The Alps

by Stephen O'Shea

  We head north and upward along a road almost smothered by woodlands to the tiny outpost of Altaussee, an Alpine Shangri-La once frequented by Sigmund Freud and Theodor Herzl. Our goal is not the village but a mountain to the west called Sandling. To the north rises the moody eminence of Mount Loser, often scaled by the visiting Viennese. The local nickname for the height is “Loser Ear” because of the ear-shaped rocky summit. Today it is home to the largest solar power plant in the Alps. Beyond it rises the Totes Gebirge massif, once the hiding place of deserters from Hitler’s Wehrmacht. By the spring of 1944, word had gotten out to draft dodgers and deserters in Germany and Austria that the remote region was a “safe house,” thanks to its being nearly inaccessible. Local sympathizers, however, knew their mountains and regularly brought these men food and supplies. At war’s end, thirty-five deserters were discovered there.

  In the visitor center at Sandling, we are instructed to don white robes and pants, somewhat like karate gear or hazmat suits without the headgear. Over our shoes we adjust slip-ons. Miraculously, we are the only tourists here, and our amiable young guide makes a joke about not having to raise his voice.

  Soon we are in a dimly lit gallery, perhaps three meters tall and two meters wide. We are surrounded by rock and crystal, purple and black. In places, some planking secures the rockface, as the salt behemoth of Sandling rises a millimeter or so in elevation every year. The guide informs us that we are to walk about two kilometers into the center of the mountain. As we do this, we are treated to a recitation of facts and figures: Sandling has been mined for more than seven thousand years; 60 percent of the mountain is composed of salt, evaporite residue of the great oceans that covered this area millions of years ago; the salt works, the largest in Austria, are still in operation, producing 80 tons a day, of which 13 percent is table salt, 23 percent industrial salt, and the rest, road salt. As at Hallstatt, most of Sandling’s salt comes from what the guide calls the “wet method,” which requires a high-pressure stream of water to dissolve the salt and eventually bring it to the surface as brine. The water is then boiled off, leaving only salt. As for the “dry method”—or, more properly, the room-and-pillar method—the salt is removed in a checkerboard pattern to leave permanent, solid salt pillars for mine roof support. About half of the salt is removed. At Sandling, this method is used sparingly.

  Ernst asks us to stop for a moment. Even in the wan light, I can see that his face is greenish. He fishes out a handkerchief and mops his damp brow. Both the guide and I stare at him—Ernst is a claustrophobe! In a weak voice, he says that he’s okay and we can continue. As I walk behind him, visions of revenge dance in my head. The tables have been turned since he grabbed my shoulders during the ascent of the Ebensalp in Appenzell. I rehearse in my head the things I can say to terrify him: “Jeez, I hope there won’t be an earthquake, or we’ll all be goners.” “Ernst, can you just imagine how many millions and millions of tons of rock surround us?” “Wow, there sure isn’t a lot of room in here. I wonder if it gets narrower farther on?” But as I entertain these thoughts, I find myself growing more and more uneasy. I realize that I am scaring myself. I banish the thoughts and the chance for revenge passes.

  Surprisingly, the mine brightens and opens up the farther in we go. The gallery leads into a roomy chamber where a fully ornamented Christian chapel stands to one side. It is dedicated to St. Barbara, patroness of artillerymen and anyone, like a miner, who handles explosives. The young woman, thought to be of the third-century Near East, was possessed of such great beauty that her father locked her in a tower to prevent an onslaught of suitors. When Barbara confessed to her pagan father that she had become a Christian during her captivity, he tried to kill her but was foiled, as she was miraculously transported to the mountains. Her father then denounced her to the authorities, who found her and tortured her. Because she would not recant her faith, her father was summoned by the prefect to lop off her head. This he gladly did, only to die himself on his homebound journey after being struck by a lightning bolt, a natural explosive force. Thus, Barbara is revered by anyone who likes to blow things up.

