Cosmopolitan Landscapes of Consumption: Alpine Winter Tourism, 1930–70

In this paper, I explore the history of winter tourism in the Alps to show how Alpine skiers and the tourism industry remade the Alps as a landscape of leisure, and how this transnational leisure landscape stimulated cosmopolitan patterns of consumption in the mid-twentieth century.  I argue that Alpine skiers consumed nature, place, and space as much as goods and services, rendering the Alps a landscape of great paradox; Europeans understood the Alps to be entirely dependent on modern capitalist practices, and yet also an escape from modern urban civilization.   The desires of winter tourists proved contradictory, as Alpine resorts catered to European customers’ longing to “get back” to nature in a particularly dramatic landscape while also enjoying the comforts of modern luxury. Indeed, Alpine skiing was an incredibly lucrative integrated industry that supported a wide array of economic practices in Alpine Europe and beyond that, paradoxically, depended on the perception of solitude and authenticity.  As winter tourism became increasingly lucrative, the sport of Alpine skiing, once viewed as an ideal synthesis of pristine nature and modern culture became increasingly banal, commodified, and, in a particularly damning mid-century critique, “Americanized.” Thus, by examining archival sources, tourism and sporting journals, and advertisements and other ephemera produced across the Alpine states, this paper shows how the landscape itself became a lucrative commodity in Alpine winter tourism. Winter tourism affected a synthesis of nature and modern capitalism that encouraged Europeans to consume landscapes without regard for national borders. This transnational economy of nature proved alternately liberating and maddening to skiers, tourists, and nature enthusiasts in the mid-twentieth century, illustrating how a single landscape engendered multiple, often conflicting interpretations.