That unfashionable gyre

Are there parallels between present-day rumblings in the Alps and the prewar period?

In the summer of 1924, the Swiss author and alpinist Alfred Graber was on a walking tour around Zermatt with a friend who edited a German mountaineering journal. On a day of bad weather, they were relaxing in a hut when the door crashed open and two German alpinists strode in after climbing a north face, greeting the company with a loud “Berg heil!”

“Only our mountaineers could pull off something like that,” Graber’s neighbour said, prompting the Swiss writer to wonder if “the shadow of the Thousand-Year Reich was not already looming up behind him."

The incident is retold in Dichter am Berg (Poets on the hill), a lucid and readable study of Switzerland’s modern mountain writers by Emil Zopfi, who is best described as the doyen of the Academic Alpine Club of Zurich’s arctic/mountain literature cadre.

By coincidence, when I came across Zopfi’s anecdote, I’d just been leafing through Mountains and the German Mind (see previous post), edited by Sean Ireton and Caroline Schumann.

Their – really very useful – historical anthology includes, as it must, a chapter on Eduard Pichl (1872–1955), a pioneer of guideless climbing and many first ascents in the Austrian Alps, some of which still carry his name.

Pichl started his career as a civil servant but, after a spell in captivity during the first world war, retired early to head up the Section Austria of the German and Austrian Alpine Association. He also founded an “Austria-Jungmannschaft” that “he raised from the beginning in a heroic sense for Volk and homeland”.

Yet, as Wilfried Wilms notes in his excellent translator’s introduction to this chapter, it is Pichl’s campaign against the Alpine Association’s Section Donau that did most to secure his prominence during the 1920s and 1930s.

Section Donau, with its Jewish membership, had been admitted to the Association in 1921. Pichl opposed the move, setting out his thoughts in an article entitled “The Alpine Association and German Purity”, published in a 1923 edition of Der Bergsteiger, a magazine.

“And we will continue to travel down the path we consider indispensable in order to preserve the Germanness of the German and Austrian Alpine Association, which to us in an emblem of German unity,” Pichl concluded ominously.

His campaign succeeded: a year later, the Alpine Association held a special meeting to expel Section Donau. This was in 1924, around the time when Alfred Graber was being Berg heil’d in Zermatt.

Later episodes, such as the cooption of the Eiger’s first ascenionists in 1938 for propaganda purposes, have also become notorious. But a reading of Emil Zopfi’s book reveals that right-wing nationalists were not alone in politicising the Alps.

The left-affiliated Swiss writer Emmy Nöthiger-Beck (1910–2004), for example, was an enthusiastic supporter of the Naturfreunde (“Friends of Nature”). The movement was founded in 1895 in Vienna to give working-class people access to the mountains and nature – a set of aims similar to those of the present-day Japan Workers Alpine Federation.

Its members organized hikes, nature studies, and political lectures for workers, and built hundreds of volunteer-constructed huts (Naturfreundehäuser) in forests and mountain areas. Pointedly, their favoured mountain greeting was “Berg frei!”, not “Berg heil!”

As Emil Zopfi notes, Fritz Kasparek, Heinrich Harrer’s rope partner on the Eiger, started out as a Naturfreund but later gave up his affiliation. His change of heart probably took place when Germany's new regime banned and dissolved the Naturfreunde in 1933, confiscating their huts and persecuting their officials. When the Austrian government followed suit in 1934, the organisation’s headquarters resurfaced in Zurich, where they remained until 1988…

All this might have remained on the level of a historical footnote – were it not for an article in the very latest issue of Die Alpen, the bimonthly journal of the Swiss Alpine Club. In it, under the title of “Right-wing extremists ideologically appropriate the mountains”, the historian Damir Skenderovic reports on the doings of far-right groups such as Switzerland’s “Junge Tat” (“Youth Action”).

Such groups, Skenderovic says, use mountains, outdoor activities and even sportswear to promote a völkisch-nationalist worldview – Junge Tat is currently offering a sweat shirt with the logo “Unser Berg unsere Regeln” (Our mountain, our rules).

As for the Alps, far-right groups present them as symbols of an authentic homeland that they believe is threatened by modernity, globalization, immigration, multiculturalism, technology and development.

In this view, the mountains represent a refuge from modern society, where an idealised bond with nature and tradition can be preserved. The links between nationalism, nature, and political reaction have deep historical roots, Skenderovic notes.

Far-right groups also like to organize hikes and other outdoor exercises. Although the hikes themselves may be unexceptionable, organized activities often serve a political purpose by strengthening group identity and solidarity, Skenderovic argues.

Finally, Skenderovic suggests that the authorities should take right-wing extremism more seriously. Outdoor communities in Germany and Austria, for example, have organized alternative hiking activities to show that mountains and nature can remain shared spaces rather than symbols of exclusion.

Back in 1936, the poet W B Yeats warned that “all things run/On that unfashionable gyre again.” In the same spirit, it might be time to pay more attention to how the mountains and other landscapes are being exploited in political discourse. What starts in the Alps doesn’t necessarily stay there.

References

Emil Zopfi, Dichter am Berg: Alpine Literatur aus der Schweiz, AS Verlag, 2009.

Sean Ireton and Caroline Schaumann (eds), Mountains and the German Mind: Translations from Gessner to Messner, 1541–2009, Camden House, 2020.

Interview with Damir Skenderovic, Associate Professor of Contemporary History at the University of Fribourg, Die Alpen, 05/26 edition.