Where it comes from, heaps are among the highest elevations. But Susanne Beckmann, violist in the Ruhr area city of Bochum, raves about the mountains, about real mountains. For two years she took on additional services in her orchestra and earned days off to fulfill her dream – to work on an alpine pasture in the summer.
She has to keep 53 young cattle, up on the Königstalalm above Berchtesgaden, only accessible on foot and over a steep slope. There is no electricity. Beckmann chops wood and stokes fire when she brews coffee. She must scythe and fence, give the animals salt and bran, look for and count them every morning and evening. "Kimm, kimm," she lures the animals, come, come. The cows only understand Bavarian, she says.
Fascinating Alps
The wages are as meager as the comfort. The farmer pays a minimum of three hours a day. And yet the 50-year-old musician feels the greatest fulfillment: "This grandeur, this incredible beauty, the scent of mountain pine." A wonderful symphony.
Fascinating Alps. They are often extremely lucky for their more than 150 million overnight guests every year. Now that the corona virus makes traveling far away difficult or even impossible, Europe's large mountains are more attractive than ever for many Germans. It attracts them, if not for a summer as a dairymaid, for the vacation or at least for a day tour with spectacular views.
The tourist destroys what he is looking for by finding it
But what happens when too many people follow the call of the mountains, look for edification, relaxation or even loneliness in them? How many fun parks, fun huts, bike trails, mega-ski paradises and hotel castles can the Alps carry? When does the alpine dream become a nightmare?
More than 40 years ago, the publicist Hans Magnus Enzensberger pointed out a paradox that is difficult to resolve: the tourist destroys what he is looking for by finding it. In this Corona summer, after one of the warmest winters in the history of weather records, the question arises with new urgency: What can a future for the Alpine region look like that will not only do justice to its guests, but also to its inhabitants and nature itself?
The Alps as a “longing dispositive”
One who has thought a lot about the attraction of the mountains is Jens Badura, habilitated philosopher and certified mountain hiking guide. He lives on a farm from 1611 with his wife, a biologist, the youngest of his four children and a flock of stone sheep. Badura, a narrow 48-year-old man with graying curly hair, speaks of the Alps as a “longing dispositive” and says , they enabled "enchantment experiences" and an "encounter with the inconceivable". Because they are jagged like the soul, our ego can be reflected in them.
From his “berg_kulturbüro” in the old town of Berchtesgaden we ran up to the nearby Kneifelspitze. The terrace of the "Paulshütte" offers a Bavarian panorama – a magnificent view of what makes the mountains so special. And on what is pressing and cramping them.
You can see the suburbs of the city, which push themselves into the valley of the Ramsauer Ache along with discounters. On the Obersalzberg, where Hitler's Berghof once stood, the sun is reflected in the glass facades of the “Kempinski” hotel, which takes 5000 euros a night for its presidential suite.
You can see the ski slopes on the Jenner, which have just been ammunited with new snow cannons and six-person lifts. The alpine meadows shine, on which the subsidized cows graze and helpers like Susanne Beckmann pinch spruce shoots with long scissors. Her arduous activity is called "Schwenden". It is intended to prevent meadows from turning back into forests. Because it is not necessarily the wild nature, but often the open cultural landscape that we find particularly beautiful.
"We have to start with the cliché deconstruction"
The Königssee shines between the Watzmann, on the walls of which more than a hundred mountaineers have died since the beginning of alpinism, and the Teufelshorn. In front of Corona, boats also sailed tens of thousands of travelers from Asia across the water every year. An Instagram hype has arisen at the Königsbach waterfall.
The water has dug natural bathtubs called gumpen into the steep rock. In the distance, partly shrouded in clouds, lies the Steinerne Meer, an inhospitable limestone region, protected and protected as a great gem of the nation – as part of the national park.
The painter Caspar David Friedrich romanticized the view of the Watzmann, says Jens Badura. The Alps are an "Imaginarium", a backdrop for our dreams, an echo room of fantasies, full of pictures, from Goethe to Ganghofer, from Trenker to Bergdoktor, from Heidi to the "Bozen-Krimi".
All the myths created an alien image that the inhabitants of the mountains now thought to be their own. Getting rid of it is a prerequisite for a development of the region that could be called sustainable. "We have to start with the cliché deconstruction," says the climber and philosopher. "Our picture of the Alps should be destroyed."
Hotspot of global warming
Classic winter tourism, at least in the lower and middle floors of the mountains, is already being dismantled by the rapid change in the climate. The Alps are a hotspot of global warming. Temperatures have risen almost twice as much as the global average. The effect amplifies itself. "The less snow there is, the less radiation from the sun is reflected into space and the more heat energy is absorbed," explains Christian Rixen, researcher at the Swiss Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape in Davos.
