German Forests

Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association
The Air Cure Town: Commodifying Mountain Air in Alpine Central Europe
Author(s): Alison F. Frank
Source: Central European History, Vol. 45, No. 2 (JUNE 2012), pp. 185-207
Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of Conference Group for Central
European History of the American Historical Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23270371
Accessed: 01-12-2017 07:34 UTC
REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23270371?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
http://about.jstor.org/terms
Cambridge University Press, Conference Group for Central European History of the
American Historical Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and
extend access to Central European History
This content downloaded from 200.3.149.5 on Fri, 01 Dec 2017 07:34:15 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
Central European History 45 (2012), 185207.
Conference
Conference Group
Group
for Central
for Central
European
European
History of
History
the American
of the American
Historical
HistoricalAssociation,
Association,
2012 2012
doi: 10.1017/S0008938912000027
The Air Cure Town: Commodifying Mountain

Air in Alpine Central Europe
Alison F. Frank
oes air have value? In the first volume of Capital, Marx suggested it did
not: "A thing can be a use-value, without having value," he explained.
-1 S "This is the case whenever its utility to man is not due to labour. Such are
air, virgin soil, natural meadows, &C."1 Because it has no value, understood by
Marx in this context to mean labor value, air cannot be a commodity:
"Commodities come into the world in the shape of use-values, articles, or
goods, such as iron, linen, corn, &c. This is their plain, homely, bodily form.
They are, however, commodities, only because they are something two fold,
both object of utility, and, at the same time, depositories of value."2 Marx's mate
rialist focus on human labor and industrial production made it hard for him to
imagine air as a commodityat least when he published the first volume of
Capital in 1867.
But the turbulent 1860s represented the very moment in which the air of the
central European Alps was becoming commodifiedin which its social use value
was being created by the labor of scientists and doctors. Thanks to medicine,
mountain air was useful. It was, moreover, a moment when the labor of archi
tects, engineers, hoteliers, entrepreneurs, and a whole host of construction
workers and railway technicians was making it possible to sell air, or at least
access to it. Thanks to economic development, air was marketable. That labor
("i.e., productive activity of a definite kind and exercised with a definite aim")
appropriated "particular nature-given materials to particular human wants."3
The author wishes to thank David Blackboum, David Ciarlo, Walter Johnson, Pieter Judson, Tony
Judt, Thomas Kiihne, Uta Poiger, Larry Wolff, Tara Zahra, Jonathan Zatlin, Daniel Ziblatt, and par
ticipants in the "Internationalizing Central European History" conference (Cambridge, MA, May
2007) and the Remarque Institute European History Seminar (New York, NY, November 2007)
for comments on earlier drafts of this article. Invaluable research assistance was provided by Anna
Whittington. Research was supported by grants from the American Council of Learned Societies;
the Milton Fund; the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies; and the Davis Center for
Russia, East Europe, and Central Asia.
1 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. I, The Process of Capitalist Production,
trans, from the third German edition by Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, ed. Frederick Engels
(New York: International Publishers, 1967), 48.
2Ibid., 54.
3Ibid., 49 and 50.
185
186 ALISON F. FRANK
And it made of a "spontaneous produce of Nature," the ratified air of the central
European Alps, a commodity that could be bought and sold; it made the air a
repository of value, and the Alps became a frontier of accumulation.4
The process of transforming mountain air, which did have use-value, into
social use-value and then into a commodity, was embedded in the satisfaction
of technical, social, and political preconditions that occurred for the first time
in the nineteenth century. This is when a market demand for mountain air devel
oped for the first time, as well as the ability to access, package, preserve, describe,
and measure it. Even if no human labor went into making air, a great deal of
human ingenuity, of mental and physical work, went into creating the demand
for certain types of air, in gaining access to those types of air, in storing, marketing,
and packaging it for sale, and in distributing access to it in its original setting. The
transformation of mountain air into a commodity was part of a larger transforma
tion of the alpine environment preceded by its aesthetic reconceptualization, but
completed by a combination of different forms of labor that culminated in the
invention of the Alpine sanatoria, or air cure towns.
The belief that fresh, invigorating air was something that existed in some places
(including high and low mountain ranges, forests, certain types of valleys, and the
seaside), but not otherssomething that could (or could not) be captured, pur
chased, sold, and preservedwas, in some ways, radically new. It was, on the
surface, a revolutionary new idea popularized by a revolutionary: Alexander
Spengler.
In March 1848, Alexander Spengler interrupted his study of the law at the
University of Heidelberg, which he had begun only two years earlier at the
age of 19, to lead a student rebellion in Mannheim. After his participation in
several armed skirmishes made him persona non grata in Heidelberg, he was
forced to abandon his first calling as a jurist and his second as a political activist
and flee to Switzerland to avoid arrest. Fortunately for Spengler, he was one of
only 500 German refugees who were allowed to stay in Switzerlandanother
10,500 were asked politely, but firmly, to make their homes elsewhere.5 If he
wanted to continue to be welcome in the Swiss Confederation, however, it
4Ibid., 50.
5 A total of 11,000 former revolutionaries had entered Switzerland by July 1849. Of those, only
8,350 remained in September 1849; 2,000 by January 1850; 500 by 1851; and only 235 (of whom
192 were German) in 1852. Herbert Reiter, Politisches Asyl im 19. Jahrhundert. Die deutschen politischen
Fluchtlinge des Vormarz und der Revolution von 1848/49 in Europa und den USA (Berlin: Duncker &
Humblot, 1992), 226227; Christian Jansen, ed., Nach der Revolution 1848/49. Verfolgung,
Realpolitik, Nationsbildung: Politische Briefe deutscher Uberaler und Demokraten 1849-1861 (Diisseldorf:
Droste, 2004), 75. Switzerland argued that, with 2.5 million residents, it was too small to absorb
the refugees. Jansen, Nach der Revolution, 7475. For more information on the lives of German
exiles in Switzerland, see Helena Toth, "Emigres: The Experience of Political Exile for Germans
and Hungarians, 1849-1871" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 2008).
COMMODIFYING MOUNTAIN AIR 187
was essential that Spengler abandon his penchant for rabble-rousing and radical
political change.
Once in Zurich, Spengler had a life-changing epiphanyhis calling was
neither in law nor politics, but rather in medicine. When he finished his
medical studies in 1853, however, he had difficulty finding a job because of his
lack of family connections to help smooth his transition from the academic
into the professional world. In the absence of any other options, he took up
the unattractive post of district doctor in the remote rural town of Davosa po
sition whose lack of appeal is suggested by the fact that it had been vacant for
years.6 The Davos Valley is in Switzerland's Rhaetian Alps, near the Ratikon sub
range, which is considered the geological border between the western and eastern
Alps. It runs northeast-southwest for about ten miles at approximately five thou
sand feet, or 1,556 meters, above sea level; the mountains that surround it reach
nearly nine thousand feet (approximately 2,740 meters) above sea level.7 In the
early nineteenth century, the population of the entire valley had reached approxi
mately 1,800 people, and that of the village itself barely one hundred. Valley resi
dents specialized in animal husbandry (mostly cattle), farming (of corn and
barley), and transportation of goods over nearby passes. There were no inns, no
theaters, no clubhouses; there was no train station, and no easy communication
with the outside world. Spengler was twenty-six years old. What was a young
doctor, trained in Mannheim, Heidelberg, and Zurich, to do?
What Spengler did amounted in some ways to a different kind of revolution
than the one he and other central Europeans had so unsuccessfully attempted
in March 1848. Spengler's first years in Davos passed quietly. When the local
pastor showed signs of consumption, Spengler did what he had been trained to
dowhat any good physician would do: he recommended that the pastor
leave Davos at once in favor of a milder climate. But after five years in Davos,
largely isolated from his teachers and medical colleagues, Spengler had more
interaction with his patients and their families than he did with city doctors.
The next time he was called upon to examine a tubercular patient, he prescribed
a folk curesleeping outside at night, alternately sitting and walking briskly in the
sunshine during the day, and drinking copious amounts of wine. To Spengler's
surprise, this treatment appeared to work. He could not, however, subject this
method to empirical testing, because he could not find enough tubercular vil
lagers on whom it could be attempted. In fact, the more he looked, the more
6J. Hauri, "Historical: Davos as Commune and Health-Resort," in Davos as Health-Resort: A

