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Walking in the landscape
was a reaction against the transformations that were making the middle-class
body an anachronism locked away in homes and offices and laborers bodies part of
industrial machinery.
The writers at the
beginning of this history of walking in the landscape, Rousseau and Wordsworth,
linked social liberation with a passion for nature (though, fortunaly,
neither of them could have envisioned the Boy Scouts, the outdoor equipment
industry, and other far-flung effects of the culture of walking). The walking
clubs brought many ordinary people closer to their notion of the ideal walker,
moving without impediments across the landscape.
(p. 168)
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Pedro Cuiça © Damaia (2013) |
The Naturfreunde,
or Nature Friends, was founded in Vienna in 1895 by teacher Georg Schmiedl,
blacksmith Alois Rohauer, and student Karl Renner, at a time when Hapsburg
monarchy and other elites still controlled access to most of the Austrian mountains. “Berg frei” – free mountains – was their slogan. They were
socialists and antimonarchists, and they were immensely successful.
(…) The late nineteenth
to early twentieth century was a golden age of organizations. Some provided
social cohesion for the displaced of a rapidly changing world, others offered
resistance to industrialization inhuman apetite for the time, health energy,
and rights of workers. Many were organized around utopian ideals or pragmatic
social change, and all of them created communities – of Zionists, feminists,
labor activists, athletes, charities, and intellectuals. Walking clubs were
part of this larger movement, and each of the major political walking clubs
were founded in some kind of opposition to the mainstream of its society. For
the Sierra Club, this mainstream was the rampant destruction of a pristine
ecosystem by a rapidly developing country. In most of Europe, the remaining
open space was in more stable but less accessible condition. For the Austrian
Naturfreunde as well as many British groups, the aristocratic monopoly on open
space was the problem. Manfred Pils, the current Naturfreunde secretary
general, wrote me, “The Friends of Nature were founded because leisure time and
tourism was a privilege for upper class people at that time. They wanted to
open up such opportunities also for common people… it was the Friends of Nature
who campaigned against the efforts to exclude people from private meadows and
forests in the Alps. The campaingn was called ‘Der verbotene Weg’ (the
forbidden path). So the Friends of Nature achieved finally a legalistic
regulation which guaranteed access by walking to forests and alpine meadows for
everyone.” As a result, “the Alps are not a national territory, they stayed in
private property but we (and all tourists) have access to all footpaths and
generally to forests and alpine meadows.”
When German and Austrian
radicals arrived in the United States, they brought their organization with
them.
(…) The Naturfreunde paid
for its success. Its socialism provoked the Nazi regime to repress it in
Austria and Germany, while the Germanness of the organization made it suspect
in the Unites States during that era. After the end of the World War II,
socialism became an issue in the United States too. (…) all the branches of the
Naturfreunde in the eastern United States collapsed, and the clubhouses bought,
built, and owned by the members fell into private hands. Only the California
outposts survived by being adamantly apolitical, and a fourth one recently
opened up in northern Oregon. Of the 600,000 Naturfreunde members in twenty-one
countries, less than a thousand remain in the United States, and they are
anomalies for their apolitical stance.
The German youth, the Wandervogel,
did not survived World War II, but its history demonstrates that no ideology
had a Monopoly on walking. A reaction against the authoritarianism of the
German family and government, it began inauspiciously enough in the suburb of
Berlin in 1896, where a group of shortland students began to go on expeditions
together to the woods nearby and then farther away. By 1899 they were seting
off the weeks at a time to wander in the mountains.
(pp. 156-157)
When the Wandervogel
Ausschuss für Schulerfahrten (Wandervogel Committee for Schoolboy’s
Ramblers) was founded on November 4, 1901, it was a Romantic rambling society. Wandervogel
means a magical bird, a word taken from a poem, it suggests the free and
weightless identity the members world seek. Medieval wandering scholars were
the first role models for the thousands of boys who joined up, and rambling on
long excursions together was their principal activity. (…)
Theirs was an odd
antiauthoritarianism, since the Wandervogel was exclusive. Hierarchical,
organized into small groups giving unquestioning obedience to a leader, with
semiformal uniforms (usually shorts, dark shirts, and neckerchiefs) and
initiation rituals of various degrees of difficulty and danger. Though the
Wandervogel was detached from practical politics, most members subscribed to an etnic nationalism, and so the folk culture that meant working-class culture for
the Naturfreunde mean ethnic identity for the Wandervogel. The members were
almost exclusively middle-class, girls were admitted to some groups after 1911
or encouraged to form their own groups.
(…) There were other
organizations for young people to join, church groups and the Protestant Youth
Movement and, after 1909, a German version of the Boy Scouts, while
working-class youths had Communist and socialist youth clubs. The Boy Scouts,
like the Wandervogel, like so many situations in the history of walking, raise
the question of when walking becomes marching. Most walking clubs were groups
come together to celebrate and protest individual and private experience, but
some embraced authoritarianism. Marching subordinates the very rhytms of
individual bodies to group and to authority, and any group that marches is
marching toward militarism if it is not already there. The scouting movement
was adaoted by the Boer War veteran Sir Baden-Powell from ideas of his own and
ideas plagiarized from the Anglo-Canadian Ernest Thompson Seton. Seton’s goal
had been to introduce boys to outdoor life with a strong focus on Native
Anerican skills and values, and he is sometimes credited with starting the
pagan revival among adults instead. Baden-Powell brought a more militaristic,
conservative sensibility to the idea of living in the woods. Even now, each
scouting group seems to have its own style, some teach outdoor skills, some
train the boys a little soldiers. After World War I, the Wandervogel collapsed,
but the German Boy Scouts – the Pathfinders, they were called – rebelled
against their adult leaders and largely replaced the original movement.
(pp. 158-159)
SOLNIT, Rebecca. 2014. Walderlust
– A History of Walking. London: Granta Publications.
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