Góry, Literatura, Kultura

Einleitung

Ewa Grzęda — 2024-12-23

Introduction

Ewa Grzęda — 2024-12-23

Mehr als ein literarischer Reiseführer durch das Zobtengebirge

Jan Pacholski — 2024-12-23

Berge sind nicht seit eh und je...

Wojciech Kunicki — 2024-12-23

Die Erinnerung an die Sächsische Schweiz in den Reisetagebüchern der Schwester Florentyna und Symforoza Krzyżanowska

Katarzyna Król — 2025-01-23

In the first half of the 19th century, one of the corners of Europe most eagerly visited by Poles was Saxon Switzerland, as its natural and landscape values aroused not only admiration but also amazement among Polish tourists. This is evidenced, for instance, by various travel accounts, among which it is worth mentioning the travel diaries of two young girls—sisters Florentyna and Symforoza Krzyżanowska, which remain in manuscripts to this day. These notes contain fragments devoted to their trip to Saxon Switzerland in September 1829, which provided them with many unforgettable experiences. This expedition lasted two days, during which the young travelers visited, among others, Pillnitz, Bastei, Kuhstall, Schandau, Lichtenhain and Pirna. They explored the land surrounding them from three different perspectives: from the heights of the mountain hills, lowland areas and from the riverbed. They followed a marked and popular trail, and covered individual stages of the journey by carriage, on foot or by barge. On the pages of their diaries, they recorded sightseeing information, comments on the peculiarities of nature, observations on amenities for tourists, and details regarding the methods, conditions and time of the expedition. The descriptions left by Florentyna and Symforoza Krzyżanowska are not only a noteworthy source for studies on the issue of the presence of Poles in Saxon Switzerland, but also an interesting testimony to the fascination with the mountain landscape in the first half of the 19th century. They should also be considered an interesting example of girls’ diary writing, the true value of which can only be revealed by further research.

Der „Homo alpinus“. Eine kurze Notiz zu Willy Hellpachs Versuch, die Existenz von Bergmenschen auf ein umweltpsychologisches Fundament zu stellen

Patrick Stoffel — 2024-12-23

In the first decades of the 20th century, Willy Hellpach attempted to explain the observation that mountain dwellers differ significantly from the inhabitants of the plains in terms of the influence of the natural environment on people’s mental life. Embedded in contemporary race theory, which he expanded to include elements of environmental psychology, he came to the conclusion that mountains, beyond the “racial origin” of their population, produce a soil phenotype due to the “abundance of things to cope with” that they offer in a very confined space: the Homo alpinus, being characterized by self-sufficiency and a rich imagination.

Alpine Landschaft per Bahn. Die Bergmenschen bei Peter Rosegger und Heimito von Doderer

Roland Tusch — 2024-12-23

The construction of railways made the mountains accessible to urban society in the age of industrialisation. The construction of the world’s first high mountain railway, the Semmering Railway, was followed by the development of Alpine summer resorts for tourists, very close to Vienna. Texts of the two Austrian writers Peter Rosegger (1843–1918) and Heimito von Doderer (1896–1966) offer the op- portunity to approach the people and their relationship to the mountains and the Semmering Railway. The analysis explores the questions: How did Rosegger experience the development of the mountains by the railway? How do Rosegger and Doderer’s travellers on the train experience the mountains? How do Rosegger and Doderer describe the people who came to Semmering because of the railway?

Rosegger impressively describes his first journey on the Semmering Railway, which opened the door to the world for him. He highlights the importance of observing nature from the train. He is critical of the development of the tourist settlements on the Semmering. In the texts by Rosegger and Doderer, the travellers on the train provide different insights into the fascination that emanates from the mountains. The urban society that arrived at the Semmering with the railway felt itself to have come closer to the mountains; the locals probably always perceived them as urban people.

