Mountain Grand Hotels at the Fin de Siècle

Sites, Gazes, and Environments

Michael Wedekind

Abstract

Grand hotels had been a metropolitan phenomenon before they emerged in remote regions of the Alps between the 1880s and the 1930s. This essay explores how these semi-public spaces and early places of modernity engaged with alpine scenery and shaped the very industry of mountain tourism. It analyzes the relationship between elite tourism and the natural and social environment of the Alps.

The success of mountain grand hotels was tied to increasing industrialization and a new understanding of travel. Their thoughtful detachment from space, time, and society was an expression of a business as much as of social philosophy. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, mountains served as a backdrop for the narrative of the period’s scientific and technical progress and became subject to rational interpretation and economic exploitation. Mountain grand hotels were not only a key component of tourism infrastructure but also the bold expression of a presumptuous occupation of spaces set away for tourism. Natural space had widely been turned into social space for visual and leisurely consumption, raising questions of authority, priority, appropriation, and imposition.

By mapping the perception of mountains along the history of mountain grand hotels, this essay studies the sites, gazes, and environments of mountain tourism at the fin de siècle. It examines how the history of the mountain grand hotel conflates with the forces of nationalism, colonialism, and capitalism and showcases how these spaces reflect the socio-economic transformations that ultimately paved the way for mountain mass tourism.

Article

A fairy-tale glitter still surrounds the legendary grand hotels of the fin de siècle. Nineteenth-century contemporaries were amazed by their feudal luxury, exclusivity, and elegance, by their comfort, refinement, and impeccable service. The audacity of their architecture and the extravagance of their interiors and furnishings caused a sensation. The towering establishments that emerged in the remote regions of the Alps and the Rocky Mountains between the 1880s and the 1930s were even more spectacular than the metropolitan grand hotels. Their appearance would not have been conceivable without the epoch’s enthusiasm for the Alps, which transformed Europe’s highest mountain range into an outstanding landscape of leisure and recreation between the Enlightenment and the turn of the twentieth century.

Grand hotels (also referred to as “palace hotels”) were established in scenically privileged locations of the Alps and along numerous European coastlines, serving as luxury destinations for international aristocratic and upper-class elites. They were considered the highest hotel category, although no precise classification system existed at that time. The term “grand hotel” alluded to the size and grandeur of the buildings. Similar to the transatlantic liners that entered service at around the same time, they were celebrated as an expression of innovation, progress, and human mastery over nature.

Grand hotels and their dream worlds became a literary topos and a subject of harsh criticism, which focused on the internal organization of these parallel universes and their social hierarchies.1 Historiography has concentrated primarily on the social interactions within grand hotels, which were considered semi-public spaces and early “places of modernity.”2 However, this article is interested in how grand hotels engaged with alpine scenery and shaped the very industry of mountain tourism by analyzing the relationship between elite tourism and the natural and social environment into which grand hotels were brusquely and carelessly placed. After all, the Alps were not empty spaces when they first underwent emotionalization and aestheticization.3 However, Europe’s mountain ranges were inland peripheries and, like its coastlines, became sites of tourism, commercialization, and exploitation.

Exploring human attitudes toward nature, this article sketches how the perception of mountains changed from the second half of the eighteenth century to the decades around the turn of the twentieth, from early aristocratic and upper-bourgeois alpine experiences to the advent of mountain mass tourism. It studies the sites, gazes, and environments of mountain grand hotels to examine how these spaces informed the role of nature and landscape in upper-class tourism.

Longing for the Alps

Early enthusiasm for mountains, partially fueled by Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, had its primary origins in a Romanticist devotion to nature. The epoch’s cultural representations, largely produced in urban centers, framed the alpine landscape and charged it with new meanings. As the Alps became increasingly aestheticized and emotionally occupied, early mountaineers pilgrimaged there in search of primeval wilderness and sacred summits. They frequently cast their experience as a spectacle of uplifting emotions and a desire for contemplation and mystical immersion in nature. These experiences touched on basic questions of human creation and existence. They held the fleeting illusion of rapture from earth to heaven and awakened foreboding feelings and transcendental sensations of connectedness with all beings. In short, they conveyed a sense of fusion with the universe.

However, perceptions of nature and landscape are primarily conditioned by culture and are therefore subject to changing patterns of evaluation. By the late nineteenth century, bourgeois enthusiasm for the natural world was little more than a reaction to the crisis of modern civilization. The relationship was an ambivalent one: love for nature was very much an escape to nature from a life of rationality, mechanization, and urbanization. Therefore, one might argue that the widespread longing for mountains resulted from the epoch’s civilizational fatigue, its nervousness and anxiety, and the discontent with modern urban life. By contrast, reconnecting with nature was considered archaic and maternal, and was felt to have regenerating, purifying, and ennobling effects on humans, elevating them morally and intellectually. Mountaintops became an “emotionally highly charged reserve of ‘healing’ through aesthetic [experience] and of ‘sanctifying’ nature.”4 Here, humans seemed to be liberated from positivist isolation, modern fragmentation, and alienation from nature.

During the four decades preceding the First World War, the Alps became an increasingly important bourgeois outdoor leisure space. Europe’s leading mountain climbing associations were founded, and winter sports emerged. Like the World Fairs, mountain museums (established in Italy in 1874, in Switzerland in 1905, and in Germany in 1911) brought the mountains to the city, long before “Swiss chalets” began to appear in parks in Britain, France, and Germany. German-speaking countries also saw the advent of “Alpenfeste” (alpine festivals) and widespread enthusiasm for alpine traditional costumes, which were particularly favored in upper-class social circles.5 Simultaneously, higher-class Berlin tenants would decorate their courtyards with murals based on alpine postcard motifs.6 The writings of Ludwig Ganghofer and Richard Strauss’s Alpensinfonie (Alpine Symphony op. 64; 1911–15) owed much of their success to this longing for the Alps. In December 1897, the magazine Die Kunst für Alle (Art for Everyone) referred to the “longing of our time for peace and harmony, born out of extremely hard-fought social struggles.” Rather than “the human hustle and bustle,” the “unspent, constantly rejuvenating stirring of the plant world [and] the earth with its seemingly unchanging mountains and rocks” would be able to offer fulfilment.7

Measurable evidence of mountain enthusiasm as a mobilizing force is provided by figures on the members of mountaineering societies. Apart from minor differences due to the varying socio-economic and political frameworks at both regional and national levels, continental European clubs mainly appealed to the educated middle classes, such as professional workers and higher civil servants.8 Fin-de-siècle grand hotels, whose guests would often stay for weeks or even months, were, by contrast, populated by distinctly different social classes. They were the places to see and be seen for those who had always enjoyed the privilege of travel and for the new upper-middle-class elites. The guests were members of the highest aristocracy and Europe’s ruling houses, top administration officials, high-ranking military figures, members of the financial oligarchy, industrial magnates, members of parliament, writers and artists, celebrities, fashionable persons, and all those striving to rise in social status. Intellectual elites only appeared in mountain grand hotels in later years. Meanwhile, the North American grand hotels tended to be less exclusive, hosting a more socially mixed clientele.

