Bretton Woods Mountain Resort has been host to a Ski Museum exhibit in recent years. Located in the ground floor of the Bretton Woods base lodge, the exhibit usually consists of about fifty photographs and text drawn from the annual exhibits seen at the Ski Museum. A single chair from the 1940 Mount Mansfield chair lift, once the world’s longest, is also on display here.

Hannes Schneider Exhibit currently on display at  Bretton Woods

At the start of the 1955-56 ski season, Herbert Schneider took over the Hannes Schneider Ski School at Mt. Cranmore in North Conway, NH. Herbert’s father Hannes Schneider had died the previous April in North Conway, bequeathing the ski school to his son, and much more to the world of skiing. Schneider was the developer of the Arlberg technique of ski instruction that he developed as a young man in his region of western Austria on both sides of the Arlberg Pass. In 1938, at the height of his fame, Schneider’s life was turned upside-down by the occupation of his hometown by Austrian Nazis, who felt great animosity for him due to his past slights. Through the intervention of former North Conway resident and Manufacturer’s Trust president Harvey Dow Gibson, after a year of harassment, uncertainty, and house arrest, Schneider was allowed to emigrate to America to continue his ski teaching career at Cranmore Mountain.

The 50^th anniversary of Schneider’s passing was the occasion for a celebration of his life in his native Austria. The municipality of Stuben, Schneider’s birthplace, along with its neighboring town across the pass, St. Anton, where Schneider spent his career, organized an exhibition of the life of their skimeister, and held an academic conference in April, 2005. The exhibition, Hannes Schneider: Skiing Pioneer, will be on display at the New England Ski Museum’s satellite exhibit in the Bretton Woods Base Lodge through the end of the 2007 ski season.

There had been other teachers of downhill ski technique before Schneider, most using the same basic body positions that Schneider depended upon. Schneider’s great contribution was the addition of speed to the sport, an enhancement that spread the popularity of skiing, and the name of Hannes Schneider, around the globe. This diffusion of awareness was helped tremendously by a series of ski films directed by Arnold Fanck that were widely seen and clearly conveyed the beauty and grace of downhill skiing.

Many American skiers have been aware of Schneider’s time in North Conway, but fewer have a clear picture of his life in Austria, where he made his most important contributions, because there has been little material available to the English-speaking audience on his life and work there. The exhibition, curated by Christof Thöny of the Klostertal Museum with the addition of some American material by the New England Ski Museum, covers his life from his earliest days, when he taught himself to ski behind his Stuben house, running straight down the hill and into the open doors of the family barn, where he was only able to stop by aiming for the haystack.

The success of Schneider’s ski school in St. Anton set the stage for that town to enjoy a blossoming winter tourism business, bringing unexpected yet welcome prosperity to the rural area. Schneider assembled a remarkable collection of ski instructors, some of whom had large impacts on the American ski business in the 1930s and later; Friedl Pfeiffer, for instance, was instrumental in the development of Aspen as a ski destination.