Alumni Travel Reading 2018-2019: Alpine Splendor

O'Shea takes readers up and down the majestic Alps in an "engaging combination of candid first-person travel writing and absorbing historical narrative" (Chicago Sun-Times), whisking readers along his adventures with watchmakers, salt miners, cable-car operators, and yodelers.

Revised and completely updated edition of Jonathan Steinberg's classic account of Switzerland's unique political and economic system. Examines the complicated voting system and idea of proportional representation as well as the perfectionist Swiss bureaucracy which regulates its well-ordered society. Can the complex machinery that has maintained Swiss institutions for centuries survive globalization, neo-liberalism and mass migration from poor countries to rich ones?

Switzerland has always provided a refuge for writers attracted to it as an escape from world wars, oppression, tuberculosis... or marriage. While often for Swiss writers, from Rousseau to Bouvier, the country was like a gilded prison or sanatorium, for the Romantics, the utopians (Wells, D. H. Lawrence) and other spiritual seekers (Hesse), they viewed Switzerland as a land of milk and honey, as nature's paradise. Rooney finds alpine village rooms crammed with curios, spas and spies, fool's gold and numbered accounts. Literary detective work and treasure chest, history and scandal, often go hand-in-hand when Switzerland is the backdrop.

In June 1863 an English lady set off by train on the trip of a lifetime: Thomas Cook's first Conducted Tour of Switzerland. A century and a half later, Bewes decides to go where she went and see what she saw. Guided by her diary, he followed the same route to discover how much had changed and how much hadn't. This is a tale of trains and tourists, of the British and the Swiss, of a Victorian traveller and a modern-day Englishman abroad.

Herrmann, a dual U.S.-Swiss citizen, offers a witty, profound, and ultimately universal exploration of identity and community. "Swissness," a loose confederacy, divided by multiple languages, nationalities, religion, and geography, often is reflected in pervasive clichés. The author dispels myths and scrutinizes topics that may surprise: the "invention" of the Alps, the English Colony in Davos' role during WWII, and women students at the University of Zurich in the 1870s.

The soaring mountains of the Alps have inspired and challenged some of the greatest explorers in history. Fleming recounts the incredible exploits of the mountaineers who explored Europe's frozen wilderness.

Our thoughts on German food are usually relegated to beer, sausage and pretzels. But the inhabitants of modern-day Germany do not live exclusively on bratwurst. Defying popular perception of the meat and potatoes diet, the author delves into the history of German cuisine and reveals its long history of culinary innovation. She explores the nineteenth century back-to-the-land movement, which called for people to grow food on their own land, rationing and shortages under the Nazis, postwar hunger, and divisions between the East and West.

From Tafelspitz to Backhendel and Wiener Schnitzel to Gugelhupf and apple strudel: These world-famous dishes from the Hotel Sacher kitchen in Vienna are an integral part of Austria’s culinary heritage. In a sensual and noble manner, innovatively and creatively, the Sacher cookbook continues this great tradition and develops it even further.

Unwrap the mysteries of award-winning winemakers from Switzerland: step into history, go to the source of the Rhone river, and trek through the vines. Consider larch barrels and sip glacier wine. Share a glass of red from the cellars of the Pinot Noir world champion and a white from vineyards carved by monks a millennium ago.

The grand palaces and princely villas of the Bavarian Wittelsbach dynasty—Nymphenburg, Schleissheim, the vast Residenzschloss in Munich, and others—impress visitors with their great halls and seemingly endless rows of sumptuously decorated rooms. But these dazzling residences did not exist solely to delight the eye. Klingensmith discusses how successive rulers reshaped the internal spaces of their residences to reflect changes in the elaborate ceremony that regulated daily life at court.

In the spring and summer of 1942, five young German students and one professor at the University of Munich crossed the threshold of toleration to enter the realms of resistance, danger and death. This is an account of German resistance to the Third Reich. It is a window into human resilience in the face of dictatorship.

This collection of approximately 150 fables is the first dual-language edition of highlights from a three-volume scholarly work originally published in the 1850s. The Introduction contains critiques of the newly rediscovered German and East Bavarian stories, in addition to background on Franz von Schönwerth and his legacy.

A revelatory look at the residences of Adolf Hitler, including his home in Munich and retreat at Berchtesgaden, illuminating their powerful role in constructing and promoting the dictator's private persona both within Germany and abroad. Adolf Hitler's makeover from rabble-rouser to statesman coincided with a series of dramatic home renovations he undertook during the mid-1930s.

A look at German history from 1750 to modern day, examining numerous cultural and intellectual leaders, the devastation of World War II, and how the nation has rebuilt itself in recent years.

