eJournals Colloquia Germanica 56/4

Colloquia Germanica
cg
0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
121
2023
564

From The Vulture Wally to The Dark Valley: Imaging the Alps at the Crossroads of the Heimat Genre

121
2023
Christian Quendler
The German notion of Heimat is a form of place attachment that is simultaneously shaped by senses of longing and belonging. Heimat not only accommodates the unhomely in the homely, it also blends foreign perspectives with stylized forms of self-exoticization. To the extent that Heimat responds to a desire for rediscovering the (trans)national in the local, the urban in the provincial, the modern in the anti-modern, and so on, it may be described as a delocalized place. This article examines changing national, gendered, and generic transpositions of Alpine imaginaries by analyzing film adaptations of two novels that prefigure and refigure Heimat art respectively: Wilhelmine von Hillern’s Die Geier-Wally (The Vulture Wally), which appeared in 1873 and became the source of many film and TV adaptations, and Thomas Willmann’s Alpine Western Das finstere Tal (The Dark Valley), published in 2010 and adapted to a motion picture by Andreas Prochaska in 2014.
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From The Vulture Wally to The Dark Valley: Imaging the Alps at the Crossroads of the Heimat Genre3 7 9 From The Vulture Wally to The Dark Valley: Imaging the Alps at the Crossroads of the Heimat Genre Christian Quendler University of Innsbruck Abstract: The German notion of Heimat is a form of place attachment that is simultaneously shaped by senses of longing and belonging� Heimat not only accommodates the unhomely in the homely, it also blends foreign perspectives with stylized forms of self-exoticization� To the extent that Heimat responds to a desire for rediscovering the (trans)national in the local, the urban in the provincial, the modern in the anti-modern, and so on, it may be described as a delocalized place. This article examines changing national, gendered, and generic transpositions of Alpine imaginaries by analyzing film adaptations of two novels that prefigure and refigure Heimat art respectively: Wilhelmine von Hillern’s Die Geier-Wally (The Vulture Wally), which appeared in 1873 and became the source of many film and TV adaptations, and Thomas Willmann’s Alpine Western Das finstere Tal (The Dark Valley), published in 2010 and adapted to a motion picture by Andreas Prochaska in 2014� Keywords: Heimat, Western, Dorfroman, adaptation, Geierwally , Das finstere Tal It is a misleading cliché that the Heimat genre in literature and film is so exclusive that it remains utterly incomprehensible to people outside German-speaking countries� Although the very resistance of the term ‘ Heimat ’ to translation seems to underscore this claim, this linguistic singularity is better understood as a Heimat effect that accommodates foreign perspectives through acts of self-exoticization� Heimat may be thought of as the inverse case to the German neologism ‘Wellness,’ which sounds foreign but is really home-made. Heimat refers to home, but is often constructed from afar. While Heimat typically refers to non-urban and peripheral localities, it is intricately linked to projections of urban centers, national and transnational networks. A case in point are nine- 380 Christian Quendler teenth-century folktales about rural areas that were compiled and frequently fabricated by the members of the academic urban elite to satisfy the national demands for an organically grown repository of narratives (Schenda 32)� In the Heimat genre, longing and belonging complement senses of national and cultural identities� Place attachment and cultural identity seem to form an ideal unity. In response to the melodramatic search for a home, Heimat art often rediscovers home as a place one has always belonged to� It is a place that can be appreciated all the more after a detour through foreign and unfamiliar terrains� This recurring plot pattern of returning to one’s Heimat narratives literally drives this point home: “Wer nie fortgeht, kommt nie heim” (“Who doesn’t leave, can’t come home”), says Tonio Feuersinger in Luis Trenker’s film Der verlorene Sohn ( The Prodigal Son, 1934) (see also von Moltke, “Convertible Provincialism”)� Although it seems that Heimat can never be truly appreciated from an outsider’s or a foreigner’s perspective, it remains a place of imaginary projections� Heimat [is] A German Dream that imagines A Nation of Provincials , to draw on the titles of Elisabeth Boa and Rachel Palfreyman’s as well as Celia Applegate’s studies on the Heimat movement� The prodigal son’s return to Heimat , and the reader’s or viewer’s arrival at or vacation in this idyll, are complementary movements that shape the image of Heimat � The consumers’ discovery of a shared fantasy echoes the protagonist’s recognition that there is no place like Heimat. Heimat may thus be understood as a dialogic image, which not only includes the unhomely in the homely (or what is sometimes referred to as the darker side of the Heimat genre) (von Moltke , No Place like Home 44) but blends foreign perspectives with stylized forms of self-exoticization� As a source of inland exoticism that can serve as a contrast to both urban and lower-lying country life, high-alpine areas often play a special role in this dialogic remediation� To the extent that Heimat responds to a desire for rediscovering the (trans)national in the local, the urban in the provincial, the modern in the anti-modern, and so on, it may be described as a delocalized place� This article examines changing national, gendered, and generic transpositions of Alpine imaginaries by analyzing film adaptations of two novels that prefigure and refigure Heimat art respectively. The first novel is Wilhelmine von Hillern’s Die Geier-Wally ( The Vulture Wally ), which appeared in 1873 in serialized form in Julius Rodenberg’s Deutscher Rundschau � 1 Hillern’s Dorfgeschichte was published shortly before the rise of Heimat literature in the 1890s� It has had a lasting impact on the Heimat film. With at least six feature-length