughout this terrifying encounter, does not persist. A short time later, Ruth has a much more positive experience: as she settles in in GroßEinland and takes up employment there, the golden myth resurfaces and appears to override her fear. Ruth begins to engage with the Alpine landscape in a way similar to the “use” that is advertised by tourism marketing. Leaving work in the evenings Ruth steps out of her office to take walks in the woods. Doing so, she grows more and more amazed by her surroundings. Sitting on tree trunks and overlooking the valley, while digging her hands into the fresh and earthy moss, she is once again struck by the power of nature.26 Her reaction to this power, however, is entirely different than the one we see in her first encounter with the landscape: rather than feeling overwhelmed and fearful she is elated and amazed. Departing from the surreal impression of Ruth’s initial encounter with the Wechselgebiet, which Ruth had had to cross on her way to Groß-Einland, this scene returns to the well-known aesthetic and dominant narrative of tourism advertising. In fact, it is strikingly similar to a video ad produced by the Austrian Tourist Office in 2013.27 In this short film a stressed and performance-driven woman is shown training on her treadmill, the only sounds surrounding her the monotone noises of the machine’s  Marc Augè, Nicht-Orte (Munich: C.H. Beck, 2010), 83.  Edelbauer, Das flüssige Land, 79.  Austria, Arrive and Revive, https://drive.google.com/file/d/145L4q13LI_d1Qvq0ZX6mLXzzgDLPQVb9/ view?usp=sharing.

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motor and her partner’s typing in the background. After a sleepless night, during which she is visibly unable to find rest, she and her partner are shown in their car – en route to Austria. The woman already begins to relax on the way: passing through sub-Alpine foothills she sticks her hand out of the car window, playfully letting it float through the airstream. This scene heralds a wonderful holiday, and the longer the couple stays the more they grow detached from their hectic and unpleasant life in the city. This is made visible as their gadgets, from phones through fitness trackers, disappear one after the other, monochrome sportswear and strict suits are replaced by floating dresses and plaid shirts and as they themselves adapt, their perception of nature evolves too. During a walk through a forest the woman steps close to a piece of lichen hanging from a tree, carefully touching it and leaning in to take in its earthy smell with a deep breath – a scene reminiscent of Ruth digging her hands into the moss to have a similar experience. The ad comes to the expected conclusion in portraying the Alpine landscape as a tourist haven and confirms its roots in the aesthetic of the “Goldener Landschaftmythos” with a closing scene reminiscent of The Sound of Music. A beauty shot of the mountainscape is shown, the woman, wearing a light summer dress, at its centre, her arms outstretched just like Julie Andrews in her famous scene in the 1965 film. Ruth, prone to extreme reactions, however, is not capable of maintaining a relationship with her surroundings that would allow her to preserve a similar level of positivity. Instead, even the positive emotions brought on by her immersion in the Alpine landscape intensify far beyond a point of pleasure and she begins to develop an addiction of sorts. I, always a passionate city dweller, now became almost anxious if I spent more than three or four hours indoors. I began to get up once every five minutes to check on the nature outside my window, hidden behind the facades of the houses like a ghost.28

While positive experiences with nature elate Ruth for a short time, they have long term consequences. She forges a new, close bond with the landscape of her new home, and the forests and mountainscapes instil a sense of belonging in her, reaffirming the internal function of a golden myth of the Austrian landscape that Hanisch argues for. Her euphoria and sense of home, however, cannot persist. As the quote above hints, the landscape is at risk of disappearing and Ruth is aware that the landscape is threatened by the gaping abyss just as much as the town itself, her observation on this fragile place thus evokes a profound sense of eeriness. Following a wave pattern, once more alluding to the title of the novel and its cover design, the aforementioned peak in Ruth’s positive attitude towards the

 Edelbauer, Das flüssige Land, 113.

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Alpine landscape is soon followed by a new low. The premonition that her gaze might very soon no longer meet the landscape she has grown so fond of becomes particularly poignant as she finds herself in a complex moral dilemma very soon after. As outlined above, Ruth puts her expertise in the natural sciences into practice and manages to develop a material capable of filling the hole and stabilising the town and its surroundings. As she soon finds out, however, the solution brings with it fatal consequences: It did not take long for me to identify [. . .] the main problems to be worried about when implementing it: first, I would have to produce a gasoline-based mixture that would leave the land barren a few hours after injection; dead castrate soil that would murder the flora. [. . .] This was a moral problem, I thought [. . .].29

Applying the concoction to rescue the town from its untimely and man-made end would thus be a death sentence for the lush meadows and dense forests that shape the Alpine landscape. This destruction of the very backbone of a golden myth of the Austrian landscape would instantly make the apocalyptic and dark images attributed to a dark myth, the “Schwarzer Landschaftsmythos,” a harsh and inescapable reality for the citizens of and visitors to Groß-Einland.

The Alpine nightmare In drawing such a devastating image of the landscape, Das flüssige Land builds on polemical portrayals of the Alpine landscape as a nightmarish site which are prominent in Austrian literature and have taken up a fixed place in the nation’s popular culture. In addition to the texts written by authors of Anti-Heimatliteratur, the popular films of author and filmmaker Felix Mitterer have left a lasting impression. The particularly popular “Piefke Saga,” a 1990 film trilogy co-created by the Austrian ORF and German TV station NDR, the plot of which is focused on the tense relationship between the German Sattmann family and the locals in the Tyrolian town to which they routinely travel, not only draws a sardonic picture of both the tourists and the hosts, it also shines a harsh light on the impact of tourism on the Alpine landscape. The fourth film of the series, created three years after the original trilogy drew to a close, puts the damaged landscape centre stage: the Sattmann’s Tyrolian holiday destination is still popular with tourists, but it has morphed into the polar opposite of a nature reserve. The locals, technologically augmented and doomed to eternal hospitableness, welcome tourists to an entirely artificial Alpine landscape. Astroturf covers

 Edelbauer, Das flüssige Land, 204.

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huge mountains of trash, an illusion that is revealed to the viewer as the cover is lifted and the hideous reality comes into view. It is no longer the force of nature that creates mountains, instead it is human wastefulness that has taken its place. This destructive force has first destroyed the entire region and then developed into a creative force of its own which results in perverted and ugly artificial landscapes that lack history and authenticity – the entire Alpine landscape is turned into a nonplace. Edelbauer takes this polemic yet a step further, getting even closer to the core of a dark myth of the Austrian landscape: while the Tyroleans in Mitterer’s film have made a handsome living from literally covering up the damage they have done with a shiny façade, the townsfolk in das flüssige Land are no longer capable of even maintaining an illusion. The town will either collapse or the last attempt to save it will leave nothing but destruction and a dead landscape behind. The very moment this realisation begins to sink in Ruth’s view of nature undergoes yet another dramatic change and her excitement subsides as a far more negative sentiment encroaches upon her. Laying eyes on the landscape leaves her with an impression of brokenness that appears to be brought about by her distinct awareness of the traces humans have left in the landscape. Overlooking the valley, she grasps the extent of human interference even in the areas she formerly saw as untouched nature. The valley is described as having been “chopped into pieces” resulting in “fields which are forced into shape”30 and a crack encircling the town appears to her like a prominent scar, defacing the landscape. Overwhelmed by this new outlook, Ruth is once more overcome by discomfort and disgust. Instead of wanting to be one with nature, instead of walking through the forest and digging her fingernails into the moss to touch its earthy foundation, she feels threatened, haunted, almost molested by her surroundings: “The panorama disgusted me – and at the same time, the more I kept my distance from it, the more it drew closer, like an indiscreet person who doesn’t want to leave you alone.”31 While this repeated change in Ruth’s attitude chimes with her unstable character – the reader is made aware that she is taking a mixture of psychotropic drugs and other medicine to control her performance and mood – it is striking that it is not merely a reversal into an old pattern. This new experience is by no means a mere repetition of or return to the one she has during her initial drive to Groß-Einland, even though this too is a crushing episode. A core difference between these two moments in Ruth’s relationship with the Alpine landscape lies in the portrayal of those facets of nature which can be deemed “untouched” by humans and those undeniably impacted by their interventions and transgressions. Initially, it is the pure, unaltered landscape

 Edelbauer, Das flüssige Land, 210.  Edelbauer, Das flüssige Land, 210.

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that terrifies Ruth, it is the mountainscape itself that dominates her experience and is distorted into a nightmarish form. The only visible space of human intervention in said landscape – the lay-by –, and a particularly unsightly one at that, appears as a sign of civilization and safety, it becomes a rescue device. Here, however, the marks that human interference have left on the landscape cause an entirely different reaction. They come to the fore as the apparent cause of Ruth’s distress – what she can no longer stomach is not nature’s sheer force but rather its defeat and the resulting impossibility of the Austrian Alpine landscape to function as a safe haven any longer. Groß-Einland has reached the point of no return, the point at which the imaginary of the Alp-Traum has once and for all been replaced by an Altptraum(a).

Conclusion Ruth eventually asks herself a question that is ubiquitous in discourses of and in contemporary Austria: “I loved the nature here, [. . .] and what has become of it because of this damned filler? Can the alternative perhaps only be that there is either no landscape at all or a dead one? No home [Heimat] or a rotting one?”32 This passage makes strikingly clear that the Austrian approach towards self-stylization, its focus on a flawless façade of which the Alpine landscape is the most crucial element, is inadequate considering its history. A stable home, a Heimat, can only be upheld if an honest revision of the nation’s history, its guilt, and its exploitation of human and natural resources alike, is undertaken and maintained. Failure to take this necessary step will push the country to its breaking point, and yet, even though this insight resonates throughout Edelbauer’s text, its verdict is far from positive. Being confronted with the paradoxical functions of the Alpine landscape, oscillating between natural beauty, threatening force, and – quite literally – a cover-up for Austria’s dark past, Ruth realizes that the illusion of unscathed natural beauty, synonymous with the image of her Heimat, cannot persist. Despite this realisation, she too fails to speak up and a chance of turning the tragic state of the town into a moment of learning goes to waste. A grand gesture of distributing portfolios which contain information about the town’s history to journalists, invited to attend an absurd tourist spectacle staged to celebrate the ceremonial filling of the hole, thus never happens. Instead, Ruth, who was scheduled to give a speech and has thus been granted an opportunity to voice her concerns and trigger the long overdue debate, flees. She gets into her car and embarks on the journey back to Vienna, turning her back on the town for good. During the drive she tries to calm her  Edelbauer, Das flüssige Land, 303.

