Bahnen und Berge: Verkehrstechnik, Tourismus und Naturschutz in den Schweizer Alpen, 1870-1939 (review)

Bahnen und Berge: Verkehrstechnik, Tourismus und Naturschutz in den Schweizer Alpen, 1870-1939. By Wolfgang König. Frankfurt: Campus, 2000. Pp. 242. DM 58.

In this study Wolfgang König sets out to examine the interaction between the development of railways, emerging tourism, and environmental problems in the Swiss Alps before World War II. He concentrates on Davos in Graubünden, Grindelwald and Lauterbrunnen in the Bernese Oberland, and Zermatt in Wallis. Railways in these three regions had very different histories.

Davos, already famous for its healthy climate, was developed as a health spa for tuberculosis patients largely through the efforts of a Dutch banker, W. J. Holsboer. Through his connections with Basel banking houses, Holsboer found the necessary capital to connect Davos by rail to the rest of Switzerland in 1890. Grindelwald, Lauterbrunnen, and Zermatt were developed chiefly for tourism, and proposed rail connections were hotly debated by the local population. Opposition came in the first place from coachmen, teamsters, and guides, afraid of losing their jobs. Moreover, railways were seen as a means of speculation by outsiders, bankers and businessmen from Bern and Basel, who had better not meddle with these outlying and somewhat xenophobic valleys and mountain villages. Environmental questions were hardly raised. The railways caused an influx of mountain climbers and wanderers, resulting in a healthy growth of the economy, and the number of hotels in these villages multiplied rapidly. Of course, tourism in these early years was something for the well-to-do only. British and Germans made up the bulk of visitors, but people from other countries, notably the United States, participated too.

Mass tourism did not really take off during the period König covers, although the years before 1914 witnessed strong growth. Davos excepted, all these tourist villages were open in the summer season only and the railways leading to them had no winter schedule until well into the 1930s. Environmental issues were raised now and then, when new rail and road construction threatened to destroy unspoiled Alpine valleys, but generally the local population found that railways meant better communication and increased prosperity.

In 1908 the first aerial cableway was opened. Such cableways were capable of reaching destinations impossible for railways, and plans for lines up such famous mountains as the Matterhorn raised an outcry. The Swiss Alpine Club and foreign sister organizations succeeded in delaying their further construction, and the outbreak of war in 1914 dried up tourism almost completely. In Switzerland, cableways were seen as foreign (that is, German) technology and did not catch on during the period covered by König. Skiing became popular after 1918, and ski lifts proliferated in the 1930s. Only in those years did the Visp-Zermatt railway finally open in winter. The federal government in Bern had been responsible for the granting of concessions for railways, and had pursued a fairly liberal policy in this respect, but Bern gladly left controversial decisions about ski lifts to the cantonal authorities.

König explains the different policies of federal, cantonal, and local authorities with respect to railways and funiculars, and he makes clear that before 1939 environmental issues were raised only when other arguments failed to impress the federal authorities. The "Naturschutz" of the title of his book played only a minor role in the contention over the opening of outlying valleys and mountain resorts to mass tourism. As König concedes, the period treated in his book is only the prelude to the real fight between economy and ecology that was to erupt after 1945, when road construction on a large scale brought hundreds of thousands of tourists in automobiles, with all the ensuing pollution and destruction of natural resources. Though I would have liked to have seen better maps, König is obviously master of his subject. He has used all available sources and writes an easygoing prose.

Augustus J. Veenendaal Jr...