The environmental historian Tait Keller offers, with his first book, impressive insights about the ways the tourism industry, Alpinism, and Alpine clubs altered the Alps not just physically but also, and more importantly, discursively. This thought-provoking and ambitious work explores the paradox that Europe's seemingly peaceful outdoor places were a battleground where competing visions of Germany and Austria clashed. Apostles of the Alps specifies the crucial role of Alpinism for the imagined communities of the Austrian and German nations—in the sense of a Greater Germany, including both countries. Keller shows convincingly that these borderlands were the center of nation-building struggles. While writing the history of this ecoregion, the author rethinks traditional national narratives, while also rethinking the relationship between the center and the periphery in Germany and Austria. Keller demands that German and Austrian history be read in tandem, which is truly often overlooked by historiographers of both countries. He thereby emphasizes the borderland, the Alpine environment, and brings together two national narratives.

Keller achieves this bringing together by telling three interwoven tales crucial to the making of modern Germany and Austria, doing so in a precise and detailed way. First, he provides an account of humans in nature with several clashes among tourists in the Alps—for example, bourgeois against proletarian hikers, male chauvinists against female climbers, Sunday sightseers and skiers against climbing aficionados, Alpinists looking for individual solitude against tourist crowds. Second, he shows how humans shaped nature and brought the modern world with them to the mountains—how outdoor organizations paved the way for greater environmental transformations of the mountains, how tourists’ mass consumption affected the delicate Alpine ecology, and how nature lovers were alarmed when more cable cars, rail lines, and highways traveled up to the heights. Keller points out how the emerging nature preservation movements fought for the mountains as the last “immaculate” nature free from the sins of industry. Finally, he examines nature as a national symbol, depicting how recreational pursuits placed the Alpine periphery at the center of the German nationhood question. Keller shows how the mountains remained sacred for urban Alpine enthusiasts and how they served as “hallowed ground for the secular nation” for these “apostles” of the Alps, which is truly remarkable, because most Germans lived in the North, nowhere near the Alps—and even most Austrians resided in Vienna. The allegiance of the Alps offered, as Keller underlines, a solution to German nationhood dilemmas that went beyond state lines, beyond borders, which became increasingly vague as one wandered over the Alpine frontier. Keller provides valuable insight into how the efforts to open the mountains and foster a Greater German community bound together tourism, the borderlands, and nation-building in a unique way.

The particular research results are not surprising. For example, it is known that in 1874 the German and Austrian Alpine Associations merged into the supranational Deutscher und Österreichischer Alpenverein, and the club presented, in times of a different political situation, ideas of Großdeutschland. The asset of the book lies in the clear and comprehensive illumination of the connections of the discourse lines based on broad and often previously unearthed archive material. The history of the discourses is developed in two chronological parts. The first one, “Opening the Alps, 1860–1918,” analyzes the structural—particularly the economic and environmental—changes to the Eastern Alps in the Gründerzeit, highlighting how bourgeois values of individual and social notions of progress colored the Alps while attempting to use the mountains to meld heritage and geography into a progressive “Greater German” identity. Further, discussions about environmental impact and traditional mountaineering norms are examined in the context of nationalistic discourses. In the last chapter of the first part, Keller reflects on World War I as the crucial turning point in militarized mountaineering ideals (something he did already convincingly before 2016 in an article “The Mountains Roar: The Alps during the Great War,” Environmental History [April 2009]: 253-74). The second part, “Dominating the Alps, 1919–1939,” deals with the aftermath of World War I, when political antagonisms and antisemitism as well as the explosive growth of mass tourism shaped Alpinism. From 1918 on, the borders in the Alps were felt more because they were unwanted between Germany and Austria or/and new in Tyrol between Austria and Italy, which intensified the ideas of annexation. This fact, along with the rhetoric and the “fighting spirit” of Alpinism, was abused by the Nazi regime during the time the Nazis were prohibited in Austria. Keller's study follows the history until the Anschluss in 1938, when the Alps indeed became monuments of Hitler's new order. It is not only at this point that the book proves itself to be well balanced, namely, when it argues against the perspective often taken that Alpinism and conservation groups only nourished Nazism's roots. It stresses, rather, the modern tendencies and multilateral discussions within outdoor organizations.

The clear structure of Apostles of the Alps helps the reader to follow the discursive history in its different threads and different nuances, which Keller shows in detail after his extensive and meticulous archive research that brings to light different, new, and important material. Another merit of Keller's book is the lively writing style, which reflects the author's enthusiasm for the topic and the mountains; the book is also not devoid of humor. Although the individual chapters are well focused on special topics, they always maintain an overview of the surrounding topics and offer careful contextualization in terms of the two countries’ history. Apostles of the Alps will appeal to scholars and students of Austrian and German history, while enriching transnational and environmental studies. It shows, in a fascinating way, that nation-building is not purely discursive, but environmental as well.