films and TV adaptations to date, it has been repeatedly referred to as the “evergreen” of the Heimat film genre (Berg-Ganschow 24; von Moltke, “Evergreens: The Heimat Genre”)� 2 The second novel is Thomas Willmann’s Alpine Western From The Vulture Wally to The Dark Valley 381 Das finstere Tal ( The Dark Valley ), published in 2010. In his acknowledgment, Willmann credits Ludwig Ganghofer and Sergio Leone as the lodestars of his work� 3 The curious double patronship also bespeaks an aesthetic feature of the Dorfgeschichte, which in its current revival marks a historical ebbing and flowing of the Heimat genre (Nell 55). Berthold Auerbach’s Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten can be credited with having set the model for the genre in the 1840s� Based on the urban/ rural dichotomy, Dorfgeschichten typically reimagine provincial life for an urban middle-class readership� A (realistic) depiction of a rural community is examined as a microcosm that reflects larger social and geopolitical processes of nation-building, industrialization, urbanization, or bureaucratization (Baur 1978). Central aesthetic strategies of the genre are the appropriation of mythical patterns and reflexive uses of world-literary themes (e.g., Gottfried Keller’s Romeo und Julia auf dem Dorfe [1875])� The high degree of intertextuality not only underscores the artistic aspirations of the genre but also mediates between the literary construction of an experiential reality and its wider sociological analysis or claims� While the critical reception of the Dorfgeschichte during the (first half of the) twentieth century was largely marred by its association with trivial forms of Heimat novels and films, it has generated a new critical interest in recent decades (Twellmann 2019). Werner Nell (57—58) sees in the genre’s amalgamation of historical, anthropological, and literary discourses an interdisciplinary appeal that accounts for the renewed popularity of the Dorfgeschichte as a transmedial form that also lends itself to addressing global and ecological concerns (Zemanek)� Comparing The Vulture Wally to The Dark Valley sheds light on the stakes involved in shifting images of Alpine Heimat from a national to a global scale� While The Vulture Wally projects an image of Heimat by juxtaposing mythic, historical, and pseudoor proto-ethnographical accounts, it also presents its eponymous heroine as an image searching for cultural, spiritual, and gender identity. Similarly, Andreas Prochaska’s film adaptation of The Dark Valley begins with the image of a woman symbolizing a Heimat that awaits to be (re) discovered. In this case, however, the imagistic circuits extend to global and metahistorical dimensions. As I will show, The Dark Valley not only revisits the mythical imagination of the nineteenth century and reimagines Alpine Heimat through the generic frame of the revisionist US Western of the 1970s, but the film is itself part of a globalized cultural history of the Alps. The nostalgic search for a (lost) home is a deep-seated motif that sustains both the Heimat and Western genres. If the former is strongly rooted in the domestic sphere, the latter has been traditionally seen as a programmatic escape from domestic realms and 382 Christian Quendler genres (Tompkins)� This also raises the question of how a Western delocation of Alpine Heimat affects gendered subjectivities. Before discussing narrative acts of delocation in The Vulture Wally and The Dark Valley , I should point to the setting and plot patterns that link the two narratives� Both stories take place in the late nineteenth century and draw on the same tourist fantasy of a wild and unexplored Alpine landscape� The story of The Vulture Wally is set in and around the Rofenhöfe of the Öztal Alps, near the mountain pass Hochjoch, which connects North and South Tyrol. Andreas Prochaska’s film adaptation of The Dark Valley (which in the novel is somewhere between Bavaria and Tyrol) was shot at Marchegghof in the Schnalstal located south of the Hochjoch (see figure 1). Both Wally and Sam Greider, the protagonist of The Dark Valley (2014), have lost their mothers� Wally’s mother died at her birth� We can only assume that Greider’s mother died sometime after she emigrated to America� Greider returns to his mother’s Heimat valley to take vengeance on the patriarch Brenner, who, with the help of his sons, raped Greider’s mother on her wedding night. By revisiting Brenner’s valley, Greider relives and seeks to bring closure to his traumatic family history. Paradoxically, Willmann’s detour via America takes us back to the delocated beginnings of the genre: the appropriation of the Dorfgeschichte as a Heimat narrative� Hillern’s novel The Vulture Wally may be an ‘evergreen’ of the Heimat film, but it does not belong to this genre� Its seeds were planted elsewhere� This makes The Vulture Wally a particularly insightful example of a dialogic imaging of Heimat as a form of domesticated exoticism� Given the iconic role The Vulture Wally assumes in developing and revising images of Alpine Heimat , I will begin with a brief discussion of the way this dialogic image is constructed in Hillern’s novel before focusing on the film adaptations of The Vulture Wally and The Dark Valley � In Hillern’s novel the domestic exoticism of the eponymous heroine is underscored by the intertextual construction of her character, the staged encounter of foreign and local perspectives as well as the interpretive effect of reading a mythically coded narrative against the real-life account of Anna Stainer-Knittel� Urban legends maintain that Tyrolian painter Stainer-Knittel told her story to Hillern or that Hillern was directly inspired by Stainer-Knittel’s monumental self-portrait that depicts her emptying an eagle’s nest� 4 However, as Katja Mellmann has pointed out in great detail, Hillern fabricated her story mostly on the basis of Ludwig Steub’s exaggerated newspaper account and heavily relied on his travel narratives Drei Sommer in Tirol (1846). Thus, not only was the novel written with a German urban middle-class readership in mind, its main source is itself informed