Hotelscapes

Switzerland was the first tourist destination in the Alps, and it catered primarily to elite travelers. Grand hotels proliferated around Lake Geneva, in central Switzerland, and the Bernese Oberland (Illustration 1), in the canton of Valais and the Upper Engadin. In Austria, they were mainly located in Tyrol (including Italian-speaking Trentino), in Bad Gastein and the Salzkammergut, around Lake Wörth, and on the Semmering Pass. In the Italian Alps, they predominantly bordered the lakes of Lombardy and Piedmont, but they also rose in the Graian Alps northwest of Turin, in the Dolomites, and Cadore. In the French Alps, they could be found in the Department of Upper Savoy, especially in the Mont Blanc region (Chamonix) and on Lake Geneva. In southern Bavaria, where King Ludwig II had Neuschwanstein Castle built in 1869, large hotel complexes were constructed on lakeshores and in valley locations (Bad Schachen, Bad Reichenhall, Bad Tölz, Partenkirchen, and Garmisch) during the final years before the First World War. Only from 1914 did they begin to be built in the mountains: on the Wendelstein in 1914, on the Predigtstuhl near Bad Reichenhall in 1928, and on the Zugspitze in 1931 (Schneefernerhaus). However, they were far from comparable to the Swiss alpine grand hotels. In the rarely visited alpine region of today’s Slovenia, the only such hotel opened its doors in 1931, on Lake Bled.

Illustration 1: The Grand Hôtel des Alpes in Mürren (Canton of Berne, Switzerland). Postcard, c. 1905.
Kilchberg: Verlag Gebr. Wehrli.

Switzerland remained the alpine hotelscape par excellence. There, travelers could find “probably the best hotels in the world” with the greatest facilities.9 Run by highly competent management, they were established much earlier than in neighboring countries and located in the most spectacular sites. More than any others, Swiss hotels became a major draw for international tourists and were the most outstanding from an architectural perspective.10 The 1875 Baedeker Travel Guide to Switzerland regarded the “new large hotels . . . to be in themselves worth seeing.”11 By 1909, the country had more than 800 grand hotels, “some of the grandest consider[ing] themselves too grand to be in [the official guide of the Swiss Society of Hotel Keepers].”12 British author Arnold Bennett, who was a grand hotel habitué, frequently dining at London’s Savoy, jibed:

You may put Snowdon on the top of Ben Nevis and climb up the height of the total by the aid of railways, funiculars, racks and pinions, diligences and sledges; and when nothing but your own feet will take you any farther, you will see, in Switzerland, a grand hotel, magically and incredibly raised aloft in the mountains; solitary—no town, no houses, nothing but this hotel hemmed in on all sides by snowy crags, and made impregnable by precipices and treacherous snow and ice.13

As a rule, Swiss accommodation prices rose in proportion to the geographical altitude of the establishments.14 In 1880, about fifteen percent of Switzerland’s 1,000 hotels (and of its 58,140 hotel beds) were situated in high mountain regions above 1,500 meters (about 5,000 feet).15

In the nineteenth century, whether in Switzerland or elsewhere, the success of grand hotels was tied to scientific and technical progress and increasing industrialization. The growing railroad network provided significant impetus. From the end of the 1830s, sizeable private railway companies started erecting luxury hotels close to their stations for the convenience of long-distance travelers. Constructed to guarantee well-heeled guests maximum ease and comfort, these hotels also allowed railway companies to compensate for possible financial losses in their core business. This concept was further developed in the years to come when extravagant railway-run hotels opened in remote scenic sites along the train routes and in secluded mountain locations. Staying at such exclusive destinations was often the primary motivation for travel.

Railway hotels opened first in Britain, then in the USA and Canada, where the coast-to-coast Canadian Pacific Railway operated several, such as the Banff Springs Hotel (1888) and Chateau Lake Louise (1890) in the Rocky Mountains.16 On the European mainland, the Austrian Kaiserlich-Königlich Privilegierte Südbahn-Gesellschaft (Imperial and Royal Southern Railway Company) constructed lavish hotels in Dobbiaco/Toblach in South Tyrol (the Grand Hôtel Toblach, in 1878), on the Semmering Pass (the Semmering, in 1881, around 100 kilometers, 60 miles, southwest of Vienna), and in Opatija/Abbazia (the Quarnero, in 1884, in the vicinity of Rijeka/Fiume).17 Although other railway-run hotels were to open along Austria’s transalpine lines, none would equal the luxury establishments of the Southern Railway Company.18 The rail network development also gave a significant boost to tourism on the lakes of northern Italy, especially Lake Maggiore. There, the first grand hotels catering to affluent guests were built in Stresa and Verbania, in parallel with the erection of numerous stately villas.19 In Switzerland, remote mountain regions were opened up for elite tourism after the extension of the railroads, the newly installed cable cars, the introduction of steamships (which started to ply their trade along Swiss lakes in 1823), and the construction of high mountain roads, which were often built for military purposes.

The railways were pioneers in the hotel industry and helped create further demand for tourist accommodation. They contributed to the embourgeoisement of the upper middle classes, enabling them to travel and share what until then had been the privilege of the nobility: stays in spas, health, air, and seaside resorts. Upper-bourgeois visitors had begun to appear in such places, which often resembled aristocratic summer residences, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, bringing about a significant change in the social composition of vacationers.20 In particular, the fashion for spas, which had become particularly popular from the 1830s onward as a result of scientific advances in balneology, was another contributing factor to the building of luxury hotels. In 1885, however, Ludwig Rohden, a renowned German balneologist and spa physician practicing in Gardone on Lake Garda, asserted that he could not, and would not, “believe, for the honor of mankind, that the hustle and bustle of large, crowded health resorts and ‘grand hotels,’ which cater most promptly to any whim and stupidity of the wealthy, is a suitable environment for sick people and for those needing rest.”21

Celebrating Modernity

Grand hotels owed much of their popularity to a new understanding of travel that had developed in the second half of the eighteenth century. Travel was increasingly understood as a process of education and experience. Railroads greatly increased the comfort and speed of travel and changed the voyagers’ perception of time and space. Soon, trains not only connected cities but also extended into smaller towns and rural areas. Curiously, this did not mean that the new mountain grand hotels were within easy reach. Here we are confronted with a paradox: while trains cut down on travel time, much of it was then lost when guests, heading to luxury out-of-the-way hotels, had to face astonishing obstacles on the final miles toward their destination.

The Grand Hotel Giessbach in the Bernese Oberland, established in 1875, was one such hard-to-reach place. Guests had to walk or hire a porter for the short steep climb leading up to where the hotel was nestled, one hundred meters (300 feet) above Lake Brienz. Access to this isolated cosmos was eased only in 1879 when a funicular railway was built, the lower station of which was located at the landing stage of the local steamship company. It could only be reached by boats departing from Brienz and Interlaken. Yet, when travelers had finally arrived at their destination, they could enjoy contemplating the might of nature from the hotel’s terrace—a nature whose forces most likely awed and thrilled them when they finally made their way up to the hotel. Guests reminisced about “the plummeting waters [of the Giessbach Falls], their deafening noise, the rugged landscape.”22 Above all, the “view on Lakes Brienz and Thun was so magnificent that one could not take one’s eyes off it.”23 Equally superb was a journey to the Grand Hôtel des Rochers-de-Naye (Illustration 2), which opened its doors in 1893, and offered a spectacular view of “the whole of Lake Geneva, its charming shores, the splendid chain of the Savoy Alps, majestically overlooked by the silvery peak of Mont Blanc, [and] the green belt of the Jura Mountains.”24 Travelers who wanted to join the hotel’s exclusive belle assemblée at 2,054 meters (about 6,700 feet) above Montreux between May and October had to be patient, because getting there entailed a rack-railway journey of almost one-and-a-half hours.25 The Schweizerische Nordostbahn (Swiss Northeast Railway) brought its passengers from Zurich to Romanshorn on Lake Constance some seventy kilometers (about 45 miles) away in roughly the same time.

