The Alps Read online

  THE

  ALPS

  A Human History from

  Hannibal to Heidi and Beyond

  STEPHEN O’SHEA

  TO MY HELPERS,

  H. Ellison, Dana H., Edward H., Ernst H.

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  A Note on Measurement

  PART ONE

  Lake Geneva to the Gotthard Pass

  PART TWO

  Heidiland to Grindelwald

  PART THREE

  Innsbruck to Trieste

  Acknowledgments

  Index

  PREFACE

  THE BEST DESCRIPTION OF THE ALPS I’ve seen comes from a geologist, Richard Fortey, in Earth: An Intimate History. Writing of the violent collision of European and African tectonic plates over millennia, he says, “Alpine mountains might be seen as badly made lasagne, crudely layered and buckled in the cooking.” The result of a mountain-building process that began about sixty-five million years ago, the Alps form a fearsome, gargantuan intrusion of stone inconveniently located not at the edge but square in the middle of Europe.

  I lived almost two decades in Paris, then another few years near Perpignan, in the shadow of the Pyrenees. All the while, I was drawn to Europe’s most evocative mountain range, the Alps, again and again. I have overflown them, taken trains through their tunnels, driven over their heart-stopping passes, and skied down their slopes.

  There is a temptation to dismiss the Alps as simply a winter wonderland, a backdrop for skiers taking pictures of themselves with stuffed marmots. They are much more than that, and always have been. The Alps impede the passage between northern and southern Europe. Their size and inaccessibility have made them the source of divisions—in language, cuisine, culture, religion, history, and much more. It is this human geography that interests me most. Their hidden valleys have seen the march of armies since Antiquity, witnessed the clanking of Crusaders and the tramp of pilgrims. Tradesmen have struggled over their passes, as have bishops, emperors, noblewomen, and thieves. Fourteen million people live in the Alps, and many of them cannot talk to one another, so great are the language barriers created by the mountains. Disruption, to use a term now in vogue, has been their role in a colorful history.

  Before satisfying my curiosity by journeying in their midst, I was unaware that these mountains were the midwife of the Romantic Revolution, that they changed the very way we look at nature, that what was once considered forbidding ineluctably became erotic. The Alps more or less invented tourism, and they ushered in the mania for winter sports. They have inspired artists and criminals. They have also stood as a challenge for people of great courage and intellect. Mountaineering came of age in the Alps, as did the science of geology. They have been the stage for marvelous engineering achievement and the setting for horrible disaster.

  Taken together, the various Alpine ranges cover a Kansas-sized 210,000 square kilometers and stretch from France to Slovenia in a 1,200-kilometer arc that is 200 kilometers at its widest. That makes for thousands of peaks—monstrous, medium, and modest—as one proceeds from west to east. There are 1,599 Alpine peaks with an altitude exceeding 2,000 meters. After much head-scratching, I opted to take a route from west to east, from Lake Geneva in Switzerland to Trieste in Italy. This meant that I could engage with the mammoth heights first, while I was still fresh. More important, I decided to concentrate on the high passes of the Alps rather than their high peaks. It is by cresting a pass that one sees the diversity in human geography, learns the different stories told on either side of the height, finds out that what is goofy on one side may be grand on the other. With a high pass, you go through the trees, then they fade away, until you are at a tundra height overlain with snow. Downward you go, around dozens of hairpin turns, and usually you end up in someplace entirely different. You may have passed a national boundary, a “lard line” (pork fat vs. olive oil), a linguistic cleavage (from the Germanic to the Latin or the Slavic), a shift in architecture, or a sudden change in human behavior and custom. To someone who has always been interested in boundaries and differences, the Alpine passes proved irresistible. I am hardly alone in this feeling. Writing in 1904, British mountaineer William Conway observed,

  To climb a peak is to make an expedition, but to cross a pass is to travel. In the one case you normally return to the spot whence you set out; in the other you go from the known to the unknown, from the visible to what is beyond. The peak, which is before you when you set out to climb it, is only explained, not revealed, as you ascend; but every pass is a revelation: it takes you over into another region. You leave one area behind and you enter another; you come down amongst new people and into fresh surroundings. You shut out all that was familiar yesterday and open up another world.

