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From baker’s son to archaeologist and hotelier

Jakob Wiedmer, the son of a baker born in 1876 in Herzogenbuchsee, was a child prodigy. He found school easy and was a quick learner. However, his father was not a great believer in academia; he wanted his son to “get a proper job” and learn about business. Having taken up a position in commerce in Zurich, Wiedmer’s employer promptly sent him to Athens. His time there awakened an interest in archaeology, which seemed to supplant his desire for a business career.On his return to Bern, the young man worked as an excavator and writer. In January 1904 at the age of 27, he married Marie Stern, who owned a hotel in Wengen, making him a hotel manager under the law of the day.

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The slippery slope to mass tourism in the Bernese Oberland

Wiedmer’s experience of mass, and at times excessive, tourism in 1904/1905 as a Wengen hotelier seems to have had a formative impact on him. The area in the Lauterbrunnen valley stretching into Lütschinental at the foot of the Eiger, Mönch and Jungfrau already had a relatively long tradition of alpine tourism at the time. Tourist trips to the Bernese Oberland increased from the second half of the 18th century, mainly due to some striking natural spectacles in the area.

Mass tourism is when large numbers of people visit popular places, usually as part of organised tours. Overtourism is when tourism reaches a level that perceptibly impacts the quality of life of the locals and the visitors’ experience.

The lower and upper Grindelwald glaciers attracted a lot of attention. They were visible from Grindelwald village in those days, from where they were just a short walk away. There are many watercolours and paintings to remind us of the great appeal that seeing a glacier up close held for tourists who mainly came from urban areas. The mighty waterfalls also greatly impressed visitors during the Romantic period.

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Apart from the area’s natural beauty, cultural events also attracted visitors from the towns and cities. To preserve some vestiges of the traditional alpine way of life, the Unspunnenfest was inaugurated in 1805. Bernese patrician elites hosted an event similar to the traditional alpine herdsmen’s festivals, featuring competitions as well as displays of arts and crafts. Around 600 people visited the festival to the south of Interlaken and needed accommodation, which far exceeded the capacity of the local hotels and guesthouses.

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The growth of tourism in the Bernese Oberland prompted an upgrade of the transport infrastructure. It started with the expansion of the road network from the mid-18th century. Then ships were commissioned to cross the larger lakes in the Bernese Oberland. The first steamboat crossing of Lake Thun was in 1835, and four years later paddle steamers began operating on Lake Brienz. However, there were also many rowing boats ferrying people around the lakes until the 1870s.

However, the key to the emergence of mass tourism was the area’s connection to the railway network. It began rather modestly with a line from Bern to Thun (completed in 1859/1861), allowing people to transfer to the boat from there. It wasn’t until 1885 that investment in the rail network really took off: within ten years the line along Lake Thun from Thun to Interlaken, connections from Interlaken to Grindelwald and Lauterbrunnen plus the Brünig railway line from Brienz over the Brünig Pass to Lucerne were built. The opening of the Lötschberg mountain railway in 1913 opened up access to Upper Valais and then on to Milan.

This improved accessibility gave a further boost to tourism in the Bernese Oberland, and the different places and areas in the region began to compete for business. The rivalry centred on hotels and mountain railways. Quality accommodation attracting the more affluent visitor was initially restricted to destinations on the periphery of the Alps, such as Thun. In the last third of the 19th century, however, new hotels sprang up by Lake Brienz and in Grindelwald, Wengen and Mürren. The race was on to offer the best accommodation and win over the wealthiest visitors, and it must have caused a lot of friction and jealousy within the small rural communities, as they were at that time.

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The mountain railways had a special function, i.e. offering an elevated view of the mountains. Until then only mountain climbers had been able to see the Alps at eye level, so to speak. The mountain railways thus brought about a fundamental change by making these views accessible to everyone regardless of their physical prowess. The funicular and cogwheel railways built from the late 1870s until the First World War became increasingly costly and elaborate.

