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Alpine Modern: Central European Skiing and the Vernacularization of Cultural Modernism, 1900–1939

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2014

Andrew Denning
Andrew Denning*
Affiliation:
University of British Columbia
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Extract

In 1932, author and outdoorsman Carl Luther diagnosed the pathologies of modern life and prescribed their ideal cure, writing:

Because our work in the daily routine and in the cities, in factories, and in offices has become prosaic, atomizing, and devoid of adventure—because we live faster and must demonstrate greater resistance—because we do not wish to age, but rather wish to remain young, fresh, and slender—because we are anxious and know that only new thrills and new visions can rejuvenate us . . . Spring, summer, and fall, the former seasons of relaxation, no longer suffice for us . . . We have also discovered the winter, the most alien to us of all manifestations of nature, thus for us nature in its most modern and most youthful form . . . The ski entered into the world . . . to allow men to flee excessive snow and cold. Today, however, skiing is also flight, but flight from the metropolis [in search of] all remote winter environments . . . Fortune is with the skis, because they overcome the awkwardness of nature-estranged urbanites and have so evaded natural [limits upon] speed, that in them man and speed become consubstantial.

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Articles
Information
Central European History , Volume 46 , Issue 4 , December 2013 , pp. 850 - 890
Copyright
Copyright © Central European History Society of the American Historical Association 2014 

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References

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2 Alpine skiing grew massively in popularity between 1900 and 1939 in both quantitative and qualitative terms. The sport gained tens of thousands of converts, with the largest national ski club, the Deutscher Skiverband, expanding from less than 2,500 members at its founding in 1905 to more than 100,000 members by 1932. The Österreichischer Skiverband enjoyed similarly meteoric growth, expanding from 700 members in 1905 to nearly 25,000 in 1932; the Schweizerischer Skiverband grew from barely 600 members in 1905 to nearly 25,000 in 1934; and even the late-arriving French, who formed the Fédération Française de Ski only in 1924, counted nearly 20,000 members by 1932 (an increase of nearly fifty-seven percent over 1931). Falkner, Gerd, 100 Jahre Deutscher Skiverband, vol. 1 (Planegg: Deutscher Skiverband, 2005), 116Google Scholar; “Verzeichnis der dem S.S.V. angehörenden Clubs/Liste des Clubs affiliés à l'A.S.C.S.,” SSV Jahrbuch 30 (1934): 194–200Google Scholar; “Activité des sociétés,” La Revue du Ski 3 (1932): XVIIGoogle Scholar.

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8 The term “Alpine modernity” appears in a different context in Amourous, Charles, “L'implantation du ski alpin dans les Alpes françaises: La tradition étayage de la modernité,” Revue de géographie alpine 88 (2000): 9–20Google Scholar.

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16 Jon Mathieu has noted that from 1500–1900, the Alps exhibited some degree of coherence in economic terms due to common threads in Alpine development such as low levels of urbanization, relatively slow population growth, and dependence on similar industries such as mining, all of which differentiated the Alps from the lowlands. On the other hand, in social and political terms, Alpine communities generally identified more with adjacent lowland territories than with one another. The popularization of skiing, combined with wider cultural, political, and socioeconomic trends, played an important role in the transformation of the Alps into a coherent region in the twentieth century. Mathieu, Jon, History of the Alps, 1500–1900: Environment, Development, and Society (Morgantown, WV: West Virginia University Press, 2009), 224Google Scholar. On the historical development of Alpine peoples and landscapes, see also Bätzing, Werner, Die Alpen. Geschichte und Zukunft einer europäischen Kulturlandschaft (Munich: Verlag C. H. Beck, 2003)Google Scholar.

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27 Oertel, “Sport, Alpinismus und Schilauf,” 6.

28 Ibid., 7.

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31 The idea that the human mind is tempestuous and conflicted became prevalent in the fin de siècle, represented, for example, by Sigmund Freud's description of the friction between the id, ego, and superego, and the schizophrenia of Robert Louis Stevenson's titular Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. See Freud, Sigmund, New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1989 [1933])Google Scholar; Stevenson, Robert Louis, Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1886)Google Scholar. On the history of modern subjectivity, see Siegel, Jerrold, The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe since the Seventeenth Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005)Google Scholar; Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

32 Oertel, “Sport, Alpinismus und Schilauf,” 18.

33 On Romantic mountain aesthetics, see Nicolson, Marjorie Hope, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1997)Google Scholar.

