Ilaria Scaglia's book examines international organizations and institutions active in the Alps through the lens of emotions. Arguing persuasively that “the functions that emotions have played in international cooperation have been largely overlooked” (5), she uses emotions as a basis to investigate the histories of the League of Nations, the International Climbing and Mountaineering Federation, and tuberculosis sanatoria in Switzerland. In this intriguing book, Scaglia is at her best when presenting archival material for the first time, something she does frequently.
After an introduction detailing the importance of emotions in internationalism, Scaglia discusses the role of the Alps in internationalist institutions in the period between the world wars. This first chapter includes excurses on Pius IX, the so-called “Alpinist Pope,” as well as the Winter Olympics, which began in 1924. The internationalist, as opposed to nationalist, spirit continued through the 1936 Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Nazi Germany, as Scaglia shows, using newspaper reports and a remarkable photograph of American athletes celebrating with SA members.
The focus of the second chapter is on the League of Nations. In addition to the role emotions played in the general activities of the League, Scaglia devotes the second half of the chapter to the history of the construction of the League's headquarters in Geneva, the Palais des Nations. She shows how the setting of the Palais with mountains in the background was part of the internationalist use of the Alps.
The case of the International Climbing and Mountaineering Federation (UIAA by its French initials) is a bit different than the League of Nations, since its home is, by definition, the mountains. The chapter on the UIAA describes its founding in the 1930s, half a century or more after the founding of most of the national mountaineering federations. These national associations could often be quite nationalistic to the point of being discriminatory (the German Alpine Association began excluding Jews from membership already in the 1920s), but most alpinists were bound by their shared identity as climbers rather than a national identity.
The following two chapters focus on two tuberculosis sanatoria in Leysin, in the canton of Vaud in Switzerland. Not nearly as famous as the Davos portrayed in Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg, these two sanatoria had similar missions of using Leysin's unique geography and weather for the benefit of an international clientele. While the Clinique Manufacture Internationale put its patients to work building springs, the University Sanatorium provided a pedagogic atmosphere for its more educated patients. Both clinics employed heliotherapy in strict regimens; patients had to follow exact orders in how the exposure to the Alpine sun, in addition to breathing the Alpine air, would help treat their disease. These chapters are the strongest in the book. Particularly convincing is Scaglia's use and analysis of photographs of patients to describe the various milieus of the two sanatoria. She also cogently discusses how the importance of the body in these pictures differs from the contemporary fascist interest in the body. Using detailed patient records, Scaglia shows that the clinics were truly international, though of course that changed as World War II began. After the war, streptomycin made tuberculosis sanatoria obsolete, though, as Scaglia points out, something of the internationalist spirit remains in Leysin, for it is today home to a top Swiss hospitality school.
A conclusion follows the two chapters on Leysin. Once again, Scaglia argues for more recognition for the role emotions play in human actions. Overall, this is a very interesting book, gathering material on many different topics all united by a geographic and temporal focus on interwar Switzerland. Scaglia is at her best when she is unearthing untold histories using archival material, as in the case of the Leysin sanatoria. She is less sure when discussing film and literature set in the Alps (the section on the German mountain film or Bergfilm is not up to date, nor is her discussion of Heidi of sufficient length to influence her argument). These are minor quibbles. Finally, I would normally look askance at an author inserting her own experiences into a historical monograph, but at several points Scaglia mentions her own formative study-abroad experiences with such obvious enthusiasm that one cannot help but be enthusiastic about them, too. Clearly, Scaglia's own experiences within the internationalist system of study abroad, which she traces to such internationalist organizations as those detailed in The Emotions of Internationalism, have borne fruit.