by a German tourist perspective� From The Vulture Wally to The Dark Valley 383 Mellmann suggests that Hillern may even have given a nod to her principal source in the figure of the tourist, who at the very beginning of the novel hikes through the valley accompanied by a local guide. Although the reader’s first encounter with Wally is focalized through the tourist and the guide’s introduction, the novel begins with a view from the mountain top (approximating Wally’s point of view) before alternating between the travelers’ mountain view and Wally’s outlook over the valley� Both parties are but tiny spots in the mountainous landscape; they are too far apart from one another to understand each other’s words or gestures. Their encounter remains largely imaginary, driven by the wanderer’s curiosity and prejudice, on the one hand, and Wally’s longing for belonging, on the other. Wally, who in this chapter is compared to an Alpine rose, is framed by the stranger’s exotic curiosity and the guide’s dismissive identification of her as a tomboy. But she is also an image that itself beholds an unchanging and guiding mental image� She looks for its external counterpart in every distant wanderer that passes through the valley, even if they appear “no bigger than a moving image in a peepshow”: Es war ein Bild, das sich immer gleichblieb, sie mochte es sehen in grauer Morgendämmerung oder in goldener Mittagsglut, im Abendrot oder im bleichen Mondlicht, und es ging mit ihr seit einem Jahr überall, wo sie ging und stand, hinab ins Tal und hinauf auf die Berge, und wenn sie so allein draußen war, […] dann suchten sie den, welchem das Bild glich, und wenn dann und wann ein Wanderer da unten winzig klein vorüberglitt, so dachte sie, das könnte er sein, und eine seltsame Freude kam über sie bei dem Gedanken, daß sie ihn gesehen, wenn sie auch nichts erkennen konnte als eine menschliche Gestalt, nicht größer als ein bewegliches Figürchen im Guckkasten. ( Die Geier-Wally 7—8) This initial exchange of gazes prompts the guide’s account of how Wally received her nickname Vulture Wally� At the age of fourteen she saved a farmer’s lambs by rappelling down a cliff to kill the ferocious vulture with a knife and bring back its chick, which she raised as a pet. This vignette, which synthesizes the mythical model of Kriemhild’s falcon and the historical model of Stainer-Knittel’s eagle (Mellmann 150), undergoes interesting changes in the first three film adaptations of the novel. While Ewald André Dupont’s Vulture Wally of 1921 retains the gazes that are exchanged among the Vulture Wally, the tourist, and his guide as a framing device for the vulture story, The Vulture Wally (dir. Hans Steinhoff, 1940) produced during the Nazi era excises any foreign perspective. The vulture episode is no longer part of a prehistory that introduces the protagonist to a tourist but becomes the very event that propels the narrative� Wally’s act of bravery comes as a wake-up call to a group of young men that have grown soft and would not meddle with the 384 Christian Quendler vulture and its offspring. Wally’s seizing of the vulture’s chick literally disrupts the pastoral idyll, symbolized by a boyish goatherd who, upon seeing this act, gets up from his repose and runs to inform the farmer� 5 In Frantisek Cáp’s postwar adaptation of 1956, the vulture episode moves even deeper into the story, where it marks a tragic highlight. In this version, Wally captures the vulture after her father has thrown her out of the house and forced her to stay in a cabin up on the Murzoll glaciers until she agrees to marry the man he has chosen for her. In contrast to the previous adaptations, the vulture does not represent a given feature of or a determining moment in Wally’s life but expresses what she has become, symbolizing both her abjection and longing. In the course of these adaptations, the vulture story changes from a story intended to frame the stranger/ reader’s relationship to the character to an initiating and ultimately an existential event. In this sense, the tableau that introduces Wally at the beginnings of the novel and the first adaptation is only gradually developed throughout the entire film adaptation from 1956 (see figures 2 and 3). One could even say that the recreations of this iconic image generated by the adaptations parallel - on a cultural level - the protagonist’s search for someone who resembles the image she carries within her� The character’s longing for a matching image mirrors the reception history performed by the film adaptations� Figure 1: Opening sequence of Dupont’s The Vulture Wally (1921) starring Henny Porten� Figure 2: Final Sequence of Cap’s The Vulture Wally (1956) starring Barbara Rütting� The search for a preexisting, original, or eternal image encapsulates the poetics of the Dorfgeschichte and its ‘discovery’ of literary themes of world literature in provincial settings� It is also programmatic of the novel’s trajectory and the plot’s alignment with the telos of a Christian Heilsgeschichte (Mellmann 143— 54) . Having been raised without a mother, Wally’s life is marked by a series of From The Vulture Wally to The Dark Valley 385 displacements of father figures and a continued search for the one (almighty) father� Hillern draws on local folkloristic myths such as white fairy-like virgins that live in the eternal snow of the personified mountain, named Father Murzoll, who gives her a home after she was thrown out by her heartless biological father. In the pure element of ice, Wally experiences freedom and peace. The sublime mountains lift her spirits above the common sense of the people in the valley� The overarching myth that sustains the narrative of The Vulture Wally is the legendary Norse heroine Brunhild of The Song of the Nibelungs. Hillern originally intended to title the novel “Die Dorfbrunhild” (“The Village Brunhild”)� The many references to folk mythology and Germanic paganism underscore Wally’s bond with the forces of nature, which will eventually be reconciled with and refined by Catholicism. 