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conscience, employing thought patterns and lines of reasoning that chime with Austria’s stance towards its past due their paradoxicality and absurdity: Silence, the refusal to speak, I thought once more while taking the first serpentine, was the highest and most pervasive act of rebellion. I would simply withdraw from Groß-Einland, turn my back on my so-called home, and I would leave no trace – that is, except for the tons and tons of filler material that were just being pumped into the ground. If one disapproves of a group’s actions, then one simply has to go in search of a new group to put an end to this problem – yes: problems do not demand a solution, rather a complete evaporation, an annihilation.33

Ruth’s decision to sacrifice nature to avoid the turmoil of facing the town’s, and by extension Austria’s, past is met with her simultaneous inability to face the consequences of her actions. In Edelbauer’s vision then the Alpine Landscape is a contested sphere and much more than a romantic backdrop. Rather than upholding a golden myth of the Alpine landscape, Das flüssige Land shows how the trauma of a supressed past, in conjunction with an urge to please its visitors, are eroding the Austrian landscape. Remaining on the well-trodden path of denial and of exploitation must result in the loss of one of the most influential and valuable elements of Austrian tourism advertising, self-stylization, and nation-building. The reader is confronted with a question that is as crucial as it is painful: once the Alpine landscape has died, what remains of Austria? For Ruth, taking the very approach that has led Groß-Einland to its demise by suppressing the memories of her own guilt, the answer is Vienna. A place full of history, well-structured, and with a tamed Danube at its centre, the city makes her feel secure, not least because this place is the product of human activity, a space where the Alpine landscape is far off and what is left of nature is reigned in, straightened, or cut into shape. And yet, she glances into her rear-view mirror to reassure herself that Groß-Einland is no longer visible, that she has managed to get away from it. As she drives, a song by Andreas Gabalier plays on the radio, bringing into view what would really remain for the rest of Austria once the landscape is gone – pseudo-romantic illusions, empty folklore, and touristic kitsch. The Alpine landscape in Edelbauer’s text is much more than mere romantic scenery, so much more than a kitschy postcard idyll; it emerges as a contested space with multiple and at times paradoxical functions. Das flüssige Land thus highlights the importance of the Alpine landscape for a twenty-first century discourse of Austria and calls for an unflinching look behind its shiny façade.

 Edelbauer, Das flüssige Land, 348.

Part 4: Boundaries and the Alps

Leonie Silber

The Alps as a Site of Boundary Suspension? Wilhelmine von Hillern’s Die Geier-Wally (The Vulture Maiden, 1875) in Deutsche Rundschau Wilhelmine von Hillern’s story Die Geier-Wally – Eine Geschichte aus den Tiroler Alpen (The Vulture Maiden – A Story from the Tyrolean Alps), first published in January and February 1875 in Deutsche Rundschau, has enjoyed extraordinary popularity ever since it was first printed. The author adapted the literary material revolving around the life of a woman farmer from the Ötztal valley for the theatre as early as 1880, and in 1892 the opera La Wally by Alfredo Catalani was staged for the first time. Since then, numerous film adaptations of the material have been produced, including a silent film in 1921 directed by Ewald André Dupont, feature films by Hans Steinhoff, Franz Cap and Gretl Löwinger in 1940, 1956, and 1967 respectively, along with a television version in 2005 based on a script by Felix Huby. In light of the popularity and productivity of the material, which has continued to shape the cultural image of the Alps up to the present day, it is remarkable just how little attention the work has received to date in German literary and cultural studies discourse. There are few academic discussions of the work; those that do exist are primarily concerned with the life of the Tyrolean artist Anna Stainer-Knittel, who is viewed as an historical reference point,1 or explore the popularity of the material from an ethnographic perspective,2 unearth the historical sources behind the work in an effort to situate it in a broader historical context,3 or attempt to analyze the narrative with respect to the notion of Heimat.4

 Nina Stainer, “Selbstbild und Fremdbild: Anna Stainer-Kittel und die Geier-Wally,” in Visualisierungen von Kult, ed. Marion Meyer and Deborah Klimburg-Salter (Vienna: Böhlau, 2014).  Susanne Päsler, “Die Geierwally: Eine Romanfigur im Spiegel ihrer Popularität,” Augsburger Volkskundliche Nachrichten 1.1 (1995).  Katja Mellmann, “Wilhelmine von Hillerns Quellen für die Rundschau-Novelle Die GeierWally,” Jahrbuch Franz-Michael-Felder-Archiv 19 (2018): 122‒159.  Susanne Scharnowski, “Escaping from Heimat and longing for Heimat in Wilhelmine von Hillern’s Die Geier-Wally,” German Life and Letters 72.1 (2019): 40‒51. Translated by Joel Scott & Marc Hiatt for Gegensatz Translation Collective https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111150536-012

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My discussion here is centered around a close reading of the original periodical version by Wilhelmine von Hillern from 1875, which has not yet been addressed in literary scholarship. By way of this close reading, I will investigate the spatial semantics of the Alps and the literary treatment of the world of the Tyrolean mountains and discuss why, with respect to the landscape of the mountains, this particular example of serial publication contains an almost excessive treatment and discussion of various borders and boundaries. Central to this is the function that the high Alpine region of the Hochjoch mountain pass plays within the literary topography of the text, introduced as Wally’s refuge far away from civilization and social practices. My primary question is whether the pass can be viewed as a site of the suspension of boundaries, a depiction typical of literary treatments of Alpine landscapes since the nineteenth century. To put it otherwise, I examine whether the pass is a kind of alternate world, in which the dominant existing social and political order is reproduced, yet also reflected upon and transformed. Methodologically, I combine theories of space with concepts from material philology, as has been proposed by the DFG Research Unit 2288: Journal Literature.5 I am interested in the way that the narrative text is framed by the form of the periodical, which is why I will consider the contextual framing in Deutsche Rundschau toward the end of my discussion. The text was first published in two instalments in January and February of 1875 in Deutsche Rundschau, which was founded in 1874 and edited by Julius Rodenberg.6 This periodical, published by Verlag Gebrüder Paetel in Berlin from 1874 to 1914 is not a publication devoted to Alpine journalism, as was the Deutsche Alpenzeitung, launched some 25 years later and published by Rother Verlag in Munich from 1901 to 1915 and then again from 1920 to 1943. Rather, the magazine covered a broad range of themes, as reflected in the name Rundschau. The publication featured contributions covering the fields of literature, the sciences, the military, economics, tourism, politics, contemporary history, and the visual and performing arts, as well as music. According to the subscriber lists, it was aimed at a readership that was extremely well-positioned both socially and economically, located in the major cities in the early years of the German Empire, as well as in other European and non-European metropolises of the Western world. It was a place where the educated German-speaking elite wrote and read, many of

 Nicola Kaminski and Jens Ruchatz, “Journalliteratur – ein Avertissement,” Pfennig-Magazin zur Journalliteratur 1 (2017): 1‒44.  Wilhelmine von Hillern, “Die Geier-Wally,” Deutsche Rundschau 2.4 (1875), 1–53 and Deutsche Rundschau 2.5 (1875), 167–227. In the following, I cite from the first English edition, published in Leipzig by Bernhard Tauchnitz in 1876: Wilhelmine von Hillern, The Vulture Maiden, 1876, trans. E. F. Poynter and C. Bell.

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whom were also affiliated with universities. Viewed through a sociohistorical lens, Deutsche Rundschau was connected closely with the “emergence of the German Empire and the capital at its center,” and viewed itself not only as a medium in which the educated bourgeoisie could reflect on political and cultural issues, but also as a “journalistic counterpart to the nation-state.”7

Verticality, boundaries and exclusion In the midst of the thematic diversity that made up Deutsche Rundschau, von Hillern’s Geier-Wally was afforded a prominent position, which is reflected both typographically and editorially, given that it is the lead feature in the second issue, published in 1875. Von Hillern had already published significantly at the time and was also the first female author to have a literary text published in Deutsche Rundschau.8 In Die Geier-Wally, the natural landscape of the Tyrolean Alps9 serves as a stage for the negotiation of numerous boundaries and borders, including their formation, their justification, and their disintegration. This dynamic of boundary formation is structured and produced in the narrative, I would like to argue with a nod to Juri M. Lotman’s conception of space, by an underlying vertical distinction. This is established in the opening of the novel between the “down below” located in the bottom of the valley and the “up above” of the Hochjoch, which becomes foundational to the text. Initially, it seems as if this vertical structure produces a stable order. To continue with Lotman’s vocabulary, it creates “disjunctive spatial compartments”,10 that is the depths and the heights, to which the narrator assigns different figures or groups of figures. In turn, these “spatial compartments” are understood as being strictly separated by a boundary that cannot be crossed.11 In von Hillern’s text, the spatial compartments are semantically complemented by numerous other distinctions that enforce this sense of a boundary: not just between mountain and valley, lowland and highland, but also between

 Margot Goeller, “Hüter der Kultur”: Bildungsbürgerlichkeit in den Kulturzeitschriften Deutsche Rundschau und Neue Rundschau (1890‒1914) (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010), 30.  Chapters one to nine in the first instalment in January 1875, ten to fourteen in the second instalment in February 1875.  Other literary texts on the Alps to appear in the journal Deutsche Rundschau include: Paul Güßfeldt, “In den Hochalpen,” Deutsche Rundschau 11, 411–427; Güßfeldt, “Jenseits der Schneegrenze,” Deutsche Rundschau 23, 383–406; Güßfeldt, “Col du Lion,” Deutsche Rundschau 29, 438–53.  Jurij M. Lotman, Die Struktur literarischer Texte (Munich: Fink, 1972), 327.  Lotman, Die Struktur literarischer Texte, 327.

