As mountain climbing in its diverse forms continues to grow in popularity, scholarship on its cultural history has likewise expanded, especially over the last decade. Historically, mountaineers have been part of an educated and wealthy elite, with a keen interest in the scientific and philosophical questions of the day. While the profile of the “scholar mountaineer” (to borrow Wilfrid Noyce’s term) still tends to hold true, recent studies have critically probed the privileged pastime, ideological bent, imperialist thrust, and gendered bias of mountaineering and its discursive practices. Such studies include Elaine Freedgood’s Victorian Writing about Risk: Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World (2000); Peter L. Bayers’s Imperial Ascent: Masculinity, Mountaineering, and Empire (2003); and Susan R. Schrepfer’s Nature’s Altars: Mountains, Gender, and American Environmentalism (2005). Subsequently, Maurice Isserman and Stewart Weaver’s Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes (2008) and Tait Keller’s Apostles of the Alps: Mountaineering and Nation Building in Germany and Austria, 1860–1939 (2016) further emphasize the nexus of mountain conquest, empire, and nationhood, but ultimately offer more nuanced and comprehensive analyses. In the present volume, which focuses exclusively on the Germanophone mountaineering tradition, nationalism arrives in somewhat belated but all the more forceful fashion during the early twentieth century, as is evident here in chapters 9 through 12, which feature translations from texts by Eduard Pichl, Leni Riefenstahl, Arnold Fanck, and Hans Ertl.

In the early days of mountaineering, motives of science, aesthetics, exploration, and pure pleasure often coalesce—or at least work together in productive tension. The first two chapters presented here, which feature sample writings by the early modern Swiss naturalists, Conrad Gessner and Johann Jakob Scheuchzer, are exemplary in this regard, as they bring together classical and early modern discussions of the sublime, attention to the physical activity of mountaineering, and emerging scientific discourses. These texts by Gessner and Scheuchzer also challenge a longstanding trope in mountaineering cultural history—namely, the transition of mountain spaces from sites of dread to destinations of worship. On a broader intellectual-historical level, the periodization of human-mountain engagement has received its share of critical scrutiny.