Cities, Mountains and Being Modern in fin-de-siècle England and Germany by Ben Anderson (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Cities, Mountains and Being Modern in fin-de-siècle England and Germany by Ben Anderson Simon Bainbridge (bio) Cities, Mountains and Being Modern in fin-de-siècle England and Germany, by Ben Anderson; pp. xi + 301. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, $89.99, $69.99 ebook. The development of mountaineering as a leisure pursuit is often seen as driven by the desire to escape both modernity and the city, with its early origins linked to the industrial revolution and urban growth. The poet and pioneering scrambler Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who made the first recorded use of the word mountaineering in 1802, compared himself to the figures of the shepherd and chamois hunter, suggesting a search for a preindustrial, mountain-based identity. However, examining the remarkable period of mountaineering's evolution in Europe roughly a century after Coleridge's groundbreaking exploits, Ben Anderson offers a striking reconceptualization of upland activity, arguing not only that most mountaineers were "urban people" who "lived, worked and spent most of their leisure time in Europe's towns and cities" but also that they were quintessentially modern (25). In his fascinating and richly detailed study Cities, Mountains and Being Modern in fin-de-siècle England and Germany, Anderson argues that the mountains provided a location for the performance and contesting of different forms of modernity, showing how upland environments were physically and imaginatively shaped by values that came from the cities. Anderson's focus is on Manchester, Munich, and Vienna in the decades leading up to 1914; he brilliantly traces the presence of the mountains in these cities and reveals how their residents took their ambitions to be modern into the high places, particularly the English Lake District and the Eastern Alps. He draws illuminatingly on the archives of several mountaineering and rambling clubs and associations, including those of the Co-operative Holidays Association, the Rucksack Club, the Deutsche und Oesterreichische Alpenverein, Touristenverein "Die Naturfreunde," Oesterreichische Touristen-Club, and Oesterreichische Alpenclub (10). While remaining attentive to local and national detail, Anderson examines how these organizations shared a view of mountaineering and rambling that justified the activities as exercises in self-improvement and progress; ascent facilitated mental and physical strengthening that in turn could regenerate society. Reversing a familiar binary, Anderson shows how mountains became a part of city life through exhibitions and displays in a range of civic environments as well as through the discussions and initiatives of those who climbed the peaks. His writing on the role of Alpine panoramas and landscape reliefs is particularly interesting, describing them as forms that "promised complete knowledge, and control, of a landscape—these were celebrations (or fantasies) of human sovereignty over self and nature" (107). Anderson presents this modern response to mountains as "disconnected from Romantic understandings of landscape," though this history may be more complex than the Romantic/modern binary allows; Thomas West's famous identification of viewing stations in his Guide to the Lakes (1787) and William Wordsworth's opening description of an Alpine relief model in his own Guide to the Lakes (1822) provide Romantic-period parallels for the modern interest in the commanding view that Anderson writes about so well (106). Anderson shows how the desire for a totalizing view shaped mountain environments, particularly the Eastern Alps, through the production of "a dense network of paths, huts, viewpoints, signposts, bridges, ladders, cables and stakes from one end of the Alps to the other." These infrastructural developments, a feature of what Anderson calls "new forms [End Page 315] of affectively disciplined tourism," minimized the physical effort required to reach prescribed viewpoints and made the visual consumption of the mountains easier, bringing the challenging environment under the control of the middle-class viewer (112). In an excellent chapter on "Time," Anderson shows how this control of the mountains was achieved in temporal as well as spatial terms; not only did mountaineers emphasize their own modernity by ascribing the past onto unmodern others, particularly by representing upland regions and their inhabitants as primitive, but they also found various means of bringing the mountains into the realm of "modern time," such as measuring routes through "guidebook time" (154). Mountaineers and walkers were not only...