Handbook, ed. W. R. Huggard (Davos: Davos Printing Company, 1907), 10-11; Birta vom Bruck,
"Alexander Spengler. Pionier der Klimatherapie," Deutsches Arzteblatt 101, no. 6 (February 6,
2004): A357.
7 Die Landschaft Davos. Climatischer Curort fur Brustkranke. Mit spezieller Berucksichtigung des therapeu
tischen Verfahrens in der Curanstalt W. J. Holsboer Actien-Gesellschajt Curhaus Davos (Zurich: Orell
Fiissli, 1877), 9; Huggard, ed., Davos as Health-Resort, 2-3.
188 ALISON F. FRANK
Spengler realized that among those residents of his district who had spent their
entire lifetimes in the Davos Valley, there were scarcely any sufferers of pulmonary
tuberculosis to be found.8
Of all possible explanations (occupational, social, cultural), Spengler was con
vinced that the most plausible was that the local climate protected humans from
developing respiratory illness and even cured those who had contracted it else
where and come home to die. He consulted with the Zurich physician Conrad
Meyer-Ahrens (18131872), a well-respected balneologist, about Davos's suit
ability as a climatic health resort. Meyer-Ahrens then spread word of Spengler's
impressionistic findings on the health benefits of the local air, confirming that
"the climate is very healthy. In effect, one does not encounter any ailments."
Most significantly, he attested that the Davos climate was as effective in treating
tuberculosis in the winter months as in the summertime.9 This was a radical asser
tion at the time: medical orthodoxy had no place for the voluntary exposure of a
diseased lung to the cold, winter air of the Alps.
A trickling of warm-weather visitors began almost immediately; the first two
winter visitors arrived in February 1865. The fact that those two visitors opted
for a cure in Davos in February 1865 can only be understood within the context
of the invalid's desperate willingness to try anything to extend a fleeting lifetime.
It was certainly not a decision to be made lightly. Not only was Davos devoid of
any appropriate lodgings before the construction of the first sanatorium was
begun in 1867, but voluntary exposure to the ratified mountain air in the dead
of winter went against every medical convention of the day. The methods used
in Davosmaximum exposure to open air, especially in the winter time, preferably
in the sunshine and at rest, combined with moderate physical exertion, as appropri
atewere not unprecedented, but they were revolutionary when applied at
high altitude.10 In the foreword to his 1869 publication, The District of Davos as
Health-Resort for Pulmonary Tuberculosis (Die Landschaft Davos als Kurort gegen
Lungenschwindsucht), Spengler declared that he was aware that his proposals "coun
tered beliefs that were hitherto considered axiomatic."11 His book was greeted with
a combination of suspicion and contempt due to contemporary beliefs in the danger
8 In the 1850s, of course, lung ailments that would later be called tuberculosis were known by other
names, such as consumption and lung catarrh.
9 [Conrad] Meyer-Ahrens, "Balneologische Spazierg'ange," Monatsblatt fur medicinische Statistik
u. offentliche Gesundheitspjlege (1862): 82; Alexander Spengler, Die Landschaft Davos (Kanton
Graubiinden) als Kurort gegen Lungenschwindsucht. Klimatologisch-medicinische Skizze (Basel: Hugo
Richter, 1869), 12; Paul P. Bernard, Rush to the Alps: The Evolution of Vacationing in Switzerland
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1978), 113.
10These methods had been developed in the lower Silesian health resort of Gorbersdorf by
Hermann Brehmer (1826-1889), starting in 1854, but Gorbersdorf lies only 1,800 feet above sea
level, compared to Davos's more than 5,000 feet. O. R. McCarthy, "The Key to the Sanatoria,"
Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 94 (2001): 413; Hauri, "Historical: Davos," 21.
11 Spengler, Die Landschaft Davos, 3.
COMMOD1FYING MOUNTAIN AIR 189
that cold air posed for the weakened lung. According to one Davos physician who
reflected in 1907 on Spengler's role in popularizing this new treatment, "People
had formerly read that mountaineers in the Andes had bled from nose and ears at
an altitude of 17,000 feet, and they concluded that at an elevation of 5200 feet
lung patients must be subject to haemmorrhages."12 To invite invalids into the
upper reaches of the Alps, Spengler's medical colleagues argued, was nothing
short of criminal. Many patients who came to Davos over the years did succumb
to their disease, which was often in a very advanced state before they arrived.
Those first two patients, however, livedand one of them, a physician himself,
set about publishing reports of Davos's efficacy in medical journals throughout
German-speaking Europe.
Only twenty years after Spengler's first publication, a British physician could
expect little resistance to his claim that "The most notable advance in the treatment
of consumption achieved during the present century has unquestionably been the
rapid progress in public and professional favour of the High Altitude sanatoria."13
Other, apparently less notable, advances in the treatment of consumption achieved
in that period included Robert Koch's 1882 realization that tuberculosis was caused
by a bacillusa medical discovery that obviously did not lead to a transformation in
medical treatment overnight. Indeed, the leading physician at the Consumptive
Hospital in Belfast could argue in 1887, even while acknowledging Koch's discov
ery, that "the best way to fight tubercle is to treat it, not as an inflammatory process
allied to pneumonia or bronchitis, but as a product of debility, to be resisted by tonic
and hardening methods, and by such measures as tend to promote the nutrition of
the body."14 And no place was better suited to promote the nutrition of the body,
according to Spengler and his allies, than the mountains.
Until the publication of Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain in 1924, whose
tales of quackery, licentiousness, and the abuse of cures by healthy individuals
looking for diversion from urban routine besmirched the regal resort's reputation,
Davos was unrivaled as the facile princeps of all high-altitude sanatoria. Spengler's
discovery meant that no longer would consumptives be "condemned to confine
ment in hot rooms, to mental and physical inactivity, to a course of medicines
which soothed [their] cough at the cost of impairing appetite and lowering nutri
tion."15 By the time Thomas Mann's wife was instructed by her physicians to
spend half of the year 1912 in Davos, high-altitude sanatoria made up a
booming industry, and Davos had dozens of successful competitors. After a few
setbacks, Spengler had spearheaded a successful revolution after all.
12Hauri, "Historical: Davos," 13.

13James Alex Lindsay, The Climatic Treatment of Consumption: A Contribution to Medical Climatology
(London and New York: Macmillan, 1887), 51.
14Ibid., 52. On the reception of Koch's work, see Thomas D. Brock, Robert Koch: A Life in Medicine
and Bacteriology (Madison, WI: Science Tech Publishers, 1988).
15 Lindsay, The Climatic Treatment of Consumption, 51-52.
190 ALISON F. FRANK
But, like so many revolutionaries exposed to the glare of historical revision,

