Sport | Mountaineering |
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Category | Amateur athletic association |
Founded | May 9, 1869 |
Affiliation | International Federation of Sport Climbing |
Regional affiliation | 355 sections |
Headquarters | Munich |
President | Josef Klenner |
Official website | |
alpenverein |
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The German Alpine Club (German: Deutscher Alpenverein, DAV) is the world's largest climbing association, and the eighth-largest sports union in Germany. The Club is a member of the German Olympic Sports Confederation, and the responsible body for sport and competition climbing, hiking, mountaineering, hill walking, ice climbing, mountain expeditions, as well as ski mountaineering.
The German Alpine Club was founded as Bildungsbürgerlicher Bergsteigerverein on 6 May 1869 in Munich by 36 former members of the Austrian Alpine Club around the Ötztal curate Franz Senn, in order to promote the tourist development of the Eastern Alps by the erection of mountain huts, hiking trails, and via ferratas. The association enjoyed a large clientele from the beginning, with a number of 1070 members after only 10 months.
The German and the Austrian societies merged in 1873 to form the German and Austrian Alpine Club (DÖAV). Already in the late 19th century, the association's policies were increasingly characterized by nationalism and antisemitism. In 1899 the Brandenburg section amended an "Aryan paragraph" to exclude non-Christian members, followed by the Vienna section in 1905 and the Alpine corporations of Vienna and Munich in 1907 and 1910. After World War I, the Jewish associates like Viktor Frankl and Fred Zinnemann (adding up to about one third of the membership) were banned in most of the sections and in turn established a separate Donauland section insisting on their DÖAV fellowship. The Donauland members were officially ousted in 1924. Jews were even banned from visiting the DÖAV mountain huts.