  This journey will necessarily be automotive, a vertical road trip for the stout of heart. The ground to be covered is vast—six Alpine countries, tens of thousands of meters up and down, up and down. I do not intend this to be an exhaustive itinerary covering every pass—that is an outright impossibility, given their number. Rather, I will concentrate on those with the most stories to tell. The vistas will be magnificent, scary even, but the insight gained might just be well worth the effort and the fright.

  And did I mention that I’m afraid of heights?

  A NOTE ON MEASUREMENT

  THE HIGHEST MOUNTAINS OF THE ALPS are called “four-thousanders”—for their metric elevation. Road signage everywhere in the mountains shows kilometers. Signs at the mouth of a tunnel inform you of the distance, in meters, you can expect to be driving in darkness. The Alps are incontestably metric mountains.

  Accordingly, throughout this book I have used the metric system. A kilometer is 0.6 mile; thus, 100 kilometers equal 60 miles. The meter is 3.28 feet in length. So, if you insist on getting a foot value for the elevations of peaks and passes, use 3.28 as a multiplier, or 3 and then some. Or just think: slightly longer than a yard.

  But I will not abandon our irrational system entirely. Snarled traffic will still inch along, a nearby object will still be a few feet away. A six-foot-tall man will remain six feet. Consistency is vastly overrated, so in the particulars of daily life I shall revert to the familiar. In this I take my cue from a former leader of the French Communists who, when called out on an inconsistency, used to say, “Such are my contradictions!”

  PART ONE

  LAKE GENEVA TO THE GOTTHARD PASS

  1. LAKE GENEVA

  THE ROAD SOUTH lies before me, the air above it shimmering in the heat. Once past the outskirts of Paris, the woodlands of the Ile-de-France close in, only to be relieved an hour or so later by the vines of Chablis. Farther into Burgundy, fortified farmhouses stand atop the gentle folding of the landscape, sentinels of pastoral plenty since the Middle Ages. The hot day wears on. The vineyards of Beaujolais appear now to my right, whereas beyond the River Saône to my left rise the first foothills of the Jura Mountains. The green hills are harbingers of where I will spend the summer, in a geological bedlam.

  The kilometers click past until I’m about an hour north of Lyon. After a quick overnight in a sleepy wine-making town, I leave the north–south expressway for another heading eastward, straight to Switzerland. As the heat of the day has yet to build, I slide the windows down and let the cool morning air flow through the car. The rolling hills and red-roofed houses of the Franche-Comté file past, every public building glimpsed seemingly required to have a huge clock, as if no one here wants to lose track of the time. This strikes me as odd, for the beautiful region seems entirely stuck out of time. Bucolic and peaceful, the Franche-Comté is the kind of France that starry-eyed France-lovers imagine after their second glass of wine.

  At last the border arrives. A woman with some sort of Swiss uniform tells me that I have to fork ove
r the equivalent of twenty euros. I comply, and she slaps a sticker on my windshield, allowing me to use Switzerland’s expressways for the next twelve calendar months. As my car purrs through the quiet streets of Geneva, heads turn in my direction, almost all of them male, leading me to wonder if I’m in denial about some aspect of my personality. Then I remember that I am at the wheel of a limited-edition, souped-up Renault Mégane Sport, gray with red trim, a muscle car rented for the mountain driving ahead. No one has seen this thing before. When I park by the lakeside, three car-lovers approach, seemingly rising out of the sidewalk, eager to inspect the vehicle.

  Geneva is limping through a broiling weekend of late spring. Out in the harbor, the city’s famed fountain shoots a stupendous volume of white water more than a hundred meters into the air. Defeated by gravity, the spray falls through the haze of the day into the milky waters below. Those waters, at the western end of the great banana-shaped Lake Geneva (or Lac Léman, as it is called here), then continue on as the Rhône to resume a long journey to the Mediterranean.