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man and woman, foreign and native, human and animal, Christian and nonChristian. As such, this boundary functions as a “normative barrier, by which a culture sets itself apart from another culture or from a space of non-culture.”12 The boundary functions, then, as an initial indication of the otherworldliness of the Alpine landscape. It is only when this barrier is traversed that Lotman speaks of an “event,”13 which in turn is designated as a narrative act, and which can be identified in von Hillern’s text. At the outset, the narrative perspective follows a “traveller,”14 and the reader is introduced to the narrative world by following in the footsteps of this figure. This initial approach immediately establishes the wanderer as being from the city far away from the Alps, as is the reader and their world, and as a counter-world to the Ötztal valley, which can only be entered through the “mobile figure”15 of the wanderer and not without significant effort. The tourist enters the valley accompanied by a mountain guide and from this position observes a girl on “the eagle heights of the giddy precipice above him,”16 “firm and tranquil, though the mountain gusts tore and snatched at her, and looked without dizziness down into the depths where the Ache rushed roaring through the ravine.”17 Wally is introduced as belonging to the higher of the two spheres; it seems as if some of the spatial-semantic qualities of the Alps (“firm” and “tranquil”18) have been transferred onto her. In the eyes of the traveler, she symbolizes the alien Alpine culture, which is introduced in terms that bear close similarity to the lofty formulas of the sublime and its aesthetic manifestation in the form of vertigo, such as that ascribed by Immanuel Kant in his 1764 pre-critical text Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime to the experience of nature’s spaces, of gazing at stars in the night sky or towering mountains.19 In the next sentence, the narrative perspective changes to the location of the girl, who in turn catches sight of the wanderers down below, but is unable to hear what they are saying about her: “That is certainly the Vulture-maiden standing up yonder; no other maiden

 Gerhard Neumann, “Transgressionen: Literatur als Ethnographie,” in Transgressionen: Literatur als Ethnographie, ed. Gerhard Neumann and Rainer Warning (Freiburg: Rombach, 2003).  Lotman, Die Struktur literarischer Texte, 330.  von Hillern, The Vulture Maiden, 1.  Lotman, Die Struktur literarischer Texte, 346.  von Hillern, The Vulture Maiden, 1.  von Hillern, The Vulture Maiden, 1.  von Hillern, The Vulture Maiden, 1.  Immanuel Kant, “Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen,” in Gesammelte Schriften Erste Abteilung Bd. II (Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1912). Susanne Scharnowski comes to similar conclusions in her essay but does not explore how this vertical distinction is connected to a gendering, which can also be found in Kant. Susanne Scharnowski, “Escaping from Heimat,” 48.

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would trust herself on that narrow point. See, [. . .] she always does just the contrary to what other reasonable Christian folk do.”20 Here it is made clear that for those surrounding her, Wally is an outsider, a transgressive figure, a “girl” who is “half boy,”21 who flouts the Christian behavioral codes and gender roles that prevail in the valley. Psychosocial reasons for her otherness, as the narrator terms it in passing, are to be found in her family life, in growing up without a mother as the only child of a rich farmer, Stromminger, who pressures his daughter, in a key scene recounted retrospectively, to abseil down a cliff-face to empty the nest of a Lämmergeier, or bearded vulture.22 This is an heroic deed, which recalls the figure of Brunhilde from the Nibelungenlied (introduced by the village priest) and comes to define the protagonist in the eyes of others. For the people of the village, she is no longer Walburga Stromminger, but the “Geier-Wally,” whose fame stretches far beyond the Ötztal valley. Furthermore, she is depicted as a hybrid human-animal being, another oppositional pairing that adds to the semantic charge of the distinction that underlies the entire work – neither human nor animal, her vulture Hansl follows her every move. When Wally refuses to marry the man whom her father had picked out for her, Vincenz, the second-richest farmer in the valley and rejects the expected roles and the socio-economic logic of the village, she is banished from her father’s house and moves into a hut on the Hochjoch.23 This functions as a manifestation of her exclusion from the village community. The Hochjoch, a mountain pass that connects the Ötztal valley with the Rofental, Ventertal, and Schnalstal valleys and is situated on what is today the border between Austria (North Tyrol) and Italy (South Tyrol), becomes the heroine’s refuge. The literary treatment of the geographically attested location initially conforms with the topos of the locus horribilis: here are eternal winter and the stillness of death. Sadly and gently as a mother kisses the pale forehead of her dead child, so the sun kisses these cold glaciers, scanty meadows, the last clinging vestiges of organic life.24

Wally’s exclusion from society in the valley leads her into the high Alpine sphere, which in the summer is only inhabited by animals and “a few half-wild, weatherbeaten fellows, who clothed themselves in skins and lived [. . .] in stone cabins like hermits.”25 Thanks to her solid constitution, she grows accustomed to living

     

von Hillern, The Vulture Maiden, 2. von Hillern, The Vulture Maiden, 3. von Hillern, The Vulture Maiden, 3. von Hillern, The Vulture Maiden, 39. von Hillern, The Vulture Maiden, 40. von Hillern, The Vulture Maiden, 40.

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far away from the claustrophobia of village life, which is described as dysfunctional, violent, and suffocating: “up here was freedom – [. . .] far below were strife and anguish and crime,”26 the “tyranny of small minds.”27 At the same time, a process of expiation begins, which is intended to transform the “hard wood”28 that Wally is into a holy figure. This process of domestication is proclaimed by the village priest and is intended to transform Wally into a respectable member of the village community. The extraordinary abilities that are ascribed to her, her masculine strength and volition, are to be transformed into the order of beauty and meekness. After the plot is interrupted and then picked up again in the second instalment, the social order of the village community is seemingly reestablished. But when, after numerous twists and turns Wally embraces her counterpart, Joseph the Bear-hunter,29 the order has only superficially been consolidated: “a simple cross”30 that reminds “travellers”31 and readers of the later benefactor Wally, demonstrates the superficiality of this harmony. For both of them die young and their marriage does not produce any children, while the vulture, Wally’s animal attribute, remains. The order of the narrative world established at the beginning, with its clear delineations, is not reconstructed. The high-altitude region of the Hochjoch, with its loneliness and inhospitable conditions that were described at the outset, evolves in Wally’s perspective into a place that clearly distinguishes itself from the violence and social frigidity of the community in the Alpine village, which is symbolized in the figure of the father. It also becomes a place where the narrative, even for the attentive reader, threatens to collapse, since the procedure of the narrator, which seeks to consolidate a spatial order that is based on the distinction of clearly signaled oppositions by first putting it in jeopardy and then reconstructing it, cannot be completed within the bounds of the text itself.

Reception and transgression In the context of Deutsche Rundschau, both the “story from the Tyrolean Alps,” as the subheading describes it, and its protagonist, a girl who survives as a hunter in the rocky mountain landscape, are figured as a transgression. In 1880, the journalist

     

von Hillern, The Vulture Maiden, 61. von Hillern, The Vulture Maiden, 93. von Hillern, The Vulture Maiden, 92. von Hillern, The Vulture Maiden, 278. von Hillern, The Vulture Maiden, 278. von Hillern, The Vulture Maiden, 278.

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Wilhelm Goldbaum writes, likely in relation to the publication of The Hour will come,32 that Wilhelmine von Hillern masters her literary “depiction of the landscape of the Alps,”33 but that her text represents a “chapter from women’s writing,”34 whose “theatrical atmosphere”35 and proximity to the “daguerreotype”36 or “aphorisms” makes it into a gender-political and aesthetic chimaera that reveals a “tension between her masculine abilities and her feminine being.”37 This ascription to both the literary figure and the empirical author of a transgressive quality that opens up an interstitial space in which the borders of the feminine and the masculine38 overlap is accompanied by an attempt at fencing in the work aesthetically and in terms of the question of its literary genre. In Goldbaum’s view, by bringing together elements of the drama and processes that reference the visual creations of early photography, the literary text thwarts a clear distinction between prose and drama, literature, and photography. In this way, paratextually, there is a redefinition of what had been opened up materially through the initial publication in two installments. The absence of a completed, coherent work in the periodical form – a direct reality caused by the form’s seriality and temporal dispersity – was familiar to contemporary readers of literature and was not perceived as a fault.39 Goldbaum’s analysis of von Hillern’s Vulture Maiden in the same journal, however, designates the lack of this completion as a deviation. Here, the intratextual manoeuvre of the literary text that I have highlighted in this essay, of placing the focus of the reader on boundaries and their transgression, finds an echo at the level of the paratext in Goldbaums framing. The field of tension that begins to emerge between the norms that hold sway in contemporary consciousness and the tendency for them to be aesthetically and culturally transgressed is reflected in the Alpine discourse that takes shape in

 Wilhelmine von Hillern, Und sie kommt doch! Erzählung aus einem Alpenkloster des 13. Jahrhunderts (Berlin: Gebrüder Paetel, 1879).  Wilhelm Goldbaum, “Wilhelmine von Hillern: Eine literarische Studie,” Deutsche Rundschau 23 (1880): 106.  Goldbaum, “Wilhelmine von Hillern”, 104.  Goldbaum, “Wilhelmine von Hillern”, 110.  Goldbaum, “Wilhelmine von Hillern”, 113.  Goldbaum, “Wilhelmine von Hillern”, 106–7. This, he says, is displayed particularly in the character of the figure Geier-Wally, a “classical model of bellicose femininity [. . .] a femininity that wrestles with itself, in order to free itself from itself.”  In terms of a socio-historical framing of the political constellations around gender in the Gründerzeit, Karin Hausen’s work continues to be essential. See, for example,“Die Polarisierung der Geschlechtscharaktere: Eine Spiegelung der Dissoziation von Erwerbs- und Familienleben,” in Sozialgeschichte der Familie in der Neuzeit Europas, ed. Werner Conze (Stuttgart: Klett, 1976).  Kaminski and Ruchatz, “Journalliteratur”, 25.

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Geier-Wally. In the literary text, the intratextual space of the world being narrated initially conforms with the typical topoi of descriptions of mountains in the nineteenth century. The solemn language of the sublime and of vertigo and the motif of the locus horribilis, which are taken from the pastoral, form the narrative backdrop of the action, which also weaves in elements of Heimat40 history or village history. What was new in a literary sense, and what was presumably not lost on the readers of Deutsche Rundschau and may have been the reason for the text’s popularity, is to be found in the subtle shaping of an Alpine aesthetic that transcends hackneyed, masculinizing descriptions and characterizations. The Alpine literary discourse that emerges in Geier-Wally is informed by the vertical structure of the nature of the Alps and to a certain extent takes on its spatialsemantic characteristics. This procedure is concentrated in the image of the boundary (understood in both the topographic and the figurative sense) and can also be linked with numerous identity-forming discourses from the Gründerzeit or the early years of the German Empire. And although, against this backdrop, the Alps cannot be read entirely as the site of a complete suspension of boundaries, this phenomenon may have been central to the formation of the phantasm of the Alps for the urban readership of Deutsche Rundschau, which particularly from the 1870s on, led to bourgeois alpinists joining the newly founded Alpine associations and tourists heading to the mountains in hordes.

