From The Vulture Wally to The Dark Valley: Imaging the Alps at the Crossroads of the Heimat Genre.

The German notion of Heimat is a form of place attachment that is simultaneously shaped by senses of longing and belonging. Heimat not only accommodates the unhomely in the homely, it also blends foreign perspectives with stylized forms of self-exoticization. To the extent that Heimat responds to a desire for rediscovering the (trans)national in the local, the urban in the provincial, the modern in the anti-modern, and so on, it may be described as a delocalized place. This article examines changing national, gendered, and generic transpositions of Alpine imaginaries by analyzing film adaptations of two novels that prefigure and refigure Heimat art respectively: Wilhelmine von Hillern’s Die Geier-Wally (The Vulture Wally), which appeared in 1873 and became the source of many film and TV adaptations, and Thomas Willmann’s Alpine Western Das finstere Tal (The Dark Valley), published in 2010 and adapted to a motion picture by Andreas Prochaska in 2014. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]