The Wachau is a Gesamtkunstwerk

An offhand sentence in the 1999 UNESCO nomination document perhaps describes the Wachau cultural landscape best. It describes the Wachau as “a big and lively Gesamtkunstwerk”7 .

The term Gesamtkunstwerk (translated best as ‘total work of art’) was used by the composer Richard Wagner to describe a work of art where different elements and art-forms are combined into a single ensemble.8 The use of this term in the UNESCO nomination document makes sense considering the valley’s history of Romanticism.

In the early 1880’s Vienna’s Academy of Fine Arts took annual summer trips to the valley. Many of the students that joined later established the “Wachau Künstlerbund”, a community of Romantic painters that lived and worked in the Wachau. The group had popular exhibitions in Vienna. Since these exhibitions coincided with the construction of a train line between Vienna and the Wachau, many Viennese went on to visit the region. The Wachau would not be the touristic landscape it is today without its representation in Romantic painting9 . Romantic art focused on emotions, feelings, and moods. For the romantic painters it was not the architecture of a specific time period that made the Wachau valley special, but the mishmash of historic styles that give the valley the appearance of being ‘Historic’ without being placed in a distinct time period. Idiosyncratic elements of the valley, like the many castle ruins and abbeys, could be added in the background of a painting to strengthen an air of mystery, invoke nostalgia or create the ‘sublime’.

This means that the qualities of the Wachau valley flow forth from the collective experience architectures and the landscape made by different people at different times. Many of the buildings and different landscapes are used and cultivated because of everyday processes that support the existence of the region. Viticulture, infrastructure and housing. The stasis caused by the generic OUV’s will over time not only affect the living qualities of the inhabitants. It also stops the processes that formed the ephemeral, aesthetic qualities that lead to the UNESCO status of the Wachau in the first place.