Eine Gebirglerin und die Wissenschaft – Josephine Kablik als prominente Wissenschaftlerin des Riesengebirges

Karel Stibral — 2024-12-23

The chapter deals with the work of the scientist Josephine Kablik (Josefína Kablíková, née Ettel, 1787–1863), who worked in Vrchlabí (Hohenelbe) in the Czech (or Austrian) part of the Krkonoše Mountains. Kablik, who was born in the Giant Mountains (Krkonoše), became a leading botanist of the Austrian Empire, fundamental for the systematic knowledge of the Krkonoše flora. Although she remained in the mountains for most of her life, she maintained numerous correspondence with a number of scientific authorities, was a member of several scientific societies and supplied herbariums not only in Prague, but also in Austria, Germany and England. Among other things, she contributed a number of plants for the creation of the Herbarium Silesiacum of the Silesian Society for Patriotic Culture in Wrocław. Her activities also extended to other natural sciences, and at the same time she and her husband, a pharmacist, were active in charity work.

Sudeten: Erinnerung reinterpretiert

Jan Pacholski — 2024-12-23

The obelisk, placed at the corner of today’s Kościuszki and Daszyńskiego streets in Kłodzko, originally commemorated Friedrich Wilhelm von Götzen, a Prussian general and hero of the Napo leonic Wars. After World War II, this monument was reinterpreted; Borussian symbols were removed from it, including the emblematic eagle taking flight and the visage of von Götzen himself, and replaced with a hammer and sickle and a red star. As a result, it became one of many socalled monu ments of gratitude to the Red Army. After the political changes in 1989, the dilapidated obelisk, with its red with the red paint already flaking off, was covered with sheets of bluish glass with the logo of Powszechny Zakład Ubezpieczeń (the oldestt surviving Polish insurance company) attached. And thus, in a second bout of this peculiar process of upcycling, the new ultracapitalist reality of the Third Polish Republic regurgitated the former Prussian symbol, repurposing it to fit its current needs.

The above example, although it comes from the foothill area, from the Nysa Kłodzka valley, flowing through the very centre of one of the most important Sudetes valleys, perfectly encapsulates the subject of this article. An attempt was made to discuss a number of examples of the appropriation of various objects from the mountains themselves and giving them new meanings. One of them is the former Bismarck Tower at the top of Wielka Sowa, which for some time was named after General Władysław Sikorski, and eventually gained the same patron as the Main Sudetes Trail, i.e. Dr. Mieczysław Orłowicz. The remaining examples come from the land of Silesian and Kłodzko—which at the present day translates to: Polish—Sudetes. They also include objects located in the Czech and Moravian parts of the mountains. Through them, the processes of appropriating and taming these “postGerman” mountains in the period of 1945–1989 were illustrated. The second part of the article points out the manifestations of rediscovery, processing, and assimilation of the German past of these lands that ap peared after 1989, and more strongly after the disastrous flood of the millennium in 1997.

Motivický vývoj obrazu minulosti Šumavy

Michal Hořejší — 2024-12-23

The article seeks to answer the question of the historical development of the depiction of Bohemian Forestʼs past, and what motives may therefore interfere with the nature of the current discourse on the management of the Bohemian Forest National Park. To this end I analysed a corpus of nearly fifty prefaces and afterwords to mostly tourist guides to the Bohemian Forest from 1883–2013. The research itself consists of a qualitative part, based on simple reading, and a quantitative part, based on collocation and concordance corpus analysis. The result indicate that the image of the Bohemian Forestʼs past has a long-standing motif of enduring continuity ending with a break, which is often portrayed in various ways—e.g. as the accession of the Habsburgs to the Czech throne, the expulsion of the German-speaking population after 1945, the storm of 1870, or even the establishment of a national park in 1991. I find it remarkable that the competing image based on the motif of permanent continuity appears mainly in texts from the period 1945–1990.