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35 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (Leipzig: E. W. Fritzsch, 1887 [1882]), 194Google Scholar. The original quotation reads “Du sollst der werden, der du bist.”

36 Oertel, “Sport, Alpinismus und Schilauf,” 8–9.

37 Ibid., 9.

38 Ibid.

39 Armiero, A Rugged Nation, 43. See also Lekan, “A Noble Prospect,” and Klein, “A Vertical World,” 520.

40 Recent works have studied the importance of movement and sensory perception to the creation of a sense of place. See Spinney, Justin, “A Place of Sense: A Kinaesthetic Ethnography of Cyclists on Mont Ventoux,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 24 (2006): 709–32Google Scholar; Edensor, Tim, ed., Geographies of Rhythm: Nature, Place, Mobilities, and Bodies (Farnham, UK, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010)Google Scholar.

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46 Paulcke, Wilhelm and Zsigmondy, Emil, Die Gefahren der Alpen, 4th ed. (Innsbruck: A. Edlinger's Verlag, 1908)Google Scholar. Wilhelm Paulcke, a professor of geology in Freiburg im Breisgau and a skiing pioneer, produced updated editions of Die Gefahren der Alpen after its original author, Austrian doctor and alpinist Emil Zsigmondy, died in a mountaineering accident.

47 In their 1913 skiing guidebook, Germans Carl Luther and Dr. G. P. Lücke recommended the following items for a safe and successful ski tour: (1) clothes, including a snowsuit, hat and snowshoes, gloves, undergarments, and either a sweater or a leather vest; (2) outerwear, such as a wind jacket; (3) boots; (4) if the boots did not contain nails, then detachable climbing irons would be necessary; (5) skis with good bindings and a set of reserve bindings, along with a set of screw keys for spring bindings; (6) a carrying harness for the skis; (7) seal fur attachments for the ski bottoms to aid in climbing; (8) ski crampons; (9) a ski-repair kit; (10) ski wax; (11) ski poles; (12) a backpack; (13) an avalanche cord; (14) sunglasses; (15) sunscreen; (16) a stove with fuel; (17) a lantern, candles, and matches; (18) a knife and tourist's silverware; (19) string, a sewing kit, and safety pins; (20) a whistle or signaling horn; (21) maps and a compass; (22) a pocket first-aid kit; (23) hut keys; and (24) provisions and a canteen. Luther, Carl J. and Lücke, Dr. G. P., Der Skitourist (Munich: J. Lindauersche Buchhandlung, 1913), 18–19Google Scholar.

48 See, for example, Nietzsche's evocation of the will to power in Nietzsche, Friedrich, Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1896 [1883])Google Scholar; the importance of instinct to Sigmund Freud's tripartite model of the mind in Freud, New Introductory Lectures; and the celebration of instinct and the spirit in fascist politics, described in Falasca-Zamponi, Simonetta, Fascist Spectacle: The Aesthetics of Power in Mussolini's Italy (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 26–41Google Scholar; and Paxton, Robert O., The Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Vintage Books, 2005), 32–42Google Scholar.

49 Lunn, Arnold, Ski-ing (London: Eveleigh Nash, 1913), 41Google Scholar.

50 Martin Jay has argued that the self-referentiality and “art for art's sake” ethos of modernist artists, which led them to privilege form over content and context, was a deliberate attempt to emancipate the artist by distancing art from the weight of history and preconceptions about the object represented. Jay, Martin, “From Modernism to Post-Modernism,” in The Oxford Illustrated History of Modern Europe, ed. Blanning, T. C. W. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 255–78Google Scholar.

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53 “Les sports de neige: II. Le Ski,” 24–25. In 1903, Georg Simmel argued that urban modernity overwhelmed individuals with stimuli, and in response, moderns turned inward and urban life became “intellectual” in nature. By contrast, Simmel believed that individuals in rural societies remained more “social” and “emotional.”

