Brienz, Switzerland, August 2018 - Before and after the 2005 disaster, and Al Gore's views

Some years ago I was privileged to attend one of Al Gore’s ‘presentations’ of his film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’.  It was a great occasion.  He started with a number of sharp jokes about his failure to become US President in the year of the ‘hanging chad’ election, but then went on to outline his powerful case about climate change with the aid of a multimedia extravaganza with pictures, graphics, video, sound and everything that modern technology could offer at the time. (The film was made in 2006 before virtual and augmented reality came into use).  Part way through the film I was amazed to see footage of a devastating flood in a Swiss village that I know well – Brienz – which had clearly not been reported in the UK press.

I am in Brienz now, on holiday, and today is the 13^th anniversary of that event on 22 August 2005.  On that day a massive rainfall event in the Bernese Oberland created huge surges of water laden with rocks and tree trunks on the two mountain streams that disgorge into Lake Brienz via the village – the Trachtbach and the Glyssibach.  Houses were destroyed, two people were drowned, and the main streets of the village were rendered impassable because of mud.  The volume of water flowing down the streams emptying into Lake Brienz  resulted in the lake level rising; and with high winds whipping up waves, the lake-front promenade was destroyed.  At the other end of the lake Interlaken Ost station – one the major rail interchanges of Switzerland – was flooded up to platform level.

I was briefly in Brienz in the late summer of 2006, by which time the reconstruction of the promenade along the lake was well under way, but I was unaware of why there had been a need for such work.  I was here again in 2015.  But it has been on my current visit that I have been most impressed by the Swiss engineering response to the 2005 events.  The main road bridge over the Trachtbach used to lie low over the stream, and it was the restricted flow under this bridge that caused it to act as a dam with water, rocks and tree trunks flowing over it and into the houses and roads on either side.  The replacement bridge is an ingenious affair sitting on concrete pillars that project 20 metres lake-wards: if a torrent threatens then the whole bridge can be shifted sideways towards the lake, opening up a larger void underneath.  At the same time a 2 metre high concrete barrier has been built on both sides of the Trachtbach gulley to channel the flow. Other major works have been carried out at the bridge crossing the Glyssibach, including similar 2-metre walls, but here a large holding reservoir has also been created upstream to manage the flow.  Properties damaged or destroyed in the 2005 flood have been reconstructed: the Steinbock hotel next to the Trachtbach bridge displays both its original construction date of 1787 and a prominent message celebrating its reconstruction in 2006 ‘after the storm of 22 August 2005’ (my translation).

Concrete 'slider' for the Trachtbach bridge

The Steinbock hotel, rebuilt after the 2005 flood

I first visited Brienz in 1986 and I have come back many times since, staying in at least three of the village’s hotels and also renting chalets.  It is not one of Switzerland’s most renowned holiday destinations but I like it more than any other.  With a population of around 3000, it is not entirely dependent on tourism: it is also the centre of the Swiss wood-carving industry, with a major training school and a number of craftsmen producing the most intricate, and expensive, carvings imaginable of everything from Christmas cribs to traditional chalets, local animals to avant garde abstracts.  In 2016 I told a Maori craftsman in Rotorua in New Zealand that I knew the main village in Switzerland for woodcarving and without hearing more he held up his tools and said ‘We get these from Brienz’.  The village is twinned with the main woodcarving centre in Bulgaria.  Several shops along Brienz’s village street are dedicated to local wooden products. 

But the biggest of these was severely damaged in the 2005 flood, losing all its stock.  I talked yesterday to the woman who now runs the coffee bar that serves the small museum and showroom that has replaced it, with a bank now taking up the largest part of the original building.  She said that after the flood the carvers who had worked in the premises set up workshops in their own homes.  And during the period when the village was recovering the coaches that used to call for tourists to buy carvings and souvenirs stopped coming.  (I suspect that the opening of a new fast road on the other side of the lake may also have contributed to the change in coach routings).  To my respondent, the village now felt a very different place. And I noticed that a couple of erstwhile souvenir shops on the other side of the road are now closed.  It could be argued that the severe storm of 2005 continues to have a negative effect on Brienz.

