A woodsman who can barely read or write has a tunnel blasted through a mountain saddle so that timber can be floated across the watershed — and becomes Vienna’s most important supplier of firewood. The King of the Rax really existed. Based on the novel by Ottokar Janetschek.
At the end of the eighteenth century Vienna is running out of firewood. The forests within reach have been felled, the roads are poor, and what still stands, stands in valleys nobody can get it out of. In the Höllental between Hirschwang and the Nasswald there is primeval forest.
Two brothers have a reputation for making the impossible possible: Johann and Georg Hubmer. They bring in a close-knit crew of Protestant woodsmen from Mitterbach near Mariazell, clear the forest and float the timber down to the valley on water. Left behind are the women, the children and a schoolmaster whose job is to stop those children being baptised Catholic and absorbed into the parish.
It is hard work and not remotely romantic. Men are killed on the job, and in the process the authorities discover that the dead man was no Catholic. The ironworks manager at Hirschwang refuses to settle the accounts, and an argument about money ends with a blade in someone’s side. What grows out of the wilderness is more than a business in the end: a Protestant settlement in the middle of a Catholic country, which can only survive once the Emperor himself puts a hand over it.
And then there is the man who cannot write properly and nevertheless has the longest tunnel in Austria of its day blasted through the Gscheidl saddle. From Wiener Neustadt onwards, the canal carries the timber to Vienna.
The material is laid out as an eight-part series; episode outlines exist.
Georg Hubmer, then spelled Huebmer, was born on 11 April 1755 in Gosau below the Dachstein, one of five children of a family of crypto-Protestants. At seventeen he left the village with his elder brother Johann, without finishing school, and worked as a woodsman in the Waldviertel, on the Ötscher and on the Herrenalpe near Lunz am See. He died on 20 March 1833 in Naßwald.
In 1784 the brothers won the contract to bring charcoal timber out of the forests of the Counts Hoyos around the Rax, the Schneeberg and the Naßtal — fuel for the ironworks at Hirschwang. They settled in what is now Hinternaßwald with further woodworkers and their families from Gosau, Goisern, Hallstatt and Mitterbach, and built the timber chutes, dams and booms on the Nassbach and the Schwarza that the work required.
As early as 1797, when construction of the Wiener Neustädter Canal began, both brothers saw the chance to bring the firewood the growing imperial capital urgently needed to Vienna along this route. Johann died in 1799. Only in 1808 could Georg, now the business partner of Count Johann Ernst Hoyos, organise transport over some hundred and twenty-five kilometres. In 1817 Emperor Franz II additionally granted him the exclusive floating privilege on the river Traisen.
In 1826 Hubmer had a Protestant school and prayer house built in Naßwald. To the people there he was employer, health fund, pension provider, judge and legal representative all at once; they called him the father of Naßwald. At its height up to four hundred forest workers were employed by the Huebmer Floating Company. His last undertaking was a cemetery for the Protestant inhabitants of the district. He was the first person buried in it.
The name King of the Rax came only a century later, through Ottokar Janetschek’s novel. The descendants of his woodsmen are scattered across the world today and meet once a year in Naßwald.
The canal was meant to reach Trieste. Begun in 1797 and in operation from 1803, it was in fact only built as far as the Wiener Neustadt area. It ended in a harbour basin in Vienna’s Landstraße district — where the Stadtpark, the Hilton and the Wien Mitte complex stand today — and ran from there past Laxenburg and via Kledering, today’s marshalling yard, to the south.
Part of the Vienna stretch lies beneath Obere, Rechte and Linke Bahngasse in the third district. The RitzlFilm office stands on that line.
Roughly half the transport distance the logs covered by floating freely down the Preinbach, the Naßbach, the Schwarza and the Kehrbach. For the other half, at the peak, almost thirty vessels worked the canal.
Once the forests around Naßwald had been cleared, Hubmer had to move into the catchment of the river Mürz, which has no connection to the Schwarza. From 1811, and after an interruption from 1822, he therefore had a 430-metre floating tunnel blasted through the dividing saddle of the Gscheidl, 1,134 metres high.
Digging proceeded from both ends at once. The two bores met in the middle. By diverting several streams through the tunnel, timber could now be floated across the watershed. It was the longest tunnel in Austria at the time, devised by a man who could barely read, write or calculate.
Hubmer’s tunnel is buried today. Part of the second, 760-metre tunnel that his grandson had blasted can still be seen, as can remains of the floating channels on the Gscheidl. In Naßwald a memorial in a reconstructed woodsman’s hut recalls him; the church he founded and his house are still standing.