Spengler's achievement must also be moderated by its context and its continuities
with phenomena that preceded it. Spengler's own work was part of the evolution
of medical science, but it also coincided with the emergence of medical climatol
ogy, part of an increasing professionalization and institutionalization of climate
study in the nineteenth century. Thanks to climate science, physicians could
prove that Davos had more sunny, cloudless days in the winter than southern
seaside resorts.16 Spengler's accomplishment also benefited from a broader
change in the notion of what constituted polluted, or unhealthy, airwhich,
in turn, was connected to an explosion of research and discoveries about gases
and their properties in the field of chemistry.
It was easier for scientists, doctors, and their patients to imagine the mountains
this way in the nineteenth century than it would have been in earlier periods.
Marjorie Hope Nicolson's pioneering 1959 work Mountain Gloom, Mountain
Glory described a gradual transition in literary images of the Alps, which, until
the very end of the seventeenth century, were seen as gloomy, desolate, and for
bidding (according to Simon Schama, "the most histrionic versions of seven
teenth-century sacred mountains had presented them as spectacles of holy
Terror") and then, over the course of the eighteenth century, became inviting,
picturesque, and beautiful.17 Here, the pioneers of the imagination were poets,
literary writers, philosophers, and natural scientistsin that distant age, all of
these roles were often combined in one personage. These were the pioneers
whose reevaluation of what mountains represented set the stage for a widespread
interest in their craggy peaks that emerged in the nineteenth century.18 As
William Cronon wrote in his introduction to a later edition of Nicolson's
book, "the nature inside our heads is as important to understand as the nature
that surrounds us, for the one is constantly shaping and filtering the way we per
ceive the other."19 The reevaluation of mountains' poetic worth preceded and
made possible the change in practice. What was new about the value of the
16Spengler himself relied on monthly reports of the "meteorologische Commission der Schweiz" to
support his claims for Davos's favored climate. Spengler, Die Landschaft Davos, 13-15.
17Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Vintage, 1996), 449. Maijorie Hope
Nicolson, Mountain Gloom, Mountain Glory: The Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite, first pub
lished 1959, republished in 1997 with an introduction by William Cronon (Seattle: University of
Washington Press, 1997).
18In Japan, the equivalent work was done by the geographer Shiga Shigetaka (18631927). In his
1894 book, Nihon fukeiron (On Japanese Landscape), Shiga wrote, "Once you have experienced the
sublime qualities of mountains; once you have awakened to their magnificent splendor; once you
have taken a deep breath of the alpine air, so fresh that it seems to cleanse your lungs; once you
have allowed your thoughts to fall still and become immersed in the lonely quiet therethen your
mind will become like those of the gods and sages, and you will experience firsthand the glow of
divine wisdom." Cited in Karen Wigen, "Discovering the Japanese Alps: Meiji Mountaineering
and the Quest for Geographical Enlightenment," Jo urnal of Japanese Studies 31, no. 1 (Winter 2005): 13.
19Cronon, "Introduction," in Nicolson, Mountain Gloom, Mountain Glory, xii.
COMMODIFY1NG MOUNTAIN AIR 191
mountains was not the natural resources they containedpeople had struggled to
get lumber, salt, ore, and other minerals out of the Alps for centuriesbut rather
the transformative power of time spent in themthey offered renewed mental
and physical health and even spiritual rebirth.
The most celebrated so-called conquerors of the Alps were not poets and think
ers, but rather the mountaineers whose exploits have inspired books that usually
featured "conquest" prominently in the tide.20 But what kind of conquest was
this? In 1865, a courageous Englishman by the unlikely name of Edward
Whymper led the first mountaineering expedition to climb the Matterhorn.
But four out of the seven men who took part in this expedition died during
the descent, which begs the question, when Whymper's team climbed the
Matterhorn, who, exactly, conquered whom? To straddle an Alpine peak rep
resents a great achievementbut one whose effect on the mountaineer was gen
erally greater than its effect on the mountain. As long as the conquistadors
remained few in number, their conquests did not radically alter the mountains
themselves.21
In their persistent attempts to leave some sort of marker commemorating their
achievements, nineteenth-century mountaineers built stone pyramids or erected
iron crosses on conquered summits, but were often disheartened by evidence that
wind and lightning could easily erase evidence of the fleeting successes of their
predecessors. For example, when Edmund von Mojsisovics, a geologist, paleon
tologist, and cofounder of the Austrian Alpine Club, climbed the highest summit
of the GroBglockner (the highest mountain in Austria) in August 1861, he
reported finding "the remains of Salm's iron pyramid lying scattered around
the summit." (Franz Xaver Salm-Reifferscheid-Krautheim, Prince-Bishop of
Gurk, never set foot on the peak himself, but he did organize and finance the
first expedition to reach the summit in 1800.) Although Mojsisovics dutifully
straightened the "squashed iron rods" and tried to reconstruct the pyramid, his
efforts were soon undone. In August 1863, C. Piihringer and J. Zulehner
reached the summit again and found the rods "scattered and broken."22 The
drive to leave one's mark on the summit remained undeterred by these
20Books such as Fergus Fleming, Killing Dragons: The Conquest of the Alps (New York: Grove Press,
2000); Stefano Ardito, Mont Blanc: Discovery and Conquest of the Giant of the Alps (Seattle, WA:
Mountaineers, 1997); and Walter Unsworth, North Face: A Second Conquest of the Alps (London:
Hutchinson, 1969).
21 This has changed dramatically since World War II. Trekking and backcountry tourism are now so
popular that even locations as remote as Mt. Everest suffer from tourist-induced degradation. Alton C.
Byers and Kamal Banskota, "Environmental Impacts of Backcountry Tourism on Three Sides of
Everest," in World Heritage Twenty Years Later, ed. J. W. Thorsell and Jacqueline Sawyer (Gland,
Switzerland: International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, 1992), 105113.
22"Der Glocknergipfel im August 1861," Mittheilungen des osterreichischen Alpen-Vereines (Vienna:
n.p., 1863), 305; Glocknerbesteigung," Mittheilungen des osterreichischen Alpen-Vereines (Vienna:
n.p., 1864), 350.
192 ALISON F. FRANK
disappointmentsPiihringer and Zulehner added their calling cards to a little