  Geneva is not a postcard-perfect city. Grand nineteenth-century buildings crowd the shores of its lake, of different shades and hues, like a Paris organized by the color-blind. There is no unity, no coherent civic vista to relieve the eye, just intermittent stretches of architectural beauty. Yet Geneva, the most boring interesting city on the Continent, the spot Fyodor Dostoyevsky dismissed as a “dull, gloomy, Protestant, stupid town,” midwife to the Calvinist Reformation, home to do-gooderism past and present—the League of Nations, the Red Cross, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees—Geneva must be where my journey begins. For it was along the shores of Lake Geneva that an aesthetic revolution occurred more than two centuries ago, a revolution in thought that altered how humanity viewed nature. And, more to our purpose, the mountains. What Geneva’s worldwide web and its Large Hadron Collider have done to reality, the bygone artists and thinkers and scientists of Lake Geneva did to taste, which is, arguably, reality’s stepsister.

  On the waterfront, a statue of a woman commands attention through the kinks of scorching air rising from the surrounding cobbles. The regal figure portrayed in bronze is angular, and pretty, although her Scottish creator, sculptor Philip Jackson, has her trying to hide her beauty behind a fan. The monument honors Empress Elisabeth of Austria, murdered near this spot on 10 September 1898, another furnace of a day in Geneva. The sixty-year-old empress was on her way to take a ferry out onto the lake, to escape the torpor. Her Italian anarchist assassin, armed with a sharpened file, had come to Geneva to kill another royal—the Duc d’Orléans—but, upon realizing his intended victim was out of town, settled instead on driving his needle into the heart of Elisabeth—or, as she was universally known, Sisi. To a fawning central Europe, Sisi was a combination of Princess Di and Jackie O, her beauty and many travels cataloged and wondered at. Sisi smoked cigarettes (transgressive, for a woman), wrote poetry (suspect, at court), learned Hungarian (subversive, at best), took lovers (discouraged, unless discreet), and journeyed incognito (scandalous, for a royal).

  Her statue stands in the lakeside Rotonde du Mont Blanc, along the Quai du Mont Blanc, near where the Rue du Mont Blanc meets the Pont du Mont Blanc. Yet the sculpture faces northward, inland, staring at the grand old Hôtel Beau-Rivage, where Sisi spent her last night and ate her last meal. The placement of the artwork, erected on the centenary of her demise, is clever: The vain empress turns her back on the famous view out over the lake, as though not wanting to share the spotlight, as though rebelling one last time. And by now it should be clear what that view takes in.

  When one turns from the murdered Sisi to look southward over the waters, the true drama of Geneva’s location becomes evident. This city on its lovely lake has an operatic hinterland. Here we are not faced with a hilltop castle or a medieval nunnery, as in many places in Europe. Rather, on the far shore from Geneva, in France, rise the Alps, or technically the pre-Alps, in a wall of foothills. They drop to the water as dark green cliffs, seemingly unrelieved by any softening gap or declivity. It appears preposterous that civilized Geneva should share a lake with these untamed heights. Yet were that all that one saw when looking across the waves, the vista would remain striking, but not unforgettable. But as the names of the streets surrounding Sisi make clear, the cliffs opposite presage another presence.

  Beyond the green wall, lurking like a permanent cumulus congestus thunderhead, visible even on this haziest of days, stand the summits of the Mont Blanc range, their eternal alabaster mantle of snow rising in superb mockery of the steambath suffered by the humans of Geneva on this day. The mountains are white, but not innocent, and there is no way not to see them. To look south from Geneva is to behold a horizon of might and majesty. The mountains—indifferent, superior—seem to block out the sky. Small wonder that they have captured imaginations for centuries.

  MOUNTAINS WERE FEARED. Dragons and ogres prowled their summits. They rudely got in the way of travel to important places, like Rome. They were God’s punishment for man’s sinfulness. They were useless. With their avalanches, landslides, and crashing boulders, they were killers. One should climb only as far as the high pastures; almost certain death lay farther up. Mountains were grotesque; the people who lived in their midst were inbred imbeciles, les crétins des Alpes, as the French phrase has it. As such, they were suited to their awful habitat. “[T]hese distorted mindless beings,” wrote an English traveler in the Alps, “commonly excite one’s disgust by their hideous, loathsome, and uncouth appearance, by their obscene gestures, and by their senseless gabbling.”