Illustration 2: The railway to the Grand Hôtel des Rochers-de-Naye (Canton of Vaud, Switzerland). Postcard, before 1908.
Montreux: Gaspard Lips Éditeur. Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zurich, image archive, PK_010551.

As they made their way uphill on long, winding tracks, the guests of mountain grand hotels were offered sublime spectacles that could be observed from ever newer and often confusing perspectives:

The tree-shaded road to the hotel [Giessbach] on an elevated plateau, lead up by a series of zigzags that seemed interminable . . . The light from the hotel looked always so near and yet so far, and there was always another bend when we thought we were just there. At the same time there was quite a picturesque effect produced by the rays of light falling through the green branches upon the dripping groups toiling up the ascent.26

These highly emotional preludes also provided guidance on how to decode the relationship between nature and technology. Travelers frequently marveled at the wonders of the former while sharing their admiration for the latter:

After slowly ascending from the level of the lake [of Geneva] a glorious panorama gradually unfolds itself . . . Finally, on reaching Mont Caux, the tourist, who has imagined himself to be in a country as wild as in the days of Bonnivard, suddenly finds himself transported to our ultra-modern civilization, as the train stops at the artistic station adjoining a palatial hotel [i.e., the Grand Hôtel des Rochers-de-Naye].27

Supposedly pristine, non-anthropized mountain landscapes served as a backdrop to the narrative of progress. The cable car ride celebrated the taming of wilderness, human triumph over nature, and the epoch and its technical achievements, which made such journeys (and the subsequent marketing and touristic consumption of landscapes) possible in the first place. Romantic ideas of dramatic and unspoiled mountain scenery may still have accompanied the pleasantly shuddering voyagers as they set off on their safe trips to the summit. However, these concepts, which had survived from pre-industrial times, had lost any real foundation. Nature had long since been tamed, emptied of enchantment, and explored. Contact with this now controlled environment required little but to “repeat, without any risk, proven patterns of perception, behavior and experience.”28 Furthermore, the thoughtful detachment from space, time, and society was a constituent of impression management and part of the hotels’ self-representation, as well as an expression of a business and a social philosophy.

Mountain grand hotels capitalized on a landscape that aesthetic discourses had idealized over the previous one-hundred-and-fifty years. This landscape, however, was meanwhile subject to rational interpretation and economic exploitation. Natural space had widely been turned into social space.29 Scenic landscapes became marketable products. The commercialization of idealized values and intangible capital was as novel and modern as the guests’ motivations and modes of travel. Avantgarde (not to say, downright bold) architecture, innovative construction techniques, building equipment, and utility supplies such as sanitary, communication, heating, and air conditioning systems cast mountain grand hotels in a shining light of progress and modernity, and the elevator became a symbol of this. Their fashionable sports facilities and lavish electrical interior and exterior lighting assumed a legendary reputation. Switzerland’s first electric lights were turned on in the dining room of the Kulm Hotel in St. Moritz on Christmas eve in 1879. With grand hotels conquering the mountains, technical modernity found its way into the Alps. The faith in technology, widespread at that time, led guests of the Grand Hôtel Karersee in the Dolomites to believe that even the reddish light of alpenglow, observed after sunset, was the result of electrical lighting and fireworks arranged by the hotel management.30

The staging of nature was always combined with the staging of technology. Artful arrangements of promenades, scenic vista points, and resting benches directed the gaze of the stroller back to the massive hotel complex.31 Tellingly, Fräulein Else soliloquized in Arthur Schnitzler’s eponymous novelette:

How immensely broad the meadows are, and how huge and black the mountains. There are hardly any stars. Yes, there are, three, four—there’ll soon be more. And the wood behind me. It’s pleasant to sit here on the seat at the edge of the wood. The hotel is so far, far away, and the lights are like the lights of fairyland. And what brutes live in it!32

The establishment that the heroine refers to was the Hotel Fratazza, which opened in 1908 just below San Martino di Castrozza in the Trentino Dolomites.33 Swiss writer Konrad Falke, on the other hand, voiced the perspective of the host society: “In the evening, however, the mountain people, who sneak up to the hotel windows in amazement, would see such glittering splendor in the ballrooms that it seemed as if King Laurin’s fairy-tale magic had become reality.”34

Lost in Reverie

Scenic attractions became a key element in choosing sites for the construction of mountain grand hotels and their related marketing strategies. The more grandiose the landscape, the more intense their fascination. Remote elitist microcosms expressed the spirit of the time and corresponded to the glamorous lifestyle of a social elite that, “at such an altitude, enjoyed the luxury and impeccable comforts of a modern hotel, the spicy alpine air (unpolluted by the dust and coal smoke of the cities), morning walks to important peaks . . . and, at midday, sumptuous, pleasurable upscale wining and dining.”35 Yet, the transparent superficiality with which nature was perceived is revealing: only in the imagination of the clueless may “important peaks” be reached during simple “morning walks.” The hotels owed their success not so much to picturesque, fairy-tale-like nature as to the projection of bourgeois culture and urban lifestyle onto the mountains.

Perched high among the mountains on commanding elevations, the monumental hotel buildings, many of which were hillside constructions, allowed for vast panoramas because of their longitudinal development orientated toward the landscape. Architectural features such as light-flooded verandas, glass-enclosed terraces, and winter gardens established a symbiosis between the alpine landscape and human-made objects. In this setting, guests must have felt as if they were floating between heaven and earth in an enchanted world disconnected from reality, in whose enjoyable lightness “the air . . . is like champagne.”36 As spaces between the inside and outside, verandas—often conceived as extensions of the entrance hall and equipped with rattan seating in keeping with their filigree iron and glass construction—became a place of encounter and conversation.37 From here, hotel guests could enjoy expansive, captivating mountain vistas and trace bold climbs through their binoculars. Nevertheless, nature was primarily observed from the distant perspective of a remote and isolated position that placed the ego at the center. The viewer gazed at the world from a position of superiority over nature (and society) in a way that linked ideas of authority, priority, appropriation, and of imposing order on the natural (and societal) environment.38 Gazing at, rather than experiencing, nature gave rise to the widespread application of hotel names such as Bellevue, Grande Vue, Belvoir, Beauregard, Bellavista, and Belvedere.

High-end tourists were visual consumers. They hardly interacted with their temporary environment away from the urban centers, not with its space, nature, or the host society. During their week- or month-long stays, they did not withdraw from their urban bourgeois lifestyle, but maintained their usual social and spatial ties. The telephone became a symbol of permanent availability and of constantly keeping in contact with the world of business, finance, politics, and culture. Mail delivery became a major event in the day—not least because in the “overcrowded palace hotels . . . boredom yawns from every corner,”39 thus inducing the management thoughtfully to protect guests from their ennui by a variety of amusements.40 Grand hotels, which were seen as a sort of springboard for social advancement and a platform to increase social capital, provided an ideal setting for self-staging and social interaction. People watching appeared far more meaningful and more entertaining a pastime than contemplating the spectacle of nature, as contemporaries noted of fellow tourists staying at the famous Catskill Mountain House in Upstate New York.41

Prefigured and acculturated imaginations of landscapes, which artists and writers, travelogues, and guidebooks had produced and perpetuated since travelers became fascinated with Switzerland in the late eighteenth century, were another feature that kept many tourists from enjoying nature.42 Through thoroughly canonized points of interest, the spectator’s visual consumption of landscapes became predictable. An accumulated stock of images overlaid the individual’s own sensory perceptions and reduced their willingness to open up to and deal with their emotional responses to natural environments; encounters with the visual reality then became disappointing. Landscapes were little more than a backdrop for the above-mentioned self-staging and social interaction. No wonder that nature and alpine scenery soon became part of hotel interiors (Illustration 3)—as mountain-themed tableaux, stained glass paintings, murals, tapestries, sculptures, hunting trophies, and large rows of windows facing out to the adjacent natural environment. Alpine nature was turned into furniture and reconfigured as an appendage to the world of the bourgeoisie.43

Illustration 3: The vestibule of the Waldhaus Vulpera in Tarasp (Canton of Grisons, Switzerland). Photo, 1899.
Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zurich, image archive, Ans_06984.

