The Alps

by Stephen O'Shea

  It is near Stams where I must turn right and head to the Fern Pass, which leads from Austria’s Tyrol toward Germany’s Bavaria. Clouds wreathe the middle slopes of the mountains before me like white bandannas. On an isolated hilltop stands a pale neo-Gothic church, its red needlelike spire pointing skyward. The Church of Maria Locherboden attracts pilgrims from all over Tyrol—indeed, from all over Austria. It also overlooks my route, along the trace of the Via Claudia Augusta, which, in Roman days, first saw the march northward of the legions, then the race southward of the barbarians. We motorists and bikers fall somewhere in between.

  The road climbs to meet a sudden plateau filled with rolling grasslands and lovely red-roofed villages. Churches punctuate the landscape in every direction, for these are very Catholic Alps. This Tyrolean dream—the Mieming Plateau—stretches on for several kilometers, the tall mountains to its south and north like lines of stone watchtowers.

  Once past the plateau, the Fernstein Castle, a massive turreted stone affair looming over medieval dwellings, nestles in a gorge. Unexpectedly, the road then leads down into an Alpine valley, its particularity three ponies in a field standing stock-still as if flash frozen. After that, the climbing begins in earnest and swaying valleys below grow smaller and smaller as the gray rock of the mountains looms closer. But the road is exceedingly good—it has to be, as long-haul truckers use it—and the Fern Pass arrives in no time. The view to the north is dominated by the fearsome Zugspitze, an angry-looking limestone behemoth standing on the border of Germany and Austria. A triangular massif with spiky summits, its easternmost peak (2,962 meters) is the highest point in Germany. Doubtless, my Irish acquaintance at Grindelwald would characterize it as the approach to Mordor, so sinister is its appearance. I contemplate it in silence as a grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich is placed before me—an event causing an eruption at a neighboring table occupied by four unilingual Britons, who begin desperately gesticulating to the waitress in my direction.

  Next I turn westward and watch with relief in the rearview mirror as the Zugspitze monster begins shrinking. Between the towns of Reutte and Füssen, I cross into Germany. The aspect of the countryside changes. Scenic rumpled green pastures and gullies compete for attention with nearby forested foothills and the occasional needle peak in the distance. I have been forewarned, but I recognize the landscape near Füssen immediately. It was here that an iconic movie scene was filmed: Steve McQueen’s motorcycle chase in The Great Escape. In the sequence, he tries unsuccessfully to jump the double barbed-wire fence to Switzerland, which, of course, does not border Füssen—just as Salzburg, which the von Trapps of The Sound of Music leave to climb a mountain and descend the next day into freedom, lies 370 kilometers from Switzerland. No matter, the McQueen countryside has remained beautiful and bucolic a half century on.

  Its beauty attracted another admirer, King Ludwig II of Bavaria. In the second half of the nineteenth century, he drained his personal treasury to construct a personal Xanadu here. As a child, dreamy Ludwig liked to play with his cousin Sisi, later to become the empress assassinated on the shores of Lake Geneva. When the prince attained manhood and ascended to the throne, he gave his fantasies free rein. A friend and fanatic of Richard Wagner, he decided to set the composer’s medieval phantasmagoria in stone. The result was called Schloss Neuschwanstein (New Swan Stone Castle). It is a huge fairy-tale structure perched on a crag with stupendous views. Of the dozen or so rooms completed before Ludwig’s death in 1886—the plan called for two hundred rooms—their pastiche of Romanesque, medieval, and Byzantine causes what can only be called architectural indigestion. It is understandable why we borrowed the words kitsch and ersatz from their language—obviously the Germans got there first.

  Neuschwanstein, a place with no context or content, is one of Germany’s principal tourist attractions, a Disneyland without the rides. On this day it is thronged, as usual, with visitors, including me. The wait for the obligatory guided tour is long, giving me ample occasion to wonder what the hell Ludwig was thinking. He was living in a very dynamic country in a very dynamic time—instead of embracing them, he drifted off into sterile medievalism, a Wagnerian wank. He lived alone—after breaking off his engagement to Sisi’s younger sister—and mooned for a time that never was, the very acme of the incurable Romantic. Now thought to have been firmly in the closet—there is no record of mistresses, just a succession of close male friendships—Ludwig enthusiastically dilapidated his fortune on building projects. Linderhof Castle, also in Bavaria, is a French rococo gem built in the style of Louis XV. But it was that French king’s predecessor, Louis XIV, who provided the inspiration. Taking his cue from the “Sun King,” Ludwig styled himself as the “Moon King.” In Linderhof’s formal gardens, he ordered built a Venus Grotto, a replication of Capri’s Blue Grotto, to which he would be rowed in the moonlight as electric lights—then a novelty—changed the colors of his fantasy cove. He rode around the castle’s environs in an eighteenth-century carriage, complete with coachmen in eighteenth-century livery, distributing largesse to a delighted peasantry.