So why do I still like the village so much?  Well, it has almost the same accessibility to great local scenic attractions as Interlaken at the other end of the lake, but is still a village rather than a major urban place. It is the meeting point for lake steamers, the railway from Interlaken to Luzern, buses to various outlying villages and the Swiss Open-Air Museum (consisting of historic farmhouses moved here from all over the country), and the old steam-powered rack railway up the Brienzer Rothorn.  There is a free ‘animal park’, created in the late nineteenth century to provide live models for the woodcarvers to work from.  And there are footpaths in the fields above the village as well as a reconstructed lakeshore promenade bedecked with wood-carvings and children’s amusements.   The tourist clientele has changed somewhat since I first came. Fifteen or so years ago the Hotel Bären in the centre of the village was rebranded as an ‘Ayuvedra’ centre offering Indian therapies and treatments, and it now also has a ‘Ganesha’ shop selling Indian goods.  When I first came to this area in the 1980s I was surprised to see how prevalent Japanese visitors were in some parts of the Bernese Oberland, particularly in Grindelwald where many menus had been translated into their language.  More recently (in May 2015) I blogged about Indian visitors in the area, and they have certainly been encouraged by developments such as those at the Hotel Bären.  So change in Brienz has partly come about through globalising trends in tourist markets and not just through the 2005 disaster.

The village of Brienz from the train to the Brienzer Rothorn

The evidence of climatic change is incontrovertible.  But I’m not sure that Al Gore’s use of the Brienz flood of 2005 as an example is justified as showing something entirely new.  This alpine area is one that has always experienced extreme events and continues to do so.  On 26 December 1999 storm ‘Lothar’ brought down vast numbers of trees in the region - particularly on the slopes above Wilderswil.  In July of the same year a flash flood in the Saxeten Gorge south of Interlaken swept away  and drowned 21 young holidaymakers who had been canyoning there.  But these are not new and unique disasters.  Today, on the wall of the Weisses Kreuz hotel in Brienz, I came across an old plaque commemorating the disaster caused by a previous flooding of the Trachtbach stream – in 1870.  

Vienna, Austria, August 2018 - From backwater to world city

I first came to Vienna in September 1984 as part of a conference that had started in Munich and moved on to the Austrian capital for a second set of papers.  In those Cold War days Austria was still neutral, its independence from international alliances still guaranteed by the four post-war occupying powers – the USSR, the United States, France and the United Kingdom – despite the fact that the Russians had unexpectedly pulled out of the country in 1955 and allowed it to be reunited as a single and independent state. West Germany was, of course, a crucial bastion for the ‘Free World’ against the ‘Communist East’.  To the 25 or so conference participants in Munich were added a further 15 when we got to Vienna – academics from East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Poland and so on who were not allowed by their governments to travel to West Germany but for whom Austria was an acceptable academic destination.

Vienna in 1984 was a very strange city.  Its population within the city boundaries was 1.5 millions at the time of the 1981 census, and 2 millions lived within the wider Viennese urban region.  Austria as a whole counted 7.6 million inhabitants, so over a quarter of its population lived in the capital city region.  And that 2 million total had remained static since 1951.  In the other city region of our conference – Munich – the population had more than doubled between 1951 and 1981 from 1.1 millions to 2.3 millions. One of the reasons I was invited to the conference was to translate into English a chapter written by the two organisers, comparing the two cities.

Vienna was a city cut off from its hinterland.  This had been partly so since the dismemberment of the Austro- Hungarian Empire after the First World War.  But isolation was hugely enhanced with the creation of the Communist states of Central and Eastern Europe in the later 1940s which meant that the eastern regions of Austria formed a bulge of 180 miles into the Iron Curtain.  Vienna lay 25 miles from the edge of Czechoslovakia and 35 miles from Hungary.  Borders were fortified and defended from the eastern side.  The only land routes into Vienna were via the rest of Austria lying well to the west of the city.

