ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the implications of recent performances of Tiefland and their potential to complicate the work of the historian in telling ways. Tiefland invests the Pyrenees with a fascination with the physical purity of the mountains and with a sublime inhospitability that holds the potential to sharpen and harden existence. Pure air comes to stand for a purified subjectivity, storm and snow for remoteness from the protection and comforts of modern civilization. Tiefland evokes its Catalonian locale via language, music and mise-en-scne, but, as we have seen, it also Germanicizes the mountains in a way that recalls the German cult of the mountains. It Alpinizes the Pyrenees to become a more familiar, more German, Heimat. The Heimat dynamic of the mutual dependency of the exotic and the desire to return figures not just as a narrative sequence but as the deeper confrontation that Gilles de Van exposes when he defines the exotic.
