The Alps are the highest, most extensive mountain range in Europe. Between 1860 and 1939, they became, as Tait Keller convincingly argues in Apostles of the Alps, a “landscape of paradox,” a “meeting place of opposites” (2). Keller's lively, finely written, and well-structured work recounts that history from the opening of the Alps to mountaineering, scientific research, and tourism, to their later domination by those same forces. Though the Alps stretch across eight different countries, Keller focuses on the Eastern Alps, an “ecoregion” (7) bridging Austria and Germany east of the Rhine. This mountain range played a unique and until now insufficiently explored role in nation-building efforts by the two countries.

The book's title is nevertheless slightly misleading, for Keller's work embraces much more than the deeds of the so-called apostles of the Alps, those “urban Alpine enthusiasts who preached the splendors of the highlands” (4). In more pragmatic terms, these were the members of the German and Austrian Alpine Association, which, by 1914, was the largest mountaineering association in the world. Its goal was the promotion of a grossdeutsch cultural identity through Alpinism, i.e., climbing and hiking the mountains. Yet it is the Alps themselves, rather than the apostles, who play the starring role here. By inserting the physical landscape into his narrative, highlighting how it both influenced human activity and was affected by it, Keller's account improves on other tourism, “borderlands,” and even environmental histories that tend to “overlook the land itself” (9).

The book charts chronologically the contribution of the Alps to German and Austrian national-identity formation, but Keller deftly ties his chapters together through the theme of conflict between conservation and consumption. Many Alpinists viewed the mountains as a kind of “sanatorium for the human condition” (47), the soothing and edifying effects of which could only be felt if they remained pristine: unspoiled, uncrowded, and undeveloped. Yet the Alps actually worked their magic when consumed by climbers, hikers, researchers, and tourists via climbing routes, walking paths, railways, cable cars, chair lifts, and alpine highways. This was an essential dilemma for nation builders: how to make the Alps more accessible while preserving the alpine environment. The opposing camps were often divided along generational, gender, and class lines. Young student skiers faced off against older, “stodgy” (73) mountaineers. Some male Alpinists sought to bar women from Association membership, fearing a feminizing influence on mountaineering. Apostles who wanted to conserve the elite character of mountain experiences battled those who claimed that their consumption must be open to all classes.

Another underlying tension revolved around ownership: just whose mountains were these? In theory, the Alpine Association viewed the range as a “physical bond” (55) between Germany and Austria; in reality, hostility and mistrust regularly marred relations between German and Austrian mountaineers. The Alps lay at the heart of wider international conflicts, too. Keller's thoughtful chapter on World War I weaves thematic strands together as it depicts events along the five-hundred-kilometer Alpine front with Italy.

Further conflict arose as ideas about purity and belonging merged with the racist, often antisemitic elements of German and Austrian nation-building. Some local chapters of the Alpine Association had tried to limit membership to those of “Germanic” ancestry before the Great War, but earnest efforts against a Jewish presence in the Alps began only after that conflict. Many Alpine apostles now preached outright hatred. Jewish climbers were no longer able to stay at certain mountain huts; by 1923, ninety of ninety-eight Austrian chapters included an Aryan paragraph in their statutes, although most German ones did not. By 1930, the “fusion of anti-Semitism to the Alpine Association was all but complete” (146).

Apostles of the Alps is a carefully researched book that uses primary sources ranging from Alpine Association newsletters and meeting minutes to tourist literature. The book thus makes valuable, well-supported contributions to a variety of fields—among them, tourism, environmental, and mountaineering history. There are two criticisms nevertheless worth making. First, while the Eastern Alps were certainly a unique landscape from an environmental perspective, what played out among their peaks was seldom entirely exceptional. For example, the enduring conflicts between “snobs” (“real” travellers) and “heretics” (mass tourists), and the persistence of antisemitism at vacation resorts (Bäderantisemitismus), were both widespread phenomena in the interwar period across Germany and Austria. Drawing parallels to other, similar phenomena in neighboring fields and providing better contextualization would have revealed more clearly what distinguished Alpine variants. Several recent works on this subject, not cited by Keller, do this well.

Second, Keller's assessment of the connections between Alpinism and Nazism are somewhat ambiguous and could have been explored even more explicitly. Clearly, as he shows, not all Alpinists were Nazis, either before 1933 or during the Third Reich itself; moreover, there was no direct, necessary, or inevitable link between their two creeds: Alpinism did not, he argues, “pave the path” to Nazism (6). Yet, at the same time, he asserts that Alpinism “fed into National Socialist dreams of unity, triumph, and domination” (187). It, alongside antisemitism, emerged as “reactions to the era's anxieties” (64) even before World War I. Its cross-class appeal, at times misogynistic notions, attempted embrace of youth, and pledges of “renewal and an end to degeneration” (91) all foreshadowed and echoed Nazism's promises. If the apostles did not pave the path, then, it seems they did something to prepare the way, for if liberty, individuality, and autonomy were indeed key founding tenets of the Alpinist movement, so, too, were elements that furthered and supported nationalist, racist projects. This duality was possible because Alpinism was inherently conflicted, contested, and contradictory—like the Alpine landscape itself, as Keller effectively highlights throughout this admirable study.