6 In the final chapter, this synthesis is expressed twice, on the level of narrative fiction and in a comment of the extradiegetic narrator. The last chapter returns to the tableau with which the novel began� Wally is sitting at the top of the mountain all by herself� This time she is not only an image that returns the tourist’s and the guide’s gazes and yelling (or yodeling), but one that remembers the distant encounter with the tourist and the guide and all the misfortunes she has endured ever since ( Die Geier-Wally 251—52)� Joseph, the Bear Slayer, has finally come to propose to Wally and bring her back home. For Wally, leaving the high mountains is a moment of conversion, a return from paganism to Christianity that allows for a (Catholic) degree of coexistence� She bids her Father Murzoll farewell and thanks him for giving her a home ( Heimat ) when she was homeless ( heimatlos )� When Joseph mocks Murzoll with the yodel of a triumphant wooer, Wally first shushes him and warns him not to taunt the evil spirits but immediately corrects herself by stating that there are no ghosts, there is only God. Christianity and paganism are also reconciled in the concluding tableau of the novel. A crucifix at a mountaintop commemorates the short lives of Wally and Joseph. Beneath the cross, Joseph’s sister Aphra and Wally’s farmhand Benedikt are often seen praying� Further down in the canyon, “white foggy figures” warn the hikers of Murzoll’s daughters: Von dem Kreuz herab weht es ihn an wie eine Klage aus längstverklungenen Heldensagen, daß auch das Gewaltige wie das Schwache dahinsinkt und vergehen muß - doch der Gedanke mag ihn trösten: das Gewaltige kann sterben, aber nicht aussterben. Sei es im Strahlenpanzer Siegfrieds und Brunhilds oder im schlichten Bauernkittel eines Bären-Joseph und einer Geier-Wally - immer finden wir es wieder! ( Die Geier-Wally 268) 386 Christian Quendler The pagan spirit and folkloristic traditions are not only a means of spiritualizing nature; they may also help to invigorate religion� They endow the text with what may be described as a sense of mythical authenticity, an effect that results from combining the familiar mythical intertexts of The Song of the Nibelungs and the Murzoll legend with referential claims and detailed descriptions of local color� Wally’s character is far from being psychologically sound or round� She is a rather incongruous mix of supernatural power and unswerving passion paired with low self-esteem and submissiveness. As Nina Stainer points out, feminist interpretations of the novel result from a productive confusion that equates the rather contrary personalities of the fictional character Vulture Wally and the self-determined woman artist Anna Stainer-Knittel (Stainer 207—08)� 7 Similarly, mythologizing Steub’s travel writings reinforces the historical and cultural othering of the Alps by equating geographical distance from urban centers with historical remoteness� Isolated and disconnected from social progress, the Alps represent a bygone world and a site of projection for all kinds of cultural fantasies. Vulture Wally’s description as a half-boy, who is incredibly strong and equally impulsive, offers an empowering story for urban middle-class women of the late nineteenth century (Scharnowski)� Visiting Vulture Wally in the mountains becomes a trip to a supposedly anti-modern space, a time travel fantasy that is at the same time escapist and empowering, an exotic spectacle of touristic self-discovery� Mythical authenticity is symptomatic of internal and external efforts that construct notions of Heimat at national and international scales; it is also a characteristic feature of Prochaska’s film The Dark Valley , where it takes on a transatlantic dimension, which distinguishes it from both the German and Austrian Heimat film as well as concurrent anti- Heimat movies� If The Dark Valley is authentic, as its director repeatedly suggests (Prochaska and Fuchs), then only in the sense that it adheres to a mythical image that stirred the imagination of urban readers and moviegoers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries� The Dark Valley is a case of Austrian self-exoticization that has more in common with the dark exoticism encountered in the genre’s prehistory than with the heroic vitalism for which the Heimat film became known during the Third Reich� A comparison with Trenker’s The Prodigal Son , which like Prochaska’s film contains a biblical reference in its title, can illustrate this difference in mood and perspective� 8 Tonio, a South Tyrolian farmer, tries his luck in New York City only to find out that life is best at home. This is already alluded to in the opening song, which claims that “lumberjacks are the most cheerful people in the world” as we see farmhands working, singing and courting with springlike virility� The Dark Valley also features a logging scene, which, although directly inspired by Trenker’s film, was shot in stark contrast to The Prodigal Son � From The Vulture Wally to The Dark Valley 387 It is winter and no joyful song sets the rhythm of the work� Chopping proceeds in silent gestures. Instead of the prospect of romance, the scene in The Dark Valley reveals the first victim of Greider’s revenge: the patriarch’s son, Edi Brenner. Although The Dark Valley has moments of comic relief, it differs greatly from the satirical and grotesque traditions of the Austrian anti- Heimat film that emerged in the 1970s such as Werner Pircher’s Der Untergang des Alpenlandes (1974), the TV mini-series based on Felix Mitterer’s Die Piefke-Saga (1990s), or, more recently, the film adaptation of Elfriede Jelinek’s novel Die Kinder der Toten ( The Children of the Dead, 2019) by Kelly Copper and Pavol Liska. Nor does The Dark Valley connect with the Jewish legacy of anti- Heimat films of the 1920s that existed concurrently with the German Bergfilm (Ashkenazi) and excelled in Ernst Lubitsch’s satirical and grotesque films such as Meyer aus Berlin ( Meyer from Berlin , 1919) and Die Bergkatze ( The Wildcat , 1921). Instead, I propose to view this in the context of a larger historical renegotiation of alpine culture by arguing that this sense of wilderness is characteristic of North American