In addition to hotel interiors, the mountain environment was turned into an illusion. Marvelous parks and extensive gardens—calculated, mannered, and artistically laid out—were established as counter-landscapes. They provided opportunities for promenading, becoming spaces of social intercourse for a bourgeoisie that transferred its habits (and its architectural and urbanistic requirements) from the city to the high mountains. These counter-landscapes were specifically designed for people watching, displaying the centered self, and approaching the opposite sex for encounters and conversation. Guests at the Caux Palace above Montreux on Lake Geneva, for example, enjoyed an 800-meter (about 2,600-feet) promenade-terrace from which they could take in views of the Bernese, Valais, and Savoy Alps. In Ticino and on the lakes of northern Italy, the search for alterities of nature gave rise to alternative, artificial environments. The extensive planting of exotic species in the gardens and parks of villas and hotels transformed the natural character of much of the region. This new environment, skillfully positioned as a touristic product, found its place in idealizing landscape representations and marketing strategies.44

The consumed landscape was increasingly reduced to stereotyped images with interchangeable elements. Little, charming, deep blue lakes, enclosed on both sides by densely vegetated rocky ridges and guarded at their upper end by an imposing massif, were the natural settings chosen for more than a few mountain grand hotels (Illustration 4). Serially produced images made these sceneries predictable places. The widely popular Bremen travel writer Johann Georg Kohl provided a romanticist analysis of the meaning and soul of mountain landscapes in his Naturansichten aus den Alpen (Views of Alpine Nature). He wondered:

What . . . is it, then, that fills us with such joy, with such delight, with such affection and longing, with such enchantment, and such nostalgia when it comes to lakes? In answering this question . . ., it seems to me at first remarkable that the mobile and restless element, which accumulates in lakes, is the representative of the most graceful peace. . . . The enormous mass of water in the oceans is too vast and dreary to allow individualization. The small, closed lakes, however, have far more individual life and are easier to grasp as persons. Therefore, their relationship to our soul, which is itself enclosed in the shell of our body like a moving body of water, is closer, and this is precisely why the poetic impression of lakes is stronger. A small lake, which lies still and smooth in the deep lap of a wild mountain, appears to us like a soul at peace with itself.45

Illustration 4: Grand hotel scenery as a backdrop for the emancipated woman of the 1920s. Illustration by fashion designer Grete (“Chicky”) Sparkuhl-Fichelscher for the German sports magazine Sport im Bild (1927).
From Elsa Herzog, “‘Neue Sachlichkeit’ beim Wintersport,” Sport im Bild 33, no. 24 (1927): 1469.

Travelers to the large lakes in the southern Alps, however, needed to be wary of aesthetic overstimulation, which was believed to cause an imbalance of the soul, as the Swiss writer and literary critic Joseph Victor Widmann pointed out:

I believe that a stay on Lake Lugano is more appropriate for particularly irritable natures . . . because its more tranquil beauty does not excite the mind as much as the dazzling charms of Lake Como. After all, here, too [on Lake Lugano], Armida’s magic gardens have splendor enough to completely enchant an eye which is accustomed to Nordic landscapes. I confess that I was . . . in raptures of delight at the glory of this blessed corner of the earth.46

Disconnections

According to Karlheinz Wöhler, touristification is a process of evolving and developing tourist sites that bears a strong resemblance to colonial patterns.47 It occupies space by giving new meaning and by attributing economic value to it via symbolic appropriation and the development of exploitative infrastructure. It is a process by which ready-made concepts and ideas, as well as established systems of knowledge, are transferred from their socio-cultural and spatial context of origin into spaces of tourism that dominate social exchanges.

Grand hotels were not only a key component of tourism infrastructure but also the bold expression of a presumptuous occupation of the space to be touristified. This was underlined by the places that were chosen for many of the hotels, which sat impressively enthroned on commanding, fortress-like mountains (“oppressing” the alpine environment in all their “glory of modernity”48). They seemed to rule majestically over the world that lay at their feet. Their high-rise, monumental architecture of power, drawing on feudal buildings (such as castles, châteaux, residential tower-houses, manors, villas, and palaces), made them appear as intimidating strongholds of the hosted wealthy elites and as an isolated cosmos, removed from the people in geographical, cultural, and socio-economic terms.49 It is no coincidence that along many Swiss and Italian mountain lakes, grand hotels frequently nestled down in advantageous waterside positions, occupying land formerly dominated by the edifices of power of petty dominions (castles, châteaux, residences, prefectures, town halls, and official buildings).50

As the opportunities to participate in tourism increased for the middle classes, luxury travelers demanded “ever-more exclusive hotels in ever more secluded locations.” Keeping an “elegant distance” from populated areas was crucial when it came to choosing suitable sites for the hotels.51 Their insouciant unrelatedness to space and society, their de-contextualized, decoupling, and hermetic separation from reality were well-conceived: long sinuous uphill driveways, expansive parks, entrance gates, walls and enclosures, ever-revolving doors, halls, and receptions facilitated the necessary distance and functioned as a means of social selection, access restriction, separation, and exclusion. The apparent contradiction between the challenging accessibility to carefully secluded hotel destinations, on the one hand, and nineteenth-century concepts of rationality and time economy, on the other, found a rational resolution.

Grand hotels ensured that guests were isolated from any “undesirable phenomena,” sparing them unpleasant exposure to the commonality. The host society, noticed only incidentally, was at best perceived in terms of the picturesque. Often captured in popular costume and featured on retouched postcards in the form of tourist advertising and visual evidence of tradition-steeped immutability, local society functioned as a counter-image to innovation, charged with romanticized perceptions of peasant life. Yet what threatened to outdistance rural society in so many regards was precisely the modernization whose achievements nineteenth-century tourists would enjoy and admire in their palatial hotels.

