Semmering 1912
Andrew Barker on the Austrian Alps

Ever since Albrecht von Haller published his poetic and erudite evocation of the Swiss landscape, Die Alpen (1732: The Alps), the high peaks of Switzerland, Bavaria and Austria have provided German writers with a constant source of literary inspiration. For Goethe, Haller's work signified nothing less than 'the beginning of a national German literature', one of whose pinnacles is surely reached in Thomas Mann's mighty novel Der Zauberberg (1924: The Magic Mountain).

Hardly surprisingly, the Alps have maintained a constant presence in Austrian writing, more especially since the time of the Upper Austrian writer and painter Adalbert Stifter (1805-1868), whose elemental portrayals of the mountains in stories like Der Hagestolz (The Bachelor) remain unsurpassed in their ability to conjure up the genius loci of high places. For a later, more urban Jewish author like Joseph Roth these same mountains were primarily to be regarded as the birthplace of the 'Alpentrottel' ('Alpine Idiots'), whose German Nationalist politics hastened the demise of his beloved Habsburg empire. In his Bergroman (1936-1953: Mountain Novel) another Jewish writer, Hermann Broch, located his portrayal of the rise of German fascism in an isolated alpine commmunity. Amongst the leading Austrian writers of today Elfriede Jelinek, who is also of partly Jewish origin, hit on an alpine setting for some of her most mordantly critical attacks on Austrian society and history, for instance in the play Totenauberg (1991: Mountain of the Dead) and the novel Die Kinder der Toten (1995: Children of the Dead).

However, not all mountain writing by Austrians casts such a gloomy light on Austria's crowning glory. Perhaps no single montane area in the German-speaking world has inspired such a constant flow of good writing as the Semmering, that last rearing of the eastern Alps before they slowly peter out into the Hungarian plain. From the era of Metternich right through to the outbreak of World War II, the Semmering was the winter and summer playground of Vienna's artistic élite. As the critic Paul Stefan tartly remarked on the eve of World War I:
'Vienna is praised for having three treasures: its drinking water, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and the Semmering […] The Semmering is a mountainous area on the line to Trieste, 1000 metres high, and reachable in two hours despite the Southern Railway Company. You will understand that Viennese "society" has made it its favourite haunt. To avoid them you'll have to avoid the Semmering.'
Traversing the rugged twenty-five mile stretch between Gloggnitz and Mürzzuschlag, the 'Semmeringbahn' gave rise to the world's first completely artificial tourist resort, but the route's continued existence is now threatened by the construction of a tunnel. It was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1998. As reflected in letters and diaries, verse epics and novels, by authors as diverse as Peter Rosegger, Ferdinand von Saar, Arthur Schnitzler, Robert Musil and Heimito von Doderer, the landscape of the Semmering and its railway, and the people who lived and worked there, has proved an endlessly fascinating and renewable resource.

A writer who found particular solace in the forests and meadows of the Semmering was Peter Altenberg (1859-1919), characterised as Der Narr von Wien (The Idiot of Vienna) in Felix Mitterer's 1982 screenplay and as 'Le paysan de Vienne' ('The Peasant of Vienna') in W.G. Sebald's essay of 1989. Since then, however, a more rounded picture of this many-sided miniaturist has emerged. In particular, it has become clear that Altenberg's daring mixture of the verbal and pictorial, which inspired Alban Berg to his seminal Five songs on Picture-Postcard Texts by Peter Altenberg (1913), has a crucial role to play in our understanding of European modernism (and indeed beyond). Sebald's last novel Austerlitz (2001), with its precise admixture of the verbal and the visual, may well reflect his scholarly concern with Altenberg's art.

Semmering 1912, first published in 1913 by Fischer Verlag in Berlin, is a collection of prose miniatures reflecting Altenberg's stay of many months during 1912. The book charts both his response to the Semmering landscape and to his unwholesome obsession with a twelve-year-old girl named Klara Panhans, which led to his incarceration in Vienna's Steinhof mental asylum in December 1912. In 1916, the year of Klara's engagement, Altenberg recast Semmering 1912, not in verbal terms, but as a series of inscribed visual and photographic images, all of picture-postcard size. These he gathered together in a large-format photograph album, also entitled Semmering 1912, which then lay undiscovered until the 1990s.

The satirist Karl Kraus, for long a critical friend of Altenberg, regarded the literary texts in Semmering 1912 as one of his finest achievements, but since the late 1920s Altenberg's writing has only been available in anthologised form - a trend which Kraus himself encouraged with his own collection of Altenberg's writings in 1932. However, this situation is now redressed with the first-ever publication of Semmering 1912 in its dual textual and visual forms, presenting today's readers with an early and strikingly beautiful example of the relationship between word and image in what Walter Benjamin famously dubbed the 'age of technological reproducibility'. Spread over eighty pages, the 260 images, many of them reproducing alpine flora and landscapes in glowing colour, attest both to Altenberg's personal passion and to his love of the Semmering in all its moods and guises. As the noted historian of photography Timm Starl observed in his review of Semmering 1912 for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (6 April, 2002), the startling juxtaposition of the book and the album reveals just how progressive a figure Altenberg actually was, and delivers conclusive rebuttal of the one-sided perception of him as the archetypal bohemian and 'Kaffeehausliterat', a cliché which may now finally be laid to rest.

Andrew Barker climbs chiefly in Scotland, but has enjoyed many forays into the Alps. Outside Europe he has climbed in Japan and California. He is Professor of Austrian Studies at the University of Edinburgh and co-editor, with Leo A. Lensing, of Peter Altenberg: "Semmering 1912". Ein altbekanntes Buch und ein neuentdecktes Photalbum (Vienna: Werner Eichbauer Verlag, 2002), 349pp, 220, ISBN 3-901699-09-0.