bundle that had been rolled together and stuffed into a small opening in one of
the (apparently hollow) iron rods.
One could argue that it was not a few dozen mountaineers who conquered the
Alps by hiking across them or planting steel rods in their peaks, but rather the
many hundreds of engineers who designedand the many thousands of laborers
who builtthe roads, railways, embankments, viaducts, bridges, tunnels, and
retaining walls that made traveling through, into, and within mountainous
regions not only possible, but easy, comfortable, and safe. It was their work
that made the Alps available not only to conquerors of the mind, such as
Nicolson's poets, or conquerors of the peaks, such as Whymper and the
members of Alpine Clubs, but also to tourists and entrepreneurs who attempted
a conquest of their own in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Access to the mountains became available to a wider spectrum of Europeans in
the nineteenth century because of new techniques in alpine road and railway con
struction that literally paved the way for a reinvention of formerly desolate and
impoverished regions as potential sources of personal and national wealth, foster
ing new perceptions of what makes land rich, and what makes it attractive. The
Strada d'Alemagna connecting Tyrol with Lombardy and Veneto, one of the first
modern Alpine roads in the Dolomites, was built in the 1820s. Joseph
Baumgartner, a young engineer at the time, admired what he called the
"zigzag of the new road construction, which," he explained, "unites the whole
into a beautiful and friendly landscape." Only the curve, Baumgartner believed,
could provide the traveler with an ever varying, and thus ever pleasing, perspec
tive. He praised the Strada d'Alemagna not only for its aesthetic qualities, but also
for its ability to transform an unmanageable terrain into an easily navigable route:
an achievement he called "all the more admirable since even here, where earlier
every footstep was impossible, the street is laid in an even width and slope."23 The
connection that Alpine engineers such as Baumgartner made between physical
limitations and aesthetic concerns reflects the ways that new technologies have
been contributingthough far from the onlycauses of environmental,
social, and cultural change and can themselves lead to a new appreciation of
what is beautiful and what is healthy. It was not only new techniques in road
and railway construction that laid the groundwork for the economic and cultural
transformation of Alpine landscapes, but also poetry, medicine, science, and
advertising.
As methods of building railways through mountainous terrain improved, and as
the strength of steam-driven locomotives increased, the possibility of creating a
23Joseph Baumgartner, Die neuesten und vorziiglichsten Kunst-Strafien uber die Alpen, beschrieben aufeiner
Reise durch Osterreich, Steyermark, Kdrnthen, Krain und Tyrol, das Kiistenland und die Lombardie, einem Theil
von Piemont und der sudlichen Schweiz (Vienna: Ferdinand Ullrich, 1834), 101.
railway line linking Vienna with the Empire's main port on the Adriatic, Trieste,
became more compelling. Carlo Ghega presented his revolutionary proposal to
construct a route over the Semmering Mountain in 1844, and the construction
of the Semmering Railway was completed a decade later. This railwayand
the landscape around itwas inscribed into the UNESCO list of World
Heritage Sites in 1998, and was called by the inscription committee "one of
the greatest feats of civil engineering from this pioneering phase of railway build
ing," and an "outstanding technological solution to a major physical problem,"
whose construction made "areas of great natural beauty . . . more easily accessi
ble."24 Its sixteen viaducts and fifteen tunnels, themselves graceful monuments
to human ingenuity, transformed the surrounding landscape by uniting nature
and art. It connected Vienna to Trieste, but also to the villages between, encour
aging commerce, industry, and tourism. A decade later, Austria's second major
alpine railway, the Brennerbahn, connected Innsbruck and Bolzano, in South
Tyrol, by crossing the Brenner pass.25 Semmering would shortly become a
popular destination in its own right. The railway made it easy to reach, but
only the construction of a luxury hotel in the 1880sinterestingly enough, by
the Southern Railway Society itselfmade it an attractive destination for
Vienna's most fashionable society; skiers and hikers joined poets and play
wrightsthe works of Arthur Schnitzler and Peter Altenberg are unthinkable
without it.26
The belief in the power of the mountains to reinvigorate was furthermore con
nected to a newly dominant essentialization of people who lived in the mountains
as fundamentally healthy (despite earlier concerns about cretinism, idiocy, and
alcohol abuse). For all of the rhapsodic literature on the beauty of life closer to
nature unleashed by Rousseau and a group of other, less prominent Swiss
writers in the late eighteenth century, for many Europeans at the beginning of
the nineteenth century, mountain towns were still associated with poverty, mal
nutrition, and isolation.27
24United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization, "Convention Concerning the
Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, World Heritage Committee Report," 22nd
Session, Kyoto, Japan (November 30-December 5, 1998), 27. The application and the International
Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) Advisory Board Evaluation are available online at
http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/785/documents/ (accessed January 22, 2009). On the World
Heritage List, the Semmeringbahn (Austria) appears as number 785 (October 1998).
25 For the sake of brevity, the lands and provinces represented in Parliament, or the Austrian half of
Austria-Hungary, will be referred to here as the Austrian Empire (to distinguish it from the Republic of
Austria). In the context of this paper, the concomitant blurring of the distinction between the pre
Ausgleich Austrian Empire and Austria-Hungary is acceptable.
26Roman-Hans Groger, "Das Siidbahnhotel am Semmeringein besonderer Aspekt der
Siidbahn," in Mit Volldampf in den Siiden. 150 Jahre Siidbahn Wien-Triest, ed. Gerhard Artl, Gerhard
Giirtlich, and Hubert Zenz (Vienna: Osterreichisches Staatsarchiv, 2007), 405-419.
27This trend does not seem to apply to the Dinaric mountain range of southeastern Europe.
Prominent Croatian sociologist Dinko Tomasic is representative of a common, but not universal,
194 ALISON F. FRANK
When Napoleon's survey of the Swiss canton ofValais in 1810 revealed that
nearly six percent of all residents suffered from cretinism, the proverbial
poverty of mountain people seemed to be supported by statistics.28 But
Napoleon's survey only told bourgeois critics what they already knew. Shelly
complained in a letter to a friend of the "degradation of the human species" in
the vicinity of Chamonix, where, he claimed, "people are half deformed or
idiotic." The Baedeker guide to the Savoy Alps noted that the peasantry of the
Aosta valley "appear a squalid and filthy race and are generally stunted or dis
eased." The Murray handbook to Switzerland wrote "it is a remarkable fact
that, amidst some of the most magnificent scenery of the globe, man appears
from a mysterious visitation of disease, in his most degraded and pitiable con
dition. It is in the grandest and most beautiful valleys of the Alps that the maladies
of goitre and cretinism prevail."29 A cursory glance at some of the towns that
would become prominent climatic health resorts in the mid and late nineteenth
century shows that they, too, were hardly centers of prosperity at the century's
outset. This holds true even for Meran, in South Tyrol, which was better
known, more populous, and more accessible than most future air cure towns.
Once the capital of Tyrol, Meran had fallen into poverty as a "provincial town
forgotten by the world." It was ravaged by the wars of the French
Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods and then given to Bavaria by the Peace
of PreBburg in 1805.30 Bad harvests and floods slowed its economic recovery
after its return to Austria in June 1814, as did new customs tariffs imposed on
Tyrolean wine imported into now foreign Bavaria.31 When an outbreak of
cholera swept through the town in the 1820s, this represented not only a low
scorn for the shepherds of the Dinaric range, whose communities had "bred outlaws, guerilla fighters,
mercenaries, military leaders, dynasts, and political terrorists." Dinko Tomasic, "Personality
Development of the Dinaric Warriors," Psychiatry 8 (1945): 449, as cited in Karl Kaser, "Peoples of
the Mountains, Peoples of the Plains: Space and Ethnographic Representation," in Creating the
Other: Ethnic Conflict and Nationalism in Habsburg Central Europe, ed. Nancy Wingfield (New York:
Berghahn Books, 2003), 222. Kaser compares Tomasic's mid-twentieth-century profile with a
much more positive portrayal of the Dinaric Mountain population byjovan Cvijic based on fieldwork
he conducted between 1887 and 1915.
28Four thousand out of70,000. H. Burgi, Z. Supersaxo, and B. Selz, "Iodine Deficiency Diseases in
Switzerland One Hundred Years after Theodor Kocher's Survey: A Historical Review with Some
New Goitre Prevalence Data," Acta Endocrinologica 123 (1990): 577-590; Franz Merke, Geschichte
und Ikonographie des endemischen Kropfes und Kretinismus (Berne: Huber, 1984).
29 As cited in Andrew Beattie, The Alps: A Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006),
93-94.
30Kurort Meran. Den Festgasten der 11. Versammlung deutscher Natuiforscher und Arztegewidmet (Meran:
O.O., V.u.J., ca. 1905), 6 and 41. Many of the towns that were reinvented as "air cure towns" in the
1830s had a major crisis in the 1820s or 1830s preceding the beginning of the tourist industry. Bad
Reichenhall lost two-thirds of its buildings to fire in 1834; much of Mariazell burned to the
ground in 1827.
31Renate Abram, Kurhaus Meran. Ein Blick in die Geschichte der Kurstadt (Bolzano and Vienna:
Tappeiner Verlag, 1999), 7.
COMMOD1FYING MOUNTAIN AIR 195
point in its economic development, but also fit into the image of mountain towns
and villages as sickly, impoverished, and ravaged by disease.
Reports of sickness and poverty continued throughout the nineteenth century,
but their rhetorical dominance was already being interrupted by claims of the
mountains' particularly healthy attributes. "Our Alps," wrote Archduke Johann
of Austria in 1850, "have what I need, they have an unspoiled people, may
God preserve them. The belt that holds these peoples stretches from the Jura to
the Neusiedler Lakeit is, in my mind, the best in our exhausted, antiquated,
spoiled part of the world."32 Archduke Johann had in mind Styrian and
Tyrolian villages and rural communities even smaller and more remote than
sunny Meran. Exposure to the outside world came at a cost: in 1862, Conrad
Ahrens blamed the sudden appearance of anemia in Davos over the course of
the preceding decade on "the increased traffic of Davos villagers with the
outside world and the consequent increase in luxury of the female sex."33 A
woman accustomed to the Alpine way of life, he implied, was rugged; one
spoiled by the delicacy of the cosmopolitan lady would indulge in the weakness
characteristic of the anemic. The conviction that mountain dwellers embodied
certain specific characteristics, whether laudable or not, stretched over a territory