  Many other grandiose projects were conceived. A replica of the Palace of Versailles, only larger, was partly completed on an island. But Ludwig’s aesthetic ambitions outran his bank account. When, at last, in 1886 he turned to the Bavarian parliament to subsidize his building craze, an uproar ensued. Within days after the lawmakers had him adjudged insane and deposed him, Ludwig was found dead in the waist-deep water of a lake. Coincidence? Although no water was found in his lungs, his demise was deemed a drowning.

  The route northward stretches through beautiful farmland, not at all mountainous, but I have miles to go before I sleep. This is, nonetheless, the Deutsche Alpenstrasse, as well as the Romantische Strasse, but it really is the Excess Strasse. Buttoned-down Austria has given way to blaring Bavaria. The people are louder and they take up more space. The famed “too-muchness” of Germany hits you in the face. The villages traversed do not pass quietly. One has gigantic wooden carved likenesses of bears and other wildlife waving at the passersby. Another sports sculptures of a truly awful confection: metallic and rusted boxes, like discarded sardine tins for a giant, fenced off by wire mesh. And everywhere, cow statues striped in the red, black, and yellow of the German flag, announcing dairy shops. It’s as if the inhabitants of this pastoral paradise were embarrassed by the beauty of their surroundings.

  I make a detour to Wieskirche and its pilgrimage Church of the Scourged Savior, a noted rococo masterpiece that apparently no one in the area must miss. From the outside, the church looks white, plain, and unassuming. Inside is another story. To enter this sanctuary is to enter a wedding cake. Every vaulting, wall recess, and workable space has been covered with colorful figurative painting. Elaborate statuary emerges from walls, and brilliant white pillars covered in swirling stucco hold up the kaleidoscopic ceiling. The effect is dizzying. I am brought to my senses at the rear of the nave when a man in his seventies puts his thumb and middle finger into his mouth and emits a high-pitched whistle. Everyone turns to him, looking for the dog. He does it again, angrily—a trim, mean fellow resembling a retired U-boat captain. At the third summons, a flustered matron rushes to join him, nodding meekly. The two dozen of us in the church collectively shake our heads—theirs is not the ideal marriage.

  The next stop promises more excess. I enter the narrow valley of the River Ammer. At its southern end, a distinctive mountain stands alone, looking somewhat like an old man with hunched shoulders. This height, called the Kofel, overlooks a supernova of tourism: the town of Oberammergau. There is an Unterammergau nearby, but the poor place is outshone by its world-famous twin. Gau, I learn, is an old German word for an administrative district, now outdated, so the more renowned town could be styled, in English, as Upper Ammershire.

  Every ten years, Oberammergau plays host to the Passionsspiel, or Passion Play. The tradition dates from the seventeenth century, when the villagers, fearing the plague, promised God to reenact Christ’s
crucifixion if He would spare their lives. Apparently, God agreed to the deal, and the townspeople have been staging the play ever since. Heavyweight theatrical professionals from Munich descend on the town to lend a hand, and the Passionsspielhaus, an enormous theater at the edge of town, regularly sells out years in advance.

  As might be imagined, the town itself is a riot of piety and commerce. One of its long-standing specialties is woodcarving, so a profusion of shops selling statuary of all sizes awaits inspection. Whether you’re in the market for the Blessed Virgin Mary or for a goofy-looking wooden squirrel, this is the place for you. Adding to the sensory overload is another of the town’s particularities, Lüftlmalerei—decorative frescoes on the façades of houses and businesses. As this is Bavaria, these artworks are anything but muted. Large, loud, colorful, attention-grabbing, but not without touches of whimsy, these paintings—depicting devotional scenes, peasant life, even fairy tales—give the visitor to Oberammergau the impression of having walked into an open-air graphic novel. We tourists wander about distractedly, bumping into each other. At last I find a café terrace, plop down in a chair, and order a glass of red wine—a way of paying my respect to the host of the Passionsspiel.

