Alpine Village in Summer, Bavarian Alps, 1950s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Alpine Village in Summer, Bavarian Alps, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

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Alpine Village in Summer, Bavarian Alps, 1950s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1950–1959

AA-2026-BF1BF7

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Somewhere in the Bavarian Alps in the 1950s, a traveller stopped at an elevation with a view and did what travellers had been doing in this region since the railways arrived: confirmed, with some satisfaction, that the mountains looked exactly like the postcards. The chalet-style guesthouses dotting the lower slopes were not accidents of architecture but a calculated industry — postwar West Germany had decided that scenic tourism was a perfectly respectable way to earn foreign currency, and the villages of the Berchtesgadener Land or the Zugspitze foothills had been catering to gentlemen with rucksacks and ladies in dirndl for long enough to know that a well-placed pension with a mountain backdrop was worth more than any amount of advertising. The meadows are trimmed to the careful tidiness that alpine farmers maintained partly from tradition and partly because dishevelled grass does not appear in the brochure. Every building sits at the precise angle required to suggest that no one planned any of this, which is how you know someone planned all of it. The tourist took the picture home, showed it to neighbours who had never left their county, and confirmed that Europe was, in fact, exactly as advertised.

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