Does 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. “This is the case whenever its utility to man is not due to labour. Such are air, virgin soil, natural meadows, &c.”Footnote 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.”Footnote ² Marx's materialist focus on human labor and industrial production made it hard for him to imagine air as a commodity—at 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 commodified—in 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 architects, 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.”Footnote ³ And it made of a “spontaneous produce of Nature,” the rarified 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.Footnote 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 developed 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 transformation 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 others—something that could (or could not) be captured, purchased, sold, and preserved—was, 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 Switzerland—another 10,500 were asked politely, but firmly, to make their homes elsewhere.Footnote ⁵ If he wanted to continue to be welcome in the Swiss Confederation, however, it was essential that Spengler abandon his penchant for rabble-rousing and radical political change.

Once in Zurich, Spengler had a life-changing epiphany—his 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 Davos—a position whose lack of appeal is suggested by the fact that it had been vacant for years.Footnote ⁶ The Davos Valley is in Switzerland's Rhaetian Alps, near the Rätikon subrange, which is considered the geological border between the western and eastern Alps. It runs northeast-southwest for about ten miles at approximately five thousand 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.Footnote ⁷ In the early nineteenth century, the population of the entire valley had reached approximately 1,800 people, and that of the village itself barely one hundred. Valley residents 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 do—what 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 cure—sleeping 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 villagers on whom it could be attempted. In fact, the more he looked, the more 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.Footnote ⁸

Of all possible explanations (occupational, social, cultural), Spengler was convinced that the most plausible was that the local climate protected humans from developing respiratory illness and even cured those who had contracted it elsewhere and come home to die. He consulted with the Zurich physician Conrad Meyer-Ahrens (1813–1872), a well-respected balneologist, about Davos's suitability 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.Footnote ⁹ This was a radical assertion 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 rarified mountain air in the dead of winter went against every medical convention of the day. The methods used in Davos—maximum exposure to open air, especially in the winter time, preferably in the sunshine and at rest, combined with moderate physical exertion, as appropriate—were not unprecedented, but they were revolutionary when applied at high altitude.Footnote 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 “countered beliefs that were hitherto considered axiomatic.”Footnote ¹¹ His book was greeted with a combination of suspicion and contempt due to contemporary beliefs in the danger 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.”Footnote 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, lived—and 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.”Footnote 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 bacillus—a 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 discovery, 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.”Footnote 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 confinement 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 nutrition.”Footnote 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.

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 climatology, 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.Footnote ¹⁶ Spengler's accomplishment also benefited from a broader change in the notion of what constituted polluted, or unhealthy, air—which, 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 forbidding (according to Simon Schama, “the most histrionic versions of seventeenth-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.Footnote ¹⁷ Here, the pioneers of the imagination were poets, literary writers, philosophers, and natural scientists—in 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.Footnote 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 perceive the other.”Footnote ¹⁹ The reevaluation of mountains' poetic worth preceded and made possible the change in practice. What was new about the value of the mountains was not the natural resources they contained—people had struggled to get lumber, salt, ore, and other minerals out of the Alps for centuries—but rather the transformative power of time spent in them—they offered renewed mental and physical health and even spiritual rebirth.

The most celebrated so-called conquerors of the Alps were not poets and thinkers, but rather the mountaineers whose exploits have inspired books that usually featured “conquest” prominently in the title.Footnote 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 represents a great achievement—but one whose effect on the mountaineer was generally 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.Footnote 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, paleontologist, and cofounder of the Austrian Alpine Club, climbed the highest summit of the Großglockner (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. Pühringer and J. Zulehner reached the summit again and found the rods “scattered and broken.”Footnote ²² The drive to leave one's mark on the summit remained undeterred by these disappointments—Pühringer 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 designed—and the many thousands of laborers who built—the 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 construction that literally paved the way for a reinvention of formerly desolate and impoverished regions as potential sources of personal and national wealth, fostering 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, perspective. 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.”Footnote ²³ The connection that Alpine engineers such as Baumgartner made between physical limitations and aesthetic concerns reflects the ways that new technologies have been contributing—though far from the only—causes 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 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 railway—and the landscape around it—was 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 building,” and an “outstanding technological solution to a major physical problem,” whose construction made “areas of great natural beauty . . . more easily accessible.”Footnote 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, encouraging 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.Footnote 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 1880s—interestingly enough, by the Southern Railway Society itself—made it an attractive destination for Vienna's most fashionable society; skiers and hikers joined poets and playwrights—the works of Arthur Schnitzler and Peter Altenberg are unthinkable without it.Footnote ²⁶