much larger than the central Alpine range. Historians of the Pyrenees, the
Carpathians, the Caucasus, and the Julian Alps have all pointed to the essentiali
zation of highlanders as a critical component of "the articulation of national dis
tinctions."34 All over Europe, mountain people were perceived to be shaped by
the landscape in which they livedlike the mountains, they were rugged and
strong: according to the author of a guide to the alpine pilgrimage site of
Mariazell, "The beautiful, healthy race that one finds here is the greatest proof
of the good location and the rarity of illnesses."35 One 1857 author contrasted
the simple children of the mountains with the story of a young boy in
Germany who attempted suicide out of sheer boredom. "Here in the mountains
there may be less vain egocentricity, but in exchange more common sense and
open-hearted sincerity."36 These authors shared a general conviction that all
Europeans could save themselves from filth, intrigue, depression, and disease
through exposure to the mountains: "One breathes freely, and one imagines
himself to be free, since one is raised up so high above others," Archduke
Johann wrote.37
32Johann von Habsburg, Der Brandhofer und seine Hausfrau, 3rd ed. (Graz: Leykam, 1982).
33 Conrad-Ahrens, "Balneologische Spaziergange," 82.
34 Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France & Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1989), 271.
35 Marian Sterz, Grundrifi einer Geschichte der Entstehung und Vergrdfierung der Kirche und des Ortes
Maria-Zell (Vienna: n.p., 1819), 19.
36Heinrich Nowohracky, ed.,Jubilaums-Festbluhten zurfrommen Erinnerung an den Gnadenort Maria
Zell (Vienna: n.p., 1857), 61.
37Zeitschrijt des deutschen und oesterreichischen Alpenvereins 45 (1914): 138.
196 ALISON F. FRANK
And so, by the time Spengler began advocating the salubrity of Davos, the
mountains had been redefined, populated with a newly "healthy" strain of indig
enous Europeans, and criss-crossed with the beginnings of an ever-expanding
network of roads, railways, and hiking huts. His health resort in Davos became
not only theoretically attractive, but also logistically practical thanks to a dramatic
improvement in transportation and communication networks in alpine regions.
Even after the introduction of a single-gauge railroad, of course, Davos remained
relatively inaccessible. The journey of Mann's protagonist, Hans Castorp, begins
in Hamburg, crosses the southern German plateau by rail, then proceeds by ship
across Lake Constance. From there Castorp travels by carriage to Rorschach,
where he boards another train to the small Alpine station of Landquart, where,
"after a long and windy wait in a spot devoid of charm," he switches to a
narrow-gauge train to proceed up the mountain. All of this in the fifth decade
of the resort's popularity.38
Other alpine sanatoria, however, were thrust into the center of tourist traffic
when they became connected to major railroad arteriesthe classic example
being the resort town of Semmering, on a mountain pass south of Vienna,
and, since 1854, one of many stops on the southern railway that connected the
Austrian capital with its only major port, the Adriatic city of Trieste. Thanks to
improvements in infrastructure and increases in leisure time, the nineteenth
century also saw an upsurge in tourism, travel, and athletic leisure activities
among members of the middle and working classes. That much of this tourism
involved city and town dwellers retiring, however temporarily, to the country
side, and that, in the second half of the nineteenth century, many of those tourists
chose to direct their vacation travels to the Alps, derived in part from the popu
larity of balneary medicine and from the fact that "early vacationers went more in
search of health than of pleasure."39 That tourists in the second half of the nine
teenth century came to the Alps not only for physical cures, but also for spiritual
rebirth, relaxation, sports, and inspiration, was only possible after a gradual shift in
understanding and evaluating the aesthetic and cultural importance of mountains
themselves that had occurred over the previous two centuries. Each of these
trendsdevelopments in climatology and chemistry, in transportation technol
ogy and infrastructure, in tourism and leisure, in balneology and public health,
and in cultural representations of Alpine spacecontributed to a new promi
nence of the commercial, medicinal, and spiritual value of mountain air as an
intangible public good. It was, nevertheless, also a good that was only available
in certain placesplaces to which certain people had more access than others.
The air may have been a public good, but the opportunity to sojourn in an
alpine sanatorium was not a universal entitlement.
38Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg (Berlin: Fischer, 1995), 9.

39Bernard, Rush to the Alps, 67.
The invention of the high-altitude sanatorium represented a radical reordering

of medical science and conventional wisdom about the relative benefits and
dangers of cold, dry, rarified air. Those early experiments contributed to a trans
formation of the upper Alps from impoverished and neglected peripheries to the
center of a booming sports and fitness-based industry. They built on a tremendous
increase in the value of the fresh mountain air of the lower Alpine region that pre
ceded Spengler's reinvention of Davos. Throughout the nineteenth century,
princes and chancellors, writers and artists, and even workers and artisans fled
Europe's overcrowded cities in search of good, fresh mountain air that they
hoped would restore their health, strength, even sanity. The romantic celebration
of the countryside that emerged in this era of urbanization and concentration of
industry in metropolitan Europe converged with a growing conviction that phys
ical health and mental health were intrinsically connected. No place seemed to
offer the tired, sick, and weary a starker contrast to the dissolute pleasures and pol
luted streets of the city than the mountain region that ran through the very heart
of Europefor, unlike the seaside, whose fresh air was also touted in the same
period, it was sparsely populated and, at least initially, not yet overrun with
other urban refugees. The concept of clean mountain air, in juxtaposition with
concerns about urban industry and air pollution, can help to tease out central
Europeans' growing concern with the effects that their surroundings had on
their physical health and mental well-being, and with the effects human activity
had on the landscape.
Mountain regions are often treated as borderlands that occupy what Patrice
Dabrowski has called "isolated, provincial, peripheral location[s]."40 In the long
nineteenth century, however, the Alps were at the very center of enormous lit
erary and physical activity. From the intellectual feat of redefining beauty to
the hard physical labor of building mountain roads and railways; from the eco
nomic instrumentalization of mountain water, minerals, and even air for medicinal
purposes to the missionary labors of teachers and preachers sent to the highlands,
Europeans invested enormous amounts of time and energy into claiming moun
tainous environments as useful, hospitable, and safe for human enterprise.
The lowlands, in contrast, may have been the home of industry, but they were
also, in the words of Theodor Fontane, "barren, valueless swampland."41
Frederick II's draining of the Prussian flatlands in the mid-eighteenth century
had been slowed down by annual outbreaks of deadly fevers; his doctors reported
there was little they could do, since this was "marshy, malarial terrain."42 If, in the
1750s, Frederick's response to the association between lowlands, miasma, and
40Patrice Dabrowski, "'Discovering' the Galician Borderlands: The Case of the Eastern
Carpathians," Slavic Review 64, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 380.
41 David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany
(London: Jonathan Cape, 2006), 26.
42Ibid., 34.
198 ALISON F. FRANK
illness was to drain the moors to make way for agriculture, the bourgeois central
European's response one hundred years later was to leave the lowlands and travel
up, up, and away to where the air was pure. At issue in Alpine tourism, therefore,
were not only questions of public health and disease transmission, but also a sense
of the utility of nature: what kinds of landscapes could be productively used to
improve the human condition?
It was only after the mountains became accessible to greater numbers of
Europeans that their place in the broader cultural landscape of modern Europe
became transformed. The inaccessibility of their destinations was at the heart of
mountaineers' satisfaction in reaching them. Not so the tourist, who demanded
roads, railways, marked paths, benches, huts, inns, amusements for the evenings,
refreshments, and protection from inclement weather. The real transformation of
the Alpine landscape, therefore, emerged not directly from the so-called discov
ery of the Alps, but from the crowding of the Alps.
In 1867, the same year that the first sanatorium was built in Davos, an author in
the Saturday Review complained, "It is not ten years since mountaineering became
a fashion, and already the Alps are used up. There is now hardly a peak worth
doing in Switzerland or Savoy which has not been 'done.'" Two decades later,
Oscar Wilde quipped that Mont Blanc at sunset "flushes like a rose: with
shame perhaps at the prevalence of tourists."43 This overcrowding soon directed
some adventurous British travelers to the Carpathian Mountains in search of a
more rugged and genuine "escape [from] the masses at home."44 But even the
Carpathians, which separated Hungary from the Austrian province of Galicia
(now in Poland and Ukraine), were vulnerable to the phenomenal increase in
alpine traffic. As travel writer Menie Muriel [Dowie] Norman (1867-1945) dis
covered to her chagrin when she spent six months in Austrian Galicia in 1890, "At
the north-western end of the Karpathian chain, the show-end, called the Tatra
Mountains, there are beautiful lakes, immense waterfalls, and in fact, if rumour
speaks true, the regulation 'grand' sort of scenery. Also there are health resorts,
troops of lungy invalids, healthy climbing tourists, guides, and carved paper
knives. On the whole, I preferred to dispense with the lakes rather than have
them and suffer their accompaniments."45 Dowie's complaint reflects a new set
of associations with typical mountain landscapesalong with "regulation
'grand' scenery" come crowds of people coughing, or hiking, or coughing
and hiking, but in either case, also corresponding (and using small delicate
knives to open letters), and generally cluttering the landscape. The writing of
43Both quotations from Lily Ford, "Relocating an Idyll: How British Travel Writers Presented the
Carpathians, 18621912," Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing2, no. 2 (2001):
53 and 59.
44Ibid., 59.
45Menie Muriel [Dowie] Norman, A Girl in the Karpathians, 5th ed. (London: George Philip,
1892), 31.
lettersand, more particularly, postcardshad become one of the defining fea

