Coolidge had been the last man who could speak of heroes. While alive he had been regarded as an institution and had become an object of pilgrimage for younger mountaineers willing to brave his irritability. With his death it became suddenly apparent how much the Alps had changed since the Golden Age. Sanatoriums and winter sports were in the ascendant and the old, casual attitude to exploration had been replaced by a more technical approach. New mountaineering techniques had evolved, their adherents claiming Mummery as a spiritual father, and new mechanical aids had been introduced such as the piton and the karabiner clip which allowed climbers to attack previously impossible faces. The British and, to a degree, the French and Swiss, rejected pitons and the like as unsporting. They preferred to don tweeds and hire a guide to take them on a Whymper-style scramble. The British refused even to coin a word for the karabiner, ‘because the thing is un-English in name and nature’.1 The Germans and Italians, however, adopted the new methods eagerly. A young Munich mountaineer named Willy Welzenbach introduced a system of grading the rock climbs that mechanical devices had brought within reach. Ranging from an easy 1 to a 6 that strained ‘the limit of human capability’,2 the grades were slapped heroically across the Alpine map. It was a slightly meaningless exercise: the grades were not always consistent; they did not include ice slopes, thereby excluding some of the most difficult ascents; and they took no account of weather conditions which could turn a Grade 3 into a Grade 6 in a matter of hours - as Leslie Stephen had once said, ‘nothing can be less like a mountain at one time than the same mountain at another’.3 Nevertheless, Welzenbach’s grades did provide a framework that satisfied the urgency of the time.
Since the 1880s the Alps had been either a playground or a battlefield. Nobody had thought of them much in terms of exploration for, with the conquest of the Meije and lesser Dauphiné peaks, there were few summits left to explore. What Welzenbach and his ilk recognised, however, was that the new methods opened new avenues of exploration. It was not primary exploration - no dragons, no surprises, here - but on a secondary level it provided the same excitement: once again it was possible to go where none had previously gone; once again it was possible to recapture the thrill of treading untrodden ground; and with the grading system it was possible to measure one’s conquests against those of others.
Alpine exploration had always involved a degree of rivalry but now, with Welzenbach’s grades, it became a competitive sport. During the 1920s and 1930s Italian, German and Austrian mountaineers vied to conquer the most difficult faces by the most dangerous routes. Typically they were north faces, the nastiest possible; and, by the dogma of the period, they had to be climbed by an ascent direttissima, whose purity could be measured by drawing a straight line from top to bottom. This approach resulted in an unusually high death rate. Mountaineers dropped like flies - by the late 1930s the annual toll was pushing 100 - but for every man who died there were plenty to take his place. The patriotic drive which Whymper had faced on the Matterhorn so long ago was now rampant. According to one Italian newspaper: ‘A climber has fallen. Let a hundred others arise for the morrow. Let other youths strew edelweiss and alpenrose upon the body of the fallen comrade, and lay it with trembling devotion face upturned under the soft turf. Then up, once more to the assault of the rocks and of the summit, to commemorate the fallen one in the highest and most difficult of victories.’4
Britain, which had hitherto considered the Alps its private territory, raised its hands in horror. There was something abhorrent about other nations trespassing so rudely on the hallowed heights. Members of the Alpine Club fumed with a vague and indefinable resentment. One man, R. Irving, tried to rationalise their antipathy:
A Munich expert estimated that after seven years of very difficult climbing a man was fit for nothing more, if he was still alive. My own experience has been that the thrill of climbing a step near the limit of my powers has settled down into what I can best describe as discomfort. If a man depends on difficulty and the thrill of danger or of high achievements, he must keep pushing his standard of difficulty up till it can go no higher. If he has got so far without falling off himself, then his enthusiasm must begin to fall from him unless he has advanced in appreciation of what I may call more absolute values of mountaineering.5
It was not a new argument. The disapproval of professionalism had been voiced intermittently ever since Ruskin’s time, rising to a clamour each time someone overstepped the mark. Whymper had caused an outcry; so had his contemporary, A. C. Girdlestone, who had been officially censured for the suggestion that climbers could dispense with guides. Mummery had likewise infuriated people with the notion that it was acceptable to climb for the love of difficulty and danger alone. But, as he replied, in answer to Ruskin’s soaped-pole argument, if one liked sliding down soaped poles what was the harm in doing so? In Leslie Stephen’s words: ‘If I were to say that I liked eating olives, and someone asserted that I really ate them only out of affectation, my reply would be simply to go on eating olives.’6 The hypocrisy of Britain’s attitude was demonstrated by the numbers who went annually to the Himalayas to do exactly what Irving considered bad form: to push themselves to the limit as they struggled up the world’s highest and most hazardous mountains. Irving himself was a culprit. What it amounted to was Britain’s dislike of other countries doing better than itself.
