The construction of an alpine landscape: building, representing and affecting the Eastern Alps, c. 1885–1914

Abstract

Between 1885 and the First World War, German and Austrian alpinists talked of “opening up” the Alps in Germany and the Austrian Empire with a vast network of huts and paths. This article argues that this effort to develop the Alps arose from a series of relationships between people, objects, representations and affects which linked urban spaces of middle-class conduct to the alpine environment. Alpinists utilised media such as landscape reliefs and panoramas not merely to represent the Alps, but to inculcate a particular affective response amongst Germany's urban middle-class, or Bürgertum. Instead of a Romantic ideal of mountains as unknowable symbols of nature's power, these alpinists promoted a modern gaze which would see all, from the safety of a controlled, governable landscape. In doing so, alpinists legitimised their intervention in the Eastern Alps, developing these once unknown landscapes as a bürgerlich [bourgeois, or middle-class] cultural resource.

Keywords:

• Alps
• Germany
• alpine tourism
• modernity
• affect
• panoramas

Acknowledgements

This paper has emerged from my PhD thesis, developed under the guidance of Dr. Max Jones and Dr. Leif Jerram at the University of Manchester.

Notes

1. See documents in the Archiv des oesterreichischen Alpenvereins, /KUL/1/1.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ben M. Anderson

Ben M. Anderson is a History Lecturer for the School of Humanities, Francis Close Hall Campus, University of Gloucestershire, Swindon Road, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, GL50 4AZ, UK