This book is about what it meant to build a city in Germany at the turn of the twentieth century. It explores the physical spaces and mental attitudes that shaped lives, restructured society, and conditioned beliefs about the past and expectations for the future in the crucial German generations that formed the young Reich, fought the Great War, and experienced the Weimar Republic.

Christine toils in a provincial Austrian post office in the years just after the Great War. One afternoon a telegraph arrives addressed to her. It is from her rich aunt, who lives in America and writes requesting that Christine join her and her husband in a Swiss Alpine resort. She soon finds herself enjoying a life of privilege that she had never imagined. But Christine's aunt drops her as abruptly as she picked her up, and soon the young woman is back at the post office, consumed with disappointment and bitterness, where she meets Ferdinand, a wounded but eloquent war veteran. An unexpected and haunting foray into noir fiction by one of the masters of the psychological novel, Zweig's work is one of the inspirations behind Wes Anderson's film The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Three women, haunted by the past and the secrets they hold. Set at the end of WWII, in a crumbling Bavarian castle that once played host to all of German high society, a powerful and propulsive story of three widows whose lives and fates become intertwined—an affecting, shocking, and ultimately redemptive novel.  Amid the ashes of German defeat, Marianne von Lingenfels returns to the once-grand castle of her husband’s ancestors, an imposing stone fortress now fallen into ruin following years of war. The widow of a resister murdered in the failed July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, Marianne plans to uphold the promise she made to her husband’s brave conspirators: to find and protect their wives, her fellow resistance widows. She and a young boy make their way across the smoldering wreckage of their homeland to fulfill her promise.

"Fans of sensitive, slightly aloof Euro-thrillers--think Stefan Zweig or filmmaker Claude Chabrol--will recognize the metier of Swiss writer Suter..." -Publishers Weekly. Adrian Weynfeldt is an art expert in an international auction house, a bachelor in his mid-fifties living in a grand Zurich apartment filled with costly paintings and antiques. Always correct and well-mannered, he's given up on love until one night--entirely out of character for him--Weynfeldt decides to take home a ravishing but unaccountable young woman. The next morning, he finds her outside on his balcony threatening to jump. Weynfeldt talks her down and soon finds himself fallingfor this damaged but alluring beauty and his buttoned up existence comes unraveled. As their two lives become entangled, Weynfeldt gets embroiled in an art forgery scheme that threatens to destroy everything he and his prominent family have stood for.

From Bernhard, arguably Austria's most influential novelist of the postwar period, this novel takes the form of the autobiographical testimony of Franz-Josef Murau, the intellectual black sheep of a powerful Austrian land-owning family. Murau lives in Rome in self-imposed exile from his family, surrounded by a coterie of artistic and intellectual friends. On returning from his sister's wedding to the "wine-cork manufacturer" on the family estate of Wolfsegg, having resolved never to go home again, Murau receives a telegram informing him of the death of his parents and brother in a car crash. Not only must he now go back, he must do so as the master of Wolfsegg. And he must decide its fate. It is Bernhard's summing-up against Austria's treacherous past and a literary event of the first magnitude.

Fly Away, Pigeon tells the heart-wrenching story of a family torn between emigration and immigration and paints evocative portraits of the former Yugoslavia and modern-day Switzerland. In this novel, Melinda Nadj Abonji interweaves two narrative strands, recounting the history of three generations of the Kocsis family and chronicling their hard-won assimilation. Originally part of Serbia's Hungarian-speaking minority in the Vojvodina, the Kocsis family immigrates to Switzerland in the early 1970s when their hometown is still part of the Yugoslav republic. Parents Miklos and Rosza land in Switzerland knowing just one word--"work."  And after three years of backbreaking, menial work, both legal and illegal, they are finally able to obtain visas for their two young daughters, Ildiko and Nomi, who safely join them. However, for all their efforts to adapt and assimilate they still must endure insults and prejudice from members of their new community and helplessly stand by as the friends and family members they left behind suffer the maelstrom of the Balkan War. With tough-minded nostalgia and compassionate realism, Fly Away, Pigeon illustrates how much pain and loss even the most successful immigrant stories contain. It is a work that is intensely local, while grounded in the histories and cultures of two distinctive communities.

Charged with compassion, and an utterly unique radiance of vision, Walser is as Susan Sontag exclaimed "a truly wonderful, heart-breaking writer." The Assistant is his breathtaking 1908 novel, translated by award-winning translator Susan Bernofsky. Joseph, hired to become an inventor's new assistant, arrives one rainy Monday morning at Technical Engineer Karl Tobler's splendid hilltop villa: he is at once pleased and terribly worried, a state soon followed by even stickier psychological complexities. He enjoys the beautiful view over Lake Zurich, in the company of the proud wife, Frau Tobler, and the delicious savory meals. But does he deserve any of these pleasures? The Assistant chronicles Joseph's inner life of cascading emotions as he attempts, both frantically and light-heartedly, to help the Tobler household, even as it slides toward financial ruin. Tobler demands of Joseph, "Do you have your wits about you?!" And Joseph's wits are in fact all around him, trembling like leaves in the breeze--he is full of exuberance and despair, all the raptures and panics of a person "drowning in obedience."

