Читать книгу Trekking Munich to Venice. The Traumpfad, 'Dream Way', a classic trek across the eastern Alps онлайн

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Stephen, Whymper and the British led the ‘golden age’ of climbing in the Alps, the time when, in the 1850s and 1860s, hundreds of peaks where ‘conquered’ for the first time. In Britain climbing and hiking was an elite activity but not so in Germany where the Romantic ideal of the mountains captured the imagination of the new middle class. The British Alpine Club was modelled on an English gentleman’s club with a small select membership but the German equivalent grew rapidly into the world’s largest mass membership sporting organisation. The new membership wanted access to the mountains and the huge infrastructure of mountain huts used today was largely built in the 30 years before the First World War (the names often reflect the local clubs that paid for them – such as the Berliner Hütte).

The German Alpine Club recruited members from the wider German-speaking world (including Austria), and hiking and climbing in the Alps was seen as a ‘German’ activity and closely associated with German nationalism. By the late 19th century this nationalism shamefully became associated with anti-semitism and a number of city and regional associations adopted an ‘Aryan Paragraph’ excluding non-Christian members.