The Wengernalp railway from Lauterbrunnen via Wengen to Kleine Scheidegg and then down to Grindelwald (1893) is the line that put Wengen on the map. It made the small mountain village a lot easier to reach, which became only too apparent to Jakob Wiedmer. Moreover, by far the most daring project was connected to the Wengernalp line. It went from Kleine Scheidegg up to the Jungfraujoch. Numerous photographs from the Belle Époque show that this route was especially attractive for tourists.

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Travel literature was also instrumental in the development of mass tourism. The ‘Murray’s Handbook for Travellers’ series for English speakers and the German-language ‘Baedeker’ were among the most popular. They included must-see places when travelling through Switzerland. These travel guides were regularly updated to show what tourists could get for their money as business boomed. New mountain railways and attractive hotels turned some, previously peripheral, destinations into the most sought-after holiday spots.

Wiedmer’s book and its criticism of excessive tourism

Wiedmer began work on the novel Flut in 1904 with his customary elan, and it came out the following year. The book was published to widespread acclaim and received extensive media coverage, including a mention in London broadsheet The Times. However, it was understandably less popular in the Bernese Oberland.

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The story has lost none of its ability to shock with the passage of time. It is about a place called Stägen, an unmistakeable reference to Wengen, although some references could also apply to other places like Mürren. The remote mountain and farming village suddenly transforms into an international holiday destination flooded by tourists. Farmers became hotel owners; money and resentment poison the community. The events recounted by Wiedmer in Flut are more than figments of his imagination and can be traced to many places in the Bernese Oberland. The book ends with an apocalyptic finale as Stägen goes up in flames.This final catastrophe alludes to the problems arising from the obsession with tourism at the expense of everything else and how it impacts the natural world. It wasn’t too long afterwards that the industry collapsed when the outbreak of the First World War saw visitors from abroad stay away.

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Jakob Wiedmer’s critical take on tourism was part of a broader literary tradition expressing reservations, nuanced perspectives or downright condemnation of the advent of mass tourism and its impact on the small rural communities in Switzerland’s alpine valleys. Clashes between locals and tourists came under growing scrutiny at the end of the 19th century; social ruptures within alpine societies also became more of an issue. Arnold Halder’s book Die Stiefelchen oder Was sich in Interlaken Alles treffen kann (1883) takes a brief look at the poverty to be found round the corner from the grand hotels, describing the slums with children, street beggars and bandits all lumped together. Bernese writer Rudolf von Tavel, who went on to become a Swiss dialect poet, also wrote about open and disguised begging by Alphorn players or children with bouquets of flowers in his 1891 dissertation on the main ways in which life had changed for Swiss alpine communities during the 19th century. In other words, overtourism was already an issue in the Bernese Oberland around 1900.

Life after Wengen

As the novel was not well received in Wengen, Jakob Wiedmer and his wife moved to Bern where he applied for a position at Bern Historical Museum and quickly worked his way up to the position of director in 1907. His archaeology work was groundbreaking and still impacts research today. But even that turned out to be too monotonous for him. He used the proceeds of the sale of his Wengen hotel to finance business undertakings outside Switzerland, until the outbreak of the First World War put a stop to that.

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The financier then turned his hand to inventing all types of machines. His restlessness continually prompted him to try new ventures. He even tried to make a film of his last novel Kyra Fano, with none other than Alfred Hitchcock as director. However, it came to nothing: the genius who could never commit to one thing for long and had suffered from syphilis and rheumatism for some time, died on 3 August 1928.

A new edition of Flut was recently published by Chronos Verlag, 120 years after it first came out, with a foreword by Wiedmer biographer Felix Müller and an epilogue about the history of tourism by Christian Rohr.

This blog article was written in cooperation with Felix Müller.

Christian Rohr

Jakob Wiedmer’s novel "Flut" and its damning indictment of tourism