Letters Back to Ancient China combines comedy, fantasy and satire in a moving personal odyssey. Mrs. Kei-kung is a thoroughly modern women and she introduces Kao-tai, a 10th century Chinese mandarin marooned in modern day Munich by his time machine, to the joys of modern sex and champagne. However everything else he encounters is not to his taste. In his letters back to his friend in the 10th century Middle Kingdom, he expresses his horror at the noise, stench and filth of 20th century civilization. For him the invention and conveniences of modern technology are trifles compared with the pollution and lack of order in a society where women with "mountainous breasts" presume to talk and think like men. Yet he eventually does find some comfort in the mote shang-dong (champagne) of which he drinks great quantities in the arms of Mrs. Kei-kung. Letters Back to Ancient China is one of the most successful German novels of the last decade with well over a million copies sold.

This text is an ethnography that describes how the people of this high mountain region put meaning into their collective lives & how they organize the social structure of mountain survival. In addition, the author describes how the Tiroleans have suffered & solved major ethnic problems.

The Habsburgs are the most famous dynasty in continental Europe. Rady looks at their history, from their tenth-century origins in Switzerland, to the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire in 1918. He introduces the pantheon of rulers and discusses the lands and kingdoms that made up the Habsburg Empire, and the decisive moments that shaped their history.

For centuries much of Europe was in the royal hands of the peculiar Habsburg family. An unstable mixture of wizards, obsessives, melancholics, bores, musicians and warriors, they saw off any number of rivals, until finally packing up in 1918. From their principal lairs along the Danube they ruled most of Central Europe and Germany and interfered everywhere. Winder's hilarious book plunges the reader into a maelstrom of alchemy, royalty, skeletons, jewels, bear-moats, unfortunate marriages and a guinea-pig village. Full of music, piracy, religion and fighting, it is the history of a strange dynasty, and its subjects who often showed a marked ingratitude towards their oddball ruler in Vienna.

For a small, prosperous country in the middle of Europe, modern Austria has a very large and complex history, extending far beyond its current borders. Today's Austrians have a problematic relationship with that history, whether with the multi-national history of the Habsburg Monarchy, or with the time between 1938 and 1945 when Austrians were Germans in Hitler's Third Reich. Steven Beller's gripping and comprehensive account traces the remarkable career of Austria through its many transformations.

A look at the architecture and historical prominence of twenty-five castles throughout Germany.

Highlights architectural trends in Switzerland featuring important contemporary architects, from the established to the up-and-coming, including Mario Botta, Aldo Celoria, Jürg Conzett, Deventhéry & Lamuniére, Diener + Diener, Eckert & Eckert (e2a), Fuhrimann + Höchler, Patrick Gartmann, Gigon & Guyer, Herzog & de Meuron, Davide Macullo, Valerio Ogliati, and Peter Zumthor.

The catalog for the Architekturzentrum Wien's permanent exhibition on Austrian architecture is the authoritative survey of the country's architects, buildings, and styles. Images and plans, accompanied by explanatory texts--structured chronologically as well as thematically--the book points out both historical connections and contemporary movements. This is the definitive reference for Austrian architecture during the last two centuries.

The Blue Rider became a symbol of revolution in modern art in the early 20th century. Works by Vassily Kandinsky, Franz Marc and Paul Klee have since become avant-garde icons known throughout the world.

Our understanding of Mozart's life and music has broadened immensely in recent years. Much new material has come to light, including discoveries of musical sources and fresh ways of interpreting known ones. Studies in the chronology of Mozart's works, his compositional process, his relationship to the world around him--these and many other areas have yielded new thinking that has challenged or overturned the inherited wisdom. In Mozart: The Early Years renowned music historian Stanley Sadie discusses all aspects of the composer's life and music, relating them to the social, economic, cultural, and musical environments in which he worked.

In March 1965 "The Sound of Music" was released in the United States, and the love affair between moviegoers and the classic Rodgers and Hammerstein musical was on. Rarely has a film captured the love and imagination of the moviegoing public in the way that "The Sound of Music" did as it blended history, music, Austrian location filming, heartfelt emotion and the yodeling of Julie Andrews into a monster hit. Now Santopietro has written an account of all the behind the scenes stories of the filming in Austria and Hollywood. Santopietro looks back at the real life story of Maria von Trapp, goes on to tell the story of the musical and the film.