Objevená a ztracená paměť kurdských hor. Cesta Josefa Wünsche do Arménie a Kurdistánu

Veronika Faktorová — 2024-12-23

The study introduces the traveller Josef Wünsch, a successful explorer of the sources of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Wünsch travelled in the years 1881–1883 in the eastern part of Turkey, the area historically referred to as Armenia and Kurdistan. He was the first European, who maps the mountain regions of Taurus and the Armenian Highlands in detail. He created a memory of space in two ways. First, he incorporated the area into the system of European knowledge—the white spot on the world map was filled with a detailed description of mountains, streams, settlements and roads. Second, his texts preserved the cultural image of the place, which is all the more valuable because it was destroyed very soon after his expedition. At the beginning of the 20th century, the Armenian genocide took place in the region.

Das Ende der kolonialen Epoche im Himalaya

Anna Okopińska — 2024-12-23

An exceptional class of mountain people has emerged in recent years among the indigenous inhabitants of the highland regions of Asia. Since the 17th century, the local mountain dwellers were hired by Westerners to serve on exploratory expeditions as porters and pack animal drivers. The best among them worked as high-altitude porters in climbing expeditions to the highest peaks of Himalaya and Karakoram, where they gained mountaineering experience and technical skills. As residents of high-altitude settlements experienced in pastoral and hunting activities in the surrounding mountains, they had a natural physical advantage over Westerners. However, for many years, they only served as low-paid labourers. Their subservient mentality inherited from colonial times and a lack of confidencein their own abilities served as obstacles to social advancement. However, they managed to overcome this! Currently, local mountain dwellers have taken complete control of high-altitude tourism.

When I returned to the Asian mountains after thirty years, I was delighted to observe these changes. The process varies in different regions I visited—Nepal, the Indian Himalaya, the western Pakistani Karakoram, and Xinjiang—but the trend is the same everywhere. Local agencies, led by local leaders, are responsible now for organizing treks and mountaineering expeditions to the highest peaks, rather than Western companies. Their clients are not only foreigners but also the country’s residents—Nepalese and Indians in the Himalaya and Pakistanis in the Karakoram. Only in Xinjiang are the Chinese not visible. The small agencies, employing a few local guides, compete with each other and cooperate at the same time by hiring porters and carriers, creating a local mountain people’s community. The crème de la crème of this community consists of high-altitude guides who have become independent climbers increasingly active in their own and foreign mountains. They organize exploratory and sports expeditions funded by foreign clients or sponsoring companies. This process went unnoticed by self-confident Western Himalayan climbers. Sport expeditions described their successes without mentioning the involvement of high-altitude porters, and commercial expedition clients boasted about their ascents to eight-thousanders, not even mentioning the names of the Sherpas who guided them there. The impressive style of the winter ascent of K2 by a group of ten Nepalis surprised the mountaineering world. It resulted, however, in attempts to downplay their success.

Landschaftsgedächtnis und Geschlechterdiskurse in ausgewählten Werken von Elsa Bernstein und Maria Waser

Monika Mańczyk-Krygiel — 2024-12-23

This article analyzes the mutual interpenetrations of different types of cultural memory in literary texts, in particular landscape memory, myth memory, and memory of gender stereotypes.

Symbolic drama by Elsa Bernstein (pseudonym Ernst Rosmer, 1866–1949) Mutter Maria Totengedicht in fünf Wandlungen (1900) deals with the subject of the supplanting of old folk beliefs by the Christian religion, as well as the violent clash of the male and female worlds, symbolized here by the figures of alpine mythology as literary topoi (hunter and mountain goddess). The end of the drama—a combination of a mythical being after death with a sculpture of the Madonna carved in rock—is usually interpreted as the apotheosis of Christianity and the triumph of a new religion (and thus a new world order) over the pagan world. However, its subversive aspect should be emphasized because, in the cult of the Mother of God, one can find strong reminiscences of the cult of the Great Goddess and other ancient fertility deities. Therefore, old beliefs are not lost forever; they remain part of the cultural heritage and are waiting to be rediscovered.

