This voluminous collection of twenty-five essays by European Germanists explores the representation, and representability, of the Alps in the wake of the so-called “spatial turn” or topographische Wende in the humanities and social sciences. The Alps, after all, constitute an enormous geographical space in the heart of Europe, one that has become an increasingly vibrant subject of discourse in the age of modernity, more specifically, ever since Albrecht von Haller published his elaborate poem Die Alpen in 1732. Haller, in effect, laid the groundwork for the narration of this vast and varied mountain range as a geophysical topos that has, in turn, spun a wide range of literary topoi. As a native of Switzerland, like his more scientifically inclined and arguably more influential compatriot Horace-Bénédict de Saussure, Haller was able to appreciate the deeper topographical spatiality of the Alps over their mere affective sublimity. This is another way of saying that Switzerland enjoys a privileged discursive status with respect to its autochthonous geological folds. The neighboring Alpenrepublik Austria, although slightly less fortunate in this regard since its cultural center of gravity has long been situated in metropolitan Vienna, nevertheless yields abundant literary fruits with respect to its own (albeit lower and less glaciated) Alpine heights.
Das Erschreiben der Berge begins with contributions on Haller and the eighteenth century (e.g., also Goethe and Gottsched) and ends with chapters on the contemporary genre of the Alpenkrimi. In between these literary-historical bookends, it proceeds in roughly chronological fashion with discussions of texts and films by the likes of Adalbert Stifter, Arthur Schnitzler, Joseph Roth, Ödön von Horváth, Arnold Fanck, Luis Trenker, Max Frisch, Elfriede Jelinek, and Ilija Trojanow. A handful of essays deal with broader cultural-historical phenomena such as the issue of gender in the practice of alpinism and the question of Swiss and Austrian national identity in relation to their respective Alpine subranges and/or iconized peaks (e.g., the Großglockner). The reader thus has a wide array of authors and topics to choose from—and here is where caution is advised. The quality of the pieces varies as much as the volume's manifold focuses and approaches. Generally speaking, all the chapters are short (approximately ten pages) and do not explore their respective subject matter in article-length depth. As a whole, this book resembles more an assemblage of published conference proceedings than a full-fledged—let alone peer-reviewed—edition of polished essays. Granted, some of the contributions shine, for example Christoph Deupmann's nuanced reading of Gottsched's Die Oberpfalz as a critique of Haller's Die Alpen, Wibke Backhaus's perceptive study of male bonding in nineteenth-century climbing narratives, and Lena Eckert and Silke Martin's filmic and gender-theoretical deliberations on Reinhold Messner in Joseph Vilsmaier's feature film Nanga Parbat. Several other chapters are interesting but leave the reader in want of more detailed analyses. From an Austrian perspective, some of these concern major Viennese authors whom one does not tend to associate with Alpine discourse (e.g., Schnitzler, Roth, and Horváth) and whose entrance into this unfamiliar realm warrants more methodical scrutiny. And, alas, a few amateurish papers, or what seem like solicited Hausarbeiten, also enter the mix. Another serious problem with basically all (except one!) of the contributions is that they fail to acknowledge recent Anglophone scholarship on German mountain imaginary. For example, many of the chapters treat the exact same authors, texts, and/or themes as can be found in a special issue of Colloquia Germanica from 2009 (“Mountains in the German Cultural Imagination”) and the essay volume Heights of Reflection: Mountains in the German Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Present from 2012. (Indeed, at just under four hundred pages, this latter book is equally sizeable and similarly organized in terms of cultural-historical chronology, even featuring chapters on Haller, Goethe, Stifter, Fanck's mountain films, and the filmic legacy of Nanga Parbat.) Das Erschreiben der Berge thus seems a curiously self-involved project. What it lacks, at any rate, is a more vetted lineup of contributors, a better editorial sense of quality control, and a broader dialogue within the international field of German studies.
Nevertheless, it has its merits. While many chapters fail to deliver in scholarly depth and interdisciplinary breadth, they at least stimulate interest in whatever primary text the reader might be unfamiliar with. One might thus find his or her curiosity piqued and seek out Horváth's Die Bergbahn (1929), Frisch's early novel Antwort aus der Stille (1937), or pretty much anything by the Swiss author Meinrad Inglin, who often problematizes the clash between modern and montane existence. Or, thanks to some illuminating interpretations of Jelinek's anti-Alpine aesthetic, one might be inspired to read yet another of her (numerous) hypercritical novels or plays. Finally, there remains the guilty pleasure of the Alpenkrimi, whose hybrid discursivity and careful construction of topographical spatiality should appeal to mystery and mountain enthusiasts alike. In the end, all of the texts examined in Das Erschreiben der Berge, whether they happen to be literary or filmic, canonical or non-canonical, high- or lowbrow, raise intriguing questions of subjectivity, masculinity, narrativity, and cultural identity—in a word: modernity.