mountain culture or, more specifically, a North American appropriation of the romantic Alpine idyll� The Dark Valley (2014) does not simply retreat to a time before the Heimat genre but takes a detour through the Wild West and brings a sense of wilderness to the Alps. In order to fully understand an Alpine Western, it is important to trace this notion of wilderness across the Atlantic. Watching the film, one gets the impression that The Dark Valley is reigned over by a war lord, an autonomous tribe, whose existence in the lowlands - which the film describes as “nothing but a half-forgotten legend” (“eine halbvergessene Legende”) - is echoing the kind of rhetoric of mythical authenticity that I quoted from the ending of The Vulture Valley � This stark archaic image is corroborated by appropriating the medieval myth of the so-called droit du seigneur , which supposedly allowed feudal lords to have sex with subordinate women on their wedding nights� While this myth has been dismissed by historians, it received a great deal of attention during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries (Boureau). In particular, Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais’ comedy La Folle journée (1778) and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera adaptation Le Nozze di Figaro (1786) fueled the popular imagination that has kept this myth alive. Thus, rather than depicting nineteenth-century Alpine culture, The Dark Valley excessively projects a fantasy that was popular in the nineteenth century� The remarkable stability of Alpine cultures and their social and economic structures throughout the early modern period certainly contributed to this medieval image of the Alps. As Werner Bätzing puts it, in the Alpine countryside the Middle Ages lasted until 1848� But this does not mean that the mountain 388 Christian Quendler people were cut off from non-Alpine civilization. The Alps were well connected through dense transportation and migration networks that can be traced back to the Middle Ages. By the early nineteenth century, more than three hundred transit routes crossed the Alps and economically invigorated their valleys, which today are being rediscovered as hiking trails (Bätzing, Die Alpen 65, 77). If already in the nineteenth century the medieval portrayal of Alpine culture was a fantastic projection, what motivates this ‘bewildered’ representation of the Alps today? Throughout the modern period (from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century) the Alps, akin to mass media today, globalized mountainous perception� Imperialist and touristic gazes have left us with Alps around the world. On a cultural and commercial level, we can see the lasting impact all the way through the first decades of the twentieth century in scenic films and travelogues that present North American mountains by comparing them to the European Alps (Peterson)� The romantic appreciation of mountains as a source of secularized forms of spirituality, which in the late eighteenth century manifested itself in literary pilgrimages and the reevaluation of pagan elements, had important ramifications for the cultural perception of mountainous landscapes in North America (Mathieu 165). The nineteenth-century fad of erecting crucifixes on mountain summits, which was especially widespread in Catholic Austria, can illustrate this point� Setting up crosses on mountain tops can be seen as a powerfully symbolic act that conveniently turns mountains into altars or even cathedrals, but it also bears the risk of bringing back the animistic specters of paganism� The controversy surrounding Caspar David Friedrich’s famous altar piece The Cross in the Mountains (1809) spells this out. In part, the irritation resulted from the fact that pantheistic paganism is not represented in a coded symbolic or allegorical form but prevails atmospherically and through allusions� Instead of personifying wilderness, natural forces are evoked emotionally. 9 Friedrich’s paintings are also great examples of the Romantic celebration of wilderness as a quasi-religious experience, which had a great impact on North America (Wilke; Keck)� American Romantics and transcendentalists not only adopted this sacralized view of mountains, but surpassed it in ways that would lead to an emancipation from the European model of mountain culture� European mountains may be cathedrals and majestic domes, but American mountains are pure wilderness� Wild nature was a place where one could experience God’s divinity and, perhaps more importantly, experience oneself as a part of it. This idea of a transcendental natural wilderness also led to an appreciation of landscapes beyond the picturesque ideal of mountains with trees and a lake (and perhaps a dilapidated castle) and embraced in particular stark and rugged desert landscapes as unique forms of American wilderness� From The Vulture Wally to The Dark Valley 389 When the frontier movement was drawing to a close at the end of the nineteenth century, wilderness underwent a nostalgic reevaluation that is captured in the genre of the Western� Conquering the wilderness has invigorating and regenerating effects that could serve as antidote to all kinds of diseases that came with civilization. In this respect, the Heimat and Western genres perform a similar vitalizing function. Yet, the Heimat film operates in a culturally domesticated sphere and deals mostly with private or personal dramas that are projected onto nature. By contrast, the Western’s programmatic preoccupation with transforming wilderness into public order can be seen as a historical response to “a female-dominated tradition of popular culture” that eclipses “everything domestic from its worldview” (Tompkins 132)� The Dark Valley represents an interesting mix in this regard� The Brenner family constitutes a totalitarian regime that literally exerts and maintains its power by inseminating itself in the most private and intimate spheres� While there is a public showdown at the end of the film, at first revenge is carried out in secrecy. American wilderness also generated its own form of tourism, and it is through this