tures of Alpine tourismto the dismay of some. One visitor complained that
postcard fever denigrated the Alpine pilgrimage site of Mariazell, writing, in
1907, "If only the nerve-wracking specter of postcard-sport didn't follow you
even into this pure Alpine air. Ach, I'd like to throw whoever it was that let
this genie out of the bottle back to PfefferlandV'46 Alpine tourism was, however,
a fundamentally social activity that involved not only interacting with locals
andperhaps more importantly in the more prestigious spasother tourists,
but also in communicating with peers left at home.
There were cases of air being literally bottled and soldbut generally speaking,
air is, itself, non-rival and non-excludable, the classic example of a public good.
Once the air in a particular place is imagined to be better than the air in another
place, however, some element of excludability is introduced: access to air was ulti
mately dependent on access to landthat is, private property-above which it
circulated. Village mayors, budding entrepreneurs, innkeepers, and hoteliers
anticipated that travelers wishing to inhale mountain air would find that their
excursions required accommodation and nourishment, and they reacted accord
ingly. As the clean air of the Alpine region gained in value, regional advertising
copy changed accordingly. Typical of the new formulae that appeared in scores
of guidebook advertisements in the late nineteenth century was that of the
Rosenlaubad, in the Bernese Oberland, 4,094 feet above sea level, that promised
"fine air," in addition to the more traditional "lovely scenery and internal
comfort."47 The curative properties of mountain areas were extolled not only
in the central Alps, but also in the Carpathians, which separated Austria's Polish
provinces from Hungary, as well as outside Europe in the Andes, the Rocky
Mountains, the highlands ofjava, and elsewhere.48
46"Eine Blitzwallfahrt nach Maria Zell," Lambach, May 17, 1907, newspaper clipping (the title of
the newspaper is unfortunately not included), with marginalia in Othmar Wonisch's hand. Stiftsarchiv
Sankt Lambrecht, St. Lambrecht, Austria, unlabeled carton: Mariazell. Note: this quotation proved
difficult to translate. "Pfefferland" was used idiomatically to indicate a place far, far awaybut it
was also a play on Cayenne, the capital of French Guyana, where France maintained a penal
colony from the mid-nineteenth until the mid-twentieth century.
47This advertisement can be found in a special advertising section appended to Hermann Alexander
Berlepsch and Johann Georg Kohl, Switzerland and the Principal Parts of Southern Germany (Leipzig:
H. A. Berlepsch, 1873).
48According to historian ofjapan, Karen Wigen, "Whether through the Boy Scouts in Britain, the
heimat movement in Germany, or the American hiking clubs that multiplied after the Civil War,
rugged country was increasingly cast as a place to fortify both physical strength and native-place
prideand, by implication, to enhance young people's fitness for imperial rule." Wigen,
"Discovering the Japanese Alps," 4. For a list of appropriate alpine curatorial across several continents,
see Lindsay, The Climatic Treatment of Consumption, 55. While his focus is on water cures, Ericjennings's
Curing the Colonizers: Hydrotherapy, Climatology, and French Colonial Spas gives a sense of the geographic
dispersion of spa towns across the globe, taking his readers from the mountains of Guadeloupe, to
Tunisia, Madagascar, and Reunion Island. Eric Jennings Curing the Colonizers: Hydrotherapy,
Climatology, and French Colonial Spas (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2006).
200 ALISON F. FRANK
In the late nineteenth century, thanks in part to the qualities of their air, moun
tains became a refuge to any who sought purity, peace, and good health. A young
Otto von Bismarck visited the Austrian mountain spa, Mitterbad, known for it
"aromatic mountain air," hoping it would restore his severely damaged self-con
fidence following the coarse rejection of his courtship of a fellow Junker's daugh
ter.49 Henrik Ibsen summered in the Tyrolian mountains to escape the oppressive
heat of Rome and Munich.50 German poet Christian Morgenstern, who, as a
child, contracted tuberculosis from his mother before she died of the disease,
was sent by his doctors in Berlin first to Davos and then to the mountains of
South Tyrol in the hopes of curing his "lung ailment." In a letter to a friend
back in Germany, he praised the "good air" he found in Meran, claiming the
weather could not help but be "gay."51 These examples are illustrative of three
of the most common reasons that central Europeans were drawn to the Alps in
the second half of the nineteenth century: in search of a cure from disease
(most commonly tuberculosis, but also asthma, other chronic respiratory ailments,
heart problems, obesity, syphilis, and a wide assortment of other ills); an escape
from the stultifying air of bustling cities; or a fresh environment in which to rein
vent themselves.
The intrusion of urban visitors into what they perceived to be previously iso
lated areas was not, however, a one-sided process in which locals were the passive
objects of outsiders' civilizing zeal. Rather, mountain residents themselves partici
pated in a redefinition of the value of their landand the air they breathedto
their own benefit. This is what made the "commodification" of Alpine air possi
ble. The wooing of visitorsprominent and anonymous alikeconstituted a
revolutionary reevaluation of this spacethe aesthetics of the landscape and
the worth of natural resources including clean air. By the last quarter of the nine
teenth century, changes in the fields of medical science, exploration, transpor
tation infrastructure, and advertising had all contributed to a new accessibility
of and interest in the Alps.
The culmination of all these trends was the Alpine sanatorium, or air cure
town. The process of turning the Alps into a space shared by the people who
lived there and tourists who wanted to breathe freely and imagine themselves
to be free was a reciprocal one, not one imposed from outside. When Alpine
spa towns whose livelihood was based on a continual supply of the bored,
sickly, and stifled sold good health and good spirits, they were inviting outsiders
to partake of the natural wealth that surrounded them. They sold this natural
wealth to urban visitors who slept in hotel rooms, rented coaches, ate in
49Dietmar Grieser, Im Rosengarten. Eine literarische Spurensuche in Sudtirol (Frankfurt: Insel, 1999),
214. Lothar Gall, Bismarck, der weisse Revolutions (Frankfurt: Propylaen, 1980), 47.
50Edmund Gosse, Henrik Ibsen (New York: Scribner, 1917), 282.
51 Grieser, Im Rosengarten, 13.
restaurants, visited panorama shows, and purchased postcards, guidebooks, and

souvenirs.
And, like Spengler, they sold not only natural wealth, but alsowith
increasing confidence thanks to advances in medical sciencegood health.
The reconceptualization of the Alps as healthy coincided with a reinvigoration
of spa-culture in general in the early nineteenth century. Taking the waters
was a long-standing tradition, but not one pursued the same way across time.
The fashionable English seaside resort of the eighteenth century and its successors
in France, Germany, and the rest of the continent that together constituted the
"modern spa culture" that reached its apogee in the nineteenth century, were
products, according to David Blackbourn, of "the age of absolutism,
Enlightenment, and commercial revolution."52 With the emergence of
modern balneology, however, taking the waters became medically sanctioned
with renewed authority.53 The publication of Emil Osann's Physikalisch-medici
nische Darstelhmg der bekannten Heilquellen der vorziiglichsten Lander Europas
(.Physical-Medical Description of the Known Spas in the Most Excellent Lands of
Europe) in Berlin in 1829 marked only the first of decades' worth of academic,
medical, and scientific study into the healing properties of water and minerals
available through springs and other localized natural sources. In the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, Europe's most famous seaside resorts and spa towns
(including Spa in Belgium, Bath in southwestern England, and Carlsbad/
Karlsbad/Karlovy Vary and Marienbad/Marianske Lazne in Bohemia) depended
on restorative properties of water gathered from a local spring. There was nothing
revolutionary, then, about the notion of the spa town itself.
But contemporary physicians' handbooks demonstrate that "modern balneol
ogy" became, in the words of an 1898 spa almanac, "evermore convinced that the
airthe climateof a cure town, of all the factors among the available remedies,
in every circumstance and at all times, exercises the greatest influence over the
whole person and must be considered above all else in the choice of the location
of a cure."54 The invention of the air cure town in the second half of the nine
teenth century is perhaps the most striking example of the commodification of
52David Blackbourn, "Fashionable Spa Towns in Nineteenth-Century Europe," in Water, Leisure,

