On a freezing January morning the first tourists stepped onto the platform and waded through a Sunday gathering with friendly faces. To the astonishment of the villagers, the guests rolled about the hills around Ladaun. And before they knew it, their village had become a first-class center for winter sport. A few hotels and a cinema were built; during the winter the young boys earned decent money as skiing instructors, and in summer they were reliable mountain guides….
The change was painful, but even the old men had to admit that now their roofs were new and their grandsons could go to school instead of earning little money as day laborers. And it was amusing to watch the once fiercest opponents of the railway using it with great ease and delight.
Ten years after he wrote the above passage, Klier embarked on his career as a ski area developer. He began by building lifts on various mountains in Tyrol, and then he raised the capital to develop the Stubai Glacier. Bringing this project to fruition was a vast undertaking, and he pursued it with characteristic energy. First he had to convince the herdsmen who owned the land around the glaciers to grant him permission to build his gondolas and stations. Then he had to get permits from the obstructionist Austrian bureaucracy. Last but not least, he had to extend the Stubai Valley’s main road eight kilometers, through twenty-four avalanche zones, to provide car access.
Over the years, Klier raised and invested about 170 million Euros in the Stubai Glacier—a great entrepreneurial achievement in any country and a miracle in Austria. Unlike many developers in Austria who create jobs, he never received government subsidies, which was a point of pride for him. Within a few years of its opening, the Stubai Glacier became a smash success and the first ski area mentioned in Wolfgang Ambros’s 1976 megahit Schifoan (Skiing)—a pop anthem to the national pastime.
Before the Stubai Glacier, the number of overnight guest bookings in the municipality of Neustift during the high winter season was around 25,000 per year. By 2003, the number had soared to 700,000. The tremendous growth of tourism transformed the economy of the Stubai Valley and poured millions of tax revenue into state coffers. In recognition of his contribution to the prosperity of Tyrol, the state awarded him the Tiroler Verdienstkreuz (Distinguished Service Cross) in 1995. In 2006 he was made an honorary citizen of Neustift, and the ceremony was attended by the Governor of Tyrol, the President of the Austrian National Assembly, and other high ranking officials. In Neustift’s long history, it has bestowed this honor on only one other man: Otto von Habsburg, the son of the last Emperor of Austria.
The Stubai Glacier was Heinrich Klier’s fiefdom—his “Kingdom of Snow” as it styles itself in marketing literature. Unlike the old counts of Tyrol, he’d inherited nothing; he built it all himself. Every day in his Innsbruck office he could look at the splendid aerial photographs of his kingdom and see what he’d achieved. As he boasted in his official biography, he’d reached all of his goals “in spite of avalanches, floods, climbing falls, and the torture instruments of bureaucracy.” By 2003, the only thing that could have put his crowning accomplishment at risk was some seriously bad publicity.
Chapter 32: In the Holy Land of Tyrol
The first time I visited the Stubai Valley in August of 2009, I was often struck by how much the inhabitants had retained their distinctly local qualities. The charming waitress who served me coffee every morning at my hotel had the same last name as about a fifth of the people buried in the parish church graveyard, and she struggled to speak standard German with me instead of her Tyrolean dialect, which I could scarcely understand. Everyone I met was very friendly, but they obviously viewed me as a total outsider, and I got the feeling that their regular contact with foreign tourists had caused them to embrace their Tyrolean identity all the more.
I met a man who’d grown up on a small farm in the southwest end of the valley, raising cattle. The paternal side of his family had lived in the same farmhouse since the 15th century, and the pastoral life he’d known as a boy wasn’t so different from the life his ancestors had known five hundred years earlier. His father had struck a deal with Heinrich Klier to build the road to the Stubai Glacier through his family property.
“I personally don’t think it was such a great deal for us,” the man said. “Over the years many of our cows got hit by tourists driving too fast. I remember how angry I was when I found injured animals that had to be put down. Other farmers also questioned whether the ski resort was such a good thing, but after it became so successful, there was no turning back, and even the officials in Neustift who’d initially opposed it had to admit that it did a lot for the economy.”
The first night of my visit, my girlfriend Johanna and I went to a restaurant near our hotel called the Gasthaus Geieralm. Walking into the cozy dining room with a wood-burning stove, I asked the waitress for a table for two, at which point everyone in the restaurant turned to look at me, with my heavy foreign accent. Shortly after we sat down, a man seated at a nearby table said, “You’re the man with the Porsche staying at the Hotel Gasteigerhof, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” I replied, astonished. “How do you know that?”
“I saw you pull into the hotel as I was walking down the road.”
“It’s your car,” Johanna said to me in English. “It’s a lot flashier than an Opel Corsa.”
After a couple of beers, I asked the observant man about the history, animals, and plants of the valley, and soon everyone in the restaurant, including the waitress, joined our conversation. The evening wore on, and we switched from beer and wine to schnapps.
“You should try our home-distilled Laerchenschnaps,” our waitress told me. She was referring to schnapps infused with the aromatic oil of larch buds, but at that moment I thought she said Leichenschnaps—i.e., “corpse schnapps.”
“Corpse schnapps?” I said with an alarmed expression, at which point everyone in the room burst out laughing.
“Yes, exactly,” she replied. “Corpse schnapps—the specialty of the house.”
“To Stubai and its corpse schnapps,” I said, and toasted everyone.
That Sunday I attended an outdoor mass to consecrate a new hiking trail in honor of a highly revered Neustift parish priest named Franz Senn, who was also a founding member of the Austrian and German Alpine Associations. 2009 was the 125th anniversary of his death, and the mass was one of many commemorations that year. As I hiked up to a clearing in the woods above Neustift where the mass was held, I was impressed by the many elderly people, some apparently in their eighties, ascending the steep trail. A priest performed a traditional service, and then the deputy director of the Austrian Alpine Association (Stubai Section) gave a speech.
After lamenting that the Section Director, Dr. Kurt Somavilla (the district medical officer who’d allegedly examined Duncan’s corpse in the funeral chapel of the parish church) couldn’t be there to give the speech, he talked about the outstanding life of Franz Senn. Father Senn had introduced tourism to the valley, and tourism had been their salvation. Just to the south, in Italy, the young people were obliged to leave their valleys to seek work in the cities, but not in Stubai.
2009 was also the bicentenary of Tyrol’s “Liberation War” from Franco-Bavarian occupation, and a number of celebrations took place throughout the state. One balmy summer evening, Johanna and I went to an outdoor party in Neustift, with live music performed by a singer dressed up like the freedom fighter Andreas Hofer. When he broke into the rousing “Andreas Hofer Lied” (Tyrol’s national hymn) we all stood to join him. I particularly liked the second verse, which alludes to Hofer’s guerilla tactic of setting loose rock slides onto the enemy.