  The town will not be hosting me, though. On learning its hotels are fully booked, I drive around the Kofel and head south to the regional capital, the twin cities of Garmisch-Partenkirchen—or, as they are known to the smart ski set, Gapa. Partenkirchen’s Ludwigstrasse—part of the Via Claudia Augusta—displays a fondness for Lüftlmalerei as extravagant as Oberammergau’s. I find a pizzeria and take a seat. My waiter, whom I’m surprised to discover is a Neapolitan, explains to me, “Italy is a good place to visit; Germany is a good place to work.”

  He nods sadly and goes to fetch my pizza. When he returns, I ask him one last question: What is that monstrous mountain on the southern horizon?

  “The Zugspitze,” he replies.

  ON THE WESTERN OUTSKIRTS of Partenkirchen stands an old stadium, built in the muscular art deco style in vogue in the 1930s. In truth, a more accurate description would call it Fascist. In 1936, with Germany then in thrall to Hitlerian madness, Garmisch-Partenkirchen hosted the Winter Olympics (Berlin got the Summer Games of that year). This stadium witnessed the opening and closing ceremonies one snowy February long ago.

  The stadium building houses a small museum with an exhibit called “The Dark Side of the Medal.” The first thing one sees on entering is a yellow-and-black swastika medallion encircled by the words JUDEN UNERWÜNSCHT (Jewry Undesirable, or Jews Not Welcome). These medallions were attached to road signs on many German byways, including in Bavaria. When the head of the International Olympic Committee, a Belgian, visited Garmisch-Partenkirchen prior to the Winter Games, he was upset to see such signs and forced Hitler to have them taken down. (They were put back up after the Games.) He also mentioned seeing road signs at dangerous curves telling Jews that they were exempt from taking precautions, anti-Semitic black humor at its darkest.

  The exhibition itself presents photographs from the event, and accompanying texts explain how the Games were hijacked for feel-good pro-Fascism purposes. Not all the athletes were taken in, though: One striking shot shows three distinctly unhappy ski jumpers on the medals podium flanked by an official giving the Nazi salute. A projection room screens “Youth of the World,” a Nazi newsreel, coproduced by Paramount and Fox. The film opens with a bucolic evocation of Garmisch-­Partenkirchen, before ascending to capture terrifying if not revolutionary (for the 1930s) aerial Bergfilm footage taken above the tree line, showing avalanches and forbidding rockfaces. I am put in mind of the scary opening mountain shots of The Sound of Music. That idle thought dissipates when we descend through a cloud into the valley and the Olympic stadium. On the reviewing stand in a driving snowstorm is a crowd of dignitaries, among them a chatty Adolf Hitler and a positively giddy Joseph Goebbels. We cut to the parading athletes, most of whom give the Olympic salute, which, in this setting, looks uncomfortably close to a Sieg Heil arm stretch. The American delegation, whose passage we do not see, was the only one not to lower its flag before the reviewing stand. Mercifully, we eventually leave the inevitable shots of adoring crowds saluting their Führer to focus on the feats of the athletes. Clearly, this gathering was a militaristic cornucopia of propaganda, a show that should have been a huge embarrassment for the Olympic movement. Not so: Somewhat unbelievably, in 1939—after the Nazi annexation of Czechoslovakia and Kristallnacht—the IOC awarded the 1940 Winter Olympics to Garmisch-­Partenkirchen. They were never held. One wonders whether the grandees of the IOC had any regrets about who lost the war.

  I try to cleanse my mind of the images seen in the museum by taking secondary roads westward. I pass a mountain pleasingly called Wank, then enter a narrow valley with fastidiously arranged haystacks alternating with black, yellow, and red cow statues. At a hamlet named Wallgau, I turn into a tiny road that I have to squint to see on my map. The route follows the northern bank of the River Isar, which will eventually flow through the great city of Munich. The Karwendel Alps tower in limestone majesty on both sides of the silver waters. Great birds of prey soar high above in the thermals and kayakers race down the waterway. There are no cars, no villages, just a kind of pristine natural beauty not usually associated with European landscapes. At last, a settlement is reached: Vorderiss, a collection of wooden houses once favored by King Ludwig on his many hunting expeditions.