and Culture: European Historical Perspectives, ed. Susan Anderson and Bruce Tabb (Oxford and
New York: Berg, 2002), 10.
53Balneology itself predates the nineteenth century by half a millennium. The founding father of
balneology is Gentile da Foligno (ca. 1300-1348), whose medical tracts on the therapeutic use of
baths continued to be published into the seventeenth century. In the Middle Ages, notions of the
therapeutic use of baths were based as much on balancing and exploiting humors as on the water's
mineral content. Frank Fiirbeth, Heilquellen in der deutschen Wissensliteratur des Spatmittelalters. Zur
Genese und Funktion eines Paradigmas der Wissensvermittlung am Beispiel des "Tractatus de balneis naturalibus"
von Felix Hemmerli und seiner Rezeption (Wiesbaden: Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 2004), 8384, 196.
54 Bader-Almanack. Mittheilungen der Bader, Luftkurorte und Heilanstalten in Deutschland, Oesterreich, der
Schweiz und den angrenzenden Gebieten fur Aerzte und Heilbediiiftige, 7th ed. (Berlin: Rudolf Mosse,
1898).
202 ALISON F. FRANK
mountain air. Some of these towns were, like Davos, at high altitudes, while
others, like Meran, were at moderate altitudes. Well over 100 towns and
regions added "Switzerland" to their names in the nineteenth centurymany
of them to lend credence to their claims to be air cure towns. "Holsteinische
Schweiz" in northernmost Germany is an example of one of these; at its
highest point, the Switzerland of Holstein reaches 164 meters (537 feet).
The popularity of alpine air cure towns emerged from a combination of the
appeal of the sublime mountains with changing notions of the difference
between polluted and healthy air. The belief in the malevolence of bad airin
polluted, disease-ridden miasmagoes back to antiquity and has endured mul
tiple transformations and adaptations. In antiquity, the Greek word miasma
derived from the word miaino, to dye, in reference to the tarnished blood shed
during a crime. Only with Hippocrates did the notion of miasma move away
from sacred notions of purification (in connection with diseases such as epilepsy)
to the rational-medical notion that impurities carried in the air contributed to the
spread of disease.55 In the Middle Ages, outbreaks of plague were attributed to
"bad, corrupted air."56 Even in the early nineteenth century, the greatest
source of pollution was, according to Peter Thorsheim, "miasma: gases produced
by decomposing vegetables, garbage, corpses, and excrement," and until the
1870s and 1880s, "wild nature was suspected to be a source of deadly miasma,
and coal smoke was frequently credited with providing an antidote to it."57
Only in the last decades of the nineteenth century did coal displace organic efflu
via as the major culprit blamed for pollution; even then, pollution continued to
be associated with poor sanitation in central European cities. Berlepsch's guide to
Switzerland and southern Germany noted in 1873, for example, that "the sanitary
condition of Munich was in ill repute" for many years.58 While the reader may be
amused by historian David Barnes's assertion that "In the late summer of 1880 in
Paris, death was in the air, and it smelled like excrement," Parisians who lived
through the "Great Stink of 1880" were "panic-stricken" and "anguished."59
55Jacques Jouanna, "Air, miasme et contagion a l'epoque d'Hippocrate et survivance des miasmas
dans la medecine posthippocratique," in Air, miasmes et contagion: Les epidemies dans I'Antiquite et au
Moyen Age, ed. Sylvie Bazin-Tacchella, Danielle Queruel, and Evelyne Samama (Langres:
Dominique Gueniot, 2001), 9-28.
56Joelle Ducos, "L'air corrumpu dans les traits de peste," in Air, miasmas et contagion, ed. Bazin
Tacchella, Queruel, and Samama, 87.
57Peter Thorsheim, Inventing Pollution: Coal, Smoke, and Culture in Britain since 1800 (Athens, OH:
Ohio University Press, 2006), 195.
58Berlepsch and Kohl, Switzerland and the Principal Parts of Southern Germany, 38.
59David Barnes, The Great Stink of Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Struggle against Filth and Germs
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 12. Barnes notes that there was nothing
new about the conviction that certain types of bad "smells represented an urgent danger to public
health," 13. Smell itself, however, was not always an indication of malevolent forces at work.
According to Gisela Reineking von Bock, "The Middle Ages loved strong smells less for cosmetic
than for medical reasons, since they were seen as salutary and as preventive of infectious disease.
Increasing concerns about industrialization and pollution and long-standing

