15
“T
he Austrian has a fatherland, and rightly loves it,”
wrote the 18th-century German playwright Friedrich
Schiller. As we will see in the following chapters,
Austrians have not always agreed about what the nature of that
“fatherland” is. But Austria as a place is undoubtedly easy to love.
It has one of the most spectacular landscapes in the world, and its
enormous modern-day tourist industry is testament to the appeal
of the country’s natural, as well as its man-made, environment.
The very beauty of Austrian topography has ironically been more
of a challenge than a boon to its history, however. Though ideal for
picture postcards, Austria’s daunting terrain is much less suited to
settlement and agriculture and has constricted the country’s
demographic development. Austrians, like all peoples, have to
some extent shaped their economic, social, and cultural ideas to
The Land
2
reflect the circumstances of the geography that surrounds
them. One outcome of this has been a strong local identification
with the varied regions from which Austrians come.
A Landscape of Beauty
Austria is a medium-sized European country in the
southern-central part of the continent, surrounded by
several other nations: Switzerland and the tiny duchy of
Liechtenstein to the west, Germany to the northwest, the Czech
Republic to the north, Slovakia to the northeast, Hungary
to the east, and Slovenia and Italy to the south. At 32,378
square miles (83,859 square kilometers), Austria is roughly
the size of Maine. It is a somewhat pear-shaped land, with a
long, thin western end that bulges out as one travels farther
eastward. The distance from west to east is approximately
340 miles (547 kilometers)—about the driving distance from
New York City to Richmond, Virginia. Austria is subdivided
into nine self-governing “Länder,” or federal provinces:
Burgenland, Carinthia, Lower Austria, Upper Austria,
Salzburg, Styria, Tyrol, Vienna, and Vorarlberg.
The single most dominant feature of the country’s landscape
is its mountains. Austria is part of the great European
Alpine chain, and almost two-thirds of the country is classed
as mountainous. There are no huge individual peaks in
Austria; the highest mountain—Grossglockner—measures
in at a relatively modest 12,460 feet (3,798 meters). But there
are fairly large areas of the Austrian Alps that rise above
10,000 feet (3,048 meters), and these suffer correspondingly
severe weather and temperature conditions throughout the
year. The most mountainous part of the country is to the
west and south, and as one heads eastward, the Alps gently
recede into foothills that eventually flatten out to become
part of the Great Hungarian Plain at the eastern border.
Despite Austria’s reputation as a land of hills, some eastern
parts of the country are very flat indeed—so much so
16 Austria
that flash floods are a serious environmental hazard during
the oftentimes-stormy summer months. But it nonetheless
true that for most people, both inside and outside the
country, the Alps are the definitive symbol of the Austrian
national landscape.
Three other natural features define much of Austrian
geography. The first is the country’s green blanket of forest.
Even after more than a century of heavy industrialization,
about two-fifths of Austria is still covered with woodland,
making it the most densely forested country in central
Europe, with thick belts of spruce, beech, oak, and
conifers. This dense foliage provides a home to a plethora
of woodland animals straight out of fairytale lore, including
wolves, bears, wild boar, deer, and birds of prey. Rich
17The Land
The country map of Austria shows that its most dominant feature is its
mountains, which are part of the European Alpine chain. Large areas of
the Austrian Alps rise above 10,000 feet (3,048 meters) and have severe
weather and temperature conditions throughout the year.
hunting opportunities encouraged generations of aristocratic
sportsmen to take their summer vacations at family hunting
lodges deep in the Austrian forests.
Another characteristic part of the Austrian countryside
is its many lakes. These predominate in mountain and
subalpine regions, particularly the beautiful Salzkammergut,
a hilly central district of limestone massifs punctuated by
water. The two largest lakes in Austria are at opposite ends
of the country and represent the geographical extremes of
its territory; Lake Constance forms a dramatic rift in the
westernmost mountains of Vorarlberg, while the marshlike,
salty Neusiedler See in the east is extremely shallow—only
4 to 6 feet (1.2 to 1.8 meters) deep at most—and almost
disappears during hot summers.