Erected amidst a world of peasant privation, poverty, and emigration, these were islands of exuberant luxury in an ocean of suffering. The 1884 Kursaal Maloja on Lake Sils, for example, the largest hotel in Switzerland at the time, was a vast neo-Renaissance five-storied edifice built in close proximity to a “little village of poor huts.”52

Up here [on Maloja] and down there, on Lake Sils, where it was once so quiet, things became pretty lively after 1884. Before then, there was nothing up here except a mass of granite debris surrounded by flourishing alpine roses, along with a simple osteria and the great view of the enchantingly beautiful valley of Bregaglia or Bergell and the Upper Engadine, with the blue lake at your feet. Meanwhile, on its green shore stands a huge hotel palace, a splendid building, together with numerous other edifices situated in the grounds. The area is dominated by the unfinished “Château Belvedere,” which looks like a feudal castle. And above, up here, rises “Hotel Kulm”! All this is so magnificent, so luxurious, that it is said that there is no hotel palace and no hotel interior in all Switzerland that rivals hotel “Maloja”—not even the 1888 grand hotel in Territet-Montreux.53

Grand mountain hotels contributed to the penetration of international tourism into remote agricultural areas. With technical, cultural, and political modernization pushing into the periphery, these areas’ physical and social structures underwent considerable change.54 As was the case with the Austrian Semmering Pass, grand hotels constituted the starting point for the touristification of the surrounding environment, which typically led to spatial and socio-environmental transformation. Villa complexes, avenues, and promenades were frequently erected in the neighborhood of the hotels, just as majestic sea-front and processional architecture rapidly developed at British and continental seaside resorts from the 1820s. Due to growing infrastructure and the metropolitan bourgeoisie “bringing the city with them” when on vacation, these new settlements quickly assumed an urban appearance.55 This held particularly true for the Semmering Pass, which, around 1900, could be reached by train from Vienna in just a little over two hours. Although different in terms of the level and peculiarities of touristification, the area showed significant similarities with the Catskill Mountains, which at the time, could be reached by train in around four hours from New York. Nowhere could Vienna or New York urbanites “get so high so quickly, and yet remain so attached to the city” as on the Semmering and in the Catskills, which became “remarkably urbanized landscape[s].”56

We can safely define European belle époque grand hotels as worlds of escape from social tension and fear of upheaval. It is no coincidence that they peaked at a time of widespread social conflict. We can also safely call these tourist enclaves a laboratory of technical modernity. It might be too far-fetched, though, to imagine those self-sufficient grand bourgeois establishments in terms of a social laboratory; that is, of an experimental microcosm of a society characterized by strong hierarchies where subordinates were excluded from political and socio-economic participation. Nevertheless, the hotels’ managerial structures and work organization—the strict (albeit not hermetic) separation between guests and staff along with the hierarchization and control of the personnel (often locally recruited)—may well have corresponded to the vision of a social order on the part of many guests. In short, we may argue that grand hotels were fortresses of the existing order, defenses against social disruption, and also bastions of ruthless hedonism—a world eloquently sketched by Austrian writer Stefan Zweig in his essay “Bei den Sorglosen” (Visiting the Careless),57 written against the background of the First World War, in which he provides a description of Suvretta House near St. Moritz (Illustration 5).

Illustration 5: The Suvretta-Haus in St. Moritz (Canton of Grisons, Switzerland). Postcard, c. 1910.
Kilchberg: Verlag Gebr. Wehrli. Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zurich, image archive, PK_004968.

During the First World War, high society in neutral Switzerland did not need to worry about its safety. Nevertheless, in the middle of the summer season of 1914, many left hastily. Those who stayed in the hotels often became impoverished together with the owners. These former places of ease, unexpectedly depopulated, were plunged into existential despair. Summering in the hotels had previously been more than a fashion and much more than a question of social prestige. As a matter of fact, they were places of social and business life, where personal contacts were established and continued year after year. For regular guests and frequent staff members, “nothing short of a death-certificate is accepted as a more or less adequate excuse for [their] nonappearance” during the season.58

The grand hotels, which at first had often been perceived as a bourgeois substitute for noble country estates, became places for pre-war social elites to reassure themselves of their common social status and identity. They also enabled guests to achieve an (albeit illusory) elevation of their social status. A number of hotels and tourist resorts owed their fame to the sojourns of royalty and the highest nobility. Regular stays by members from the Habsburg family, for example, brought Madonna di Campiglio in the Brenta Dolomites to international prominence, guaranteeing “a constantly increasing influx of tourists, despite the fact that the prices are all but insignificant.”59 Hence, the local 1886 Grand Hôtel des Alpes “was usually filled to overflowing” in July and August.60 Here, where the international grand bourgeoisie basked in the glow of aristocracy, unabashedly imitating its habitus, symbols, and way of life, the contradictory aristocratization of the upper bourgeoisie became apparent.61 It was a fundamental break with its own values and norms, along with an understanding of its societal role.

Objections

The construction of grand hotels and the associated infrastructural and landscaping interventions resulted in the conversion of the natural landscape into a cultural landscape. The building of railroads caused an irreversible transformation of the environment and alpine geography. So, what could be saved and preserved from intensive intrusion; what could be protected; and what should be protected? After all, elite travel marked only the beginning of more extensive processes of touristification, which were about to evolve into mass tourism. Long before the turn of the century, it had been evident that the tourist industry would have to “adapt even more than before to the ordinary middle class,” and that “people other than Jewish bankers and English nabobs would also love to travel in Switzerland,” as was stated in 1885.62 That same year, French writer Alphonse Daudet became a prominent critic of mountain tourism.63

However, even before the 1880s, the touristification, technification, and artificialisation of the Alps, along with the unchecked commercialization of nature, had already been regarded with high levels of disapproval. The Schweizer Heimatschutz (Swiss Society for Nature and Cultural Heritage Protection) was a particularly strong force in voicing aesthetic objection to the defacement of nature and townscapes.64 Soon after the beginning of the twentieth century, its criticisms turned into a declaration of war against “any willful destruction of landscape beauty, [and against] any insensate obliteration of cultural distinctiveness.”65 The association, founded in Bern in 1905, idealized vernacular architecture along with traditional forms of economy and living. It was opposed to modern urbanization and industrialization, and to the advance of urban culture and extravagant lifestyles into the countryside.

Others regarded pre-1900 grand hotels as an expression of the exploitation and banalization of the landscape, as symbols of a heteronomously determined building epoch, if not as architectural aberrations.66 The Grand Hôtel St. Moritz (Illustration 6), a fifty-six-meter (about 185 feet) high-rise edifice with a one-hundred-meter-long (about 330 feet) façade, was considered an unparalleled architectural “monstrosity,” erected in St Moritz-Dorf in the immediate vicinity of Badrutt’s Palace Hotel (1896).67 When it opened for business in December 1905, the monumental building and the impact of landscape interventions met with harsh criticism from Heimatschutz members, architects, and guests alike. Two years later, Hotel La Margna, was opened only 300 meters (about 1,000 feet) away. Its “servile reverence to vernacular architecture” was perceived as “a petrified manifesto against grand hotels.”68 After the Second World War, when their fortunes had since long declined and their clientele had thinned out, clean-up efforts led to the demolition of various hotel buildings, especially on Mount Rigi. Many, however, found posthumous recognition from both an architectural and environmental viewpoint.69

Illustration 6: The Grand Hôtel St. Moritz (Canton of Grisons, Switzerland). Photo, 1905.
Kulturarchiv Oberengadin, Samedan: ID-4200577.

Echoes

So then: what remained of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century nature ideals at the fin de siècle? What remained of the aestheticization of nature and high mountain landscapes and those “great temples of nature,” which had provided the basis for early alpine tourism and (to some degree) for the later success of grand mountain hotels?70 A pale glimmer of those ideals. They gave rise to an awareness that tourism, through the commodification and commercialization of inherited landscapes, had profoundly transformed those landscapes and their aesthetic values, thus diminishing their attractiveness for tourism itself. While promoting regional economic growth and technological progress, turn-of-the-century elite tourism, centered on grand hotels, furthered capitalist expansion into Europe’s coastal and mountainous inland peripheries, into residual areas of non-capitalist environments and supposed economic wastelands. Mountain grand hotels, destinations of capital-intensive luxury tourism, were an expression of “an arrogant colonialization through tourism.”71 They made nature available to an aristocratic and upper-middle-class clientele for casual consumption and as a stereotyped backdrop for self-staging. The touristification of European inland peripheries was a process of land seizure, internal colonization, and socio-economic transformation—a process that was concurrent with the climax of the colonial and imperial expansion of Europe’s nation states and their access to natural and human resources overseas.