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69 On skiing in World War I, see Czant, Oberst Hermann, Alpinismus, Massenwintersport und Weltkrieg (Munich: Bergverlag Rudolf Rother, 1929)Google Scholar; Luther, Carl J., Schneeschuhläufer im Krieg (Munich: J. Lindauersche Universitäts Buchhandlung, 1915)Google Scholar; Lunn, Arnold, The Mountains of Youth (London: Oxford University Press, 1925), 132Google Scholar.

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71 Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 3.

72 Millar, Jeremy and Schwartz, Michiel, “Introduction—Speed is a Vehicle,” in Speed—Visions of an Accelerated Age, ed. Millar, Jeremy and Schwartz, Michiel (London: The Photographer's Gallery, 1998), 16Google Scholar.

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75 Borscheid, Das Tempo-Virus, 8–12.

76 Schnapp, Jeffrey, “Crash (Speed as Engine of Individuation),” Modernism/Modernity 6 (1999)Google Scholar: 5 and 21.

77 Indeed, the massive increase in neurasthenia diagnoses in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries may be seen as, in part, a cultural obsession with the deleterious consequences of speed. See Radkau, Joachim, Der Zeitalter der Nervosität. Deutschland zwischen Bismarck und Hitler (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1998)Google Scholar.

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84 André Teissier, “Essai conçis,” Ski—sports d'hiver II (1933/34–1934/35): 74–76.

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86 Lunn, The Mountains of Youth, 33–34. Cf. Duffy, The Speed Handbook, 106.

87 “One must be always drunk. Everything lies in that; it is the only question worth considering. In order not to feel the horrible burden of time which breaks your shoulders and bows you down to earth, you must intoxicate yourself without truce, but with what? With wine, poetry, or art?—As you will; but intoxicate yourself.” Baudelaire, Charles, “Intoxicate Yourself!” (“Enivrez-vous!”), in Baudelaire, Charles, Little Poems in Prose, ed. Starr, Martin P. (Chicago: The Teitan Press, 1995 [1869]), 87Google Scholar.

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89 Jeffrey Schnapp notes that speed affects the body and mind simultaneously and in concert, and that the impact of speed can only be measured in this combination: “there is no simple way to disentangle somatic from cognitive iterations of velocity: the accelerated circulation of bodies from the accelerated circulation of thoughts, perceptual stimuli, or data; physical hyperactivity from mental hyperactivity.” Schnapp, Jeffrey, “Fast (slow) modern,” in Speed Limits, ed. Schnapp, Jeffrey (Milan: Skira, 2009), 31Google Scholar.

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91 Schnapp, “Crash,” 3–4. Cf. Duffy, The Speed Handbook, 199–261.

92 Quoted in Lunn, Switzerland and the English, 219–20. The original quote dates from 1935.

93 Lunn, The Mountains of Youth, 35–36.

94 Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 52–69.

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96 See Adamson, Walter, Embattled Avant-Gardes: Modernism's Resistance to Commodity Culture in Europe (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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102 Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, xiii; Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey, 10. Enda Duffy has argued that when individuals deem speed alienating, as in Taylorist production processes, they stress that it collapses time, but that when they deem speed pleasurable, as in automobile travel, they stress that it collapses space. Duffy, The Speed Handbook, 18 and 270.

103 Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism,” 51.

104 In 1894, British Reverend Joseph Sanger Davies published an account of his experiences climbing the Fünffingerspitze and other Dolomite peaks in the late 1880s and early 1890s. The subtitle of this work, “The Last Untrodden Alpine Peaks,” alludes to the bittersweet nature of this conquest. Davies, J. Sanger, Dolomite Strongholds: The Last Untrodden Alpine Peaks (London: George Bell and Sons, 1894)Google Scholar. Thanks to Tait Keller for bringing this reference to my attention.

105 On the Alps as a frontier with positive moral implications, see Armiero, A Rugged Nation, 134–54, particularly 137; Klein, “A Vertical World.”

106 Bernhard Tschofen describes the Alps as “a modern space of experience” in Tschofen, Bernhard, “Tourismus als Alpenkultur? Zum Marktwert von Kultur(kritik) im Fremdenverkehr,” in Der Alpentourismus. Entwicklungspotenziale im Spannungsfeld von Kultur, Ökonomie und Ökologie, ed. Luger, Kurt and Rest, Franz (Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2002), 92Google Scholar.