The last significant feature of Austrian geography, and
the only serious competitor with the Alps as the defining
icon of the country’s natural heritage, is the Danube. One of
the great river systems of the world, coursing for 1,770 miles
(2,849 kilometers) from the Black Forest in western Germany
to the Black Sea, the Danube, in addition to providing the
inspiration for some of Austria’s most enduring artistic
works, gives the northeast corner of Austria—through which
it flows for 220 miles (350 kilometers)—a vital commercial
and agricultural base. Always one of Austria’s lifelines to the
outside world, the Danube’s usefulness as a channel of trade
has been increased even more by the opening in 1992 of a
canal linking it to the Rhine and the Main, allowing river
traffic to travel directly from the North Sea to the Black Sea
and beyond. Indeed, the Danube is so critical to the countries
that border it that its pollution has become a serious international
controversy in recent years.
Austria’s climate is an eccentric one, reflecting its central
position on the European mainland. The Austrian Alps are
a meeting point for weather patterns originally emanating
from the North Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and the
18 Austria
19The Land
Another outstanding feature of Austria’s geography is the Danube River,
which stretches over 1,700 miles from Germany to the Black Sea. In this
stunning view, we see the ruins of an ancient castle, perched high above
the river valley.
Ukrainian steppe, and the combination of these can produce
unstable and occasionally bizarre quirks of temperature and
precipitation. Although the country below the mountainous
snow zone is generally temperate, eastern Austria in the
summer is often alternately basted with hot dry winds from
southern Russia and lashed by violent rainstorms. Farther
west, the Salzburg region is home to the peculiar phenomenon
known as Schnürlregen, a type of rain that comes down
not in drops but in continuous ribbonlike streams. And
moody Austrians, especially in the Tyrol, have always
blamed their state of mind on the so-called Föhn, a warm
and moist air mass from the south that it is sometimes
claimed induces depression and even suicide. But despite
these idiosyncratic touches, Austria has a reasonably consistent
seasonal cycle that does not place great handicaps in
the way of farmers.
However, what do create handicaps for farmers—or,
for that matter, any kind of dense population growth—are
the selfsame geographical features that combine to make
Austria a place of unsurpassed beauty: the poor and uneven
quality of the land caused by the mountainous terrain and
the interspersed woods and lakes. Less than one-fifth of
Austria’s soil is really suitable for conventional agriculture.
Much of the grassland is at a high altitude, which is used as
pasture for dairy cattle during the summer months but is
not appropriate for growing cereal crops or animal fodder.
The best farming land is predominantly to the north and
east, in Upper and Lower Austria, Burgenland, and parts of
Styria, and not surprisingly these areas have been the focus
of human settlement throughout most of Austria’s history.
The scarcity of useful food-producing land, plus its
geographical imbalance, is reflected in the fact that Austria
has a very low population density compared to other rich
European countries—closer to that of the Balkans than the
industrialized West—and the majority of Austrians (over
20 Austria
two-thirds) live in the more sustainable Danubian region
beyond the Alps. In the mountainous western region the
population is mostly restricted to small river valleys, which
until recent advances in communication were largely cut off
from one another. Nearly all Austrians live in just two-fifths
of the country’s territory; the remaining area supports a
very low and widely scattered population.