 On the concept of Heimat in the context of periodical literature, see Nicolas Pethes, “Die Semantik von Heimat in Zeitschriften/Literatur des späten 19. Jahrhunderts,” Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift 5.1 (2020): 15‒30.

Jon Hughes

At the Limit: Edgework, Ethics and Environment in Paul Preuss’ Theory and Practice of Climbing Introduction and methodology This essay re-evaluates the ideas of the pioneering Austrian mountain climber Paul Preuss (1886‒1913) from an interdisciplinary perspective and makes the case for his continued relevance to today’s debates about human interaction with the Alps and with natural landscapes more generally. Preuss was not only one of the most brilliant young European mountain climbers of the early twentieth century but was also one of the most insightful and controversial writers about mountains and mountaineering of his day. Preuss’s name may not be widely known, but his ideas, in particular his conceptualization of climbing as a practice led by a set of ideals, continue to resonate more than a century after his death. Sports historians, most recently David Smart, the author of a first English-language biography of Preuss, often give credit to Preuss as the originator of free climbing.1 This is not inaccurate, but, given the notoriety of free climbing as the most extreme form of an already dangerous sport, may give a misleading impression of an individual driven by bravado or recklessness. I argue here that Preuss’ articulation of his ideals and the resulting open debate in the German and Austrian climbing community, are not only of interest for their significance in the evolution of climbing as a sport, but can also be read as one of the first attempts at a systematic defense of a practice defined by the sociologist Stephen Lyng as “edgework” – voluntary actions involving a high degree of perceived risk, for which there is no obvious reward.2 Indeed, Preuss problematizes edges, limits, and borders, both literal and figurative, in innovative ways that were widely misrepresented in his lifetime. By foregrounding an experiential relationship both to the act of climbing and to the natural world, and by challenging the conventional distinction between “subject” and “object,” Preuss’ ideas not only reflect contemporary philosophical currents, notably the phenomenology associated with Husserl and Heidegger, but have practical ethical implications.  David Smart, Paul Preuss: Lord of the Abyss. Life and Death at the Birth of Free-Climbing (Victoria: Rocky Mountain Books, 2019).  The term was first employed in: Stephen Lyng, “Edgework: A Social Psychological Analysis of Voluntary Risk Taking,” American Journal of Sociology 95.4 (1990): 443‒460. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111150536-013

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With these in mind, this essay concludes by reflecting on the environmental concerns implicit in his critical view of the impact of tourism and leisure activities upon the mountains. Preuss was born and grew up in Altaussee in Styria, close to the mountains of the Salzkammergut in Upper Austria, the son of middle-class, secular Jewish parents.3 Always attracted by the outdoors and the natural world, he became a committed rock climber during his time as a student of botany in Vienna and Munich. He came of age during a time in which Alpine sports and leisure activities were booming, embraced by an increasingly diverse range of people, both men and women, and the Alps themselves were being discovered and developed as popular destinations for tourism, recreation, and health.4 “Alpinism”, encompassing both mountaineering – the scaling of mountains in order to reach the peak, by a particular route – and sport climbing as an end in itself, was in fashion. Preuss was one of a close-knit generation of climbers from across the Alpine states, including figures such as Hans Dülfer, originally from North Germany, and the Italian South Tyrolian Giovanni “Tita” Piaz, known as the “Devil of the Dolomites”, who were redefining the nature of climbing and exploring its limits. Preuss’ short career was concentrated and transnational; he tirelessly crisscrossed the Alps to explore his native ranges in the Salzkammergut and Tyrol, the Italian Dolomites, the Julian Alps in Slovenia, and the Bavarian, French, and Swiss Alps. The intensity of his climbing was remarkable and indeed obsessive. For example, between June and October of 1911 Preuss reached 93 different summits, including the first solo ascents of the notorious Western Face of the Totenkirchl in the Tyrolian Kaisergebirge and of the Guglia di Brenta in the Dolomites.5 The latter two are both extreme climbs by any standard, and Preuss free-climbed them – that is, he did so without the aid of securing ropes. It was this purist approach to his discipline that inspired both respect and a degree of bafflement even before he articulated it in theoretical terms in a series of articles and essays published in 1911 and 1912. Many of his pioneering generation were to die in the First World War, which also saw the instrumentalization, militarization, and nationalization of Alpine climbing, but Preuss’ death, sadly, came even sooner – in October 1913, from a fall while climbing alone in the Gosaukamm in his home region.

 Further biographical information in Smart, who builds on the work of Reinhold Messner. See Reinhold Messner, Der Philosoph des Freikletterns: Die Geschichte von Paul Preuß (Munich: Malik, 2011).  For an account of this phenomenon (in the Swiss context) see Susan Barton, Healthy Living in the Alps: The Origins of Winter Tourism in Switzerland, 1860‒1914 (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2008).  Messner, Der Philosoph des Freikletterns (284‒293), provides an extensive (but still incomplete) list of Preuss’ expeditions and climbs between 1904 and 1913.

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Climbing in the twenty-first century Before I turn to Preuss’ ideas, it is relevant to reflect briefly on the status of climbing today, more than a century on. It has recently become significantly more ‘mainstream’, both in terms of participation levels and culturally. We might cite three pieces of circumstantial evidence in support of this. At the delayed Tokyo Olympiad in the summer of 2021, sport climbing finally made its debut as an Olympic sport, marking a significant change in its status, garnering significant global attention and praise, and making stars of climbers such as the Slovenian women’s gold medalist Janja Garnbret. A second cultural indicator is provided by the Oscar-winning success of the 2018 documentary film Free Solo, directed by Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin, which records the American climber Alex Honnold’s solo, free ascent of El Capitan, the legendary, towering cliff wall in Yosemite, California. And third, we might observe that mountain tourism, dating in the Alpine nations to the nineteenth century, has seen continued expansion and technological innovation, with once remote and inaccessible regions being opened up to tourism. Parallel to this, climbing itself has become more accessible through equipment and infrastructure, as well as improved knowledge and skills. The summit of Mount Everest, not long ago the non plus ultra of difficult objectives, has now been reached by well over 4000 different people. Yet while climbing is popular, it is also an activity that is pulling in radically different directions. Sport climbing today is a pure test of skill and strength with the risk to life and limb essentially eliminated – in the speed and lead disciplines, climbers are secured by belayed ropes. In bouldering, falls are routine and broken by padded mats. Alex Honnold’s achievement, by contrast, could not be more different – in climbing a 1000m near-vertical cliff without ropes or any other form of failsafe, a fall would have been fatal. Honnold’s is an extreme version of climbing, unthinkably terrifying to the majority. For some, his climb was a landmark human achievement and an inspiring example of the attainment of goals. Daniel Duane saw it as “a miraculous opportunity for the rest of us to experience what you might call the human sublime ‒ a performance so far beyond our current understanding of our physical and mental potential that it provokes a pleasurable sensation of mystified awe right alongside the inevitable nausea.”6 For others, it was a self-indulgent example of recklessness and a dangerous precedent. Honnold likes to point out that few activities are without risk, and he is critical of the attempt to reduce climbing to a predictable form of sight-seeing. The

 Daniel Duane, “El Capitan, My El Capitan,” New York Times, 9 June 2017, accessed 6 September 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/09/opinion/el-capitan-my-el-capitan.html.

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sight of long queues of guided parties of climbers near the summit of Everest, even during the current pandemic, is a case in point.7 Here the impression of order is illusory, as such “tourists” – for that is what they surely are – are at extreme personal risk when such “traffic jams” occur at extreme altitude. The fact that they are also having a considerable environmental impact, just as they are upon every mountain environment whose summit has been made accessible, is another concern.8 The global pandemic in 2020‒21 has seen a noticeably critical response to domestic tourism in the Alps (and in other areas of natural beauty), with the perception that many young visitors in particular see the natural world as little more than an Instagram opportunity and behave accordingly.9 Such negative views need to be framed carefully, however, as public access to the countryside, once a privilege of the wealthy, has been hard won and is worth defending. But the continued “touristification” of the mountains is neither sustainable nor, arguably, ethically justifiable.

The piton controversy and its implications Many of these concerns were anticipated by Paul Preuss, who voiced them in the articles which triggered a debate remembered as the Mauerhakenstreit (the piton controversy). By the early 1910s, Preuss was an established commentator and speaker on Alpine topics and a prominent member of the German and Austrian Alpenverein (Alpine Club), at this time a relatively inclusive organization that was not tied to “national” claims on the Alps and saw the opening up of the Alps as part of its mission.10 It was in the Deutsche Alpenzeitung, in August 1911, that he initiated the “piton controversy.” Preuss’ essay “Artificial Aids on Alpine Routes” critiques the tendency to “sportify” Alpine climbing by applying all available technology to

 See for example: “Photos: Virus fails to deter hundreds of climbers on Mount Everest,” Boston Globe, 7 June 2021, accessed 6 September, 2021, https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/06/07/world/ photos-virus-fails-deter-hundreds-climbers-mount-everest/.  See for example the reporting of the impact of tourism on the Zugspitze, the peak of which, complete with viewing platform, is fully accessible via cable car: “Besucheransturm: Fluch und Segen der neuen Zugspitz-Seilbahn,” Bayerischer Rundfunk, 13 September 2018, accessed 6 September 2021, https://www.br.de/nachrichten/bayern/besucheransturm-fluch-und-segen-derneuen-zugspitz-seilbahn,R00zOjB.  See for example Ulrike Fokken, “Touristen in den Bergen: Alpengeister, die ich rief,” TAZ, 30 September 2020, accessed 6 September 2021, https://taz.de/Touristen-in-den-Bergen/!5713088/.  On the problematic history of the Alpenverein see Rainer Amstädter, Der Alpinismus: Kultur, Organisation, Politik (Vienna: WUV, 1996).

