The conquest of the landscape - Semmering, Rax, Schneeberg

The conquest of the landscape through the construction of the railway in the Semmering-Rax-Schneeberg region, the creation of a cultural landscape and the relationship between technology and nature were the focus of this provincial exhibition. The exhibition was presented in Gloggnitz Castle, the renovation of which began in the 1980s (costing around 50 million schillings, equivalent to around 3.63 million euros) and which was thus made accessible to a wider public for the first time.

A familiar, prominent and spectacular landscape ensemble, an old Austrian "magic mountain", served as a model and experimental set-up to document the history of landscape perception from the Middle Ages to the beginning of mass tourism. This cultural-historical exhibition showed how foreigners have always sought freedom in mountain images and how tourism has always tamed new views and made them consumable - because landscape views, whether they are cast from a summit, a railway window or an idyllic bench, are also subject to fashion.

The attractive title "Conquest of the Landscape" is deliberately ambivalent, explained exhibition curator Wolfgang Kos, it makes us think "of the discovery of new images (and new technologies such as railways or cable cars) as well as the irreversible consequences of the initially innocent curiosity and longing for nature".

Semmering, Rax and Schneeberg were meeting places for Viennese society. Hermann Bahr wrote about the Semmering that it was "a suburb of the city, an immense cottage, provided for every need, reachable by direct trains from the city in an hour, even at night, after the theatre." By 1900, the network of paths on the high plateau of the Rax was already so dense that a particularly busy fork in the road near the Otto House was named "Praterstern", after a Viennese city centre transport hub. "The term 'Viennese local mountains' also testifies to the successful domestication of the wilderness: mountainous areas that for centuries seemed terrible and inaccessible were tamed like pets" (Wolfgang Kos).

Among the exhibits on display at the provincial exhibition were the oldest business ledger in Austria, dating back to the early 16th century, in which the Fink trading house in Wiener Neustadt recorded the transport of goods from Venice via the Semmering Road, as well as a seven-metre-long model of the first passenger train on the Southern Railway and a three-metre relief of the Semmering Railway, which was made for the Paris World Exhibition in 1900.

Many representatives of Austrian cultural history are associated with Semmering: the painter Kolo Moser, the actor Josef Kainz, the writers Arthur Schnitzler and Peter Altenberg. The exhibition also recalled buildings that famous Viennese architects planned for the region and showed everyday artefacts such as guest books, photo albums and personal souvenirs.

Riegersburg Baroque Castle