But despite these formidable natural obstacles Austria
has historically been a major conduit for people, goods and
information, a European crossroads that connects west to
east and north to south. The narrow 4,511-foot-high (1,375
meters) Brenner Pass is the most important land link
between southern Germany and Italy’s Po River Valley, a
route for invading armies used by the Romans onward and a
channel of trade from the Mediterranean to the Baltic and
North Seas since late medieval times. And as we have already
noted, the River Danube is the principal commercial artery
between western and southeastern Europe. The river’s
strategic significance is highlighted by the string of castles
and fortifications that bedeck its banks, and Austria’s
control of a couple of hundred of those miles has long
afforded it a military and political significance that has not
always been in its best interest. Turkish ambitions in Europe
from the 15th century on, for example, depended on a
secure line of communications back to their imperial capital
at Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul), and this meant
advancing along the Danube; for hundreds of years
Austria had to act as Europe’s frontier guard against the
onslaught of the Ottoman invaders. There has also been a
corresponding traffic of people from west to east, with
merchants, pilgrims, and crusaders journeying to the cities
and shrines of the Near East and the Holy Land. Nowadays
the old pilgrim routes have been supplanted by a dense interstate
(Autobahn) road network that acts as a transportation
hub for European commerce.
21The Land
Austria can be subdivided into three major geographical
regions: the western Alpine region of Vorarlberg, Tyrol,
Salzburg and Carinthia; the central foothill region of Styria and
Upper Austria; and the eastern predominantly flatter plains
region of Lower Austria and Burgenland. It is important to
keep in mind that these subdivisions are somewhat arbitrary—
all of Austria’s provinces contain some hills and mountains, for
example—but however imperfectly, they do represent a real
shift in the topographical character of the country.
The Alpine West
The Austrian Alps consist of three major groups, northern,
central, and southern. The northern and southern mountain
chains are limestone, while the central peaks are made up of
softer crystalline rocks. Glaciers have cut dramatic clefts in the
mountain faces and formed lush valleys in which the majority
of settlements are clustered. The isolated circumstances of this
life have been reflected in a rugged individualist ethos within
the local communities, which have a long history of political
independence from Vienna.
Vorarlberg is the smallest (excepting the capital itself)
and most westerly of all Austria’s provinces, and before the
construction of the Arlberg tunnel in 1978, it was effectively
cut off from the rest of the country during winter. Despite its
rustic nature and inhospitable terrain, it is one of the most
heavily industrialized regions of Austria and has an ancient
textile and dairy-farming industry; its largest city, Dornbirn,
is an important manufacturing center. Culturally close to
their Swiss neighbors, the citizens of Vorarlberg attempted to
secede to Switzerland after the breakup of the Habsburg
Empire. The locals have now accommodated themselves to
life as Austrians, perhaps encouraged by the fact that they
possess the highest income per head in the country.
Tyrol lies at the heart of the Austrian Alps, and one of its
more dubious claims is that it has the lowest percentage of
22 Austria
useable arable land (3 percent) of any national province;
barely 15 percent of Tyrol is permanently settled. Boasting
daunting mountain peaks, its capital, Innsbruck, is a major
winter-sports destination and has hosted two Winter
Olympics, which has helped to give Tyrol the highest earnings
from tourism of all Austria’s provinces. The medieval
silver mines that once enriched the local nobility were
exhausted by the 17th century, and aside from tourism the
region’s most significant economic activity is cattle and dairy
farming. Tyrolean patriots are famous for waging an effective
guerilla war against Napoleon Bonaparte in the early 1800s,
but the province was less fortunate a century later when it
was carved in two by the Treaty of St. Germain, which
awarded South Tyrol to Italy.
Salzburg, a province that shares its name with its
principal city, was an independent bishopric outside of
Austria until 1816. The city built its gorgeous Baroque
churches with the taxes acquired from mining deposits of
gold, silver, and salt—for which the region is named—
deposits, and salt production is still an important factor in the
local economy; but nowadays Salzburgers prefer to mine the
rich reputation of their most famous son, Wolfgang
Amadeus Mozart. Salzburg also includes the Krimml Falls,
the largest waterfalls in Europe.
Carinthia is the southernmost of Austria’s provinces, and
its position south of the major Alpine groups means that it
enjoys a warmer, more consistent summer temperature than
the rest of the country. Carinthia is home to over 2,000 lakes,
including four very large bodies of water, and the Riviera-like
climate has particular appeal for tourists from elsewhere in
Austria. Carinthia’s timber industry is especially important for
the regional economy. The province borders Slovenia, formerly
part of Yugoslavia, and has a small Slovenian ethnic minority.
