European Mountaineers Between East and West: A Transnational History of Alpinism in the Twentieth Century

Abstract

This dissertation explores ideas of internationalism in Europe’s long twentieth century through a transnational study of mountaineering. It examines how alpine clubs—traditionally regarded as the vanguard of bourgeois nationalism—developed networks across changing political fault lines in an effort to regulate the usage, risk, and environment of mountain spaces. Locating a major source of interwar internationalism in East Central Europe, the dissertation reveals how actors from the newly sovereign states emerged as active shapers of the transnational community rather than as victims of nationalist imperatives. Internationalism offered a tool for the marginalized states to overcome the divisions of a formerly shared Habsburg space and at the same time assert their ranks in a larger European community. In the Cold War, encounters between Soviet and Western alpinists provided an unsurpassed opportunity for citizen diplomacy outside of the controlled environments in which standard forms of choreographed East-West exchanges took place. Building on evidence gathered in archives across Europe, the United States, New Zealand, and Russia, as well as published sources in eight languages, this dissertation highlights the structural connectedness of European history and re-inserts marginalized actors back into the history of internationalism and transnational exchange.