economic circuit that the American wilderness has found its way back to the European Alps. Yellowstone National Park in the Rocky Mountains, founded in 1872, was the first park of its kind worldwide. By 1940, there were about twenty national parks in the US. In the second half of the twentieth century, national parks became a global trend. The first Austrian National Park was founded in 1981� It is around this time that the notion of wilderness was introduced to the Alps in ecological and touristic discourses� We can also see this in a recent hiking trend that moves away from summiting towards long trails� While the Appalachian Trail was created in the 1850s as an effort to develop an economic infrastructure, long transalpine hiking trails in Europe rediscover medieval transportation paths to promote eco-friendly tourism in one of the densest tourist infrastructures worldwide (see Bätzing, Zwischen Wildnis und Freizeitpark )� The result is a set of contradictions that can only be glossed over by the rhetoric of advertising, as this promotion of transalpine hiking illustrates: The Alps region is both Europe’s largest wilderness area and home to almost 14 million people with abundant traditions of cultural exchange� The Via Alpina traveler has hundreds of opportunities to not just appreciate natural wilderness but also to dine on local delicacies in civilization like famous Swiss fondue, French delicacies, and German pilsners� (“Spectacular Alps Hiking”) Prochaska’s The Dark Valley plays with this trajectory� In contrast to earlier European attempts to emulate the US Western, such as the German Winnetou 390 Christian Quendler movies or the Italian Spaghetti Westerns, The Dark Valley does not reimagine the Alps as a North American landscape but reviews the Alps through a North American frame of wildness� It also exploits the sense of entitlement and superiority that is often cast as the result of the frontier’s civilizing encounter with wild nature. While there is a long tradition of American films that showcase superior Americans in the European Alps, Prochaska’s immediate model can be found in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (2009), which reimagines European history as a Western movie� 10 If history followed the logic of Hollywood cinema, then Hitler would have been killed off by some renegade cowboys, whose superiority results from their wild, uncultured savageness. The opening scene shows a farm in what is meant to depict German-occupied France, where the Nazi standard leader Peter Landa searches for Jews. The scene is accompanied by the song that Ennio Morricone wrote for the Italo-Western La resa dei conti ( The Big Gundown , 1966) . And it ends with a visual allusion to John Ford’s Western The Searchers (1956) - a shot from inside a cabin that shows how a young woman escapes the Nazi search troops. Perhaps the most interesting of Tarantino’s tweaking of genres occurs in the figure of Fredrick Zoller, a Nazi sniper who became famous for killing 250 soldiers from a church tower and as a reward got to play himself in a propaganda movie. Zoller is modelled on the decorated fighter pilot Ernst Udet. A so-called flying ace in WWI, Udet became a camera pilot and pilot actor in mountain movies after the war� He is featured in The White Hell of Pitz Palu (1929), Storm over Mont Blanc (1930) and S.O.S. Eisberg (1933). Turning a fighter pilot into a sniper neatly facilitates a genre switch from modern war drama to the Western� Tarantino’s film not only rewrites history, it also uses cinema as an explosive agent of his creative historiography. The screening of Fredrick Zoller’s film, which Hitler and high-ranking Nazis attended, takes place in the cinema that belongs to Shosanna Dreyfus, the woman that fled from the SS-Standard Leader at the beginning of the film. Her cinema serves as the fatal trap in which the entire Nazi leadership burns to death while Shosanna’s pre-recorded message is projected on the screen. This reflexive twist, in which film fabricates history according to the generic and stylistic conventions of cinema, is also characteristic of the The Dark Valley � The pre-title sequence of The Dark Valley frames the film as a memory image. We see a woman in a wedding dress who is forcefully taken away� The scene fades into a photograph of a woman that, as we will find out later, belongs to her son, the American Greider. As the film gradually resolves the mystery of the opening scene, we can compare watching the film to the act of remembering a traumatic past� We are guided in this act of remembering by two kinds of narration. One is mediated by Greider, who has come to the dark valley to avenge From The Vulture Wally to The Dark Valley 391 his mother. Like all newlyweds in the valley, she was raped and impregnated by the patriarch Brenner. But unlike others, she managed to escape the valley. Greider functions as a focalizing character; he is the outsider who introduces us into the valley. Through him or rather near him, we experience the events of the film. By seeking revenge, he reenacts the past, hoping that it will give him a sense of closure. The film also uses voice-over narration, which frames the narrative as the story of Luzi, a young woman of the village, who is about to get married� If Greider’s mother marks the beginning of an end brought about by Greider’s revenge, then Luzi signals a hopeful new beginning. Her first words as narrator address the traumatic past of the valley: “Es gibt Sachen, über die darf man nicht reden, Sachen, die früher passiert sind, vor langer Zeit. Aber dass man nicht darüber reden darf, das heißt nicht, dass man das je vergessen kann.” The film presents itself as an answer to this paradox, showing us what otherwise cannot be said. An experience, which in its unforgettable nature feels forever present yet inexpressible, is turned into a manageable past that can be recounted and accounted for. From the very start, the recounting of the past (embodied by Luzi) and the reenactment of the past (embodied by Greider) are presented as the gendered perspectives of an insider and an outsider� The fusion of the present