According to Munich mountaineer and writer Heinrich Steinitzer, the gradual opening-up of the Alps by scientists, sportsmen, and early travelers was nothing less “than a specific manifestation of global research and expansion efforts which, once the internal structure of the societal edifice had been consolidated, strove to extend their reach beyond the [own] political, economic and social realm.”72

Human disposal over nature paired with alienation from nature; both phenomena were equally symptomatic of an epoch characterized by increasing industrialization and urbanization. While a specific perception of nature initially helped mountain travel destinations gain lasting popularity, turn-of-the-century elite tourists followed values and norms that were different from those of early-day mountain tourists, let alone from the particular back-to-nature concept of the Jugendbewegung (the German Youth Movement) that emerged shortly before 1900. High-society vacationers tended to experience landscape and nature from distanced and isolated positions. The grand hotels’ large viewing verandas, providing vast panoramas through picture windows, reinforced the upper class’s sense of otherness, and may be regarded as having symbolized their loss of contact with both the natural and broader social environment.

Notes

-01- For an overview, see Cordula Seger and Reinhard Wittmann, eds., Grand Hotel: Bühne der Literatur (Munich: Dölling & Galitz, 2007). | return to main text |
-02- See Habbo Knoch, Grandhotels: Luxusräume und Gesellschaftswandel in New York, London und Berlin um 1900 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2016); see also Habbo Knoch, “Das Grandhotel,” in Orte der Moderne: Erfahrungswelten des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Alexa Geisthövel and Habbo Knoch (Frankfurt: Campus, 2005), 129–40. Unless stated otherwise, all translations by the author. | return to main text |
-03- Alain Corbin, Meereslust: Das Abendland und die Entdeckung der Küste (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1990), 319. | return to main text |
-04- Götz Großklaus, “Naturtraum des Kulturbörgers,” in Natur als Gegenwelt: Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte der Natur, ed. Götz Großklaus and Ernst Oldemeyer (Karlsruhe: von Loeper, 1983), 190. | return to main text |
-05- See Ulrike Kammerhofer-Aggermann, “Von der Trachtenmode zur heiligen vererbten Vätertracht: ‘Volk in Tracht ist Macht!,’” in Ein ewiges dennoch: 125 Jahre Juden in Salzburg, ed. Marko M. Feingold (Vienna: Böhlau, 1993), 177–90; Reinhard Johler, “Nachwort,” in Die unsichtbare Grenze: Ethnizität und Ökologie in einem Alpental, ed. John W. Cole and Eric R. Wolf (Vienna: Folio, 1995), 427–28. | return to main text |
-06- Werner Brunner, Verblichene Idyllen: Wandbilder im Berliner Mietshaus der Jahrhundertwende: Beispiele internationalen Zeitgeschmacks der Belle Epoque (Berlin: Mann, 1996), 116–30. | return to main text |
-07- “Ausstellungen und Sammlungen: Hannover,” Die Kunst für alle 13, no. 6 (1897): 111. | return to main text |
-08- Alfred M. Müller, “Geschichte des Deutschen und Österreichischen Alpenvereins: Ein Beitrag zur Sozialgeschichte des Vereinswesens,” PhD diss. (University of Münster, 1980), 242; Michael Wedekind, “La politicizzazione della montagna: borghesia, alpinismo e nazionalismo tra Otto e Novecento,” in L’invenzione di un cosmo borghese: valori sociali e simboli culturali dell’alpinismo nei secoli XIX e XX, ed. Claudio Ambrosi and Michael Wedekind (Trento: Museo Storico, 2000), 35; Michael Wedekind, “Alpes et Carpates: Conflictualités ethniques et culturelles dans l’alpinisme de la fin du XIXe siècle,” in La montagne pour tous: la genèse d’une ambition dans l’Europe du XXe siècle, ed. Olivier Hoibian (Toulouse: Le Pas d’Oiseau, 2020), 114–15. | return to main text |
-09- Karl Baedeker, Die Schweiz, nebst den angrenzenden Theilen von Oberitalien, Savoyen und Tirol: Handbuch für Reisende (Leipzig: Baedeker, 1875), XXIII. | return to main text |
-10- Nikolaus Pevsner, Hugh Honour, and John Fleming, Lexikon der Weltarchitektur (Munich: Prestel, 1992), 569. | return to main text |
-11- Baedeker, Schweiz, XXIII. | return to main text |
-12- Arnold Bennett, “The Hotel on the Landscape,” The Living Age 7, no. 44 (1909): 541. | return to main text |
-13- Bennett, “Hotel”, 541–42. | return to main text |
-14- Gustav Peyer, Geschichte des Reisens in der Schweiz: Eine culturgeschichtliche Studie (Basel: Detloff, 1885), 193. | return to main text |
-15- Eduard Guyer, Der Fremdenverkehr und die allgemeinen Verhältnisse des Wirthschaftswesens in der Schweiz (Schweizerische Landesausstellung Zürich 1883. Bericht über Gruppe 41: Das Hotelwesen) (Zurich: Füssli, 1884), 10. | return to main text |
-16- See Christopher Monkhouse, “Railway Hotels,” in Railway Architecture, ed. Marcus Binney and David Pearce (London: Orbis, 1979), 121. | return to main text |
-17- See August Prokop, Über österreichische Alpen-Hotels, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung Tirol’s (Vienna: self-published, 1897); Désirée Vasko-Juhász, Die Südbahn: Ihre Kurorte und Hotels (Vienna: Böhlau, 2018). The Südbahn also established hotels in Baden near Vienna, Dobrna, Gorizia, and Merano; the company probably owned further hotels in Graz, Ljubljana, Pivka, Rijeka, and Trieste; see Vasko-Juhász, Südbahn, 37–38. | return to main text |
-18- See Vasko-Juhász, Südbahn, 78–81. | return to main text |
-19- Antonio De Rossi, La costruzione delle Alpi: immagini e scenari del pittoresco alpino, 1773–1914 (Rome: Donzelli, 2014), 295–305. | return to main text |
-20- Maria Wenzel, Palasthotels in Deutschland: Untersuchungen zu einer Bauaufgabe im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert (Hildesheim: Olms, 1991), 81, 101. | return to main text |
-21- Ludwig Rohden, “Gardone-Riviera am Gardasee: Ein Beitrag zur Klimatotherapie,” Deutsche Medicinische Wochenschrift 11, no. 41 (1885): 706. | return to main text |
-22- Silke Behl and Eva Gerberding, eds., Literarische Grandhotels der Schweiz (Zurich: Arche, 2008), 88. | return to main text |
-23- Konrad Meyer-Ahrens, Die Heilquellen und Kurorte der Schweiz und einiger der Schweiz zunächst angrenzenden Gegenden der Nachbarstaaten (Zurich: Orell, Füssli & Comp., 1867), 252. | return to main text |
-24- Alexandre Martin, La Suisse pittoresque et ses environs: tableau général, descriptif, historique et statistique des 22 cantons, de la Savoie, d’une partie du Piémont et du pays de Bade (Paris: Souverain, 1835), 306. | return to main text |
-25- Eugène de La Harpe, La Suisse balnéaire et climatique: ses eaux min´rales, bains, stations climatiques d’été et d’hiver, établissements hydroth´rapiques, etc. (Zurich: Schmidt, 1897), 71. Before it was opened up to tourists, the Rochers-de-Naye could only be reached by a four-and-a-half-hour climb along steep and arduous footpaths. See Martin, Suisse pittoresque, 305; John Murray, A Handbook for Travellers in Switzerland, the Alps of Savoy and Piedmont, the Italian Lakes, and Part of Dauphiné (London: Murray, 1879), 185. | return to main text |
-26- “Among the Switzers,” The Evening Star (Washington, D.C.), September 12, 1878: 1. | return to main text |
-27- “More Alpine Railroads: How Swiss Peaks Are Made Accessible to Tourists,” New-York Tribune, illustrated supplement to New-York Tribune 64, no. 21189 (November 20, 1904), 10. | return to main text |
-28- Großklaus, “Naturtraum”, 195. | return to main text |
-29- Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), 30–31. | return to main text |
-30- Elisabeth Baumgartner, “Elektrisches Alpenglühen,” Distel: Kulturelemente, nos. 42–43 (1990): 63. | return to main text |
-31- Evelyne Polt-Heinzl, “Ein Fräulein und sein Autor zu Gast im Grand Hotel,” in Grand Hotel: Bühne der Literatur, ed. Cordula Seger and Reinhard Wittmann (Munich: Dölling & Galitz, 2007), 49. | return to main text |
-32- Arthur Schnitzler, Fräulein Else: A Novelette, trans. F.H. Lyon (London: Philpot, [1925]), 77. | return to main text |
-33- Karl Baedeker, Südbayern, Tirol und Salzburg, Ober- und Nieder-Österreich, Steiermark, Kärnten und Krain: Handbuch für Reisende (Leipzig: Baedeker, 1906), 446. | return to main text |
-34- Konrad Falke, Wengen: Ein Landschaftsbild (Zurich: Rascher, 1913), 78. | return to main text |
-35- Arthur Achleitner and Emil Ubl, Tirol und Vorarlberg: Neue Schilderung von Land und Leuten (Leipzig: Payne, [c. 1900]), 354. | return to main text |
-36- Schnitzler, Fräulein Else, 15. | return to main text |
-37- See Eduard Osenbrüggen, Wanderstudien aus der Schweiz, vol. 5 (Schaffhausen: Baader, 1876), 290–91. | return to main text |
-38- See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 7. | return to main text |
-39- Woldemar Kaden, Das Schweizerland: Eine Sommerfahrt durch Gebirg und Thal (Stuttgart: Engelhorn, [1880]), 177. | return to main text |