The belief in the power of the mountains to reinvigorate was furthermore connected 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, malnutrition, and isolation.Footnote ²⁷

When Napoleon's survey of the Swiss canton of Valais 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.Footnote 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 diseased.” 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 condition. It is in the grandest and most beautiful valleys of the Alps that the maladies of goitre and cretinism prevail.”Footnote 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 Preßburg in 1805.Footnote 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.Footnote ³¹ When an outbreak of cholera swept through the town in the 1820s, this represented not only a low 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 Lake—it is, in my mind, the best in our exhausted, antiquated, spoiled part of the world.”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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 essentialization of highlanders as a critical component of “the articulation of national distinctions.”Footnote ³⁴ All over Europe, mountain people were perceived to be shaped by the landscape in which they lived—like 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.”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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.Footnote ³⁷

And so, by the time Spengler began advocating the salubrity of Davos, the mountains had been redefined, populated with a newly “healthy” strain of indigenous 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.Footnote ³⁸

Other alpine sanatoria, however, were thrust into the center of tourist traffic when they became connected to major railroad arteries—the 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 countryside, 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 popularity of balneary medicine and from the fact that “early vacationers went more in search of health than of pleasure.”Footnote ³⁹ That tourists in the second half of the nineteenth 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 trends—developments in climatology and chemistry, in transportation technology and infrastructure, in tourism and leisure, in balneology and public health, and in cultural representations of Alpine space—contributed to a new prominence 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 places—places 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.

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 transformation 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 preceded 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 physical 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 polluted streets of the city than the mountain region that ran through the very heart of Europe—for, 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].”Footnote ⁴⁰ In the long nineteenth century, however, the Alps were at the very center of enormous literary and physical activity. From the intellectual feat of redefining beauty to the hard physical labor of building mountain roads and railways; from the economic 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 mountainous 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.”Footnote 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.”Footnote ⁴² If, in the 1750s, Frederick's response to the association between lowlands, miasma, and 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 discovery 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.”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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 Ménie Muriel [Dowie] Norman (1867–1945) discovered 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.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Dowie's complaint reflects a new set of associations with typical mountain landscapes—along 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 letters—and, more particularly, postcards—had become one of the defining features of Alpine tourism—to 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 Pfefferland!”Footnote ⁴⁶ Alpine tourism was, however, a fundamentally social activity that involved not only interacting with locals and—perhaps more importantly in the more prestigious spas—other tourists, but also in communicating with peers left at home.

There were cases of air being literally bottled and sold—but 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 ultimately dependent on access to land—that 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 accordingly. 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.”Footnote 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 of Java, and elsewhere.Footnote ⁴⁸

In the late nineteenth century, thanks in part to the qualities of their air, mountains 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 its “aromatic mountain air,” hoping it would restore his severely damaged self-confidence following the coarse rejection of his courtship of a fellow Junker's daughter.Footnote ⁴⁹ Henrik Ibsen summered in the Tyrolian mountains to escape the oppressive heat of Rome and Munich.Footnote 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.”Footnote 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 reinvent themselves.

The intrusion of urban visitors into what they perceived to be previously isolated areas was not, however, a one-sided process in which locals were the passive objects of outsiders' civilizing zeal. Rather, mountain residents themselves participated in a redefinition of the value of their land—and the air they breathed—to their own benefit. This is what made the “commodification” of Alpine air possible. The wooing of visitors—prominent and anonymous alike—constituted a revolutionary reevaluation of this space—the aesthetics of the landscape and the worth of natural resources including clean air. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, changes in the fields of medical science, exploration, transportation 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 restaurants, visited panorama shows, and purchased postcards, guidebooks, and souvenirs.

