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 snow-capped 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 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, socio-economic, 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 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 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-Maria Müller argues, the Alps are unique as a cultural space because of the long-term 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 image-making 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...