-40- Ornella Selvafolta, “I Grand Hotel e la tradizione dell’accoglienza sul lago di Como tra Otto e Novecento,” in I Grand Hotel come generatori di cambiamento tra 1870 e 1930: indagini nei contesti alpini e subalpini tra laghi e monti, ed. Monica Aresi (Riva del Garda: Museo Alto Garda, 2016), 102. | return to main text |
-41- See David Stradling, Making Mountains: New York City and the Catskills (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2007), 82. | return to main text |
-42- See Uwe Hentschel, Mythos Schweiz: zum deutschen literarischen Philhelvetismus zwischen 1700 und 1850 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2002). | return to main text |
-43- Wolfgang Kos, “Die Verkleinerung der Alpen, am Beispiel der touristischen Eroberung des Semmeringgebietes im 19. Jahrhundert,” Distel: Kulturelemente, nos. 42–43 (1990): 47. | return to main text |
-44- See Claudio Ferrata, La fabbricazione del paesaggio dei laghi: giardini, panorami e cittadine per turisti tra Ceresio, Lario e Verbano (Bellinzona: Casagrande, 2008); Claudio Ferrata, “Dall’importazione di piante alle trasformazioni del paesaggio: il caso della Regione dei laghi,” in I Grand Hotel come generatori di cambiamento tra 1870 e 1930: indagini nei contesti alpini e subalpini tra laghi e monti, ed. Monica Aresi (Riva del Garda: Museo Alto Garda, 2016), 193–202. | return to main text |
-45- Johann Georg Kohl, Naturansichten aus den Alpen (Leipzig: Arnoldische Buchhandlung, 1851), 116, 120; see also Kaden, Das Schweizerland, 84–85. | return to main text |
-46- Joseph Victor Widmann, Spaziergänge in den Alpen: Wanderstudien und Plaudereien (Frauenfeld: Huber, 1885), 89. | return to main text |
-47- See Karlheinz Wöhler, Touristifizierung von Räumen: Kulturwissenschaftliche und soziologische Studien zur Konstruktion von Räumen (Wiesbaden: VS-Verlag, 2011). | return to main text |
-48- Jakob Hardmeyer, Locarno und seine Thäler (Zurich: Orell Füssli, [1890]), 10. | return to main text |
-49- For the architecture of grand hotels, see Isabelle Rucki, “Grand Hotels in den Alpen: Zur Entstehung und Entwicklung eines Bautyps,” Itinera, no. 12 (1992), 199–215; Roland Flückiger-Seiler, Hotelträume zwischen Gletschern und Palmen: Schweizer Tourismus und Hotelbau, 1830–1920 (Baden: Hier und Jetzt, 2001); Roland Flüückiger-Seiler, Hotelpaläste zwischen Traum und Wirklichkeit: Schweizer Tourismus und Hotelbau, 1830–1920 (Baden: Hier und Jetzt, 2003); Wenzel, Palasthotels. See also Wolfgang Richter and Jürgen Zänker, Der Bürgertraum vom Adelsschloß: Aristokratische Bauformen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1988). In Austria, quite a few grand hotels initially adopted regionally based architectural elements, followed the Swiss Chalet style, or still strove for a fusion of architecture with nature. | return to main text |
-50- Kohl, Naturansichten, 137. | return to main text |
-51- Roland Flückiger-Seiler, “Hotelpaläste des Historismus in der Schweiz,” in Baukultur im Wandel: Historismus in Südtirol, ed. Arbeitskreis Hausforschung Südtirol (Bolzano: Athesia, 2014), 188. | return to main text |
-52- Caspar Ulrich Huber, Album von St. Moritz in Oberengadin, Canton Graubünden (Zurich: no publisher, [c. 1858]), 15. | return to main text |
-53- Woldemar Kaden, Durchs Schweizerland: Sommerfahrten in Gebirg und Thal (Zurich: Meier-Merhart, 1895), 388. | return to main text |
-54- In this context, see Karl Baedeker, Die Schweiz, nebst den angrenzenden Theilen von Oberitalien, Savoyen und Tirol: Handbuch für Reisende (Koblenz: Baedeker, 1869), 100; Peyer, Geschichte, 2. See also Cédric Humair et al., Système touristique et culture technique dans l’Arc lémanique: analyse d’une success story et de ses effets sur l’économie régionale, 1852–1914 (Neuchâtel: Alphil, 2014); Andrea Leonardi, “I Grand Hotel come motore dello sviluppo turistico in area alpina,” in I Grand Hotel come generatori di cambiamento tra 1870 e 1930: indagini nei contesti alpini e subalpini tra laghi e monti, ed. Monica Aresi (Riva del Garda: Museo Alto Garda, 2016), 26–28; Andrea Zanini, “Grandi alberghi e organizzazione turistica in Italia tra Otto e Novecento: il ruolo pionieristico dell’esperienza lariana,” in I Grand Hotel come generatori di cambiamento tra 1870 e 1930: indagini nei contesti alpini e subalpini tra laghi e monti, ed. Monica Aresi (Riva del Garda: Museo Alto Garda, 2016), 37–49. | return to main text |
-55- In this context, see Jon Sterngass, First Resorts: Pursuing Pleasure at Saratoga Springs, Newport, and Coney Island (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 6–39. | return to main text |
-56- Stradling, Making Mountains, 90, 79. | return to main text |
-57- Stefan Zweig, “Bei den Sorglosen,” in Die schlaflose Welt: Aufsätze und Vorträge aus den Jahren 1909–1941, ed. Knut Beck (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2012), 104–111. | return to main text |
-58- Erich Kästner, Three Men in the Snow: A Story, trans. Cyrus Brooks (London: Cape, 1935), 53. | return to main text |
-59- Achleitner and Ubl, Tirol, 354. | return to main text |
-60- Karl Baedeker, Südbayern, Tirol und Salzburg, Ober- und Nieder-Österreich, Steiermark, Kärnten und Krain: Handbuch für Reisende (Leipzig: Baedeker, 1910), 411. | return to main text |
-61- See also Hans Heiss, “Das ‘Österreichische Engadin’: Das Hochpustertal—Pionierlandschaft des Tiroler Fremdenverkehrs,” Distel: Kulturelemente, nos. 42–43 (1990): 42; Wenzel, Palasthotels, 293. | return to main text |
-62- Peyer, Geschichte, 239. | return to main text |
-63- Alphonse Daudet, Tartarin sur les Alpes: nouveaux exploits du héros tarasconnais (Paris: Flammarion, [c. 1905]), 117–18. | return to main text |
-64- See e.g. Kaden, Durchs Schweizerland, 388; Hermann Wollschlaeger, Sommerferien in Tirol: Reise-Erinnerungen (Berlin: Janke, 1901), 46; Édouard Rod, Là-haut (Paris: Perrin, 1897); Édouard Rod, “Der Alpinismus, Teil I: Die Schweizer Alpen,” in Die Schweiz im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, vol. 3, ed. Paul Seippel (Bern: Schmid & Francke, 1900), 409. | return to main text |
-65- Albert Burckhardt-Finsler, “Was wir wollen,” Heimatschutz: Zeitschrift der “Schweizer[ischen] Vereinigung für Heimatschutz” = Ligue pour la beauté: Bulletin de la “Ligue pour la conservation de la Suisse pittoresque” (1905/06): 1; “Projekt für ein Kurhaus,” Heimatschutz: Zeitschrift der “Schweizer[ischen] Vereinigung für Heimatschutz” = Ligue pour la beauté. Bulletin de la “Ligue pour la conservation de la Suisse pittoresque” 1, no. 2 (1906): 9. | return to main text |
-66- Roland Flückiger-Seiler, “‘Architektur nach dem Sündenfall’: Der Umgang mit Hotelbauten aus der Belle Époque,” in Erhalten und Gestalten: 100 Jahre Schweizer Heimatschutz, ed. Madlaina Bundi (Baden: Hier und Jetzt, 2005), 81. For a lucid criticism of the Heimatschutz and for the confutation of some of the its positions, see Samuel Guyer, “Das ‘Suvrettahaus’ bei St. Moritz: Ein Beitrag zum Hotelbau-Problem der Gegenwart,” Schweizerische Bauzeitung: Wochenschrift für Bau-, Verkehrs- und Maschinentechnik = Revue polytechnique 69, no. 7 (1917): 71–74; no. 8 (1917): 85–87; no. 9 (1917): 94–98. | return to main text |
-67- Michael Schmitt, Palast-Hotels: Architektur und Anspruch eines Bautyps, 1870–1920 (Berlin: Mann, 1982), 70. | return to main text |
-68- Guyer, “Suvrettahaus,” 97; Cordula Seger, “‘Ihr werdet arm im Glück, im Reichtum elend bleiben!’: Bauen für den Tourismus im Spannungsfeld zwischen Tradition und Spekulation,” in Alpenland: Terrain der Moderne, ed. Marius Risi (Münster, New York, Munich, and Berlin: Waxmann, 2011), 108. On the hotel La Margna, see “Das Hotel ‘La Margna’ in St. Moritz,” Schweizerische Bauzeitung: Wochenschrift für Bau-, Verkehrs- und Maschinentechnik = Revue polytechnique 53, no. 22 (1909): 277–79. | return to main text |
-69- See Jürg Ragettli, “Berglandschaft, Hotelarchitektur und Heimatschutz,” Turrisbabel: Trimestrales Mitteilungsblatt der Stiftung der Kammer der Architekten, Raumplaner, Landschaftsplaner, Denkmalpfleger der Autonomen Provinz Bozen = Notiziario trimestrale della Fondazione dell’Ordine degli architetti, pianificatori, paesaggisti, conservatori della Provincia autonoma di Bolzano, no. 84 (2010): 26–29. | return to main text |
-70- Kaden, Das Schweizerland, 104. | return to main text |
-71- Carlo Calderan, “La costruzione del paesaggio turistico,” Turrisbabel: Trimestrales Mitteilungsblatt der Stiftung der Kammer der Architekten, Raumplaner, Landschaftsplaner, Denkmalpfleger der Autonomen Provinz Bozen = Notiziario trimestrale della Fondazione dell’Ordine degli architetti, pianificatori, paesaggisti, conservatori della Provincia autonoma di Bolzano, no. 84 (2010): 7. | return to main text |
-72- Heinrich Steinitzer, “Die Psychologie des Alpinismus,” in Saggi sulla psicologia dell’alpinista: raccolta di autobiografie psicologiche di alpinisti viventi, ed. Adolfo Hess (Turin: Lattes, 1914), 67. | return to main text |

