| Summary: | Focusing on the so-called <i>Nördliche Kalkalpen</i> or Northern Limestone Alps of Germany and Austria, I will discuss how human interaction with these mountains during the age of the Anthropocene shifts from scientific and athletic exploration to commercial and industrial exploitation. More specifically, I will examine travel narratives by the nineteenth-century mountaineers Friedrich Simony and Hermann von Barth, juxtaposing their respective experiences in diverse Alpine subranges with the environmental history of those regions. This juxtaposition harbors a deeper paradox, one that can be formulated as follows: Whereas Simony and Barth both rank as historically important <i>Erschließer</i> of the German and Austrian Alps, having explored their crags and glaciers in search of somatic adventure and geoscientific knowledge, these very sites of rock and ice were about to become so <i>erschlossen</i> by modernized tourism that one wonders where the precise boundaries between individual-based discovery and technology-driven development lie. In other words, during the nineteenth century a kind of <i>Dialektik der Erschließung</i> (a variation on Horkheimer and Adorno’s <i>Dialektik der Aufklärung</i>) manifests itself in the increasing anthropogenic alteration of the Alps.
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