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make it standardized and safe.11 His objections centered on the use of Mauerhaken or pitons, which are steel wedges, usually with a hook, loop, eye or ring, that climbers hammer into a crack in a rock face in order to secure a rope, and which in Preuss’ day were usually left in place. This was, and sometime still is, done for safety, as a failsafe – to allow a climber to continue with a climb with the knowledge that they are roped to a piton. But it was not unheard of for climbers to climb up ropes secured to pitons, or to use the pitons themselves as hand- or footholds; and it was even more common for ropes to be used to abseil down from the top. Preuss expresses a fundamental objection to the idea of using any “artificial aid” to complete a climb. Yet he also rejects the routine use of pitons and ropes for safety and abseiling: “Even the piton counts as an emergency aid; it shouldn’t be the means through which mountains are conquered.”12 In other words, he allowed for the carrying of pitons and ropes for use in an emergency, but not as part of a plan to complete a particular climb. It was this latter point that triggered controversy – the most skilled of his contemporaries were likewise happy to reject the use of “artificial aids” as the primary means of climbing. But they were reliant upon the use of pitons and ropes as a fallback, which allowed the most difficult routes to be attempted. This, they argued, would simply not be possible in the absence of the securing presence of the rope. Preuss’s views prompted counter-arguments and a welcome boost in sales to the publishers of the Alpenzeitung over the following months.13 The primary criticism aimed at Preuss was that his idealism was unethical in failing to distinguish between “use and abuse” of pitons and ropes and would risk lives if put into practice.14 In his response, published in the following issue of the Alpenzeitung, Piaz defends the use of pitons both for safety and as a way to make climbing more accessible: “If the most trivial use of pitons had saved even one person’s life, then that alone would justify their use.”15 He continues: “By using secured pitons we don’t want to cheat our way up cliff walls. By using them we just want, as much as possible, to reduce the dangers we face.”16 Franz Nieberl is more aggressive in his response, including both anti-Protestant and Antisemitic innuendo,

 Paul Preuss, “Künstliche Hilfsmittel auf Hochtouren,” Deutsche Alpenzeitung 11.1 (August 1911). Reprinted in (and here quoted from) Messner, Der Philosoph des Freikletterns (2011), 50‒58.  All translations from the original German are my own. Preuss, “Künstlich Hilfsmittel auf Hochtouren,” 55.  See Smart, Paul Preuss, 118.  G. B. Piaz, “Erwiderung – Auszüge” in Messner, Der Philosoph des Freikletterns (2011), 58.  Piaz, “Erwiderung,” 59.  Piaz, “Erwiderung,” 60.

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and calling Preuss “the reborn puritan of rock climbing” representing “a cold, stiff, frosty ideal.”17

Risk, limits and self Preuss’ response to the criticism is still not well understood. He was certainly not arguing for callousness or for heroic fearlessness, or for aggressively asserting one’s will upon the mountain – discourses that were to be applied to mountaineering under National Socialism. His views are underpinned by the idea that the individual climber should exercise caution and be willing to recognize his or her limits. He stresses that he is not arguing against all tourism and concedes that there is a place for the use of ropes to allow tourists a safe taste of mountaineering.18 But the climber, he argues, should never knowingly attempt a climb that is likely beyond his or her limits or abilities, suggesting that this approach, which necessarily would mean that some climbs will remain impossible, would result in greater safety than would an over-reliance upon aids. The problem, he suggests, is that few really know their own limits: “Most climbers today are uncertain of the limits to their own ability as the use of artificial aids encourages illusions.”19 What Preuss is advocating is the rediscovery of something like “authentic” experience in climbing, and I will return later to the ideas of experience and authenticity. The emphasis on “limits” here is significant, and we can illuminate Preuss’ ideas by viewing them through the lens of sociological conceptualizations of “risky” behavior. On the face of it, what Preuss is advocating is a form of climbing that would seem inherently less “safe.” Does the rejection of equipment reducing or removing the possibility of a fatal fall or serious injury not suggest that embracing “risk” is an important part of his view of his sport? The answer, however, is not straightforward. His attitude would certainly seem to be consistent with Erving Goffman’s analysis of the cultural concept of “action” (in the sense of “action movies”), a form of activity that is what he terms “fateful” in that it is both “problematic” (inherently uncertain) and “consequential” (the consequences of mistakes are likely to be extremely serious). What interests Goffman is when such a situation is knowingly accepted, indeed embraced:

 Franz Nieberl, “‘Gewitter’ – Auszüge”, in Messner, Der Philosoph des Freikletterns (2011), 68. See also Smart, 121‒122.  As Smart, Paul Preuss, 118, notes, Preuss was also willing to compromise in practice, as when he was reported to have used pitons while climbing with two companions.  Paul Preuss, “Entgegnung – Auszüge”, in Messner (2011), 65.

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Instead of awaiting fate, you meet at the door. Danger is recast into taken risk; favourable possibilities, into grasped opportunity. Fateful situations become chancy undertakings, and exposure to uncertainty is construed as willfully taking a practical gamble.20

Goffman analyzes the various rationalizing and coping mechanisms – training to reduce risk, or following superstitious rituals – that such individuals, participating not only in extreme sports but in gambling or even in business, may apply. But the validation of their behavior, he argues, and which falls outside rational standards, comes in the performance of “character,” which he understands as something that can be generated or made. Although much of Goffman’s interest is directed at socially marginalized situations – high-stakes gambling, for example – in his analysis he presents the associated behavior not as socially deviant, but as demonstrating qualities – courage, composure – that society as a whole should value. Goffman’s analysis, with its emphasis upon a form of moral behavior and self-awareness (which is also self-creation), echoes Preuss in highlighting the slightly paradoxical idea of self-knowledge arrived at through action; Goffman’s conception of character is noticeably corporeal: “To display or express character, weak or strong, is to generate character. The self, in brief, can be voluntarily subjected to re-creation.”21 A comparable idea of self-knowledge was crucial to Preuss’ understanding of his sport. In December 1911, writing in response to Nieberl, Preuss sought to clarify his position through six core principles, in which the emphasis is not upon risk but rather on setting boundaries and control. This is particularly evident in the first, second, and sixth principles: 1. You should have mastery over, and not simply be equal to, any mountain expedition that you undertake. 2. The upper limit to the difficulty of the ascent should be determined by whatever the climber can manage as a descent with certainty and a clear conscience. [. . .] 6. Among the highest priorities is the principle of safety. By this I mean not a strained compensation for one’s own inability, achieved through artificial aids, but that primary sense of safety which every climber can achieve by realistically balancing one’s ability against one’s ambition.22

 Erving Goffman, “Where the Action is,” in Where the Action is: Three Essays (London: Allen Lane, 1969), 125.  Goffman, “Where the Action is,” 179.  Paul Preuss, “Künstliche Mittel auf Hochtouren,” 72.

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This final point is a subtle one, perhaps counterintuitive – how can it be possible to remove safety precautions and still favor safety as a principle? Preuss’ contention is that personal safety will emerge from self-knowledge – if a climber attempts only what he or she is able to manage comfortably then the risk involved is reduced, if not entirely eliminated, in the same way, say, that we might be confident in judging whether we can safely cross a road or not. In other words, safety and risk are relative. But the intimidating challenge of testing the upper limit of one’s ability without over-reaching and falling requires not only restraint but also, surely, the sort of character which Goffman suggests can only be expressed and even made through action. Preuss’ arguments anticipate those applied by Alex Honnold when pressed on the perceived extreme danger of his free solo climbs – Honnold, a teetotaler who lives an extremely frugal life, likes to point as a comparison to the widely ignored “risks” of sedentary, unhealthy lifestyles. And like Preuss, he has argued for the relativity of danger in regard to a given climb. He rarely undertakes climbs “on sight” (without preparation) and only attempted his El Capitan climb after meticulous study and practice. The climber and author Mark Synnott, who has discussed the question of risk with Honnold, notes how the rationalization of the danger involved is crucial. He observes that, according to the American Insurance Information Institute, a person born in 2013 stands a one in twenty-four chance of eventually dying in an accident: Most of us look at our one-in-twenty-four chance of dying in some kind of accident the same way Alex looks at free soloing. We choose to go through life believing that we won’t be unlucky because otherwise, we’d be too afraid to get in our cars or even leave the house. If hanging from a fingertip jammed in a crack 1,000 feet off the ground is just as ordinary an experience for Alex as negotiating rush-hour traffic is for the rest of us, then one might have to admit that his rationalization makes sense.23

What this rationalization seems to lack, as does Preuss’ equivalent argument that self-knowledge will eliminate risk, is all sense of the experience of climbing and why it is fundamentally different from, say, driving a car on a busy road. To make sense of this, Lyng’s notion of edgework is helpful and takes us beyond Goffman’s ideas, formulated in the 1960s, in acknowledging, on the one hand, the affective reality of the activity – what makes climbing feel different to driving – while also, on the other hand, introducing the idea of control, limits, boundaries, and “edges.” Whereas Goffman’s analysis is focused on activities which are “problematic,” in the sense that the outcome, as in the toss of a coin, is undetermined,

 Mark Synott, The Impossible Climb: Alex Honnold, El Capitan and the Climbing Life (London: Allen & Unwin, 2019), 236.

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failure a real possibility and in which chance or luck may even play a role, Lyng’s reading of similar activities, drawn from his research on the subculture of skydiving, differs in one key respect. The term “edgework,” borrowed from Hunter S. Thompson’s description of his own experimentation with drugs, points to the central importance of meeting an edge, or “negotiating the boundary between chaos and order” which is entirely absent in “everyday” experiences.24 Activities such as skydiving, boxing, or indeed free climbing, may seem “extreme” to outsiders, but in general are only undertaken by experts who have practiced and rehearsed to an extraordinary degree. The purpose of such training is, as implied in Preuss’ principles, to reduce risk and increase safety by anticipating difficulties and variables. However, Lyng also notes that “[w]hat [edgeworkers] value most is confronting and managing challenges that are entirely unpredictable [. . .] which propels them to get as close as possible to the edge without actually crossing it.”25 In other words, the experience of being close to that border or limit and the recognition of it as such, is the key which unlocks a form of authenticity otherwise absent and which may even transform the experiencing subject. Lyng notes the parallels with Foucault’s exploration of “limit experiences,” to be found in liminal psychological states and artistic expression, containing the potential for resistance against structures of power and knowledge that work to make bodies “docile.” Yet Lyng emphasizes that “limit-experience involves the transgression of boundaries while in edgework one approaches boundaries but does not transgress them.”26 Preuss’ insistence upon “safety” emerging from knowledge of limits, which requires a degree of self-awareness that can only really emerge through practice, is very much in keeping with this and also explains why he was so upset at the accusations of recklessness or willful endangerment. Preuss’ practice as a climber, as expressed in his articles, proceeds from a clear sense that there is an “authentic” experience worth preserving; moreover, this authenticity would seem to relate both to the subjective experience of the sport itself – the pushing of one’s limits without transgressing them – and to the landscape upon which the climber is acting and without which the experience is impossible. There are revealing parallels with phenomenological readings of the experience of extreme sports; Eric Brymer and Robert D. Schweitzer, for example, have argued that “[p]articipation in extreme activities enables a return to authenticity as we rediscover self through an experiential realization of our place within

 Stephen Lyng, “Edgework: A Social Psychological Analysis of Voluntary Risk Taking.” American Journal of Sociology 95.4 (1990): 855.  Stephen Lyng, “Action and Edgework. Risk taking and reflexivity in late modernity,” European Journal of Social Theory 17.4 (2014): 449.  Lyng, “Action and Edgework,” 454.