  As for mountainous scenery, the tradition of excoriation is just as withering. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s appraisal of the Alps in the 1780s can stand in for dozens of similar denunciations. For Goethe, “These zig-zags and irritating silhouettes and shapeless piles of granite, making the fairest portion of the earth a polar region, cannot be liked by any kindly man.” As with so many present-day Germans careering southward at the wheel of a Mercedes, the great man wanted nothing more than to get the mountains behind him and luxuriate in the embrace of Italy.

  At about the same time that Goethe was dismissing the mountains, another view of them was coming to the fore. Yes, the view is terrifying, went the novel argument, but that is what makes it beautiful, not ugly. Two hundred years ago, a shift in sensibility took hold and became entrenched in our psyche, so much so that lovers in our day beholding Mont Blanc are more likely to give their squeeze a squeeze. They don’t turn away from the vista; they wallow in it, savor it, get turned on by it.

  This aesthetic change occurred gradually. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, more and more scions of rich aristocratic families, accompanied by a scholarly tour guide known as a cicerone, embarked on the cultural and carnal excursion that came to be called the Grand Tour. Most numerous among these travelers were the British, who took passage at Dover, debarked at Ostend, then proceeded to Paris and Geneva. Their carriages were disassembled at the foot of the Alps, hauled across the Great St. Bernard Pass, then put back together for a journey through the artistic motherlode of Italy: Turin, Florence, then Rome, with multiple side trips, depending on whether the traveler wanted to spend years, rather than months, abroad. Homeward, some would take in the great cities of northern Europe, before ending their tour admiring the collections in the palaces and townhouses of Flanders.

  The Grand Tour was a rite of passage, an itinerant finishing school, an occasion to sow wild oats and meet the high-born ladies of Europe, a post-Oxbridge graduate course in civilization and a months-long occasion to polish one’s French, then the language of choice among the polite society of Europe. It was only a matter of time before these travelers began to take note of the great anomaly of their journey: the untrammeled, inhuman Alps. As the porters of these young aristocrats grunted under the load of their chaises, hauling them up and over the treacherous mountain passes that would eventually lead to the sunny plains of Lombardy, out came the sketch pad
s. The vistas were unearthly, uncanny, so at odds with the formal gardens adorning their home estates. Why such chaos? How could God have created it? The Enlightment, then stretching human horizons, had begun touching such young men, or at least those who took their education seriously.

  Already in the 1680s, an English cleric named Thomas Burnet had posited that the Alps had been formed after the seven days of Creation, thereby explaining the mysterious absence of mountains in Genesis. Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth caused an unholy stir among the learned classes. Isaac Newton, whose Principia on physics (published in the same decade as Burnet’s work) would lead Deists to believe in a clockwork universe, fashioned by God then left alone to keep ticking, felt moved to write a lengthy letter to Burnet and suggest that each “day” of Creation could, in fact, encompass a much, much longer period of time than is customarily understood by that word.

  Throughout the eighteenth century, biblical literalism wobbled on its pedestal. Although many of the pious believed Creation to have taken place on 24 October 4004 BCE, as calculated by James Ussher, the unfortunately entitled Primate of Ireland, the incremental advances of nascent scientific disciplines could not be ignored. For the Alps, this led to a peculiar hybrid period of science and superstition during the early 1700s. A Swiss scholar, Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, produced finely observed topographic maps of the mountains, yet he still had some of their peaks patrolled by dragons, in whose existence he firmly believed. Similarly, to him and many others, the marine fossils found on the rocky slopes of the mountains were deposited there by the receding waters of the biblical Flood.

  Yet the dam could not hold forever. One event, above all others, traumatized the eighteenth-century imagination and led many to distance the divine from nature. Shortly before ten in the morning on 1 November, All Saints’ Day, 1755, the great city of Lisbon was flattened by a tremendous earthquake and then swamped by a tsunami. Aftershocks were felt as far away as Britain and Ireland, and the coast of Brazil was buffeted by great waves. But the true tremors of the devastating quake affected a view of the world. Was the clockwork universe a time bomb? Or, if God took an interest in the doings of man, then He surely was possessed of a most ungodly temperament, devastating and destroying all of Catholic Lisbon’s churches, witnesses to the greatness of His glory. Worse yet, the Alfama, Lisbon’s prostitution district, emerged unscathed.