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Habsburg als Touristenmagnet: Monarchie und Fremdenverkehr in den Ostalpen 1820–1910 by Ursula Butz

2022; Austrian Studies Association; Volume: 55; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/oas.2022.0053

2327-1809

Günter Bischof,

Ecology, Conservation, and Geographical Studies

Reviewed by: Habsburg als Touristenmagnet: Monarchie und Fremdenverkehr in den Ostalpen 1820–1910 by Ursula Butz Günter Bischof Ursula Butz, Habsburg als Touristenmagnet: Monarchie und Fremdenverkehr in den Ostalpen 1820–1910. Vienna: Böhlau, 2021. 204 pp. Tourism history is popular these days. Habsburg als Touristenmagnet, Ursula Butz’s University of Lucerne dissertation on the development of three famous spa destinations (Ischl in the Salzkammergut, Meran in South Tyrol, Reichenau/Semmering in Lower Austria, very close to Vienna) in the Eastern Alps of the Habsburg Monarchy during the nineteenth century is part of a larger University of Lucerne project financed by the Swiss National Fund on “majestic mountains,” monarchy, and tourism in the Alps. Butz’s specific interest is how much the presence of members of the Habsburg family in these budding resort towns served as a “magnet” to draw the monarchy’s nobility and, eventually, common citizens to these destinations. The book seems to be a direct publication of her dissertation with the usual dissertation features (“Forschungsfragen und Gliederung,” etc.), with no effort made to present the raw research results to a broader audience. Bad Ischl began to take off as a spa town after the Archbishop of Olomouc, the Habsburg Archduke Rudolf, came to take the waters for a number of years in the 1820s and was “cured.” This gave Ischl prestige as a spa town (55). When Prince Metternich and his advisor, Friedrich von Gentz, along with Count Kolowrat came to Ischl and sang its praises, members of the Habsburg family soon showed up too. Emperor Francis Joseph made it his “summer residence” (67), coming regularly to Ischl to enjoy the mountains and vistas and going hunting. This drew other Habsburg family members and crowned heads of Europe, along with the monarchy’s elite aristocracy. By the 1840s, Bad Ischl was a well-known spa town. The turn towards twentieth-century mass tourism in the Salzkammergut is described by Christian Dirninger in [End Page 129] Kurt Luger and Franz Rest, eds., Alpenreisen: Erlebnis, Raumtransformationen, Imagination (2017). Writers, scientists, and artists discovered Meran in the 1830s; even a popular London Magazine wrote about it. Habsburg family members soon came on short official visits. What was attractive for visitors to Meran was “the wine, the mild climate and the beautiful mountain scene” around it (69). Tourism (“Fremdenverkehr”) is said to have started in 1836. Meran quickly became a spa town too with wine and water cures. When Empress Elisabeth visited Meran in 1871 with her sickly daughter Marie Valerie and an entourage of 113 persons, Meran soon attracted big crowds of visitors—it became a popular “Sommerfrische” resort (72). The royals returned in 1889. Scientists discovered Reichenau and it soon became “base camp” for those who climbed the nearby Schneeberg (76; see the poster of the Schneebergbahn in the Wolfgang Kos essay in Luger and Rest, eds., Alpenreisen). Soon aristocrats came but also Bildungsbürger. When members of the imperial family opened the famous railroad line across the Semmering in 1854, Reichenau and the Semmering became favorite destinations for the Viennese, who often visited for a day trip (77). In the early 1860s Emperor Franz Joseph’s children spent their summers in Reichenau, and soon the emperor’s brother Karl Ludwig and his family came to town regularly and built a villa there. Reichenau became a spa town and, due to the Semmering railroad, the Semmering became a favorite tourist destination for the Viennese. The big hotels built on the Semmering attracted thousands of people (see the poster on the Südbahnhotel, in Luger and West, eds., Alpenreisen). The heart of Butz’s dissertation is an analysis of the almost ten thousand Kur-und Fremdenlisten in the three spa towns under investigation (for her methodology, see 197–201). Amazingly, every visitor and his/her party was listed individually, along with where he/she stayed. From these lists Butz established quantitative graphs showing guest frequencies from year to year. These allow one to follow the regular growth of tourism in all three spa towns. Meran’s growth at the turn of the century was the steepest (89–91, 96). In its case, Butz identified spikes after Empress Elisabeth’s...