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the natural landscape.”27 Drawing on interviews with climbers and surfers, they note the frequency with which a sense of being “in nature” is voiced; the climber Lynne Hill, for example, remarks: “It’s all about learning to adapt totally to the environment you’re in. I think it provides the perfect opportunity for learning about what makes you tick.”28 This idea, which implies a rejection of conventional subjectobject relations echoing Heideggerian Dasein, “Being-in-the-world,” has aesthetic, linguistic and ethical dimensions that I will explore in my concluding section.

Authenticity, environment, and lessons for the present day For Preuss, aesthetics is clearly also a consideration that is inextricably bound to his understanding of authenticity and safety – it is implicit, for example, in his criticism of the “strained” attempt to ensure safety through artificial aids. In his response to Piaz’s criticisms he evokes the artistry of skillful climbing: “To climb beautifully, both in technical and theoretical terms, is to climb well, and to climb well is to climb safely.”29 To rely on artificial aids, perhaps because they disrupt the immediacy of the experience of nature, is aesthetically unsatisfactory and therefore inherently less safe; he notes elsewhere how many accidents happen despite all the pitons, ropes and other precautions. It is in the context of this distinctive take, combining aesthetics and psychology, that Preuss’ comments on the language of climbing and mountaineering are especially interesting. He notes that mountains, or particular climbs, are customarily conceived of in inimical terms – they are enemies to be “fought” and “conquered”: “The fact that we personify the mountains relates to our use of language and our human inability to think impersonally. In reality the mountains are always the standard against which we measure our abilities, never the enemy against which we pit them.”30 These thoughts speak to the manner in which mountain expeditions, often referred to as campaigns and sieges, became proxies for nationalistic, imperialistic, or ideological agendas. But Preuss’ argument also has an ecological dimension; his criticism of the casting of mountains as enemies and the underpinning rationale that they should be engaged with

 Eric Brymer and Robert D. Schweitzer, “Phenomenology and Extreme Sports in Natural Landscapes,” in Landscapes of Leisure: Space, Place and Identities, ed. Sean Gammon and Sam Elkington (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 136.  Cited by Brymer and Schweitzer, “Phenomenology and Extreme Sports,” 141.  Preuss, “Entgegnung,” 66.  Preuss, “Entgegnung,” 63.

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in their natural form and not routinely modified to aid human beings, anticipate the debates around the Anthropocene and man-made climate change. It is noteworthy that Preuss “won” his argument, at least in principle – most of the discussants were eventually happy to concede the point, once they had grasped that he was not arguing for recklessness, but rather the opposite. The idea that “unfair means” should be avoided was widely accepted. And it was hard to disagree with the notion that safety, always relative, should not be an absolute guarantee but something that should emerge from the selection of the route, from appropriate caution and a degree of self-understanding. Yet despite this, the history of the sport in the last century has tended in the opposite direction, with many of the things Preuss criticized coming to the fore – on the one hand technical innovation and a competitive urge to “conquer” through any means; on the other the emergence of sport climbing and a desire to test speed and skill while eliminating risk. Following his death, the turbulence of the subsequent years of war and transformation helped to erase the memory of Paul Preuss. His Jewish background also seems to have been a factor in the effective suppression of any sense of legacy within the German and Austrian Alpenverein, an organization in which antisemitism came to the fore even before 1933, and which in the postwar years failed meaningfully to engage in a process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coming to terms or dealing with the past). Only gradually has this changed. Preuss’ legacy in climbing has been championed for some decades by Reinhold Messner, the first to climb Mount Everest without the ‘artificial aid’ of supplemental oxygen (1978), whose 1968 polemical essay, published in English in 1971 as “The Murder of the Impossible,” was a conscious attempt to reinvigorate Preuss’ ideas and apply them to the age of technological climbing. Messner, whose career seems to embody the principles of “edgework,” objected to a culture in which, because of the availability of technical aids, all doubt and uncertainty can be removed from climbing, and nothing is impossible. In the absence of limits, mountaineering has, he suggests, been devalued: “Today [. . .] every single limit has vanished, been erased. In principle, it didn’t seem to be a serious matter, but ten years have sufficed to eliminate the word ‘impossible’ from the mountaineering vocabulary.” He continues, again emphasizing the intrinsic value of having limits: “It’s time we repaid our debts and searched again for the limits of possibility – for we must have such limits if we are going to use the virtue of courage to approach them.”31 Messner, like Preuss, is interested in exploring the “edge” or boundary between the possible and impossible and to do

 Reinhold Messner, “The Murder of the Impossible”, published in Mountain 15 (1971). Text online, accessed 6 September 2021, at: http://web.mit.edu/lin/Public/climbing/Messner.txt.

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so through a process of introspection and through respect for the landscape; but the idea of eliminating that boundary, of making every climb and route possible, is anathema, a theme he has returned to repeatedly in the decades since. Writing in 1999, Messner re-states the fundamentals of Preuss’ position, placing particular emphasis on the experience of danger: “In my view, a mountain without danger is no longer a mountain but something else. [. . .] Danger has to do with death. It has to do with fear. It has to do with learning; and with experience.”32 Paul Preuss, then, very much speaks to current priorities – in climbing, through Messner’s activism, and through figures such as Alex Honnold, there has been a gradual move away from technical “sieges” of mountains towards an ethical approach to the sport known as “clean climbing,” first championed in the 1950s and 60s by climbers such as the American Royal Robbins who eschewed pitons, bolts and other interventions in the environment and discouraged the reliance on large amounts of supplemental equipment. If we broaden our frame of reference, we see echoes of similar discourses in relation to other sports in which interpretations of “fair means” are contested – we might think of the recent impact of Nike’s new footplate technology upon running. Yet it is in Preuss’ promotion of a vision of climbing as a borderline experience radically different to everyday life and of an engagement with the natural world that leaves it intact, that we can see the strongest contemporary resonance. We see it in the recent growth of interest in challenge-based sport and leisure – not only in mountain sports like climbing, hiking, and cross-country skiing, but in wild swimming, fellrunning, ultra-running, and off-road cycling. Similarly, Preuss’ profound, potentially elitist skepticism about the unfettered exploitation of the Alpine space for sport, and especially of its commercialized adaptation to accommodate the needs of ever more tourists, anticipates the preoccupations of the organizations tasked with preservation and curation of the Alps, notably the International Commission for the Protection of the Alps (CIPRA). In 2016 CIPRA demanded that the Winter Olympic Games, which it deemed “neither environmentally nor socially acceptable,” should never again be hosted in the Alps (and indeed they oppose the Winter Games in principle). Paul Preuss would almost certainly concur and endorse Elfriede Jelinek’s resistance, voiced in the afterword to her In den Alpen (‘In the Alps’) cycle of plays, to the reduction of the Alps into a “mountain arena for sport and the culture industry”; “even nature itself has been turned into a piece of sports equipment or gymnastics apparatus, presenting itself for use.”33 Perhaps climbing, like skiing with its ski lifts and

 Reinhold Messner, “An essay for the New Millennium,” The Alpine Journal (2000): 3.  Elfriede Jelinek, In den Alpen: drei Dramen (Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 2002), 254, 255.

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snow cannons, is guilty of doing precisely this, but Preuss’ radical philosophy offers an alternative vision, albeit a problematic and uncomfortable one – as the price for reining in the “nothing is impossible” attitude will be a reduction in the number of human beings in and on the mountains. And, as in 1911, there seems little appetite for that.

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About the Authors David Anderson is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Comparative Literature and Culture, Queen Mary University of London. He completed his PhD at UCL in 2017. A monograph based on it, Landscape and Subjectivity in the Work of Patrick Keiller, W.G. Sebald and Iain Sinclair, was published by OUP in June 2020. Professor Peter Arnds directs the Comparative Literature program and teaches German and Italian literature at Trinity College Dublin. He has held visiting positions in Kabul, Delhi, Adelaide, and Salamanca, and is a member of the PEN Centre for German-Speaking Writers Abroad and of Academia Europaea. His publications include books on Wilhelm Raabe, Charles Dickens, Günter Grass, as well as his recent monographs Lycanthropy in German Literature (Palgrave Macmillan 2015), Translating Holocaust Literature (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015), and Wolves at the Door: Migration, Dehumanization, Rewilding the World (Bloomsbury, 2021). Dr. Arnds has also translated Patrick Boltshauser’s novel Stromschnellen (Rapids, Dalkey Archive Press, 2014, nominated for the IMPAC, Dublin International Literary Award) and published a novel, Searching for Alice (Dalkey Archive Press, 2019). His current research examines the links between cultural production and species politics as well as the philosophy of walking in world literature. He contributes to several international research networks, including Challenging Precarity: A Global Network and Narratives of Resilience. Maria Buck is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Innsbruck and a research assistant on the FWFDACH project “Issues with Europe: A Network Analysis of the German-Speaking Alpine Conservation Movement 1975–2005.” Currently, she is working on her dissertation on protest movements against Alpine transit traffic in Austria. She studied Cultural Studies and history at the Universities of Lucerne and Innsbruck. In the winter semester of 2021, she was fellow at the Department of History at the University of Basel. Her research interests include the history of the Alps, environmental history, and cultural history. She has already published the first results of her dissertation project in the journal “Geschichte – Literatur – Kultur” and, together with her colleagues, she co-authored a paper on Alpine protection in the twentieth century in the handbook Greening Europe. Environmental Protection in the Long Twentieth Century ed. by Patrick Kupper and Anna-Katharina Wöbse. Veronika Hofeneder, Mag.a Dr.in, is Post Doc Researcher and Lecturer at the University of Vienna, Institute for German Studies. She has coordinated research projects on Hertha Kräftner, Gina Kaus, und Vicki Baum, and is currently working on an annotated edition of selected works of Vicki Baum funded by FWF and DFG. Her main areas of research include: Literature and culture of the twenties and thirties; Austrian literature of the twentieth century; women’s literature; literature and individual psychology; edition philology; research on feuilletons. Her Recent publications include: TEXT+KRITIK. Zeitschrift für Literatur: Vicki Baum, edited by Julia Bertschik, Gustav Frank, Veronika Hofeneder, and Werner Jung (Munich: Text+Kritik, 2022); “Historischer Roman und (Individual-)Psychologie: Macht und Ohnmacht in Gina Kaus’ Katharina die Große (1935).” In: Frauen erzählen Geschichte. Historische Prosa von Autorinnen von der Ersten zur Zweiten Republik Österreich, edited by Aneta Jachimowicz: (Göttingen: V&R, 2022); “Fiktionalität und Finalität – Individualpsychologie im Kontext erzählender Texte der Zwischenkriegszeit.” In: Individualpsychologie, Erzählforschung, Literaturwissenschaft, edited by Bernd Rieken: (Münster u. a.: Waxmann, 2022).