An original reinterpretation of the stereotyped mountain landscape is proposed by Maria Waser (1878–1939) in her novel Die Geschichte der Anna Waser (1913). Here, the name of the mountain peak Jungfrau becomes a symbol of independence from the expectations of the environment and offers the possibility of identification. For the main character, the most important thing is the desire for self-realization as an artist (painter), which often encounters the reluctance of the environment, especially men jealous of her talent. This rather unusual way of perceiving Jungfrau in the context of building identity is intimate and personal, and at the same time explicitly feminine.

Ein Leben für den Fels: Den Körper seinen Gebrauch anpassen

Susann Winsel — 2024-12-23

The image of “mountain (film) person” has undergone considerable changes and differentiations over the past decades. This paper takes a closer look at the upcoming Mountain Film Festivals, focusing on the aesthetic and social meaning of an imagined mountain and climbing community. Initally, preliminary ideas and results of a diachronic comparison will be presented. For this purpose, the documentaries El Capitan (Fred Padula und Glen Denny, USA 1978) and The Dawn Wall (Josh Lowell and Peter Mortimer, USA 2017) are discussed, partially through the lens of Marcel Mauss’ “techniques of the body” and the issue of “toughening up.” The idea is that the adaptation of the body to the rock and its particular challenges was also construed through cinematic means, specifically the commanding, powerful character trope of the “mountain person.”

Der Tatra-Babelturm. Der Grenzcharakter vom Ethnos „homo scepusiensis“ in den Berichten von Ludwik Pietrusiński und Teodor Tripplin

Aleksandra Gintowt — 2024-12-23

The article presents the elements of multiculturalism of the Spiš area in the 19th century, which falls under the contemporary definition of a borderland: life at the intersection of cultures with an interactive character. This was demonstrated using Ludwik Pietrusiński’s description of a travel through Galicia to the Kingdom of Hungary, contained in the fourth volume of the series Podróże, przejazdki i przechadzki po Europie (Travels, Trips and Walks Around Europe, 1844), and Teodor Tripplin’s travel novel Wycieczki po stokach galicyjskich i węgierskich Tatrów (Excursions on the Slopes of the Galician and Hungarian Tatras, 1848). Both texts are interpreted using the category of borderland—emphasizing distinctiveness and differences while drawing attention to the network of cultural relations and transgressions, as well as the identity issues of the local population. Three areas of research are considered: language and other identity-building elements, stereotypes about specific ethnic groups, and the impact of contact with foreign culture on the locals’ everyday life. Pietrusiński highlights the mutual influences of the local languages, since locals used different dialects, orthographies, and pronunciations, often creating their own linguistic forms. Tripplin, on the other hand, addresses the theme of life in an area “without borders,” in a place of free cultural exchange due to the proximity of different values and beliefs, which seemed natural to the inhabitants at the time. The aim of the article is to identify the multicultural ethnolinguistic threads that are still evident in this area today, thereby also expanding the broader historical and cultural analysis of the formation of today’s Tatra Euroregion.

Von der „Rose ohne Dornen bis zum Tatra-Abenteuer von Zosia und Franek“. Das Gedächtnis und das Bewusstsein vom Bergraum in den Tatra-Wissenskompendien für Kinder

Anna Pigoń — 2024-12-23

The first compendia of knowledge about the Tatra mountains addressed to child readers emerged at the beginning of the 20th century. The most important authors in this genre include Bohdan Dyakowski, Jadwiga Roguska-Cybulska and Zofia Urbanowska. According to Pola Kuleczka, her works are characterized by “a tendency to combine the pattern of an adventure story with an encyclopedic-informative layer.” Two recent publications, Tatry. Przewodnik dla małych i dużych [The Tatras: A Guidebook for the Travellers Big and Small] (B. Gawryluk, P. Skawiński, Kraków 2021) or TOPR. Tatrzańska przygoda Zosi i Franka [TOPR: Zosia and Franek’s Adventure in the Tatras] (B. Sabała-Zielińska, Warszawa 2022) can be perceived as a sign of a re-emergence of this genre. Their popularity shows that these peculiar repositories of knowledge associated with the Tatra region are in constant demand, although they form and the goals set for them change over time. This article presents the history of the Tatra-knowledge compendia for children and their functions, particularly as transmitters of memory. The analysis encompasses some of the most important works in this subgenre of children’s literature in order to discuss different aspects of memory in the works discussed.