In 1931 the Schmid brothers climbed the north face of the Matterhorn and Germany exploded with excitement. Newspapers eulogised them in mythological terms and when Franz, the older brother, published his dry, factual account of the climb, they turned it into a tale of fantastical triumph. The press wavered only slightly when Toni Schmid, the younger brother, fell to his death off the Weissbachhorn some years later. The Alps were a propaganda gift to Europe’s fascist states. Mussolini struck a Pro Valore medal for those who completed a new Grade 6 direttissima ascent. Hitler, more reserved, offered a handshake. In the run-up to the 1936 Berlin Olympics it was suggested that mountaineering become an eligible event, a notion that was only dropped when both Switzerland and Britain condemned it as ‘something to be deprecated at all costs’.7
German newspapers and broadcasters praised the Bergkameraden, or ‘mountain warriors’, who cycled and walked to Switzerland each year to attack a new face. They were portrayed as clean-cut, bronzed Aryans who came to conquer, to do battle with nature at its wildest and most romantic, unafraid of death. These youngsters, who were rarely older than 30 and often still in their teens, made an impressive sight. Camping at the base of a mountain, they bided their time until conditions were right and then made their attack, clanking with pitons and carrying hundreds of feet of rope. For a while Alpine motion pictures became the rage, and audiences across the continent flocked to see re-enactments of dramas such as the conquest of the Matterhorn which were produced by Europe’s interwar film industry. Leni Riefenstahl, the famous German film director of the 1930s, began her career as an actress in the snow. More often than not, however, the actors who flickered on the screens were genuine climbers. The mountaineering nationalism that had raised its head in Italy during the 1860s was manifest in the Germany of the 1930s. By 1934 the German and Austrian Alpine Club (now merged) felt able to declare that ‘Our mountaineers have in recent times been successful beyond compare … their exploits, contrasted with those of other nations, stand without question on an overwhelming pinnacle.’8
As with so much Nazi propaganda the glorious image hid a gim-crack reality. The Nordic gods of repute were as snaggle-toothed, narrow-shouldered and unexceptional as anyone else. Close analysis - provided by the Alpine Club - showed that Germany lagged far behind other nations in new ascents. Apart from the north face of the Matterhorn German climbers had achieved very little: the men who climbed the Dolomites, the Grandes Jorasses and other rock faces were almost exclusively French, Swiss, Italian or Austrian. Still, Germany persisted in the fabrication that its climbers were better than any others: ‘It is an ancient English custom to climb in the Alps with professional guides,’ said the Austro-German Alpine Journal. ‘The German mountaineer finds as a rule his own way, he cuts his own steps and trudges through deep snow relying on his own steam.’ It sneered at Britain’s ambitions in the Himalayas. ‘Owing to these traditions we are still more prepared than the English for the struggle with the eight-thousanders.’9 Britain retorted that the self-sufficient Teutons could not move an inch in the Himalayas without local porters and that Germany should remember that those porters were subjects of the British Empire.
Amidst the wrangling, the Alps sat patiently as the Bergkameraden addressed what they called ‘the problems’. These were rock faces graded 6 or above and there were plenty of them. But no sooner had one problem been solved than another arose, until the climbing fraternity were finally faced with the ‘last problem’. The north face of the Matterhorn had been a last problem. When it ceased to be so, the north face of the Eiger took its place - though not for very long: in 1932 it was conquered by a pair of Swiss climbers accompanied by two guides. In the eyes of the Bergkameraden, however, there was something unsatisfactory about the Swiss triumph. It had been conducted smoothly, professionally, in traditional style and with the minimum of publicity - admirable qualities no doubt, but failing utterly to conform with German notions of endeavour. What was needed was something with a bit more punch. After some deliberation it was decided that if the last problem had been solved so easily it must not have been the last problem.