A shaky cable car carries the biologist over the Dischma valley and up to the test areas of the institute. The brook rushes, the alpine roses bloom, the fir tit calls. And at the end of the valley, the Scaletta glacier is disappearing. Like most of the smaller tongues of ice in the Alps, it should have melted completely by 2050.
Rixen has repeated plant studies that the doctor and botanist Wilhelm Schibler carried out around Davos around 100 years ago, registering the consequences of the temperature rise: the flora is rising, hundreds of meters in part. Rare, highly specialized species such as the glacial buttercup or the Ladin Hungerflower could one day be displaced by the ascending, more competitive species.
The mountains become a refuge
His colleagues from the institute are investigating another consequence of climate change. The permafrost, the cement of the high mountain regions, is gradually thawing. Lift supports could tip, huts sag, climbing walls crumble, rock falls and mudflows accumulate.
Not only plants and animals will react. "If the temperatures continue to rise, many people, for example from northern Italy, will flee to the mountains in summer," predicts the ecologist. The Alps are becoming a refuge. This creates new opportunities for many mountain villages and holiday resorts – now more as a summer resort than as a winter destination.
One place that wants to shape this future as gently as possible is Bad Hindelang in Oberallgäu. The 5000-inhabitant community is too low to be able to count on sufficient snow and skiers in the long term.
Tourism director Max Hillmeier, Mayor Sabine Rödel and innkeepers and hoteliers have therefore developed a "Strategy 2030". Snowshoe tours and a network of trails for romantic winter hikes are supposed to offer alternatives to the departure. In summer and winter, guests are welcome as “temporary residents”. Holidaymakers can get to know handicrafts and specialties, whether it is mowing with a scythe, forging nails or cooking Allgäu cheese sparrows. On the market place, traders offer goods from the region: cheese, sausage and essential oils from local plants.
A meadow as delight
Bad Hindelang has long been committed to protecting nature and the cultural landscape. 45 alpine pastures have been included in the intangible world cultural heritage since 2016. One of the areas belongs to farmer Joachim Huber. It is located at an altitude of 1100 meters in the Unterjoch district.
Wild thyme exudes its spicy fragrance. Rich yellow arnica, purple orchid and snow-white cotton grass shine like crazy. Bumblebees growl, hay horses jump, butterflies swing around. The meadow is a paradise for the senses. It combines more than 80 plant species and many protected insects on a good hectare. A good dozen cows graze on the grass. They are allowed to wear horns and belong to traditional breeds: Gray Tyrolean, Brown Allgäu and Upper Bavarian Fleckvieh, robust, muscular animals, no turbo milk cows.
Every evening Huber uses his scythe to mow a wheelbarrow full of grass for his calves in the barn. He sells some of the young cows to local organic farmers. His cows' milk is still going to an organic dairy. In the coming year, Huber's son wants to set up his own dairy on the farm to refine the milk himself.
The Bad Hindelanger eco model pays off. Since 2010, the number of overnight stays in the community has increased by 14 percent to more than one million a year. More than half of the vacationers come in the summer months. The number of residents is also increasing slightly. A good sign of a working symbiosis.
"Dense stress" and mountain escape
Bad Hindelang is of course not a blueprint for all mountain regions. The problems along the 1300 km long Alpine arc between Vienna and Nice are too different. In valleys with metropolitan agglomerations such as Innsbruck, Bozen or Grenoble, there is not enough space for apartments and infrastructure. The Swiss speak of "density stress". In the French and Italian Western Alps, on the other hand, especially in Piedmont west of Turin, the villages are decaying, the slopes are overgrown, bears and wolves are spreading.
There are many different opportunities for sustainable development, says Katharina Conradin, President of the International Alpine Protection Organization Cipra and partner of the Seecon planning office in Bern. "Each region has to show its individual strength, then the tourists will be better distributed across the Alps than before."
Conradin praises the so-called mountaineering villages as a good example. In the meantime 30 municipalities in Austria, Germany, Italy and Slovenia are following an initiative of the Alpine associations. They are committed to hiking, climbing and touring and are committed to preserving local traditions, maintaining shelters and building them in accordance with their location. In Germany, the towns of Ramsau, Schleching, Sachrang and Kreuth are included.
Direct visitors discreetly
Offering holidaymakers better connections by train and bus and thus taming traffic is on the sustainability agenda in many Alpine towns. Overcrowded regions practice a discreet “visitor guidance”. For example, they advertise some viewpoints, but do “demarketing” of sensitive areas. There is no path to valuable bogs and no information on the hiking map.