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About the Authors

Jon Hughes has taught at Royal Holloway since 2003 and is Reader in German and Cultural Studies. He has specialized in the work of Joseph Roth (subject of his 2006 monograph) and published widely on interwar German and Austrian literature, journalism and film. His recent research is concerned with the intersection between sport, leisure and culture, and in 2017 he published an interdisciplinary monograph, Max Schmeling and the Making of a National Hero in Twentieth-Century Germany (Palgrave Macmillan). In 2010 he was lead editor of the volume Austria and the Alps for the Austrian Studies yearbook, which included his essay on autobiographical texts by Austrian climbers such as Hermann Buhl. Helen Moll, M.A., is a research assistant and doctoral student at the Graduate School Language & Literature at Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. She studied German Literature and Media Studies in Tübingen and Munich. Her dissertation explores mountain environments in narrative texts of the nineteenth century, the intellectual and historical contexts in which they were produced, and the poetic strategies of human empowerment and domestication regarding the montane. This includes the first subjective attempts at empowerment in the sense of Kant’s concept of the sublime (1790), to the manifold strategies of practical appropriation in the course of the nineteenth century, such as the colonialization of the mountains through science, acculturation and commodification, which reached a relative end point around 1910. Richard McClelland is Lecturer in German at the University of Bristol. His research interests include theatre and performance culture in the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries, as well as the culture and landscapes of modern Switzerland. He has published on contemporary Swiss theatre directors Stefan Kaegi (Forum for Modern Language Studies, 2019) and Milo Rau (Peter Lang, 2019), and on multilingualism in contemporary Romansh/German literature (Modern Language Review, 2019; Jahrbuch der Franz-Michael-Felder Archiv, 2019). He previously worked as a Lecturer in German at the University of Oxford (2015‒18) and received his PhD in German from King’s College London (2017). He is a founding member of the collective EGS – Towards and Equitable German Studies, which aims to diversify and decolonize German teaching at UK universities. Leonie Silber studied German literature, philosophy, history, and education in Tübingen, Berlin, Marburg and Seattle. Her research interests include modern Alpinism, contemporary German literature, and the didactics of literature. She currently works as a teacher and university lecturer in Berlin and Marburg. Recent publications include: Poetische Berge. Alpinismus und Literatur nach 2000 (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter 2019, Diss.); “‘Unser Land! Unsere Beute’ – Erzählungen von abenteuerlichen Reisen im Deutschunterricht.” In: Tendenzen der Gegenwartsliteratur, edited by Marijana Jeleč (Berlin: Peter Lang 2019); “‘Einen deutschen Erstbesteiger bringen’, Die Alpen als Trainingsraum des Zweiten Weltkriegs.” In: Körperbewegungen in (Nach)Kriegszeiten, edited by Jonas Nesselhauf, Till Nitschmann, and Steffen Roehrs (Hannover: Wehrhan 2019). Johannes Wankhammer is Assistant Professor of German at Princeton University, where he specializes in the history of aesthetics, eighteenth-century literature and philosophy, and the environmental humanities. He is currently completing a monograph that recovers the latent connection between the invention/discovery of attention (Aufmerksamkeit) as a mental faculty and the emergence of aesthetics in eighteenth-century Germany. His publications include articles on problems in eighteenth-century poetics and aesthetics, on G. Ch. Lichtenberg’s notebooks, and on the uses and limits of anthropomorphism in contemporary environmental writing. Before joining Princeton in the fall of 2017, Wankhammer briefly taught at Reed College in Portland, OR. He earned

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his PhD in German Studies at Cornell University and holds additional degrees in Comparative Literature and German from Binghamton University and the University of Graz, Austria. Seán M. Williams is Senior Lecturer in German and European Cultural History in the School of Languages and Cultures, University of Sheffield. He has published and written a BBC radio documentary on Switzerland; he was previously wissenschaftlicher Assistent for German and Comparative Literature at the University of Bern. His recent research examines wellness and spaces of social and transnational interaction, such as hotels and hair salons. Rebecca Wismeg-Kammerlander is a Lecturer in German and European Studies at King’s College London. She holds a PhD in German from King’s and started her studies at the Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, completing a degree (Magister Artium) in German and Philosophy. Her PhD project examined the “National Brand of Austria” by exploring how elements of consumer culture shape an image of Austria and its portrayal in contemporary Austrian literature. She is particularly interested in Austrian literature and culture and the narrative role of consumer goods and other objects. Her next project will examine the role prosthetics and medical devices play in contemporary German language literature and its discourses of human bodies. Chris Zintzen, PhD, is an independent literary scholar, journalist, editor, and author based in Vienna. He studied German and Romance Studies and Art History at the University of Vienna, where he was employed for several years as a researcher and lecturer at the Institute for German Studies. He researches and publishes on the topics of cultural and discourse analysis, artistic avant-gardes, and the mediality of art and literature. Website: https://panamproductions.blogspot.com.

Index Adorno, Theodor 133 Agamben, Giorgio 28, 161 – homo sacer 28, 162, 165, 167–168, 170, 174 – nuda vita 161, 166 Alpine Area Group, EU 100 Alpine Club, Austrian 91 Alpine Club, British 15 Alpine Club, German and Austrian 232, 239 Alpine Convention, EU 99–100 Alpine Ski Club (England) 75 Alpinism. See Mountaineering Altaussee 230 American Royal Robbins 240 Andersen, Hans Christian – The Snow Queen 184 Andrews, Julie 213 Anthropocene 27, 90, 110, 126, 137, 142, 239 Anzengruber, Ludwig – The Cross Signers 37 Apocalypse Now 193 Aragon, Louis 203 Arge Alp 100 Aristotle 170 – Poetics 171 Assmann, Jan 147 Augé, Marc – non-place 212 Augustine 153 Auschwitz 159 Austria – First Republic 117 – Second Republic 105 – Ständestaat 105, 108, 117 Austrian National Tourist Office 207, 212 Bad Ragaz 82 Baedeker, Karl 74 – Baedeker guidebooks 68, 72 Bakhtin, Mikhail 175 Bannhauser, Melchior 14 Barthes, Roland 115 Baszel, Günther 109 Baum, Vicki 29, 179–188 – Career 179 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111150536-016

– Helene 179 – Marion Alive 29, 179–188 – The Ship and the Shore 179 Benjamin, Walter 133 – The Origin of German Tragic Drama 172 Bennett, Arnold – The Grand Babylon Hotel 54 Bentham, Jeremy 43 Berlin, Irving 54 Bern 59 Bernese Highlands 13, 27, 69 Bittner, Rüdiger 171 Blake, William 163 Brehmer, Hermann 16 Brenner Pass 87, 89 – Brenner highway 87, 90 Burke, Edmund 11 Burnet, Thomas – The Sacred Theory of the Earth 8, 175 Burton, Robert – Anatomy of Melancholy 172 Büscher, Wolfgang 159 Cap, Franz 221 Carinthia 91 Cassirer, Ernst 63 Catalani, Alfredo – La Wally 221 Caux, Vaud 58 Chamonix 54 Chin, Jimmy – Free Solo 231 Conrad, Joseph 193 – Heart of Darkness 199 Cook, Thomas 13 Courbet, Gustave 37 Covid-19 Pandemic 163, 205, 232 Dante 154, 167, 175 Davidson, Robyn – Tracks 160 Davos 16, 18, 60, 62, 70, 72 – Internationale Davoser Hochschulkurse 62 Davoser Blätter 72

266

Index

Davoser Revue 62 Deleuze, Gilles 161–162, 173–174, 201 Deutsche Alpenzeitung 222, 232–233 Deutsche Rundschau 31, 221–223, 226–228 Dick, Philip K. – The Man in the High Castle 195–197, 201 Dolomites 230 dragons 7 Dülfer, Hans 230 Dupont, Ewald André 221 Ebel, Johann Gottfried 77 Eberle, Ambros 73 Eberli, Henry 75–79 – Switzerland Poetical and Pictorial 75 Edelbauer, Raphaela 30, 206–216 – The Liquid Land 30, 206–217 Eiger 15, 22 El Capitan 231, 236 Engadine 58–60, 65, 84, 141–142 Falke, Konrad 58, 70 – Wengen. Ein Landschaftsbild 70 fascism. See National Socialism First World War 56, 60–61, 65, 75, 181, 186, 230 flâneur, the 163 Foucault, Michel 42, 237 – Heterotopia 202 Franz Joseph I 62 Friedrich, Casper David – Wanderer above the Sea of Fog 9 Frisch, Max 27, 125–130 – Homo faber 129 – I’m Not Stiller 129 – Man in the Holocene 27, 125–130 Gabalier, Andreas 217 Garnbret, Janja 231 Geering, Adolf 73 geistige Landesverteidigung 22 Ghega, Carl Ritter von 37 Glauser, Friedrich 193 Gloggnitz (Lower Austria) 38 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 66, 79 Goffmann, Erving 234–236

Gornergrat 66 Gosaukamm 230 Gotthard massif 111 Gotthelf, Jeremias 81 Gottsched, Johann Christoph 9 Grand Tour 56 Grauhorn 183 Graz 38 Green Man 154 Green Party, Austria 91 Grimm, Brothers 193 Grisons 6, 16, 27, 116, 141, 147 Gros, Frederic – Philosophy of Walking 164 Großglockner 205 – Großglockner-Hochalpenstraße 108 Guattari, Félix 161–162, 173–174, 201 Guglia di Brenta 230 Guisan, Henri 192 Haas, Robert 109 Haerdtl, Oswald 109 Haller, Albrecht – The Alps 2 Handke, Peter 209 Harris, Robert – Fatherland 194, 200–202 Haslinger, Josef 209 Heidegger, Martin 63, 166, 229 – Dasein 238 Heidi, Girl of the Alps 84 Heidi-fication. See Spyri, Johanna Heimat 63, 105, 108, 118, 194, 208, 216, 221, 228 – anti-Heimat 30, 105, 207–209 – Anti-Heimatliteratur 207, 214 Hell, Bodo 106 Herbert, Frank – Dune 192, 200 Herzog, Werner – Of Walking in Ice 160 Heydt, Eduard von der 63 Heyse, Paul 79 Hill, Lynne 238 Hillary, Edmund 154 Hillern, Wilhelmine von 31, 221–228

