The Slippery Slopes of Austria

 

What's so attractive about snow?

Okay, it's pretty enough when it starts to fall.
And snowflakes can be interesting, I suppose,
after you've seen a few dozen.

But mainly snow is just really, really cold rainwater,
rendered into a frosty froth that gets crushed and compressed,
until it becomes hard as a rock, being frozen an' all,
which makes it even slicker.
Put snow on a mountainside and
it looks magical from a distance.
But try slogging through heaps of it
when it's three feet deep or more.

And when tramping down a hill
it doesn't take much melting snow
before your feet start a'sliding
as the white stuff shifts
like a rug's been pulled from underneath
and next thing you know you are tumbling
down a slope out of control, a danger to yourself
and menace to everyone in your way.

That's the way I felt a few years ago when I was reluctantly persuaded to put on a pair of skis at a local ski resort. I lasted maybe 10 minutes on the bunny slope, terrified that I was either going to injury myself or crash into one of dozens of small children gleefully flying past me. The moment  I stopped shuffling I suddenly recognized that I was a menace at any speed. So I unbuckled my skis, turned them into the hire station, and for the rest of the day sat in a warmish cafe chugging hot chocolate watching more agile folk slide down the mountain.

 

I have a hunch that the artist of this cartoon image of three skiers schloosing over a snow-covered precipice knew how I felt. His name is Fritz Schönpflug (1873–1951), one of my favorite postcard illustrators that I've featured many times on this blog. Fritz was a native of Wien (Vienna), Austria where during the last decades of the Hapsburg Empire he painted hundreds of mischievous pictures like this one that lampooned Viennese society. Evidently he knew something about this new craze for recreational skiing in the Alps.

 

This postcard was sent to Dr. Hans Lentel of Wien on 29 December 1911, which explains the card's printed caption: Glückliches NeuJahr ~ Happy New Year.

 

 

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Fritz also took notice that for a young lady on the ski slopes there were more dangers than just a tumble on slippery snow. This poor woman has crossed skis with a rather boorish fellow and may have to use her pole to extricate herself from his mitts.

 

This card was sent on 22 January 1911 from Jena, Germany to someone in Berlin. Jena is a large city in Thuringia, about 50 miles southwest of Leipzig, situated between the Harz mountains in the north, the Thuringian Forest in the southwest, and the Ore Mountains in the southeast. The sender of this postcard kept their pen, and pencil too, at an exceptionally fine point. 

 

 

 

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Before the invention of four-wheel drive vehicles, people traversed snow covered roads using genuine four-footed steeds to get around in wintertime. Here a sleigh drawn by two horses has had a mishap, no doubt caused by operator error from the looks of the horses, resulting in a spill of the driver and his passengers into the snow. 

This card was never posted but it shares the same series number B. K. W. I. 560 with the previous postcards, all published by Brüder Kohn Wien whose business was established in 1898 by Salomon Kohn (1873–1944†). Schönpflug's signature includes the number 909 which stands for 1909, the year when he created this set of watercolor paintings.

 

 

 

 

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This next postcard shows how very popular skiing had become in the first decade of the 20th century. Here we see hundreds of energetic people marching up a snowy slope as an old man heading downhill looks mystified at such an exuberant crowd. I believe he is a postman as he carries a large sack on his back as well as his own skis, which for him are used for work, not recreation.

This postcard was sent on 23 December 1910 from Germany, where Schönpflug was also popular. Many of his colorful pictures appealed to tourists visiting the mountain resorts of Austria, Hungary, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and France, too.

 

 

 

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My last skiing postcard is a good example of how an artist can rework material by just changing the perspective. Schönpflug's talent for depicting movement sometimes puts the viewer in an unusual position. Here a quartet of skiers, just like the group of skiers in the first picture, are about to fly off a hidden cliff face. But here the viewer is floating in the air slightly above and ahead of the skiers, whereas in the other picture the viewer is below the overhang. Which is more thrilling?

Schönpflug's signature has 904 for 1904 which makes this the earlier image of the two pictures. However it was sent long after the end of WWI when Austria dismissed its Hapsburg Empire monarch, and just after the end of WWII when it got rid of a more malevolent dictator, as the Republik Osterreich 8g stamp is from a landscape series printed in 1946. There is no postmark and the writer's date on the message uses only two digits for the year: 20.12.46 for 20 December 1946. It's an example of how Schönpflug's witty artwork remained relevant and appealing even after the fall of two empires.

 

 

 

 

 I finish with some short newsreels of skiing in Austria
from the British Pathé archives.
This one is from 1934 entitled Ski Experts Of Tomorrow.

 

 

 

 

This next one has the title
Austrian Winter Sports (1936).
There is a horse drawn sleigh, too.

 

It's easy to see where Fritz Schönpflug got his inspiration,
probably while sitting in the ski chalet's cafe sipping hot chocolate.

 

This last video is from 1946
taken on the slopes of the Schneefernerkopf
at Zugspitzplatt, Germany.
It's titled:
First Ski Races Of Season (1946)

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is my contribution to Sepia Saturday
where once you reach the top
everything else is all downhill.