  Further entertainment comes when we leave St. Barbara’s stone cavern and descend to a lower gallery. This is not done via a stairway; rather, we sit on a long, smooth slide made of blonde wood and hurtle downward. The slide is about twenty meters long, so we pick up momentum and feel the rush of air in our ears. During the tour, we do this twice, flashing through stone caverns at speed. Eventually we arrive at a chamber covered in photographs. This is where more than ten thousand looted works of art were stored by the Nazis, destined to adorn the Führermuseum to be constructed in Linz, Austria, near Hitler’s birthplace. The low humidity and temperature in the heart of the mountain, plus its remoteness, made it an ideal place to stash a cache (Neuschwanstein was another place used for this purpose). The photos tell a story of breathtaking cultural theft: Standing stacked in this chamber seventy years ago were works by Dürer, Rembrandt, Brueghel, Rubens, Van Eyck, Michelangelo, and hundreds of others.

  The first week of May 1945 ranks as the wildest in the history of Altaussee. In the distant mountains, deserters from the German army were hiding out, fed by the villagers. The village itself housed the fleeing heads of governments of the various pro-Nazi regimes set up in eastern Europe. Altaussee had been designated as the best place to hide out, lost high up in the Alps. And the architects of the Holocaust, including Adolf Eichmann, sought refuge in the remote Austrian village, a sad irony for a place that a few decades earlier had welcomed Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism. But American soldiers were on the move, quickly making their way through the Salzkammergut. The atmosphere in Altaussee was, as can only be imagined, febrile in the extreme.

  In the midst of all this uncertainty, the miners of the Sandling watched as eight large, heavy crates were moved into the chambers containing the artworks. Each was marked, in German, with the words, TAKE CARE: MARBLE. DO NOT DROP. Disbelieving eyebrows shot up; there had to be something else in there. After several days, two curious miners, Hermann König and Alois Raudaschl, pried open one box and found five hundred kilograms of explosives, perhaps unexploded American ordnance retrieved from the bombed-out cities of Austria. Whatever its nature, the eight crates of explosive matériel were powerful enough to destroy the entire cache of stolen art.

  Which was precisely the intent of August Eigruber, the Nazi governor of the region. It is unclear whether he was obeying or disobeying an order of the soon-to-be-dead Führer, but his determination to wipe out this precious legacy of the European past is not in question. The locals thought otherwise. In the most fantastical part of the story, Alois Raudaschl, evidently a man of stupendous bravery, stole secretly through Altaussee to meet up with the monstrous Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the Austrian Gestapo. The Nazi grandee, destined for execution at Nuremberg the following year, was one of the many vicious war criminals holed up in the village. Kaltenbrunner outranked Eigruber, and, without the latter’s knowledge, approved Raudaschl’s last-ditch plan. In the dead of night of May 3–4, the miners hauled the crates out of the mountain. They also hid some of the art in remote galleries of the mine and even stashed some in their homes. We know this, our guide informs us, because long after the events of that dramatic night, a missing panel of Van Eyck’s priceless Ghent Altarpiece was discovered in the kitchen of a local man. Apparently he took one of the figures depicted on the panel to be a miner, so he kept it and used it as a surface on which to cut his daily bread.

  The clandestine removals completed, the miners then set charges at all the entrances to the galleries. In the early morning of 4 May 1945, they detonated them. St. Barbara worked her magic—the treasure trove was now inaccessible.

  “Until the Monuments Men came, like in the movie,” I say, referring to the recent George Clooney film.

  This remark provokes something akin to a sneer on our young guide’s handsome features. On our way back to daylight, he gives us a master class on all the things
The Monuments Men got wrong. They did not even come to Sandling to see what the actual place looked like. The filmed tale is ridiculously warped, resembling in no way the true story, giving the Americans almost all the credit for securing the art. The guide heatedly goes on and on, intense in his passion to debunk a movie.

  At last we emerge from the last gallery into the reception center. Color returns to Ernst’s face. Our hazmat sliding gear is thrown into a bin and we sign the visitors’ book. When the guide sees my place of residence—­Providence, Rhode Island—he seems to regret the vehemence of his lecture on The Monuments Men.

  “It is true that you Americans,” he says to me, “saved our European civilization.”

  Ernst scowls. I hand the guide a lavish tip.

