THE ALPS: PAST TIME OF THE YOUNG VIENNESE IN THE 1920s & 1930s

LIVES OF THE NON-ÉLITE IN VIENNA FROM THE AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN EMPIRE TO THE NAZI REGIME AND POST-WAR AUSTRIA, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

My grandmother Lola, Semmering 1931

My grandparents’, my great-uncles and great-aunts’ favourite leisure time activities on weekends and during holidays was hiking in the Vienna Woods, the last part of the Alps in the east, and the mountains south of Vienna, such as, Rax, Schneeberg, Gippel, Göller und Semmering and for longer vacations the whole area of the Austrian Alps, Southern Tyrol, Bavaria and Switzerland. How did that overwhelming passion for mountaineering and skiing among the younger Viennese generation in the 1920s and 1930s develop? Alpinism had evolved from an elitist sport of wealthy British tourists to the bourgeois leisure activity of “Sommerfrische” (summer holidays in the Alps) and a sport of intellectual and artistic circles in the 19th century to a widespread working class past time, too, in the 1st Austrian Republic (1919-1934/38).

Many of the beautiful black and white photos of hiking tours in the Austrian Alps were taken by my great-uncle, Karl Elzholz, a mechanic at the Viennese tramways, an atheist, a committed socialist and a member of the Alpine club “Naturfreunde”. He was married to my great-aunt, Mizzi, and later to her sister, my great-aunt, Käthe, and both of them were dedicated hikers as well and formed part of the groups of friends who went hiking in the vicinity of Vienna or on longer mountaineering tours to the Alps. They were experienced hikers and planned the tours themselves.

In the 19th century workers organised educational clubs because that was sometimes the only way to legally form workers’ associations. Later workers’ gymnastic clubs were established along the lines of German nationalist gymnasts’ associations, the “Turnerbewegung”. The aim of these clubs was to improve the health and fitness of the workers with the help sports activities and especially the exposure to “air, light and sun” was seen as beneficial. As a consequence those clubs soon moved out of the stuffy rooms of gyms into nature. That’s when walking and hiking became a popular leisure time activity of the working classes, too. In 1895 the Alpine club “Naturfreunde” (Nature’s Friends) was founded. Soon afterwards also skiing was made popular among the working class. Emmerich Wenger brought skis from a trip to Norway to Vienna and they tried them out at the “Bierhäuslberg” to the amusement of all present. After the First World War all workers’ sports clubs united under the umbrella organisation ASKÖ (“Arbeiterbund für Sport und Körperkultur in Österreich”). In 1931 the 2nd Workers’ Olympic Games took place in Austria, initiated by the ASKÖ: in February in the Semmering area and in July in Vienna in the newly erected stadium in Prater. In 1934 with the takeover of the Austro-fascist regime all workers’ clubs were declared illegal and only after the end of World War II the socialist sports organisation ASKÖ could be reactivated.

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FIN-DE-SIECLE CULTURE IN VIENNA AROUND 1900

CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE, THE DANUBE REGION: ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

  

Vienna Secession, architect: Joseph Maria Olbrich 1898

In most fields of intellectual activity, the early 20th century Europe proudly asserted its independence of the past. The modern mind was growing indifferent to history because history, conceived as a continuous nourishing tradition, seemed useless to it. The sharp break from the tie with the past could be seen as involving generational rebellion against parents and a search for new self-definitions. Emergent “modernism” tended to take the specific form of a “reshuffling of the self”. Here historical change not only forced upon the individual a search for a new identity, but also imposesd upon whole social groups the task of revising or replacing defunct belief systems. The attempt to shake off the shackles of history paradoxically speeded up the process of history, for indifference to any relationship with the past liberates the imagination to proliferate new forms and new constructs. Thus complex changes appeared where once continuity reigned. Vienna around 1900 with its acutely felt tremors of social and political disintegration, proved one of the most fertile breeding grounds of the 20th century’s a-historical culture. Its great intellectual innovators – in music, art and philosophy, in economics and architecture, and, of course, in psychoanalysis – all broke, more or less deliberately, their ties to the historical outlook central to the 19th century liberal culture in which they had been reared. This secession from liberalism grasped a social-psychological reality that the liberals could not see. This intellectual development in Vienna constituted part of the wider cultural revolution that ushered in the 20th century.

 

The era of political ascendancy of the liberal middle class in Austria began later than elsewhere in Western Europe and entered earlier than elsewhere into a deep crisis. Actual constitutional government lasted only about four decades before its defeat and the whole process took place in a temporal compression unknown elsewhere in Europe. In France this process gradually started in 1848 and lasted until World War I, in Austria however modern movements appeared in most fields in the 1890s and were fully matured two decades later. Thus the growth of a new culture seemed to take place as in a hothouse, with political crisis providing the heat. Austria became, as the poet Hebbel, said “the little world in which the big one holds its try-outs.” In Vienna, contrary to Paris, London or Berlin, until about 1900 the cohesiveness of the whole social elite was very strong. The salon and the cafe retained their vitality as institutions where intellectuals of different kinds shared ideas and values with each other and still mingled with a business and professional elite proud of its humanistic education and artistic culture. The development of an avant-garde subculture, detached from the political and social values of the upper middle class, came later in Vienna, though it was perhaps swifter and more self-confident. Most of the pioneering generation of culture-makers were alienated along with their class in its exclusion from political power, not against it as a ruling class. Only in the last decade before World War I does there appear alienation of the intellectual from the whole society.

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