and past in the memory image thus sets up a model for negotiating local and emigrant perspectives and blends the respective genres of the Western and the Dorfgeschichte . Whether the film succeeds in this is not only a question of fusing styles and genres and the self-conscious exploration of filmic narration; it also depends on the gendered implications of its narrative mediation� The focalization through Greider and the voice-over by Luzi renegotiate or complicate the trope of a superior American visitor� The ambivalence of the perspective is illustrated early in the film when we see Greider riding into the valley from a near point-of-view shot of one of the Brenner brothers looking down on him. Instead of approximating the mediating gaze of the tourist, as we saw in the opening scene of The Vulture Wally , we are given the local view on an arriving foreigner� 392 Christian Quendler Figure 3: The Brenner brothers wearing Western hats� The sequence of Greider’s arrival in the valley also establishes Prochaska’s sense of authenticity, which may be described as a performance of stereotypes that do not immediately register as clichés� Prochaska prides himself on not showing a Tyrolian hat in The Dark Valley (see Prochaska and Fuchs). Instead, his costume designer Natascha Curtius-Noss created an ‘authentic’ mix that combines historical urban and country fashion of the area with American elements. Throughout the film both Greider and the Brenner brothers are seen wearing different models of Western hats (see figure 4). On a musical level this is echoed in the orchestration of a wedding polka that combines an Alpine accordion with Western violins. In other cases, generic blends are created by simply relocating typical Western elements such as the hero’s arrival in a new hostile Alpine environment. An obligatory saloon fight takes place in the village’s grocery store that functions as an equivalent social hub� Authenticity is not a question of historicity but a question of generic innovation and production value� In The Dark Valley , mediating the past is tied to transatlantic cultural mediations� The physical media of remembering play a key role in both the novel and the film adaptation. In the novel, Greider is a painter who eventually turns out to be a rather gifted sniper. Painting and gunning are first linked by the similarity of cases in which Greider keeps his canvas and his Winchester� The connection between memory and revenge is modeled on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Greider’s successive killing of the Brenner brothers is paralleled by the gradual completion of their family portrait. By contrast, the Greider of the film is a photographer. His camera and repeating firearm are both advanced technologies unknown to the mountain people� While the camera is introduced early on as a curiosity that the patriarch calls a mirror with a memory, the Winchester gun is saved for the dramatic twist in the final showdown. Camera and gun form, of course, a deep and longstanding bond in film cultures. Metaphoric conceptions of cinema as a gun can be found in Hollywood, auteur, From The Vulture Wally to The Dark Valley 393 and revolutionary cinemas� 11 Guns are widely used as metaphors for the camera and as metonyms of cinematic attractions - of which the Western is perhaps the most prominent instance� Although Prochaska’s references to generic conventions of the Western avoid parody, he is less subtle in his stylistic allusions to Western movies and filmmakers. The film is particularly invested in the revisionist Western of the 1970s with its gruesome and stylized depictions of violence that have also inspired Tarantino’s work� Slow-motion shoot-out sequences that are set to music by the Austrian space-rock band Steaming Satellites are a much-debated case in point, which can be seen as a nod to Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973), which used Bob Dylan’s “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” for the final shoot-out. The self-conscious repurposing of the New Hollywood of the 1960s and 70s and the affinities to the new auteurism of the 1990s and 2000s draw attention to the cultural capital that is at stake in comparing German and Austrian mountain movies to US Westerns� The metaphor of the Alpine Western is typically understood in terms of disanalogies� Both landscape genres are considered characteristic of their cultures. Yet, while the Western is described as horizontal, the mountain film is described as vertical. Whereas the mountain film focuses on private affairs, the Western is all about a new public order. If The Dark Valley blends these opposites, it does so with a keen sense of participating in the cultural prestige and cinematic vision of post-classical Hollywood cinema� This does not mean that the film uncritically adopts the trope of American superiority, which - as in Billy Wilder’s The Emperor Waltz (1948) - is associated with the mechanical arts� In contrast to the gramophone in The Emperor Waltz , photography in The Dark Valley is not linked to democratic values, but to an ethos of revenge that is much closer to the spirit of Inglourious Basterds . Yet, unlike Tarantino’s film, The Dark Valley does not find redemption in vindicative fantasies. Greider’s revenge brings him neither glory nor restoration, but merely the painful understanding that he is part of an inhumane totalitarian system� Greider’s destruction of the Brenner clan is hardly met with enthusiasm� The departing tracking shot shows Greider exiting the village in a path lined primarily with women who have lost their husbands and some men who have lost their fathers� The highly charged end-of-war iconography of the scene signals towards the traumatic past for which the Heimat film has offered a suture. It highlights a German and Austrian perspective concerned with the difficulty of beginning anew in a world that is haunted by medieval ghosts that only thinly mask the terrors of war� Although the film refrains from a black-and-white depiction - the American is not an unequivocal hero but a liberator who remains caught up in a history of 394 