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Apostles of the Alps: Mountaineering and Nation Building in Germany and Austria, 1860-1939

Online ISBN:
9781469625058
Print ISBN:
9781469625034
Publisher:
University of North Carolina Press
Book

Apostles of the Alps: Mountaineering and Nation Building in Germany and Austria, 1860-1939

Published online:
19 May 2016
Published in print:
4 January 2016
Online ISBN:
9781469625058
Print ISBN:
9781469625034
Publisher:
University of North Carolina Press

Abstract

This book explores the paradox that Europe’s seemingly peaceful “playgrounds” were battlegrounds where competing visions of Germany and Austria clashed. Using newly available archival materials from state and private collections throughout Germany, Austria, as well as Switzerland, and Italy, Apostles of the Alps shows how recreational pursuits in the Eastern Alps, Alpinism, placed distant mountains at the heart of German nationhood questions. The book explores how Alpinism changed the borderlands both physically and discursively and analyzes what these Alpine intersections meant for Germans and Austrians. The Alps staged the struggles that fundamentally shaped Germany and Austria, and yet the mountains get overlooked as places of meaningful historical change. Apostles of the Alps takes an original approach that incorporates environmental, social, and cultural history and situates tourism and environmental change on borderlands as central to nation building projects. Unlike other studies, this book emphasizes Austria’s pivotal place in Germany’s troubled modernization. The emotionally charged relationship that Germans and Austrians shared with the Alps reveals the importance of the periphery for both states. Their mountaineering clubs opened the Alpine frontier to the masses in hopes of bonding patriotic loyalties to a landscape that united Germany and Austria. But tourists carried their prejudices with them to mountains, politicizing the Alps. Now pressures that had formed the contours of the modern state—political fights, social conflicts, culture wars, and environmental crusades—shaped the peaks. These borderlands did not reflect the struggles occurring at the center; they were the center of nationhood struggles.

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