And, like Spengler, they sold not only natural wealth, but also—with increasing confidence thanks to advances in medical science—good 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.”Footnote ⁵² With the emergence of modern balneology, however, taking the waters became medically sanctioned with renewed authority.Footnote ⁵³ The publication of Emil Osann's Physikalisch-medicinische Darstellung der bekannten Heilquellen der vorzüglichsten Länder 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/Mariánské Lázně 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 balneology” became, in the words of an 1898 spa almanac, “evermore convinced that the air—the climate—of 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.”Footnote ⁵⁴ The invention of the air cure town in the second half of the nineteenth century is perhaps the most striking example of the commodification of 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 century—many 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 air—in polluted, disease-ridden miasma—goes back to antiquity and has endured multiple 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.Footnote ⁵⁵ In the Middle Ages, outbreaks of plague were attributed to “bad, corrupted air.”Footnote 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.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Only in the last decades of the nineteenth century did coal displace organic effluvia 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote ⁵⁹

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.Footnote ⁶⁰ This confluence 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.Footnote ⁶¹ The conviction that the air one breathed and its quality played a critical role in maintaining good health contributed to the popularity 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 stationed in Brazil, later the ambassador to Constantinople, Bartolomäus Stürmer—although it was the local grapes that drew him to Meran in 1827.Footnote ⁶² In the case of Davos, Conrad-Ahrens credited the whey and milk.Footnote 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.Footnote ⁶⁴ In 1837, a “climatic 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.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Meran's Mayor (Valentin Haller) noted with pride that “tourism for . . . air-baths” had come to represent a significant segment of the local economy by 1850.Footnote ⁶⁶ While the number of annual visitors initially increased slowly from 380 in 1850 to 640 nine years later, it then grew quickly to 1,600 by 1867, and doubled again in the following year to more than 3,100—an increase attributable to the opening of the Brennerbahn and to the appointment 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, more credit can be given to the former than to the latter factor. Capacity, which had 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.Footnote ⁶⁷ In the brief period between 1867 and 1870, tourist traffic doubled again—this time largely thanks to the Empress of Austria's decision to spend the summer 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. Along 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 Württemberg, Prussia, and Belgium, all visited Meran and its environs and contributed to the town's transformation into a fashionable destination.Footnote 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 descriptions of “aromatic mountain air,” “comfortable and revitalizing air,” “mild, ozone-rich air,” “fine air.” Air also figured directly into economic transactions between local businesses and visitors.Footnote ⁶⁹ Meran's Kurhaus boasted not only a cafe-restaurant, but also “pneumatic apparatus” available to visitors who bought “subscriptions” for a week, or at discounted rates for periods between one and six months.Footnote ⁷⁰ A survey of the advertisement section of contemporary guidebooks reveals how frequently air featured prominently in marketing efforts. A sanatorium in Bad Reichenhall (near Salzburg) offered among its cure remedies “mild ozone-rich air” as well as “inhalations.”Footnote ⁷¹ Pension Grütli, in Seelisberg in the Uri Canton, advertised its “magnificent, very sheltered situation above the Rütli” 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.”Footnote 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.”Footnote 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 transforming themselves into “highly medicalized environments.”Footnote 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 particularly 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.”Footnote 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 that account for the above-mentioned effects of the climate on humans.”Footnote 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 (rarified? 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 advertisements for the town in various newspapers.Footnote 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).Footnote 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.’”Footnote 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 dwellers—and the mountain dwellers who wanted to profit from their patronage—transformed the landscape 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 Semmering—and it is surely no coincidence 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 Europe—serious mountaineers and casual hikers, pilgrims and proletarians, tourists and invalids.

It is also an example of the way in which the value of land—the aesthetics of landscape and even the worth of natural resources we now presume to be inherently valuable—were constructed and consequently subject to change. In the nineteenth century, central Europe was riddled with paradoxical environments 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.