theories about the effects of contaminated air versus clean air on health converged
with a nineteenth-century transformation in the nature of tourism from a pastime
of the privileged elite to an activity enjoyed by the middle classes.60 This conflu
ence contributed to an increase in interest in (and visits to) spas of all types in both
the mountains and the plains: visitors to spas in France, for example, increased
from fewer than 100,000 in the 1840s to around one million annually in the
late nineteenth century.61 The conviction that the air one breathed and its
quality played a critical role in maintaining good health contributed to the popu
larity of a host of newer "Luftkurorte," or "air cure towns," and "klimatische
Kurorte," or "climatic cure towns," in which it was the air itself that was treated
as a medicinal product.
The creation of an air cure town often began by building on older cures based
on water, milk, whey, or wine. The first recorded visitor who came to Meran
specifically for a cure (in his case, for hoarseness) was an Austrian diplomat sta
tioned in Brazil, later the ambassador to Constantinople, Bartolomaus
Sturmeralthough it was the local grapes that drew him to Meran in 1827.62
In the case of Davos, Conrad-Ahrens credited the whey and milk.63 In 1836,
the personal physician of the Princess Mathilde von Schwarzenberg (1804
1886) brought his frail patient to Meran. Having witnessed what he believed
to be the local population's striking resistance to the plague, the following
year he published a medical paper crediting the good climatic conditions of
Meran along with its milk, whey, grapes, and mineral waters.64 In 1837, a "cli
matic health resort" was created in the town. Soon tourists' interest in the
town and the region picked up; guidebooks recommended its "comfortable
and revitalizing air, which proves salubrious to all, and particularly to invalids
of the breast."65 Meran's Mayor (Valentin Haller) noted with pride that
The more intrusive the odor, the more it was preferred." Gisela Reineking von Bock ed., Bader, Duft
und Seife. Kulturgeschichte der Hygiene (Cologne: Kunstgewerbemuseum der Stadt Koln, 1976), 52.
60Juliane Mikoletzky, "Zur Sozialgeschichte des osterreichischen Kurorts im 19. Jahrhundert.
Kurlisten und Kurtaxordnungen als sozialhistorische Quelle," Mitteilungen des Instituts fur
osterreichische Geschichtsforschung 99, nos. 3-4 (1991): 394.
61 Douglas Peter Mackaman, "The Landscape of a Ville d'Eau: Public Space and Social Practice at
the Spas of France, 1850-1890," Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Western Societyfor French History
20 (Riverside, CA: University of California, Riverside Press, 1993), 282.
62Abram, Kurhaus Meran, 9. Meran continues to advertise the medicinal benefits of its "Grape
Cure." http://www.suedtirol-it.com/deutsch/traubenkur.htm (accessed April 1, 2007).
63Meyer-Ahrens, "Balneologische Spaziergange," x.
64Johann Nepomuk Huber, Uber die Stadt Meran in Tirol, ihre Umgebung und ihr Klima nebst
Bemerkungen uber Milch-, Molken- und Traubenkur und nahe Mineralquellen (Vienna: Strau, 1837).
Mathilde von Schwarzenberg was the sister of Prime Minister Felix von Schwarzenberg. Paralyzed
since childhood, she achieved prominence as the first patient miraculously cured (of her paralysis)
by the priest Alexander of Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsflirst.
65"Diese behagliche, erquickende Luft bewahrt sich Allen und gesonders Brustleidenden als
heilsam." Johann Jakob Staffler, Das deutsche Tirol und Vorarlberg, topographisch, mit geschichtlichen
204 ALISON F. FRANK
"tourism for... air-baths" had come to represent a significant segment of the loca
economy by 1850.66 While the number of annual visitors initially increased
slowly from 380 in 1850 to 640 nine years later, it then grew quickly to 1,60
by 1867, and doubled again in the following year to more than 3,100a
increase attributable to the opening of the Brennerbahn and to the appointmen
of a physician to oversee cures. Given a general tendency for dramatic increases in
tourist traffic in the first years following the creation of new railroad lines, mor
credit can be given to the former than to the latter factor. Capacity, which ha
been limited in the 1840s, when guests could choose between six apartments
increased by more than 800 percent to more than fifty apartments in 1861.6
In the brief period between 1867 and 1870, tourist traffic doubled againthi
time largely thanks to the Empress of Austria's decision to spend the summe
of 1866 in Meran along with her daughters.
The Empress of Austria was only one of a large number of European noblemen
and noblewomen to visit Meran in the middle of the nineteenth century. Alon
with Princess von Schwarzenberg, the Empress Marie Louise (Napoleon's wife)
the Emperor Ferdinand, and numerous archdukes and archduchesses of the
House of Habsburg along with crowned heads from Wiirttemberg, Prussia,
and Belgium, all visited Meran and its environs and contnbuted to the town's
transformation into a fashionable destination.68 Meran was too expensive and
Davos was too remote for some, but by the 1880s, there were scores of alpine
air cure towns to fit many different budgets and many different ailments.
It was the air that drew visitors to these towns; guidebooks were full of descrip
tions of "aromatic mountain air," "comfortable and revitalizing air," "mild,
ozone-rich air," "fine air." Air also figured directly into economic transaction
between local businesses and visitors.69 Meran's Kurhaus boasted not only a
cafe-restaurant, but also "pneumatic apparatus" available to visitors who bough
"subscriptions" for a week, or at discounted rates for periods between one an
six months.70 A survey of the advertisement section of contemporary guidebook
reveals how frequently air featured prominently in marketing efforts
Bemerkungen, vol. 2 (Innsbruck: Felician Rauch, 1847), 618. Staffler notes that Meran had 219 hous
and 2,440 residents, 626.
66Kurort Meran, 43-44.
67Ibid., 45-51. In the 1820s, Meran had 2,400 residents. Abram, Kurhaus Meran, 7.
68Abram, Kurhaus Meran, 9.
69Kurort Meran, 42; Karl Baedeker (Firm), Siidbaiern, Tirol und Salzburg. Osterreich, Steiermark
Kamten, Krain und Kiistenland. Handbuch fur Reisende, 23rd ed. (Leipzig: Verlag von Karl Baedeker
1888), 277, 93. Why hoteliers would boast of ozone-rich air is something of a mystery
Experiments in 1851, 1854, and 1863 showed that ozone adversely affected breathing, caused che
pains, irritated mucous membranes, and killed small animals (including mice and rabbits) exposed
to ozonized air for one hour. Mordecai Rubin, "The History of Ozone: The Schonbein Period
18391868," Bulletin of Historical Chemistry 26, no. 1 (2001): 48.
70Baedeker, Siidbaiern, Tirol und Salzburg, 276.
A sanatorium in Bad Reichenhall (near Salzburg) offered among its cure remedies
"mild ozone-rich air" as well as "inhalations."71 Pension Griitli, in Seelisberg in
the Uri Canton, advertised its "magnificent, very sheltered situation above the
Riitli" and its "purest mountain air" along with the "romantic view." The
Cure-Establishment Sonnenberg auf Seelisberg, a mere 2,601 feet above sea
level, offered "charming walks through fragrant pine-forests and leafy woods to
surprising points of view."72 One enterprising businessman found a way to sell
mountains to those who wished to see their restorative powers outlast their
visit to the Alpine town of Mariazell by advertising Styrian Silver Fir Tree
Perfume, whose ozone content was "guaranteed to bring the fresh, healthy
mountain air into your home."73 Mariazell was a pilgrimage town, not a spa
town, and this entrepreneur's claims may have relied as much on the precedent
of local purveyance of holy water as it did on medical practice.
Indeed, as early as the late eighteenth century in German-speaking Europe and
the July Monarchy in France, spa towns had "zealously sought to rid themselves of
their traditional association with quackery and aristocratic sociability" by trans
forming themselves into "highly medicalized environments."74 In keeping
with this trend, new mountain sanatoria and inns tried to bulwark their claims
by keeping physicians on staff or simply by providing testimonials from medical
experts. Gries and Bolzano were designated by Professor Oertel in Munich as par
ticularly suited to the treatment of invalids with circulatory troubles. Gries was an
example of a "Terrain Spa [Terrain-Kurort]," which, Baedeker explained, meant
that "the paths [Wege] are classified and marked according to their pitch, to aim
at the strengthening of the heart muscle and the control of respiration through
appropriately regulated mountaineering in conjunction with proper diet."75
Claims of individual spa towns' curative properties advertised by hotel owners
tried to market one place over another. The effectiveness of the whole industry,
however, was verified by the newest medical literature, including a physicians'
guide to "Baths, Air Cure Towns, and Sanatoria" in Germany, Austria, and
Switzerland designed to help physicians choose the right destination to suit the
illness, physical strength, and psychological state of their patients. Published in
eleven editions between 1882 and 1910, this handbook asserted that "we
know today that a sizeable array of illnesses can only be cured through a
change of air [Luftwechsel]" and that "the main element of any climate is its air.
In it and through it almost all of the physical-chemical procedures take place
71 Ibid., 93.
72 AH advertisements can be found in a special advertising section appended to Berlepsch and Kohl,
Switzerland and the Principal Parts of Southern Germany.
73 Hans Rogl, Maria-Zett. Geschichte und Beschreibung des beruhmten Wallfahrtsortes (Maria-Zell:
Selbstverlage des Verfassers, 1907).
74Mackaman, "The Landscape of a Ville d'Eau," 282.
75Baedeker, Siidbaiern, Tirol und Salzburg, 2645.
206 ALISON F. FRANK
that account for the above-mentioned effects of the climate on humans."76 The
skill of the physician was in his ability to determine correctly what type of climate
(mild or raw) and what type of air (ratified? moist? dry? salty?) was required for the
particular condition of any given patient.
Towns such as Meran recognized that advertising air was a profitable enterprise
and invested some of the profits derived from marketing their town's fresh air,
sunshine, and spectacular views in additional infrastructure that served, in turn,
to make the town more attractive to guests. A tourist commission levied a tax
of one florin for each guest during the season as well as a fee for locals who
visited the cure salon, using the revenue to support musical performances in
town; create a town bank; improve the roads; build three concert pavilions, a
library, a new Kurhaus, and a theater; install gas lighting (1873); and place adver
tisements for the town in various newspapers.77 To give a sense of the magnitude
of these investments, the annual budget to pay for concerts by the local town band
was a modest thirty florins in 1840, but 17,000 florins in 1891 (a 567-percent
increase).78 David Blackbourn tells us, "the spa reproduced an urban way of
life in a rural setting," offering "in concentrated form . . . the 'world of
goods.'"79 Although visitors to spa towns were escaping the diseases of urban
centers and modern civilization, they did not always want to escape all their
pleasures.
Of course, by visiting the mountains and by building roads, railroads, and,
eventually, chairlifts and hotels, city dwellers and plains dwellersand the moun
tain dwellers who wanted to profit from their patronagetransformed the land
scape of the Alps both visually and ecologically. Archduke Johann, who believed
that the mountain peoples' isolation from the "spoiled, antiquated world" was a
key to their happiness, was also instrumental in making those same mountains
more accessible than ever before. It was he who ensured that the Vienna
Trieste railway would be built over the Semmeringand it is surely no coinci
dence that it also ran by an iron-smelting factory that he owned in the mountain
town of Vordernberg. Even where outsiders transformed, they also hoped to be
transformed by an environment that was now opened to everyone from all over
Europeserious mountaineers and casual hikers, pilgrims and proletarians, tour
ists and invalids.
It is also an example of the way in which the value of landthe aesthetics of

landscape and even the worth of natural resources we now presume to be inher
ently valuablewere constructed and consequently subject to change. In the
nineteenth century, central Europe was riddled with paradoxical environments
76 Bader-Almanack, 5960.
77Kurort Meran, 43-44, 53.
78Ibid., 49.
79Blackbourn, "Fashionable Spa Towns,"
COMMODIFY1NG MOUNTAIN AIR 207
that were simultaneously described as rich and poor, and praised for technological
advances and derided as socially backward. The Alps represent one of the best
examples of such an environment whose most characteristic physical features
were imbued with changing value. In the nineteenth century, one of those
most fundamental qualities was that most intangible of earthly goods: clean air.
Harvard University

German Forests

Загружено:

Сведения о документе

Оригинальное название

Авторское право

Доступные форматы

Поделиться этим документом

Поделиться или встроить документ

Параметры публикации

Этот документ был вам полезен?

Это неприемлемый материал?

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

German Forests

Загружено:

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Conference Group for Central European History of the American Historical Association

The Air Cure Town: Commodifying Mountain

6J. Hauri, "Historical: Davos as Commune and Health-Resort," in Davos as Health-Resort: A

12Hauri, "Historical: Davos," 13.

But, like so many revolutionaries exposed to the glare of historical revision,

disappointmentsPiihringer and Zulehner added their calling cards to a little

certain specific characteristics, whether laudable or not, stretched over a territory

38Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg (Berlin: Fischer, 1995), 9.

The invention of the high-altitude sanatorium represented a radical reordering

lettersand, more particularly, postcardshad become one of the defining fea

restaurants, visited panorama shows, and purchased postcards, guidebooks, and

52David Blackbourn, "Fashionable Spa Towns in Nineteenth-Century Europe," in Water, Leisure,

Increasing concerns about industrialization and pollution and long-standing

It is also an example of the way in which the value of landthe aesthetics of

Вам также может понравиться