scholarly journals Dialektik der Erschließung: The German–Austrian Alps between Exploration and Exploitation

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 17
Author(s):  
Sean Ireton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Human Interaction ◽  
Exploration And Exploitation ◽  
Nördliche Kalkalpen ◽  
Austrian Alps ◽  
Limestone Alps ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Alps

Focusing on the so-called Nördliche Kalkalpen or Northern Limestone Alps of Germany and Austria, I will discuss how human interaction with these mountains during the age of the Anthropocene shifts from scientific and athletic exploration to commercial and industrial exploitation. More specifically, I will examine travel narratives by the nineteenth-century mountaineers Friedrich Simony and Hermann von Barth, juxtaposing their respective experiences in diverse Alpine subranges with the environmental history of those regions. This juxtaposition harbors a deeper paradox, one that can be formulated as follows: Whereas Simony and Barth both rank as historically important Erschließer of the German and Austrian Alps, having explored their crags and glaciers in search of somatic adventure and geoscientific knowledge, these very sites of rock and ice were about to become so erschlossen by modernized tourism that one wonders where the precise boundaries between individual-based discovery and technology-driven development lie. In other words, during the nineteenth century a kind of Dialektik der Erschließung (a variation on Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialektik der Aufklärung) manifests itself in the increasing anthropogenic alteration of the Alps.

The Storm Lab: Meteorology in the Austrian Alps

2009 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 463-486 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah R. Coen
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
High Altitude ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Early History ◽  
Austrian Alps ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Alps ◽  
Weather Stations ◽  
Definition Of

ArgumentWhat, if anything, uniquely defines the mountain as a “laboratory of nature”? Here, this question is considered from the perspective of meteorology. Mountains played a central role in the early history of modern meteorology. The first permanent year-round high-altitude weather stations were built in the 1880s but largely fell out of use by the turn of the twentieth century, not to be revived until the 1930s. This paper considers the unlikely survival of the Sonnblick observatory (3105 m.) in the Austrian Alps. By examining the arguments of the Sonnblick's critics and defenders, it reveals a seemingly paradoxical definition of the mountain as a space that simultaneously maximized isolation and communication. Drawing on the social and environmental history of the Alps, it shows how the Sonnblick came to appear as the perfect embodiment of this paradox.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Jason W. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
History Of Science ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Main Argument ◽  
Science Practice ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Naval Officers ◽  
The U.S

The introduction established the main argument of the book, which is that the U.S. Navy’s charts and its chart-making throughout the nineteenth century were integral to the expansion of American oceanic empire even as such effort exposed the limits of science practice, seafaring, and war-making in a dynamic, dangerous marine environment. The Navy and the broader American maritime world’s encounter with the ocean, mediated through science, was integral to the way mariners, navigators, and naval officers thought of an emerging maritime empire first in commercial terms and, by the late nineteenth century, in new geo-strategic terms. The introduction also places the larger work within the historiographies of military, maritime, and naval history as well as environmental history and the history of science and cartography, seeking to establish historiographical and methodological bridges among these sub-fields.

Narrative

2019 ◽  
pp. 23-46
Author(s):  
Michelle Burnham
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Publication History ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Shared Narrative

This chapter reviews the publication history of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century genre of Pacific travel narratives, and examines its narrative features. During this period, ships moved with increasing regularity on incredibly risky voyages between the world’s oceans. At the same time, novels came to dominate the literary world of fiction. These developments are related by their shared narrative dynamics, especially in the relationship between narrative suspense and numerical speculation, between words and numbers. The short-term risks and losses that attended these voyages were offset by their long-term profits, as the pleasure of accumulation concealed but also depended on the horrors of violence.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gregory Rosenthal
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Migrant Workers ◽  
Ethical Issues ◽  
Body Type ◽  
History Of Capitalism ◽  
Pacific World ◽  
History Of The Body ◽  
History Of ◽  
Conducting Research

This Introduction applies broad brushstrokes to place the story of Hawaiʻi’s nineteenth-century indigenous migrant workers in the context of Hawaiian and Pacific historiography, as well as theories of labor history, environmental history, the history of capitalism, and the history of the body. The introduction explores the discursive construction of the “kanaka” as a racialized and gendered laboring body type; the concept of a “Hawaiian Pacific World”; and the unique characteristics of nineteenth-century Hawaiian capitalism. The introduction also explores the methodological and ethical issues involved in conducting research in Native Hawaiian history, and includes concise chapter summaries.