Christian Quendler violence - The Dark Valley remains within a male purview of a revenge narrative. Despite the fact that Luzi figures as a keeper of memory, the story remains focused on the action of men� The rows of grieving wives and sons reiterate an all-too-familiar scene in which the women merely orchestrate the tragic burden of the male hero. This is reinforced in the subsequent scene, which aims to lift the desolate ending of the film. Luzi and her mother are seen nursing Greider’s wounds� The image encapsulates Luzi’s role as a narrator whose prospective motherhood announces a change for the better� This is a rather disappointing aspect in Prochaska’s otherwise innovative contribution to the Alpine Western� If Hillern’s Vulture Wally was not intended as a feminist narrative but became one in the course of its reception and adaptations, Prochaska’s reframing of the story through Luzi’s narration does little to add a feminist perspective� It rather seems a convenient narratorial solution for adapting the novel� Prochaska’s The Dark Valley represents almost the inverse case of Hillern’s Vulture Wally � Wally is presented as an object of domestication whose subjectification follows the model Shakespeare laid out in The Taming of the Shrew and develops (in the absence of her mother) vis-à-vis a series of father figures. By contrast, Luzi takes on the role of a domesticating subject. She serves as a surrogate mother in Greider’s reenactment and remains committed to her station throughout old and new forms of patriarchal violence� Luzi’s commitment to a precarious domestic sphere is in line with Western plot patterns (Halverson 5—7), where domestic enclosures are often set in stark contrast to the celebrated freedom of an open landscape (Comer 27), and women remain committed to housekeeping despite hardship and abuse (Tompkins 39—40)� Although The Dark Valley capitalizes on this incongruity, it remains within an ideological rhetoric that nurtures and sutures it� As a story that - like The Vulture Wally - revolves around an absent mother, Prochaska’s Dark Valley misses the opportunity of giving credible voices to the mothers and daughters of the dark valley� Constructions of Heimat are interfaces of self and other, the local and the foreign, male and female. This becomes particularly evident in the national endeavors of the folklore movements and touristic forms of self-representation� As I have argued with reference to Hillern’s The Vulture Wally and its lasting impact on the Heimat film, it can also be traced back to genres and forms of writing outside the Heimat art movement� Given the dialogic construction of Heimat and its constitutive integration of an outside perspective, it is important to complement regional views on Heimat with foreign perspectives� If Hillern’s novel can be seen as programmatic in illustrating an Austrian image of Heimat in exchange with its German neighbor, The Dark Valley reveals how the dialogic image of Heimat fares in a transatlantic exchange between Austria and North America� This exchange puts into relief the escapist aspect frequently ascribed From The Vulture Wally to The Dark Valley 395 to the Heimat film. The Heimat film not only serves as a means to deflect the traumas of war, but it also provides a means of reflecting upon them in an indirect manner� As a recent response to the Heimat genre, The Dark Valley reiterates the intertextual poetics of the Dorfgeschichte � It posits a critical response to American takes on the Alps while adopting American conceptions of wilderness and the Western as two influential landmarks of mountain culture. Notes 1 The adaptations and translations of Die Geier-Wally have generated a variety of titles and spellings� Vulture Wally is the most common English translation for the film adaptations. For the sake of simplicity, I will refer to Hillern’s novel and its adaptations as The Vulture Wally � 2 The first film adaptation in 1921 by Ewald André Dupont is not a classical Heimat film, but rather part of a fading cinematic interest in alpine spectacles� 3 “Und schließlich ziehe ich wahlweise den Tiroler- oder Cowboyhut vor jenen beiden, denen dieses Buch als (etwas seltsames Paar von) Schutzheiligen anempfohlen sei: Ludwig Ganghofer und Sergio Leone” (Willmann, Das finstere Tal 318)� 4 On Stainer-Knittel’s career as a painter and her self-portraits see Nina Stainer� 5 While the 1940 version of The Vulture Wally is sometimes considered one that empowers Wally’s character (see Berg-Ganschow), it is at the same time highly paternalistic. In this version, Wally does not kill the vulture herself, but is rescued by Joseph the Bear Slayer, who shoots the vulture from afar. Also, Joseph’s secret sister, who arouses Wally’s jealousy, is introduced as his secret daughter� 6 See especially chapter eight “Hartes Holz,” in which a priest draws on the metaphor of carving wood to elaborate on material-spiritual relations in building character� 7 A case has been made that Rodenberg’s intervention to change the original ending of the novel, which concludes with Wally’s suicide to a rather ‘forced’ happy ending that takes its inspiration from The Taming of the Shrew undermined the novel’s feminist critique (see Walshe 157—59; Scharnowski 43; for an argument against authorial feminist intentions of the novel see Mellmann 159)� 8 The reference is made to Psalm 23: “Auch wenn ich gehe im finsteren Tal” (Einheitsübersetzung), which is rendered in the King James Bible as “though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death�” 396 Christian Quendler 9 The Cross in the Mountains attracted hostile responses that criticized Friedrich for arousing “pathological emotion” (“pathologische Rührung”)� Friedrich’s defense to this was that it is imperative of art to have a “soulful effect” (quoted in Bätschmann 65)� 10 Erich von Stroheim’s Blind Husbands (1918) and Billy Wilder’s The Emperor Waltz (1948) are two classical examples that revisit the European Alps from an American perspective and in the wake of World War I and II, respectively. 11 Originally attributed to D.W. 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