Almost all holiday destinations are faced with a new phenomenon. E-mountain bike riders can effortlessly advance to heights previously experienced hikers. "E-biking is the new skiing", the bicycle industry is already happy. Now rules for the protection of nature and mountain peace are needed.
Corona could accelerate change in the Alps. Many people rediscovered nature in the lockdown. "The core product of Alpine tourism in its original form is taking back its place," claims the German-Austrian Institute of Brand Logic in its essay "Post-Corona in Alpine Tourism".
Cut old teams
Even places that have become the epitome of mass tourism are rethinking. The 750 inhabitants of Hallstatt in the Salzkammergut, who most recently hosted around 400,000 guests each year and received at least as many short-term visitors, are currently enjoying an unusual quiet because the travelers from Asia are absent. The mayor is now considering how to limit the number of buses in the future. The 1,600 residents of the party location Ischgl, which counted about 2.7 million overnight stays per year, experienced as a warning shot that one of their après-ski bars became the hotbed of the pandemic.
"Many want a different kind of tourism than before," says Kerstin Neumann, Professor of Sustainable Resource Management at the University of Innsbruck. To do this, however, the communities have to cut old rope teams. "If the ski lift owner also has the say in the community meeting, little will change," says Neumann. Change takes courage, staying power, and the willingness to make mistakes.
Redirecting government subsidies would help to move away from ski lifts and snow cannons, for example to landscape maintenance. The upgrade in the mountains is still going on: Alpine associations and conservationists are currently trying to stop the expansion and fusion of the two large ski areas of Pitztal and Sölden in Tyrol.
Class and elegance
The renaissance of hiking romance alone may not be enough to offer the Alpine region an economic perspective. For some places and some hotels it will be worthwhile to invest in class and elegance.
The alpine jet set feels at home at the “Stanglwirt” in Going near Kitzbühel, and you can feel that on this July afternoon. The water ripples in the pool, the guests on the terrace wear swimming trunks, as is common in St. Tropez, and against the blue sky the Wild Kaiser spreads out like a cinema screen.
That's what it is: a large-format projection surface for nature dreams. "People are looking for freedom and security in the mountains," says Maria Hauser, the junior manager. She feels responsible for the security.
The house has been family-owned for 300 years and has not had a single day off, not even during the World Wars. Only Corona paralyzed the shop. Maria Hauser believes that it took such a hard stop because the pace of life was no longer manageable. "Since Corona," she says, "people have been talking less about glamor than about values and authenticity."
The “Stanglwirt” is almost a separate district with twelve hectares of land. Tennis halls and wellness worlds blend into the hills. Sheep graze on the grass roofs. The pools are fed from their own sources, they produce almost all of their energy themselves, as do many of the organic products for the restaurants – such as the cheese from their own pasture. Balthasar Hauser, Maria's father, was laughed at as an eco-spinner for a long time until Arnold Schwarzenegger two years ago to his environment invited to Vienna and praised there as "green visionary of tourism".
Maybe healthy tourism can actually act as an intermediary – between cosmopolitanism and down-to-earthness, growth and sustainability. Ecological, social, cultural.
Snow coming from the glacier by helicopter
Prominent support is given to all efforts to protect the climate and respect the Alps by Laura Dahlmeier. The Garmisch-Patenkirchner was Olympic champion and world champion in biathlon several times, and she often saw athletes panting through the green on thin snow bands.
"At a World Cup in Hochfilzen they once flew the snow in from the glacier with a helicopter," says the 26-year-old. "That was one of the points where I thought: man, what are we doing? Does that have a future? "
The Alps from an eagle's perspective
Dahlmeier published the children's book "Die Klimagang" and is involved with the Eagle Wings Foundation, which documents urban sprawl and glacier wastage from a bird's eye view – with a camera on the back of a sea eagle named Victor. She says: “Clearly sustainability is difficult in winter sports. But not impossible. ”In a working group of the Biathlon World Federation, she urges to postpone the season in Europe:“ At the end of March there is often still a lot of snow. ”
At the weekend, the cars with Munich license plates are on their doorstep. The rush has been even greater since Corona. Local politicians complain about clogged meadows, overflowing rubbish bins, ruthless wild campers. Laura Dahlmeier says: "I'm now studying sports in Munich, so I understand that people also want to get out."
Not only Munich and Garmischer will have to be more careful with the environment in the future, she says: "This is a topic that will concern humanity – whether it likes it or not."