CULTURAL STUDIES
N
anga Parbat” is derived from the
Sanskrit term “nagna parvata”, meaning “naked mountain”, because its
sides are too steep to allow snow to cover it
entirely. At 8.125 metres, it is the ninth highest
mountain in the world. The fact that it is located
in the Kashmir area in Pakistan and more than
5,000 kilometres away from Berlin presented
no bar to the prominent place it once occupied
in the minds of the Germans.
As Harald Höbusch relates in Mountain of
Destiny: Nanga Parbat and its path into the
German imagination, it all began in 1854
when the Schlagintweit brothers, Hermann,
Adolph and Robert, explorers and scientists
from Munich, embarked on their expedition to
India and the Himalayas to conduct a Magnetic Survey of India – a project originally
conceived by Alexander von Humboldt. It was
Adolph who first drew a panorama of Nanga
Parbat in great detail. More than half a century
passed. After defeat in the First World War,
mountaineering quickly evolved as a means to
restore the moral and mental strength of the
German people. The author devotes an interesting aside to Bruno Taut’s utopian concept
of 1918–19 of architecturally transforming
the Alpine regions of Europe, as a common
effort of the European nations after the devastating experience of war. The decades before
the Second World War saw a boom in alpine
literature and films, the so-called Bergfilm
Peak curiosity
The German obsession with Nanga Parbat
BERND BRUNNER
Harald Höbusch
MOUNTAIN OF DESTINY
Nanga Parbat and its path into the German
imagination
282pp. Camden House. £60.
978 1 57 113958 0
(mountain film) genre, with Leni Riefenstahl,
both actor and director, one of its most prominent propagators. These films foreshadowed
things to come. As soon became clear, conquering the Alps was simply not enough:
national renewal required other challenges;
fantasies would be played out thousands of
miles away. As German mountaineers didn’t
have access to Tibet and Mount Everest, they
first focused on Kangchenjunga, known for its
long ridges and located partly in Nepal and
partly in India. But when the extent of the difficulties became clear, attention soon shifted
towards Nanga Parbat, which at least offered
a realistic chance for an ascent. The fact that
Willy Merkl’s disastrous expeditions of 1932
and 1934 to this mountain had ended in his
own death and that of a further nine members
of his party only helped to trigger public interest in the endeavour: the mountain became the
mountain of fate of the Germans (“Schicksalsberg der Deutschen”), and further climbing
expeditions followed. Mountaineering and
“total mobilization” would soon overlap in the
German imagination with climber and warrior
as one and the same person. When Nanga Parbat was symbolically conquered, if only partially, by a group of climbers, it became the
battlefield of “a vertical form of imperialism”.
The bond between alpinism and National
Socialism was strengthened further, and the
“German Himalaya Foundation” went on to
control all expeditions to the region, which
were supported by various German agencies.
Through a close reading of various filmic and
literary accounts that span more than eight
decades, Höbusch exposes the continuities and
discontinuities in German discourse on the
various expeditions. Not surprisingly, there
were some continuities after Hitler was
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37
defeated. Some even saw nothing wrong with
following in the ideological footsteps of those
mountaineers whose accounts were written
before the war. The Tyrolian Hermann Buhl
finally succeeded in 1953 in reaching the summit in a German-Austrian team, without artificial oxygen and with the help of Pervitin (the
drug that may have been used by Hitler, as
hypothesized by Norman Ohler in his recent
book Blitz). But it took the popular South Tyrolian Reinhold Messner, “the first superstar of
modern alpinism”, to break the common pattern
of understanding these expeditions in terms of
teamwork, comradeship and leadership and
replace it with tropes of individualism, instinct
and independence. In 1970, Messner climbed
the extremely difficult Rupal face of Nanga Parbat with his brother Günther, who lost his life in
unclear circumstances during the descent. In
2010, Joseph Vilsmaier made his film Nanga
Parbat about the expedition.
Höbusch concludes his book by stating his
conviction that Nanga Parbat “will eventually
reenter the German imagination”, perhaps
through an ascent of the mountain in virtual
reality mode. My feeling, however, is that Reinhold Messner has successfully resolved the
issue Germans had with this particular mountain and for good. The number of German
climbers on the mountain today in any case has
greatly declined, as people from other countries
have taken on the challenge.