Wordsworth's Italy

PMLA ◽  
1923 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 236-252 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martha Hale Shackford
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
General Reader ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Isle Of Man ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Alps

Wordsworth's relation to Italy has been a subject rather neglected in the annals of English poets who have known and loved “the land of lands,” and have left us memorial records of the beauty of Italy's blue sky, the golden clarity of her air, the soft greenness of her trees, and the fame of her poets and artists. Biographers of Wordsworth have so emphasized his relation to France that the general reader is hardly aware that the poet had crossed the Alps, both in body and in spirit. He belongs with Chaucer, Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, Milton, Gray, Goldsmith, Shelley, Keats, Byron, Landor, Clough, and the Brownings, all of whom will ever be associated with memories of Italy. An attempt to trace the history of his acquaintance with Italy, may, it is hoped, show that he had for things Italian a really life-long sympathy. Moreover, the study may help to dispel some lingering superstitions about Wordsworth's insularity. Wordsworth was one of the most assiduous travellers of all the English poets except Byron. The difficulty of travel in the early nineteenth century should be remembered in considering the distances he traversed. He knew France, Switzerland, Germany, The Netherlands, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the Isle of Man, and various regions of England, including every inch of the Lake Country.

scholarly journals Gehören die Alpen dem Fremdenverkehr? 150 Jahre Tourismuskritik

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 71-83
Author(s):  
Jon Mathieu
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Rapid Development ◽  
Mountain Range ◽  
The Public ◽  
Mass Tourism ◽  
European Languages ◽  
History Of ◽  
European Mountain ◽  
The Alps

The term “tourist” appeared in English in the late eighteenth century and spread to other European languages in the first half of the nineteenth century. The corresponding sector first appeared in German as Fremdenverkehr. Since the 1970s, the neutral, internationally used term “tourism” has become the standard for the mobility industry. The industry is unique and in some aspects unlike any other industry. Foreign buyers of tourist services are not only customers of specific tourism companies, but also guests of tourist regions. They move within an environment created by others and sometimes appropriate the public space of this area, especially by participating in the expansive mass tourism. This has recently led to the emergence of the term “overtourism”. It is associated with a need to reduce the burden of some fashionable tourist regions caused by an excessive influx of tourists. The Alps are one of those regions in which tourism developed as an industry already in the nineteenth century. The number of tourists in this European mountain range — initially especially in Switzerland — grew considerably particularly after 1850. The period was marked by a rapid development of infrastructure in the form of modern forms of transport, accommodation and other services. Tourism became an indicator and factor in civic “progress”. Yet at the same time there appeared voices questioning this development. The author of the present article discusses three examples from various spheres, periods and regions illustrating the history of the growth of tourism in the Alps. The first part is devoted to literature, specifically to a satirical journal of a journey to Switzerland, published for the first time in 1880. The second part deals with science, drawing mainly on the work of a French geographer and her writings from 1956–1971. The third part concerns tourism policy in recent years in a fashionable Austrian village in the Alps. 

Massimo Quaini e il viaggio: il ruolo della verticalità

2021 ◽  
pp. 311-310
Author(s):  
Claudio Greppi
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Local Culture ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Geographical Knowledge ◽  
The Andes ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Alps ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
The One

In the issue of Geotema dedicated to travel (“Travel as source of geographical knowledge”), in 1997, Massimo Quaini’s article topic was “The geographical invention of verticality: for the history of the ‘discovery’ of mountains”. It concerns a fundamental segment of the history of geographical knowledge, between eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, involving both the Old and New World: Saussure in the Alps and Humboldt in the Andes. He had already worked on this same topic in other occasions, investigating institutions like CAI in Italy, and mountain’s role in the ‘official’ geography. Such lectures mark a path that, I think, finds a theoretical output in 2006 Parma conference, dedicated to the “end of the travel”, where Quaini spoke about “Between Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century: the travel and the new paradigm of geography”: a rich and problematic lecture, opening to further researches. But perhaps before this point of arrival, the new paradigm, I would suggest to think on an idea offered by the Geotema article, where we read: “so, if we want to fully speak of discovering the mountains it will be necessary that the culture of the outside travellers meet that of the mountaineers”. Actually, in Quaini's last lecture I take into consideration, the one at Forte di Bard in September 2006, his attention shifts definitely on the figures of alpine travellers, who may encounter knowledge acquired from local culture.

scholarly journals Image, Environment, Infrastructure: The Social Ecologies of the Bergfilm

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 38
Author(s):  
Seth Peabody
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Change ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Infrastructure Development ◽  
Environmental Implications ◽  
Alpine Regions ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
The Alps ◽  
Film Aesthetics

The German mountain film (Bergfilm) has received extensive critical attention for its political, social, and aesthetic implications, but has received remarkably little attention for its role in the environmental history of the Alps. This article considers the Bergfilm within the long history of depictions of the Alps and the growth of Alpine tourism in order to ask how the role of media in environmental change shifts with the advent of film. The argument builds on Verena Winiwarter and Martin Knoll’s model of social-ecological interaction, Adrian Ivakhiv’s theoretical framework for the environmental implications of film, and Laura Frahm’s theories of filmic space. Through an analysis of Arnold Fanck’s films Der heilige Berg [The Holy Mountain, Fanck 1926] and Der große Sprung [The Great Leap, Fanck 1927], which are compared with Gustav Renker’s novel Heilige Berge [Holy Mountains, Renker 1921] and set into the context of the environmental history of the Alpine regions where the films were shot, the author argues that film aesthetics serve as a creative catalyst for environmental change and infrastructure development. While some ecocinema scholars have argued that environmental films teach viewers new ideas or change modes of behavior, this analysis suggests that film aesthetics are most effective at accelerating processes of environmental change that are already underway.

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