Parts of Carinthia were claimed by the Yugoslavs after both
World Wars, and there were violent clashes across the frontier.
23The Land
24 Austria
Perhaps best known as the birthplace of composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart,
Salzburg is a culturally rich city that built its fortunes from rich mining deposits
in the area. Overlooked by dramatic mountains and an eleventh-century fortress,
the city is home to some of the region’s most beautiful churches.
The Central Foothills
The most notable feature of this region is the Salzkammergut,
an area of forested crags and lakes that has a good
claim to be the loveliest of all Austria’s scenic landscapes and
has enjoyed a flourishing tourist industry since at least the
19th century. More suitable for agriculture and with less
treacherous communications than the west, central Austria
is consequently more populous and has a high industrial
concentration in its large cities.
Styria (“Steiermark” in German) is known as the
Green Province because of its thick forests, which cover
over half the countryside. Woodland is interspersed with
pastures and vineyards that produce part of Austria’s
growing wine export trade. Heavy mining operations
take place in Styria, which includes the well-known
Erzberg, or Iron Mountain; the largest provincial city,
Graz—Austria’s second city after Vienna and long its
political and cultural rival—is also heavily industrialized.
The decline in world demand for heavy industrial goods
depressed the local economy in the last few decades,
but a switch to service industries has aided recovery—
as have the frequent visits of Graz’s celebrated son
Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Upper Austria makes up one-quarter of the country’s
industrial output, and though the province’s major city,
Linz, is smaller than Graz, Linz’s position on the Danube
gives it particular commercial importance. Upper Austria is
also a center of agriculture, and there are significant oil
and natural-gas fields located there. Like all of Austria’s
provinces, it contains some magnificent scenery, with
granite hills surrounded by meadows and woods. There are
several well-preserved medieval towns, including Braunau,
which has the uncomfortable distinction of being Adolf
Hitler’s childhood home.
25The Land
The Eastern Plains
Although “plains” is something of a misnomer because
Lower Austria and Burgenland contain their share of high
ground as well, the provinces at the eastward extreme of
Austria are the flattest in the country and correspondingly
among the most hospitable to human settlement.
Lower Austria surrounds the city of Vienna, which
administratively is a federal province in its own right,
though the two obviously share a common historical and
geographical heritage. Lower Austria is the largest of the
nine provinces and the Austrian political heartland—the
original source of the name “Austria” and the basis of the
Eastern March, from which the country derives its origins.
As well as its important farming base, the area is also
Austria’s biggest wine producer. The so-called Vienna
Woods—an area of gently rolling hillsides, small farms, and
forests close to the metropolis—mark the division between
city and countryside.
Vienna itself has sometimes been described as a capital
without an empire, a great city that became one of the
artistic centers of European culture in its 19th-century
heyday and that now sits rather awkwardly within a small
and parochial country. With one-fifth of all Austrians being
Viennese, the city naturally plays a key role in the life of the
nation—a role that is sometimes resented by those in the
far-flung provinces.
Burgenland has a natural and man-made heritage quite
unlike any other region of Austria. Until the creation of the
First Republic, Burgenland was part of Hungary; geographically
it is the westernmost extreme of the Puszta, or Great
Hungarian Plain, and so is closer in landscape to eastern than
central Europe. Market gardening of fruit and vegetables is
an important local industry, as is the area’s distinctive wine
from its vineyards. The Hungarian flavor is maintained by
26 Austria
such local tourist attractions as the huge and opulent
Esterházy Palace, home of one of Hungary’s great aristocratic
families, and the one-time workplace of the composer
Franz Joseph Haydn.