The north face of the Eiger could be subdivided into two sections: the ‘easy’ face which the Swiss had climbed and a far more difficult face to the west known as the Eigerwand, or ‘Eiger Wall’. Here, obviously, was the true last problem. The Eigerwand was unclimbable in orthodox terms. It was steep, it was icy, it was rotten; in places the rocks formed an overhang; boulders bounced down it without cease; it had its own microclimate, trapping clouds and cold air in its concave basin so that while the surrounding valley basked in sunshine, the north face was whipped with rain and hail. In short, it was very horrible. But, as one German climber queried, ‘was its horror stronger than Man’s will-power, than his capacity? Who could answer that question?’10
In August 1935 two Bavarians, Max Sedlemayer and Karl Mehringer, became the first to do so. Peering through their field glasses they scanned the Eigerwand for a route to the summit. The first 800 feet seemed easy enough, if steep and prone to avalanches and rockfalls. Above this a large hole had been blasted out of the mountain to create a viewing gallery - officially the Eigerwand Station - for passengers on the Jungfraujoch line. Four hundred yards to the east was another hole, Kilometre 3.8, so called because it marked the point, 3.8 kilometres from the start of the track, where the tunnel engineers had drilled an opening through which they could jettison rubble. From the Eigerwand Station for a distance of perhaps 600 feet rose what appeared to be a vertical stretch of rock, ending in an ice field. A 300-foot rock face separated this ice field from a second one which, in turn, led diagonally to a third. From the third ice field a steep arête climbed up to a blodge of snow and ice whose white runnels spread out like spider’s legs - the ‘White Spider’. The topmost legs joined with a section of splintered rock; and above the rock was a final ice field that swept steeply to the 13,042-foot summit. It was impossible from a distance to tell what any of these obstacles would be like close to, but they appeared to be the only way up the Eigerwand.
At 2.00 a.m. on Wednesday, 21 August, Sedlemayer and Mehringer started their climb. News had spread and, when daylight came, people queued up at the Grindelwald telescopes to see how the pair were doing. By dusk they were well above the Eigerwand Station. On Thursday they crossed the first ice field and bivouacked at its upper rim. It took them all of Friday to pick their way up the next rock face to the second ice field. That night the Eiger was swept by a tremendous thunderstorm that continued throughout Saturday. Avalanches of stone, ice and snow poured down the north face; by all rights the two Bavarians should have been swept away. But, to the observers’ disbelief, when the clouds cleared on Sunday, Sedlemayer and Mehringer could be seen moving slowly up the second ice field. The crowd interpreted this as a good sign: if, having spent five days on the face, having endured murderously cold nights, having escaped death by avalanche and rockfall, Sedlemayer and Mehringer had not turned back, it could only mean that they were confident of reaching the top. Their optimism was misplaced: the two climbers had carried on only because they could not turn back. The rocks up which they had struggled were now glazed with ice and streaming with waterfalls; moreover, the fresh snow had increased the risk of avalanches. It had been hard enough getting up; in such conditions it would have been death to retreat; their only option was to continue in the hope that they could climb themselves out of the trap. That evening the mists closed over the Eigerwand, heralding yet another bout of ferocious weather. This time the Bavarians were lost.
Local guides were put on alert. By Tuesday German climbers had arrived in Grindelwald to assist in any rescue operation, but there was nothing that they or anybody else could do. The rocks were too treacherous to permit an attempt from below, and a descent from above was equally out of the question. Swiss army planes scoured the mountain but could see little through the mist. When the weather cleared on 19 September, the German air ace Ernst Udet and the Grindelwald guide Fritz Steuri went up for a final search. Flying 60 feet from the face, they spied a body: it was frozen upright, knee-deep in the snow at the top of the third ice field. Despite repeated passes they could not tell who it was, nor could they see any sign of a second corpse. Recovery was impossible, so the unidentified climber was left where he stood, on a spot which became known as Death Bivouac, a gruesome testimonial to the Eigerwand’s hazards. That season Grindelwald hoteliers charged double for the use of their telescopes.
Alpine purists were swift to condemn. If the two men had succeeded, said the Berne-based Sport, ‘according to our opinion even then no mountaineering deed had been achieved, merely a degradation inflicted on one of our great peaks, with the honoured traditions of mountaineering perverted into monkey tricks … It cannot sufficiently be stressed that such juggling with human life has no connection whatever with mountaineering. It is a German’s affair if he be compelled to exercise his modern psychology in “direct” ascents.’11 The Alpine Journal offered its condolences but pointed out that some thirty people had died in the Alps that year, largely through carelessness, and that Sedlemayer and Mehringer (misspelled as Nihringer) offered one of the most ‘flagrant examples of the neglect of every sane principle in an attempt to gain cheap notoriety’.12
One winter sufficed to cleanse the Eigerwand of its corpses and the memories of those who sought to conquer it. By the end of May 1936 - extraordinarily early - another two Bavarians, Albert Herbst and Hans Teufel, were in Grindelwald. ‘They were splendid climbers, to be sure,’ wrote a contemporary, ‘but perhaps lacking in that calm and relaxation which is the hall-mark of the accomplished master-climber.’13 On 1 July, to get in training for the Eiger, they went up the unclimbed north face of the Schneehorn. They reached the summit without difficulty; on the descent, however, they were swept 600 feet downhill by an avalanche. Herbst survived; Teufel hit the lip of a crevasse and broke his neck. The incident was reported under ‘Accidents and Crimes’.
