The permanent “Building of the Road” exhibition is in an old road-maker’s house next to the Fuscher Lacke on the Grossglockner High Alpine Road. The exhibition very graphically documents the severe living conditions of the Glockner labourers, with whose help Salzburg’s Head of Provincial Government Franz Rehrl and the Carinthian road builder Franz Wallack created, after Schönbrunn Palace, Austria’s most visited tourist attraction.

Wallack and Rehrl’s Memorial to the “Glockner Labourers”

This museum reminds us of a great feat achieved almost 70 years ago, the building of the Grossglockner High Alpine Road. In those days there were 556,000 registered redundancies in Austria (26 per cent) and more than 100,000 uninsured persons who received no redundancy support after 20 weeks. And because women amounted to less than 10 per cent of the employed, the redundancies hit families tremendously hard.

A bright spot during this gloomy period was the building of this road between 1930 and 1935. It offered up to 4,050 jobs, of which 80 per cent were reserved expressly for the registered jobless.
Road building in the high mountains was extremely hard work. The caterpillar had still to replace the wheelbarrow, a bulldozer the shovel, or a tractor a team of horses. The Glockner Road demanded the hardest manual work, but the jobs there were envied throughout Austria. And that was because the legendary Glockner labourers had jobs with above average pay, height bonuses, clean, warm and dry accommodation, regular good food – and they enjoyed a revolutionary social innovation: the first bad-weather provision in Austria, according to which the employer paid for accommodation and food during bad weather.

Workers from all over Austria

Naturally, those allocated jobs were also redundant hairdressers from Vienna, waiters from Graz and salesmen from Salzburg who wore town shoes, held pickaxes with delicate hands and who gave up within a few days. But the drop-out rate otherwise remained at five per cent during those hard times. A comparison to the economic miracle 30 years later: 86 per cent of those employed on the high building sites of the Kitzsteinhorn Cable Railway capitulated. The Grossglockner High Alpine Road PLC acquired the right to arrange for this socially historic and unique exhibition in the old road-builder’s house. This is the place of remembrance of calluses, sunburn, frostbite and wear and tear on the strength of the anonymous Glockner labourers, to whom we – the international recreation association – have to thank for this tremendous road.

Two great Austrians: Wallack and Rehrl

But this exhibition is also a reminder of two great Austrians of international rank: the road builder Franz Wallack travelled on all of the alpine roads in Europe and then presented his exemplary project with the self-assurance of an expert. Only the Glockner Road leads up over a glacier and it offers the intoxicating scenario of a six-kilometre-long high drive from the Fuscher Törl to the Hochtor.

Wallack’s feat had borne little fruit without the tenacity of Franz Rehrl, the most significant head of Provincial Government of Salzburg. He used the three sources of power of a poor alpine region – inexhaustible water power, a cultural heritage admired worldwide and the attraction of nature at its grandest. In 1922 Rehrl saved the Salzburg Festival from collapse; in 1924 he built Salzburg’s first power-station dam – the “Bärenwerk” in Fusch; in 1929 he brought into being the subsequent symbol of Austria’s economic recovery – the large-scale Kaprun Power Station; in 1928 he built Salzburg’s first, and Austria’s third, cable-car on the Schmittenhöhe; in 1929 he constructed the Gaisberg Road as a productive provision against redundancy – celebrated in the German press as the first road on a summit in the eastern Alps; and then in Vienna he pushed through the financing of the Glockner Road – as an employment programme and a matchless tourist attraction.

Exhibition open daily

With this exhibition today the Grossglockner High Alpine Road PLC offers the thanks of us all to the anonymous Glockner labourers, to the road builder Wallack, and to Rehrl the politician. More than 50 million visitors have seen this tremendous work to date.

The permanent “Building of the Road” exhibition is at the Fuscher Lacke (km 29.3) on the Grossglockner High Alpine Road and is open daily from 9am to 5pm. Admission to this exhibition is free of charge.

The “Building of the Road” children’s playground

In a playful way, children can experience for themselves what a tremendous pioneering feat the “Glockner labourers”, as the road builders were called in those days, achieved in the building of the road between 1930 and 1935.