  MOVIES OCCUPY the last afternoon of our excursion in the Salzkammergut. And why shouldn’t they? This Austrian lake district cries out for a cinematographer. Lushly forested mountains and sparkling blue bodies of water combine to please the eye no matter which way you turn. First up is the Attersee, the largest lake of the Salzkammergut. Narrow and long, the lake is dominated on the eastern horizon by a karst limestone behemoth. Apparently the locals share my opinion of heights: The eminence is called Höllengebirge (mountains of hell). Standing opposite on the western shore, in the village of Unterach am Attersee, I recognize the perspective immediately. Unterach was the stand-in for Bad Aussee in Visconti’s The Damned, and it was here, cinematically at least, that The Night of the Long Knives occurred. I inspect the inn of the orgy, the wharf where the SS made landfall…. Thankfully, all seems forgotten now, a hiccup of this charming village’s long vocation of seducing the sensitive. Gustav Klimt immortalized it in several paintings.

  Next up is Mondsee, a lake bounded on its southern shore by a stern row of mountains. The scenery is made for the fabulist, as in Ian Fleming’s Thunderball, when Ernst Stavro Blofeld announces to his fellow villains of SPECTRE: “Thanks in part to our German section, the recovery of Himmler’s jewels from the Mondsee was successfully accomplished in total secrecy, and the stones disposed of by our Turkish section in Beirut.” More benign is the town of Mondsee’s association with The Sound of Music, or, as it was ungallantly referred to by its male lead, Christopher Plummer, “The Sound of Mucus.” Plummer’s and Julie Andrews’s characters were wed in requisite Hollywood splendor in Mondsee’s picturesque cathedral, amidst the customary explosion of Austrian baroque. I ask Ernst if he wants to visit the church. He shakes his head vigorously, and I agree—we both had our fill of baroque in Salzburg.

  I slip onto the autobahn for the long drive back to Switzerland. I’m bringing Ernst back to St. Gallen, then going to southern Austria. A silence falls between us. Yet there is something that must be addressed.

  “No matter how she died,” I say at last, “Sisi would always be remembered.”

  He snorts. “Sissy is remembered because she was assassinated.”

  “No. She was the Hedy Lamarr of the nineteenth century.”

  “Who?”

  I explain that the Austrian-born movie star was the template for society ladies going under the knife in the 1940s.

  “Remember that sign for the cosmetic surgeon we saw in Bad Ischl?”

  Another snort. “Women do not go to him to make themselves look like Sissy. They go because they’ve got gonorrhea.”

  He has a point, I hate to say once more.

  “Lamarr was a genius,” I venture, “just like Sisi.” I tell him that the screen beauty invented a technology that would later usher in wi-fi and Blu-ray. “And she once lived in the house used as the von Trapp family mansion in The Sound of Music.”

  Knowing there is no Trappologist in the vicinity, I add this bit of unconfirmed apocrypha for emphasis.

  To no effect. “Stephen,” Ernst says, “you’re making no sense.”

  “Remember Romy Schneider?”

  “Yes…. And your point?”

  I explain that the actress, another Austrian beauty, portrayed Sisi in a very popular three-part German-language biopic. And that she reprised the role for Visconti in Ludwig.

  “Romy reintroduced Sisi to popular culture,” I conclude.

  Ernst turns in his seat to look at me directly. The mountains fly past.

  “Look, if I say that Sissy would have been remembered even if she hadn’t been killed,” he says with deliberation, “would you promise to shut up about her?”

  I laugh—and keep the promise.

  ZELL AM SEE, home to the most annoyed drivers in Austria: As I cruise around looking for a hotel, I am serenaded by a symphony of honking horns. This impatience may be attributable to the locals’ frustration with the hundreds of thousands of visitors who flock to the place every year. Located in the southern part of the state of Salzburg, Zell deserves such year-round worship. Tall mountains surround a small pristine lake, its waters made even more limpid by the prohibition of motorized boats. The lake’s German name—Zeller—is poignant for me: My immigrant Irish father, who passed away just months earlier, spent his working life at a Canadian company of the same name. I look out over the lovely expanse and think of my dad.

