Föhn

Innsbruck is an old city. Buildings in the old town bear cornerstone inscriptions of 1524, 1487, 1348. A bridge has spanned the river Inn since Roman times, when this was the eastern edge of the province of Noricum, a way station on the salt road winding north to the border forts on the Rhine. And so the people here are old in a way Americans find easy to dismiss. Old and superstitious, old and arcane, old and full of awareness out of step with modernity. They possess an affinity with intuition, a catalogue of inherited tales, and a folksy suspicion of the efficacy of modern methods of all flavors. Like their capital in Vienna, Austrians, I dare say even Europeans are a people of the past. Their moment in world history may have slipped past and now they argue and bicker and worry about how best to preserve the things they think define them, but they also have more unashamed access to tradition without self-consciousness.

I could take as an example of this some ancient pagan festival, and have before in other posts; I could critique the spittle and velvet glove populism of the xenophobic right and nanny state regulatory politics of the self satisfied left; I could point to the enduring localization of foods and dialects. But I won’t. What is more interesting are the differences so deeply anchored in the Austrian mentality that the Austrians aren’t even able to see them. Their understanding of the world, their clarifications and reasons and sense making, their myths.

I don’t mean myths as coherent stories with beginnings and ends and heros. I don’t even mean they are wrong. I just mean the network of more or less unquestioned thought processes that I have slowly come to find amusing, infuriating, and fascinating by turns.

One myth I have witnessed in action, and even have to respect, centers on the Föhn. The Föhn is a wind. In fact, in Innsbruck Föhn is almost synonymous with wind. If it’s blustery, its föhn-y. The Föhn is more than just a wind however. In modern scientific terms it is an adiabatically warmed wind, blowing down the lee side of a mountain range. That is to say that it is a mass of air that moved up the far side of the mountain range, lost its moisture due to cooling at higher altitude, then warming again at a faster rate than it cooled as it is drying on the way down. It is the Alpine version of a Chinook or a Santa Ana. It is also plays havoc with the inhabitants.

The Föhn has obviously turbulent effects on the physical world. Leaves, dust, papers and other garbage go flying. People must hold onto their hats and lean into the wind. Flags snap and the windows and doors bang. Snow melts at amazing rates. Even the clouds take on a unique shape, turning into long pulled lozenges parked on the main ridge of the Alps, looking like they are traveling at a hundred miles an hour (which they might well be in windspeed terms). It also gets blamed for almost any sort of turbulence with the folks in town:

“I have a such a headache today.”
“What do you expect, we’ve got Föhn today.”

or
“The boss is awful crabby this morning,”
“Yeah... Föhn-y afterall.”

or

“Today drivers are recommended to avoid the autobahn, as the Föhn may cause loss of attentiveness.”

It seems unlikely, that something as apparently external and physical as a wind can cause headaches, mood swings, and confusion. It seems unlikely, but I have noticed the pattern in myself. And others. And animals, who aren’t in on the blame shifting. We all wake up on the wrong side of the bed sometimes, but when a whole town wakes up on the wrong side of the bed on the same day, and a wind is blowing, it doesn’t take a large leap to the conclusion. I wouldn’t go so far as to call it the logical conclusion, because I still think there is some mythical thinking going on here, but still, it is mythical thinking that seems to bear out.

There have even been a few scientific attempts to correlate the psychology of the city and the wind. In Munich I remember hearing of a study that linked minor spikes in suicides to the Föhn. But really the myth rests on personal and anecdotal evidence. But then, who says it shouldn’t? No one really thinks entirely analytically or reasonably. And it is reasonable to think that the wind could have an effect on the body, the physical brain, and therefore the mental state, right? The Innsbruckers don’t pause to question their little leap of folk medicine, they just grumble, have an excuse to be grumpy, and wait enjoy the sunny weather that usually comes with the Föhn.

This isn’t the only time such folk knowledge goes unquestioned. One can also get a prescription for an herbal tea from a doctor, to be purchased in a pharmacy. Remedies involving foodstuffs and household supplies are commonplace (see U.S. gold medalist Lindsay Vonn smearing Austrian topfen or curd cheese on her bruised shin). They have a beer named after the local hero Paracelsus, a fellow whose given name, “Bombastus,” gave us the word bombastic and who believed that the proper mixture of salt, mercury, and sulphur could pretty much cure you of what ails you (luckily those ingredients aren’t to be found in the herbal teas at the pharmacy these days).

It may well be that skeptics are the ones who drive progress. Those who are never satisfied with the first answer, those who are a bit incredulous of the tall tales, those who try to get to the bottom of things. But still, I sometimes wonder if in all our migrations and rootlessness as Americans, we aren’t missing out on some of these local myths. Do the inversions in Boise have physiological repercussions? Is sage brush good for improving concentration? In our rush to be, well, Americans, we have sort of shut out the old wood lore and wives tales that once enriched our culture. Those funny quirks of our grandparents, of the ranchers, of the Shoshone folk wisdom--maybe they have little something yet to be proven. After all, Americans are just an old a people as the Austrians, because we are Austrians (and Shoshone, and Chinese, and Iranian, &c. &c.). And those old traditions might as well play skeptic to the skeptics now and then, because, after all, I get headaches on days when we have the Föhn.