The Culture and Sport of Skiing: From Antiquity to World War ll

preface

preface This book had its origins many years ago. On sabbatical leave from an American university in 1976, I left an Innsbruck exhibition of old skiing prints fascinated and determined to acquire some. Here was my sport depicted in a sixteenth-century Olaus Magnus woodcut with a man and a woman striding off to church, a couple of children on their backs and, in a quite extraordinary seventeenth-century print taken from Johannes Schefferus’s Lapponia, a man on two skis of unequal length. There was a wealth of late nineteenth-century illustrations, mostly from German magazines and periodicals. I was struck! Antiquarian sellers of Innsbruck and Salzburg laughed at me; it would be near impossible to find such material, and even if I did, I would never be able to afford such treasures. Very soon afterward, I was in Munich. During a massive rainstorm, as I ran from one shop awning to another, I slipped into a vast indoor flea market. Facing me just inside the entrance were two 1930s paintings , originals for ski clothing advertisements. Was I receiving some sign? With some misgivings—I had just bought a car and was planning a family trip through Europe—I bought one of the paintings. It was unsigned but I was told that it was by Thea von Wurmburgh (I have never been able to find out anything about her). I walked around the flea market, bought three old postcards of skiers, Fritz Heinrich’s Ski-­Spiele, and at the exit came upon a dealer selling military magazines. He asked me if I was a collector. I hesitated, having the second of those quasi–life decision vignettes of myself, then said jawohl! So I returned to Innsbruck with my secondhand Opel, the painting, three postcards, the little ski games book, and two Kriegsausgaben, and Heide only blinked. Back in the United States, I hunted around in secondhand bookshops, bought a few mostly “how to ski” books from the 1930s, started to read them and to look for literature of a more academic nature on the history of skiing. There was hardly anything. After many years of investigating, giving talks and papers, writing a few articles, my book From Skisport to Skiing: One Hundred Years of an American Sport, 1840–1940 was published in 1993. Much of early American skiing was immigrant driven—Norwegians in the Midwest, and in the 1930s, especially in the northeastern United States, the influence of Austrians was overwhelming. In order to understand this back- xii preface ground, I took research trips to Scandinavia and to central Europe. It soon came to me that I was, perhaps, writing first what should have been the second book. The more I gathered about European ski history, the more I realized that up until the Second World War, American skiing was dependent upon its European origins and upon the immigrants themselves. The history of European skiing began to intrigue me more and more. The problems with writing European ski history are quite different and more complex than those met with in analyzing American skiing. First, there is the enormous time span, some six thousand years. On a practical level, languages present difficulties. The two major ski languages of Europe, German and French, I can manage. I can muddle along in Spanish and less so in Italian . Course work in Norwegian I supplemented with intermittent translation, but I fail completely in the Eastern European languages. Luckily, during the Cold War, a number of Hausarbeiten (seminar papers) and theses were written at the Sporthochschule für Körperkultur in Leipzig by Eastern European students who used their own language sources and yet wrote their theses in German. Once the obligatory Marxist arguments are out of the way, there is much of interest for anyone searching for East German, Rumanian, Bulgarian , and Russian skiing. There are other cultural conundrums: In Norway, people changed their surnames when they moved to a different farm, and place-names changed as well: Norway’s capital Christiania changed to Kristiania in 1897 and to Oslo in 1925. I have used Christiania for the period before 1925.1 In the course of our European Wanderschaft, I have found that each nation has seen its ski history through its own eyes: the Norwegians are proud of their land being the cradle of skiing; the British know that they are responsible for downhill and slalom; the Austrians are sure that their method of instruction was best—in fact, they are sure...