In 1984 the city seemed almost dead after dark.  One night several of us from the conference went out to a heuriger wine house in a village on the outskirts and had to get a taxi back because public transport ceased at 11. On Kärtnerstraße, in some ways the main street of the city, there was only one café open after 9.  Tourists were few in number.  Vienna was a city that had little of the animation of a capital – although its cultural symbols such as the Opera House were being kept going with major state subsidies.  The big popular music hit in Austria that summer was a song attacking Vienna and praising life in the Austrian countryside.

My next visits to Vienna were in 1992 and 1994 – the first for a conference and the second as part of a family holiday.  The city had already been transformed.  Czechoslovakians (this was before the ‘Velvet Divorce’), Hungarians, Bulgarians, Poles and even Russians made up large numbers at the 1992 conference on mass migration in the ‘New Europe’ (as it was then being called).  The Iron Curtain had gone, to be replaced by much freer movement.  Vienna had regained its role as a capital – perhaps the capital – of Central Europe.  The official language of that 1992 conference was supposed to be English – the unifying language for this new world. But I wondered for a while whether we would actually see German supplant English as the new lingua franca: many more of our new colleagues from the former Communist world spoke German at that time than spoke English.  However, that moment passed as schools in the East took up English teaching as the first foreign language.

By 1994 Vienna was back on the tourist map of Europe.  Cafés and bars were open until late; the wide street bearing the name ‘Graben’ was lined with restaurants and tourist shops; Café Central, the premier old-style coffee-house of the city, was being frequented by tourists (although not without disapproving looks from long-standing customers). I particularly recall large groups of Italian visitors, noisily following their guides, who seemed to dominate the new arrivals.

Twenty-four years passed before my current visit to Vienna. Again this has primarily been for work – to meet a colleague to discuss a book proposal.  The population of the urban region has grown once more – to 2.6 millions – after that long period of stagnation.  This actually now amounts to 30 per cent of Austria’s population – but the old feeling that here was a head that was too big for its body has gone.  Vienna is now in some ways back at the centre of its old world – of the cities of Central and Eastern Europe only Warsaw is bigger.  But Vienna has extended its reach much more: it is now a world city (with its United Nations functions and those of the Organisation of Petroleum-Exporting Countries: OPEC), and it is a world tourist destination.

I have heard languages from all parts of the globe here, and many I can’t place.  Chinese tourists seem to have become the dominant groups – often looking with interest at my colleague who, I joke, seems to be the only Chinese person travelling independently. But there are also many groups of women from the Middle East dressed in chadors or at the least with hijabs.  Café Central has a long queue of what would previously have been seen as inappropriately-dressed tourists waiting outside on a Sunday afternoon.  Kärnterstraße is thronged with people at all hours of day and night.  Much of the area inside the Ringstraße is now given over to a combination of high status retail and everyday tourism.  The museums and palaces are thronged with people, with queuing systems set up.  There seem to be many more horse-drawn vehicles (Fiaker) for sightseeing excursions than twenty years ago, and the smell of horses permeates the streets around the Hofburg.

But beyond the Ringstraße, out towards Heiligenstadt to the north, or in the Landstraße district to the south-east (except around the Hundertwasserhaus which has become a major attraction) the side streets still seem as sleepy as they did in 1984.  Ordinary Vienna is still there: it has just been overlaid with world city functions once again.

On Saturday my colleague and I took a crowded train for the hour’s journey to Bratislava – another city that has been transformed, this time into a capital city.  Like Vienna, the town centre was busy with tourists and leisure activities.  Our train crossed the Morava River, now a site for fishing but once a defended frontier with gun emplacements and barbed wire.  We returned to Vienna from a smaller Bratislava station on the southern side of the Danube – Petržalka – along a line that once constituted the border between Western and Eastern Europe and which was consequently torn up during the period of the Iron Curtain.  Neither my Chinese colleague nor I could have crossed these borders when I first came to Vienna in 1984.  She has benefited from the opening up of China under Deng Xiaoping.  We have both also benefited from the end of the Cold War and the Iron Curtain in Europe – and so has Vienna.