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110 In the fin de siècle the relationship between sports, advertisers, and the press was already quite highly developed. In Germany, companies such as Mercedes-Benz advertised heavily in the sporting press and used sporting images to associate their products with the “modernity,” excitement, and youthfulness of the sporting movement. The noted modernity and marketability of sports differed widely from the more serious and traditional, gymnastics-infused Turnen movement, with which modern sports competed for adherents. Advertisements for products such as Ovomaltine (a malted milk drink and forerunner of Ovaltine in English-speaking markets), Leica cameras, and Nivea skin creams appeared early and often in the skiing press, often depicting skiers in action. On the general connection between turn-of-the-twentieth-century sports and the advertising industry, see Eisenberg, “English Sports,” 226–30.

111 On photography and alpinism, see Klein, “A Vertical World,” 528.

112 On spectacle in mass culture, see Schwartz, Vanessa, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1998)Google Scholar. On speed culture and mass culture, see Duffy, The Speed Handbook, 60 and 270; Borscheid, Das Tempo-Virus, 176–214.

113 See Christian Rapp, “‘Der weiße Rausch.’ Der Skisport im deutschen Bergfilm um 1930,” in Skilauf—Volkssport—Medienzirkus, ed. Herzog, 111–22.

114 For other interpretations of this photo, see Armiero, A Rugged Nation, 111 and 147; Falasca-Zamponi, Fascist Spectacle, 73.

115 Enda Duffy persuasively argued that speed eliminates a sense of “place” and renders an area meaningless “space.” Duffy, The Speed Handbook, 267.

116 Armiero, A Rugged Nation, 49; Klein, “A Vertical World,” 539; Pfister, Gertrud, “Sportfexen, Heldenmythen und Opfertod. Alpinismus und Nationalsozialismus,” in Sport und Faschismen/Sport e fascismi, ed. Ambrosi, Claudio and Weber, Wolfgang, vol. 13, Geschichte und Region/Storia e regione series (Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2004), 21–60Google Scholar.

117 Allen, E. John B., The Culture and Sport of Skiing: From Antiquity to World War II (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2007)Google Scholar, 241 and 254.

118 Schneider, Hannes and Fanck, Arnold, The Wonders of Ski-ing: A Method of Correct Ski-ing and its Applications to Alpine Running (London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd., 1933 [1925]), 81Google Scholar. This book was an instructional book produced by a famed Austrian skier (Schneider) and the celebrated German director of the Bergfilm genre (Fanck) to accompany their film of the same name. The film was an international hit and the accompanying book was quickly translated into French and English.

119 On the equivocal nature of modernisms and modernity, see Berman, All That is Solid; Friedman, “Definitional Excursions”; Saler, “Modernity and Enchantment”; Wagner, Modernity as Experience and Interpretation.

120 Mehl, Erwin, Grundriss der Weltgeschichte des Schifahrens. I: Von der Steinzeit bis zum Beginn der schigeschichtlichen Neuzeit (1860) (Schorndorf bei Stuttgart: Verlag Karl Hofmann, 1964), 12Google Scholar.

121 Friedman, “Periodizing Modernism,” 432.

122 France possessed fifty ski lifts in 1945 and more than 3,700 in 1986. Similarly, Austria jumped from 350 lifts in 1955 to more than 4,000 in 1985. By the end of the twentieth century, Alpine lifts carried more than 500 million passengers annually. For French figures, see Mouriquand, Jacques, L'or blanc: Le système des sports d'hiver (Paris: Lieu Commun, 1988), 225Google Scholar. For Austrian figures, see Jülg, Felix, “Faszination Schnee: Der Wintertourismus im Gebirge. Historische Entwicklung,” in Der Winter als Erlebnis: Zurück zur Natur oder Fun, Action und Mega-Events? Neue Orientierungen im Schnee-Tourismus, ed. Isenberg, Wolfgang (Bensburg: Thomas Morus-Akademie, 1999), 21Google Scholar. For overall passenger figures, see Kurt Luger and Franz Rest, “Der Alpentourismus. Konturen einer kulturell konstruierten Sehnsuchtslandschaft,” in Der Alpentourismus, ed. Luger and Rest, 21.