Index

– The Vulture Maiden 31, 221–227 Hilty, Carl 63 Hitler, Adolf 22 Hitler Youth. See National Socialism Hochjoch 222–223, 226 Hoffmann, E.T.A. – The Mines of Falun 28 Holsboer, Willem Jan 16 Homer 28, 159 – Odyssey 28, 159–176 Honnold, Alex 231, 236, 240 Horkheimer, Max 133 Hotel Axenstein, Marschach 73 Huby, Felix 221 Huizinga, Johan 161 – homo ludens 161, 174 Humboldt, Alexander von 12, 28 Husserl, Edmund 229 Inglin, Meinrad 66, 74 – Grand Hotel Excelsior 74 Inn Valley 100 Inntal Highway 87, 90 International Commission for the Protection of the Alps (CIPRA) 98, 240 Irving, Washington – Rip van Winkle 161 James, Henry 55 Jaun, Hans 14 Jelinek, Elfriede 209 – In den Alpen 240 Joyce, James – Ulysses 176 Joyce, Rachel – The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry 160 Julian Alps 230 Jünger, Ernst 161, 193 – Waldgang 161–162 Jungfrau 23 Kagge, Erling – Walking. One Step at a Time 173 Kaisergebirge 230 Kandersteg 65 Kant, Immanuel 224

267

– Critique of the Power of Judgement 11 – Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime 224 Kästner, Erich – Der Zauberlehrling 70 Keller, Gottfried 79, 81 – The Governor of Greifensee 80 Kickl, Herbert 208 Kilimanjaro, Mount 199, 201 Köhlmeier, Michael 209 Kokoschka, Oskar 114 Kracht, Christian 29, 189–203 – 1979 189, 198, 202 – Eurotrash 189 – Faserland 189 – Ich werde hier sein im Sonnenschein und im Schatten 29, 190–203 – Imperium 189 – Metan 199 – The Dead 189 Kufstein 87, 89 Kurhaus Tarasp 73 Kurz, Sebastian 207 Lake Lucerne 74, 76 Lansel, Peider – ‘Tamangur’ 141–142, 146–147, 151, 154, 156 Lausanne 55 Le Corbusier 193 Least Heat-Moon, William 159 Lefebvre, Henri 2, 29, 144–145, 181 Lenin, Vladimir 29 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 67 Levi, Primo – The Truce 159 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 165 Linger, Karl 67 locus amoenus 7, 181 locus horribilis 7, 123, 225, 228 Longinus 11 Lord Byron 66, 78 Lower Austria 209 Löwinger, Gretl 221 Lucerne 55, 71, 76 Lyng, Stephen – edgework 229, 236, 239

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Lyotard, Jean-François – The Postmodern Condition 202 Mad Max 193, 195 Maienfeld 84 Maloja Palace Hotel 58 Mangold, Ijoma 190, 194 Mann, Thomas – The Magic Mountain 18–21, 63, 70, 186 Marie Antoinette 78 Matterhorn 1, 14, 23, 76, 131 Meinrad, Inglin – Grand Hotel Excelsior 66 Meiringen 192 Messner, Reinhold – “The Murder of the Impossible” 239 Meyer, Conrad Ferdinand 79, 81 Meyer guidebooks 68 mining 13, 28, 209 Mitterer, Felix 208 – Piefke Saga 205, 207, 214 Modernism, synthetic 180, 188 Mönch 1 Mont Blanc 1, 23, 54, 75 Mont Ventoux 124, 152 Monte Rosa 55 Monte Verità 63 Mount Everest 154, 231, 239 Mount Kailash 198 Mount Rigi 58 Mountaineering 5, 14–15, 22, 31, 229–241 – free climbing 229 – the piton controversy 232 Mürzzuschlag (Styria) 38 Napoleonic Wars 56 National Socialism 22, 29, 105, 117, 181, 187–188, 194, 206, 208, 234 Neue Volxmusik 106 New Architecture in the Alps 116 Nibelungenlied 225 Nieberl, Franz 233, 235 Nietzsche, Friedrich 193 – principium individuationis 162 Nora, Pierre 146 Norgay, Tenzing 154

Novalis – Heinrich von Oftendingen 28 Nunn, Arnold 75 Oeschinensee 65 O’Mara, Shane – In Praise of Walking 163 Onsernone Valley 125 Osenbrüggen, Eduard 74 Ötztal 221, 224 panopticon 43 Petrarch 124, 152 Pfyffer von Wyher, Franz Ludwig 76 Piaz, Giovanni 230, 233, 238 Popliteratur 189 Preuss, Paul 31, 229–241 – core principles of climbing 235 Queen Victoria 73 Ransmayr, Christoph – The Dog King 195 Redoubt, Swiss 29, 192, 196, 199–200, 202 – as Rhizome 201 Réduit. See Redoubt, Swiss Revue de Davos. See Davoser Revue Revue Suisse des Hôtels. See Schweizer HotelRevue Ritz, César 54 Rodenberg, Julius 222 Roerich, Nicholas 201 Rofental 225 Romansh 6, 141–142, 147, 153 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 8, 10, 66, 77, 165–166 – Julie, or, The New Heloise 8, 77–78 Ruedi, Luiz 16 Ryffelalp 76 Saar, Ferdinand von – The Stonebreakers 24, 35–52 Sala, George Augustus 53, 57 Salinger, J. D. – The Catcher in the Rye 189 Salzburg 91, 107, 109 Salzkammergut 230

Index

sanatorium 16, 18–19, 60, 182, 188 – Berghof. See Mann, Thomas, The Magic Mountain Sandig, Ulrike Almut 27, 142–146 – Buch gegen das Verschwinden 142, 156 – ‘Tamangur’ 27, 142–146, 151–157 Scheffel, Joseph Victor von 79 Scheuchzer, Johann Jakob 7 Schiller, Friedrich 74, 79 – William Tell 74, 78–79 Schnalstal 225 Schneider, Robert – Brother of Sleep 193 Schöllenenbahn 111 Schweizer Hotel-Revue 55, 59–61, 64–65, 70, 72–75, 78–83 Schweizerische Lebensrettungs-Gesellschaft 62 Scott, Gilbert 53 Scuol 142 Sebald, W. G. – Austerlitz 199 Second World War 22, 56, 83, 182, 200 Semadeni, Leta 27, 142–151 – Tamangur 27, 142–151, 156 Semmering 24, 35–52, 182, 186 Silvanus. See Green Man, the Simmel, Georg 17 Sissi 205 skiing 21–22, 59, 240 Société des Bibliothèques des Grands-Hôtels 73 Solnit, Rebecca – Wanderlust 175 South Tyrol 31, 91, 225, 230 Spatial Turn 2 Speer, Albert 200, 202 Spengler, Alexander 16 Spiluttini, Margherita 26, 104–109 – Alpenblick 107, 112, 117 – Furkapassstraße 119 – Nach der Natur/Beyond Nature 106–109 – Räumlich/Spacious 114 – Schöllenenbahn 111 Spinoza 119 Spitteler, Carl 79 Spyri, Johanna 2 – Heidi 2, 82–84 – Heidiland 84

St. Galler Tagblatt 62 St. Moritz 62, 65, 84 Stainer-Knittel, Anna 221 Stamm, Peter 28 – To the Back of Beyond 28, 160–176 – Unformed Landscape 171 Star Wars 192 Steinhoff, Hans 221 Stephen, Leslie 4, 14 – The Playground of Europe 4, 8, 14 Stevenson, Robert Louis 81 Stewart, Rory 159 – The Places in Between 160 Strayed, Cheryl – Wild 160 Styria 209, 230 Sublime, the 10, 17, 38, 105, 123, 188, 231 – and anthropogenic climate change 88, 97 – Edmund Burke 11 – Immanuel Kant 11, 224 – Longinus 11 – sublime horror 40 Swiss Commission for the Protection of the Environment 67 Swiss Federal Railways 79 Swiss Hoteliers’ Association 64 Swiss National Park 64–65 Symonds, John Addington 75 Synnott, Mark 236 Tamangur, God da 27, 141–157 – as lieux de mémoire 147 Tauchnitz Publishers 75 Tell, Wilhelm 2 – see also Schiller, Friedrich The Magic Mountain. See Mann, Thomas The Matrix 193, 201 The Sound of Music 205, 213 Thompson, Hunter S. 237 Ticino 27, 125, 139 Tieck, Ludwig 162 – Der blonde Eckbert 162 – Der Runenberg 28, 161–162, 167, 185 Tolkien, J. R. R. – The Lord of the Rings 193 Totenkirchl 230 tuberculosis 15, 185

269

270

Index

Turban, Karl 16 Tyrol 25, 87–102, 116, 222–223, 225, 230 – environmental movement in Tyrol 23 – Transitforum Austria-Tirol 96, 98 – Tyrolean Forestry Department 90 Unger, Friedrich 16 Unterwalden 78 Upper Austria 230 Uri 76, 112, 119 Val S-charl 141 Valais 13, 27, 119, 182 Van der Bellen, Alexander 208 Vasarhelyi, Elizabeth Chai – Free Solo 231 Ventertal 225 Vienna 35–38, 51, 97, 107, 113, 181, 205, 209, 211, 216–217, 230 Virgil 154 Virilio, Paul – Bunker Archaeology 200 Volmar, Augusta 81

Waldeinsamkeit 161–162 Waldheim Affair 208, 210 Walpole, Horace 123 Wechselgebiet 209, 212 Weisbrod, Lars 190, 203 Wells, H. G. – The Time Machine 192 Wengen 58–59 West, Thomas 76 Wetterhorn 14 Whymper, Edward 4, 14 – Scrambles in the Alps 4 Wills, Alfred 14 Winkler, Josef 209 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 193 Wordsworth, William 75–76 Yosemite 231 Zermatt 66 Zivilisationskritik 66 Zurich 59, 69–70, 74, 189, 191, 194 Zweig, Arnold 22