Zwischen dem Gedenken und der Ideologisierung der Kämpfe der Legionen in den Ostkarpaten in der polnischen Literatur der Zwischenkriegszeit

Jagoda Wierzejska — 2024-12-23

The article provides a critical analysis of representations of the Eastern Carpathians present in the interwar Polish literature, as a space marked by memory of the legionary battles during the Great War.

Alongside the image of the Hutsul Region as a space of idyllic nature or a civilizing mission calculated to integrate the mountainous borderland with the rest of the modern state, the interwar Polish literature brought an image of the region as a unique place on the historical level for Poles. Interwar Polish writers presented the Eastern Carpathians as a prominent place on maps of the legionary combat routes, and thus as existing with special rights in the Polish national memory. Additionally, they portrayed Poles in military entourage and the Hutsuls as their helpers in the fight for Poland’s independence, and then for maintaining Polish order on the South-Eastern outskirts of the country. This way of presenting the Hutsul region and the Hutsuls in the Polish dominant discourse of the interwar period (especially literary discourse) was greatly influenced by the war events that took place in 1914–1915. The 2nd and 3rd Infantry Regiments of the Legions fought then in the Eastern Carpathians against the Russians. Literary representations and reminiscences of legionary battles in the region and cooperation of (some) Hutsuls with the legionnaires had primarily a commemorative function. But not exclusively. They also served to bring the Hutsuls closer to the Polish nation and to distinguish them from the Ukrainian nation, as well as to symbolically appropriate the Hutsul region to the needs of the Second Polish Republic. The article sheds light on both the commemorative and ideologizing aspects of the literature devoted to the battles in the Eastern Carpathians and their legionary and Hutsul protagonists.

„Wie die Geschichtsschreiber der Welt die Geschichte des Felsens schreiben“. Die zerschlagene Gedächtnislandschaft in der „Saison in den Alpen“ von Mieczysław Jastrun

Elżbieta Dutka — 2024-12-23

Mieczysław Jastrun stayed with a group of Polish painters and writers in Switzerland for three winter months between 1946 and 1947. After his return, the poet published A Season in the Alps and Other Poems (1948). The unconventional and undescriptive mountain landscapes presented in it were influenced by fresh war memories and anxieties related to the new political situation in Europe. Jastrun’s lyrical works refer to the well-known mountain symbolism and play with topoi, but despite this, there is a clear distance from tradition, especially the Romantic one. The article analyses the image of mountain space evoked in the poem A Season in the Alps, in the context of Alpine literature and using the tools suggested by geopoetics. Particular attention is paid to the texture of place in which the archive of culture plays a dominant role. Numerous tropes and figures (e.g. the metaphors “chronicles of the earth” and “a book bound with stone snaps” referring to the mountains) and allusions to Słowacki’s poem In Switzerland make the Alps in Jastrun’s poem not only a “place touched by autobiography” (per M. Czermińska), discovered during a short stay. “The peaks of old Europe” evoke the past and is a landscape of memory built by intertextual references. However, the confrontation of cultural memory with reality reveals not a community but a conflict. It generates a sense of alienation and reluctance/resentment. The broken, decomposed Alpine landscape of memory evoked in A Season in the Alps morphs into a question about history and its meaning. It also expresses fears related to the fragility of human existence and simultaneously signals the need to search for a new poetic language, giving the poem a self-referential character.