Exhibition Horror Patriae
Cabinet of Peaks and Hills
It was the European Romantics who first grew to appreciate the spectacle of high mountains rather than seeing them as a logistical obstacle. As early as the mid-18th century, English philosopher Edmund Burke (1729–1797) connected mountains to the idea of the sublime—a form of nonclassical, modern beauty that contains a terrifying, superhuman element. Such a view relied almost exclusively upon the Alps with their conflicted Italian and German connotations of aesthetic ideals and spiritual depth.
Philosophers, and later all educated classes, brought themselves to become tourists, and an Alpine tour with a cane and a guidebook in hand was a must. Lonely wanderers, mostly men, experienced the thrill of a mountain vista later to be translated into poetry. Locals—including poets and writers—more familiar with the dangerous paths, saw this landscape more as a territory of quiet, unspoiled, and flowery nature, whose purity was the horizon humanity needed to humbly achieve.
Throughout the years, all sorts of spiritual investments were made into the mountains, and ideological constructions built around them. A simple 19th-century landscape of Berchtesgaden already contains its future, when it became the retreat of Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) and an alleged “last retreat” of the almost defeated Nazis. In today’s Styria, attitudes toward mountains are split between feelings of homely belonging (it helps that most of the state’s mountains are of modest height) and shivers of admiration.