  The road leads to the Achen Pass. The approach and descent to this low pass is guarded by stands of conifers, so the motorist can drive unperturbed by the views. I am delighted to be passed by a soufflé of French bikers, who again lower their right legs in a gesture of Gallic gratitude when I move over to the right to let them roar by me. What follows is a succession of villages in a mountainous sylvan setting, paradise for hikers and cyclists with the legs of Vegas showgirls. At Wildbad Kreuth, I slow to look at the old spa buildings, knowing that two Russian tsars and one Austrian emperor came here to take the waters. The road then moseys down to the teal expanse of the Tegernsee, one of Bavaria’s loveliest Alpine lakes, surrounded by mountains of modest height. The proportions are very pleasing to the eye. Given the aesthetics, it may be no coincidence that the town of Tegernsee, situated on the eastern lakeshore, hosts a Bergfilm festival every year.

  The major town of the area is Bad Wiessee, a sleepy resort in the midday sun. I wander down a path toward the lake, noting that I am the only white-haired person here—and there are many of us—not using Nordic walking poles to propel me forward. The otherwise serene place click-click-clicks like an old-time ticker-tape machine. I pause in front of a glass display case, celebrating Bad Wiessee’s twin town, Dourdan, in the Ile-de-France near Paris. Pictures of a French medieval festival—Dourdan has one of the best-preserved thirteenth-century castles in Europe—wallpaper the backdrop to a box (empty, one hopes) of pavés de Dourdan, the delicious chocolate specialty of the town. Bad Wiessee and Dourdan seem to have enthusiastically embraced their twinning, first established in 1963 and formed as part of a Continental movement to foster friendship between former adversaries, in particular the French and the Germans.

  Yet Bad Wiessee’s lasting notoriety lies not in international relations but in domestic affairs. Or, to be blunt, in intra-German fratricide. The town played host to what has come to be known as The Night of the Long Knives, which means, alas, that we are back with the jackbooted fellows of Garmisch-Partenkirchen. In the predawn hours of 30 June 1934, Hitler, Goebbels, Rudolf Hess, and a detachment of the Schutzstaffel (Protective Echelon, or SS) stormed a resort hotel here and arrested the holidaying leaders of the Sturm Abteilung (Assault Division, or SA), brownshirted storm troopers and street thugs whose growing influence, independence, and power worried the Nazi leadership in Berlin—as well as the regular German army and the country’s capitalist elite. The SA’s leader, Ernst Röhm, as vicious a brute as any produced by the Nazi movement, had taken to criticizing Hitler for ignoring the socialism in N
ational Socialism. Hitler personally arrested his old friend—Röhm had been at his side during the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch in Munich—and had him shot the next day. Dozens more were later summarily executed, including perceived enemies who had nothing to do with the SA. Overnight, Germans awoke to the realization that extrajudicial killing by the Nazis would henceforth go unpunished and that the man they had democratically elected their leader the year before was now an absolute dictator. After Bad Wiessee, Germany entered its darkest hours.

  I realize with a jolt that today—30 June—is precisely eighty years to the day after the historic occurrence here. The hotel where the drama took place is now shuttered. It closed in 2011, apparently to make way for a casino development that has yet to break ground. I take a few desultory pictures of the banal lakeside chalet complex, vaguely disappointed. What was I expecting? If there is a historical plaque marking the site’s infamy, I do not see it.

  Yet in a larger sense, it could be argued that Romanticism met its final death here, that what began on the shores of Lake Geneva ended on the shores of the Tegernsee. The diabolical offspring of German Romanticism—­the Nazis with their ill-digested Wagner and Nietzsche and their concomitant cult of death—began eating their own at Bad Wiessee. Dr. Frankenstein’s monster turned out to be wearing a swastika.

  The early proponents of Romanticism—Rousseau, Byron, and many others—would have been aghast at what their aesthetic revolution eventually spawned. In its heyday—the first half of the nineteenth century—Romanticism could be seen as a force for good, liberating imaginations through the embrace of the irrational. Nature was revered, and the past—particularly the Middle Ages—was fondly reinvented. Politically, it fostered the development of national sentiment. Spurred by the Alps and their encouragement of the sublime, Romanticism placed emotion in a bear hug.