Leopoldine Fuhrich was exploring an unknown portion of the Lurgrotte cave in Austria when she fell to her death in 1926. A high school science teacher in Vienna, Fuhrich was only twenty-seven years old when she died. Her fellow explorers knew her as Poldi, and they turned Fuhrich’s life into an inspirational legend.
Fuhrich wasn’t the only hero of the caves, historian Johannes Mattes explains. There was a growing pantheon of heroes in the early twentieth century, as the new science of caves, speleology, emerged. But right-wing nationalism was also growing in Austria, and it changed the nature and purpose of speleology in central Europe.
Cave exploration had grown more popular in late-nineteenth-century Europe along with mountaineering. Mattes argues that Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and trends in popular science laid the foundations for speleology. People increasingly saw caves as a place of both “imagination and empiricism,” he writes.
In Austria, Alexander von Mörk helped create a speleological club and explored an ice-cave known as the Eisriesenwelt, or “World of the Ice Giants.” Mörk “regarded nature…as a kind of sentient entity,” Mattes writes, “which, metre by metre of the underground world, should be subjugated in a symbolic ‘battle with the mountain.’”
Mörk was from a military family, and the club took on a military structure. Explorers used “steel helmets, cable reel phones and other military equipment like carbide lamps,” writes Mattes. But militarism and conquest of the landscape were major themes of the growing right-wing nationalism in Austria, in which Mörk became immersed.
Mörk “introduced an ‘Aryan clause’ into the Speleological Club,” Mattes explains, “which would officially exclude Jews from membership.” He also writes that Mörk “had double moral standards”—he was engaged to a Jewish woman, Martha Okiman, which he kept secret until he went off to fight in World War I. Mörk died in the war, but that wasn’t the end of his story.
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Speleologists found Mörk’s remains and interred them in the Eisriesenwelt in 1925. A poet compared Mörk to Alexander the Great—he had become a nationalist symbol. Nationalists gave Fuhrich similar treatment, though as Mattes explains, they often portrayed her with masculine qualities. More women joined speleological societies after WWI, though they were never fully accepted, despite Fuhrich’s achievements and legend.
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World War I also gave speleology new significance to governments when imports of the fertilizer guano stopped. Speleologists made inroads into academia, and the University of Vienna created a speleology department. Then under Nazi Germany, cave research fell under the purview of the Schutzstaffel (SS), the political paramilitary force governed by Heinrich Himmler. The SS took Vienna’s speleological inventory and forced concentration camp prisoners to create a new “show cave.” They arrested the Jewish president of the German speleological society, Benno Wolf, and deported him to a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia, where he died.
Speleology fell away as a formal academic discipline after the war, Mattes explains. But international societies for speleology recovered, as the interdisciplinary nature of the research gained relevance later in the century.
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