About the Author

Michael Wedekind has been a senior researcher with the Munich-based Zentralinstitut für Kunstgeschichte since 2016. He studied history and Romance languages at Münster, Perugia, Bologna, and Bucharest, obtaining his PhD on Nazi occupation policy in Northern Italy from the University of Münster, where he also served as a postdoctoral researcher and published an award-winning study on the history of European mountaineering. After visiting professorships at the University of Trento and the University of Bucharest, he was a senior researcher at the University of Münster and the University of Vienna, where he also taught contemporary history. His research focuses on nineteenth- and twentieth-century history of the Alpine-Adriatic region, Italy, and South-East Europe. His latest monograph, Die Besetzung der Vergangenheit: Archäologie, Frühgeschichte und NS-Herrschaftslegitimation im Alpen-Adria-Raum (1939–1945) (StudienVerlag, 2019) analyzes the role of German and Austrian archaeologists in legitimating Nazi expansion to Slovenia and Northern Italy. He is currently co-editing two publications that discuss twentieth-century demography and population policies in South Tyrol and Trentino and forced transfers of cultural objects in the Alpine-Adriatic region between the 1900s and 1970s.

Contact

Michael Wedekind
Email

Suggested Citation

Wedekind, Michael. “Mountain Grand Hotels at the Fin de Siècle: Sites, Gazes, and Environments.” JAAAS: Journal of the Austrian Association for American Studies 2, no. 2 (2021): 163–187, DOI: 10.47060/jaaas.v2i2.118

Keywords

Alps; mountains; nature; Switzerland; tourism

Peer Review

This article was reviewed by the issue’s guest editors and an external reviewer.

Copyright

© 2021 Michael Wedekind. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which allows for the unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.