Ecological Issues
Throughout this chapter we have seen that two factors,
above all, have influenced Austria’s development: its marginal
land resources and its centrality in Europe’s transport and
communications system. In recent years the combination of
these two has given rise to serious environmental problems, for
the huge increases in Europe’s economic activity—especially
since the end of the Cold War and the rebuilding of the former
Eastern Bloc—have put great stress on the inherently fragile
Austrian ecosystem. Austrians have responded to this threat
with strong political pressure for “green”—i.e., environmentally
friendly—policies.
About one-quarter of all the traffic using Austria’s
Autobahn system is made up of large commercial trucks
hauling goods across the Continent. The routes they take
wind through the mountainous western provinces—areas
that are particularly vulnerable to environmental damage
from noise and exhaust pollution. The trans-European
weather patterns that meet in the Austrian Alps also import
polluted air from northwest Europe, Italy, and the former
communist countries of Eastern Europe; the latter source is
especially worrisome for Austrians because many of these
countries have lax or nonexistent pollution-control laws.
By the early 1990s it was estimated that about four-tenths
of Austria’s vast forests had been damaged by acid rain
generated from the country’s own industrial plants as well as
that which comes in from abroad. Depletion of woodland in
mountain areas has caused other environmental hazards; as
the treeline that naturally soaks up snow and rain disappears,
Alpine provinces have suffered greater incidences of
27The Land
mudslides, flash floods, and avalanches. Austria’s success at
attracting tourists has proved a mixed blessing, for the huge
numbers of incoming visitors during the vacation season
have overloaded the modest infrastructures of the remote
western provinces.
Aiming to counter these threats to their delicate ecological
balance, Austria’s government and people have tried to
introduce domestic legislation reducing environmental
damage as well as negotiate international agreements to
limit problems emanating from abroad. Vienna is engaged
in discussions with the European Union (EU) to restrict the
amount of commercial traffic that can enter the country at
any one time and encourage the greater use of railroads for
goods transit. Similar initiatives to clean up fossil-fuel
power stations, one of the principal sources of acid rain, are
under way. Austrians are fastidious about recycling, and the
country is the third largest recycler of paper in the world.
Advertising campaigns to propagate the idea of so-called
green tourism, which has a less destructive effect on the
natural environment, have begun. Austria was also the first
country in Europe to formally ban—by popular referendum
—the use of atomic energy within its own borders,
although critics have pointed out that the country turns a
blind eye to importing nuclear-generated power from
neighboring sources. A small but growing parliamentary
Green Party now pushes for more stringent environmental
legislation in Vienna.
It can be seen from all this that Austria’s environmental
problems are, above all, international problems, and that
they can only be effectively tackled by cooperation from all
the countries of the region. The fate of the River Danube is
perhaps the best example of this. Nine countries share the
Danube, and all of them exploit its transport, hydroelectric,
fishing, irrigation, and water-supply potential. As use of the
river has increased—particularly in the developing east—its
28 Austria
resources have correspondingly suffered; the Danube’s waters
are no longer safely drinkable because of the industrial
toxicants pumped into it from chemical and manufacturing
plants, its fishing grounds have been depleted, and the
addition of new canals and dams has influenced the river’s
course and flow in a perilously unpredictable way. No single
country can legislate a cleanup of the Danube in isolation
because all the members of the Danubian community are
equally responsible for its preservation.
Issues like the Danube’s pollution have played an
important role in Austria’s sometimes-fractured relationship
with the European Union. Critics of EU expansion insist that
the Union must not allow former Eastern Bloc countries to
become members unless they provide adequate environmental
safeguards for their industry. EU supporters have suggested
that it’s only the support and discipline of the Union that
will encourage the East to do this in the first place.
29The Land
Habsburg ruler, Franz Joseph (1830-1916) guided Austria out of an era of
revolutionary turmoil she suffered during the mid-1800s. To answer
pressure from his Hungarian subjects, Franz Joseph issued the Compromise
of 1867, creating what would be known as the Austro-Hungarian Empire.