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

Sean Ireton

doi:10.3390/h10010017

Abstract

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.

Highlights

In the original version of Das abenteuerliche Herz from 1929, Ernst Jünger reminisces on his ascent of the Zugspitze (2962 m/9718 ft.), Germany’s highest mountain, in the following fashion: “Welch herrlichen Tag verlebte ich damals, kurz nachdem ich die Zugspitze zum letzten Male bestiegen hatte, ehe sie die Technik für immer unbesteiglich machte” (Jünger1987, p. 108)
Pioneers—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 initially 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
They are works of nonfiction and attest to factual feats that occurred within the history of alpinism. They draw on individual experiences and are thereby inflected by the narrator in question; tinged by his or her2 contact with the natural environment; sometimes even poetically embellished to such a degree that the lines between scientific observation and literary transfiguration become blurred. (As will soon be seen, this poeticizing tendency is on full display in the writings of Simony.). This fertile blend of scientific exploration, aesthetic representation, and physical exertion has been aptly summarized by Schaumann as follows: “Over the course of the nineteenth century, science, poetics, and embodiment became mutually constitutive in the evolution of mountaineering” (Schaumann 2020, p. 4)

Summary

Introduction

In the original version of Das abenteuerliche Herz from 1929, Ernst Jünger reminisces on his ascent of the Zugspitze (2962 m/9718 ft.), Germany’s highest mountain, in the following fashion: “Welch herrlichen Tag verlebte ich damals, kurz nachdem ich die Zugspitze zum letzten Male bestiegen hatte, ehe sie die Technik für immer unbesteiglich machte” Nevada (1872), and Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra (1911) Following these generic and genetic cues, my prime focus will be on precisely such autobiographical narratives rather than, say, literary texts or historical accounts, which have long been the principal sources of ecocritical inquiry in the humanities. They are works of nonfiction and attest to factual feats that occurred within the history of alpinism On the other, they draw on individual experiences and are thereby inflected by the narrator in question; tinged by his or her contact with the natural environment; sometimes even poetically embellished to such a degree that the lines between scientific observation and literary transfiguration become blurred. This fertile blend of scientific exploration, aesthetic representation, and physical exertion has been aptly summarized by Schaumann as follows: “Over the course of the nineteenth century, science, poetics, and embodiment became mutually constitutive in the evolution of mountaineering” (Schaumann 2020, p. 4)

Enlightenment and Environment

Elucidating Erschließung

Friedrich Simony and the Dachstein

Opening and Dominating the Alps

Hermann von Barth and Beyond

Climatic Conclusions