  Evening brings solace. At a pizzeria, I fall into conversation with two couples, one from Copenhagen, the other from Antwerp. To my amazement, they voice their disdain for Dutch campers. I ask the Dutch-speaking Belgians why their countrymen do not take to the roads with campers.

  “Because we’re not cheap,” the husband replies simply.

  But surely that is just a stereotype? Every culture singles out another for cheapness.

  “We Danes are supposed to be cheap,” the wife from Copenhagen allows.

  “And are you?”

  “He is,” she says, pointing to her husband.

  When the laughter dies down, our Swedish waiter tells us the Austrians have a satirical song about Dutch campers. He thinks the cook can sing it for us.

  He returns, saying the cook is not in the mood.

  We break up and I head out for a stroll. Soon I am on the lakeshore in Elisabethpark, named for the ubiquitous Sisi. Ernst is no longer with me, so I can mention her. The park is crowded, with many of the women wearing veils and the men sporting dark beards. I later learn that Zell promotes itself heavily in the Gulf states.

  Attention turns now to the Zellersee, where the Magic Lake show is taking place. Consisting of dozens of fountains, laser projections, synchronized lighting, and special effects, the show is a pop-culture extravaganza. In short order, we see projected on the water scenes from concerts and films as music blares and lights flash. There’s Idina Menzel singing “Let It Go” from Frozen, then Freddie Mercury. The latter, who I previously thought no one could upstage, looks tame compared to the next performer, Austria’s own Conchita Wurst. Winner of the Eurovision song contest earlier in the year, the bearded drag queen belts out a pop standard as the crowd on the shore looks on agog. I wonder what the tourists from the Gulf think of this taste of Europe. And then I think of poor Sisi, shoved aside by this new Queen of Austria. To add insult to injury, Wurst hails from the Salzkammergut.

  The following morning promises a somber beginning. Prior to leaving for Europe, I was advised by an Austrian friend that anyone writing about the Alps had to visit Kaprun, a neighboring ski resort that delivered the worst shock to the country since World War II. On the morning of 11 November 2000, the opening day of the skiing season, a fire on a funicular train running upward through a mountain tunnel claimed the lives of 155 people. Most met a grotesque end, incinerated as they climbed out of the train and up the tunnel (the fire started in the rear of the train), placing themselves in what basically became a fiery flue of toxic smoke and blazing heat. The dozen passengers to survive had been in the last car of the train. A volunteer fireman on a skiing holiday wisely instructed his terrified companions that they should skirt the inferno and walk down the tunnel to safety.

  The mouth of the tunnel can still be clearly seen in the side of the mountain, but no train has operated since tha
t dreadful morning. A construction crane stands idly off to one side, as if the decision to dismantle or rebuild has yet to be made. Debris from the approach track lies on the valley floor like a collapsed roller coaster. Skiers now take a modern aerial lift to the mountaintop, where the snow and ice of Kitzsteinhorn Glacier await. I know that today will bring its share of the white stuff, so I elect instead to look for a memorial to the victims.

  It is not hard to find. Off to one side of a parking lot stands a severe modern building of dull gray stone. Shoebox shaped, it has the particularity of possessing scores and scores of vertical niches carved into its two long sides, running from the roofline to the foundation. The plaza before the entrance is forbidding, with gray granite flagstones leading to a blind wall, relieved only by a simple metallic door. I depress the door handle and step inside. The visitor is immediately confronted with a dark marble slab inscribed in German, English, Japanese, Slovenian, and Polish, honoring the victims of the disaster. As I round this imposing stela, a long rectangular chamber comes into view, suffused with subdued yellow, red, and white light. Each of the 155 niches contains colored glass and a white translucent plaque on which the victim’s name and date of birth are listed. They range from people in their first decade of life to those in their sixth, but most are in their twenties and thirties. Recurring last names show that entire families were wiped out. In each niche, their kin have placed votive offerings and heartbreaking photos. I go from niche to niche, looking at the smiling faces. One holds a gold medal beside a triumphant grin: a nineteen-year-old German, Sandra Schmitt, women’s moguls champion.