The Herbst-Teufel disaster was still fresh when another duo, this time from Austria, threw themselves at the Eigerwand. Willy Angerer and Edi Rainer had studied the north face and come to the conclusion that there must be an easier way of reaching the first ice field than by the perilous rock face which rose above the Eigerwand Station and which had trapped Sedlemayer and Mehringer. To the right were a series of rock pillars from which it might be possible to traverse sideways onto the ice. On 6 July they climbed up the rock pillars, saw that a crossing might be feasible and came down the next day, nearly killing themselves in a 120-feet fall as they did so. ‘Grim?’ they told reporters, ‘No, only a trifle wet!’ They said other things too: ‘We have to climb your Wall for you if you won’t do it yourselves’ and ‘We must have the Wall or it will have us.’ Most importantly, ‘We shall go up again as soon as conditions improve.’14 The press loved it and blazed headlines like ‘The Battle with the Eiger Wall’, ‘New Life on the Face’ and ‘The All-Out Investment’. They also introduced a new word for the north face. It was no longer the Nordwand, or north wall, but the Mordwand, the murder wall.
On Saturday, 18 July 1936 Angerer and Rainer returned to the rock pillars - ‘in the teeth of every conceivable warning from local guides and experts’15 - pursued by a German team comprising Andreas Hinterstoisser and Toni Kurz. The two parties climbed independently for a while; then, as the Germans drew level with the Austrians, they decided to join forces. It was a good decision. Intrepid as Angerer and Rainer were, they lacked the climbing skills of the Germans. Hinterstoisser, in particular, was an adept at rock faces, having mastered the craft of manoeuvring by pitons and belays over seemingly impossible obstacles. With Hinterstoisser in the lead, they embarked on the traverse towards the first ice field. By train and bus, hordes of spectators came to Grindelwald to enjoy the spectacle.
Hinterstoisser performed magnificently, hammering his pitons across the near-vertical face, steadily paying out rope for the others. In Grindelwald and on the Kleine Scheidegg pass, the telescope tourists watched every move. When the last man had crossed the face, Hinterstoisser drew up the rope. The watchers were bemused: surely the point of finding a new approach was that it would provide a new retreat. Without a rope there could be no going back. But this was a strong team, they told themselves. Hinterstoisser knew what he was doing. He must have taken the rope because it was needed for the next part of the climb. On 20 July they rejoiced as Hinterstoisser and Kurz led the way in clear weather towards Death Bivouac, the two Austrians lagging slightly behind. Then something happened. The Austrians had stopped. The Germans came back down and, after some time, the whole team retraced its steps. Angerer, it transpired, had been hit on the head by a rock. On 21 July, having helped Angerer over more than 1,000 feet of rock and ice, they were once more at the head of the traverse. Without a fixed rope, however, it was impossible to retrace their steps. The only way down was via the rock face which Sedlemayer and Mehringer had rejected as being too dangerous in 1936 and which was no safer now. Hinterstoisser led the way and, to his great credit, brought the team safely down the first few hundred feet.
Albert von Allmen, an elderly employee on the Jungfrau Railway, had heard of the attempt and wondered how things were going. At noon on 21 July, he opened the wooden door that linked Kilometre 3.8 to the bleak cliffs outside and shouted to see if anyone was there. To his surprise there came a call from almost directly above. Instead of braving the whole descent Hinterstoisser had decided to take his men to one of the railway galleries. They would soon be with him, they told Allmen; everything was fine. Mistaking their relief for confidence, Allmen said he’d put the kettle on and shuffled back to his office. He waited for two hours, shifting the kettle on and off the hob, before he went back to the door. This time when he shouted only Kurz replied. The others were all dead and he himself was stuck. Allmen ran to the telephone.
A train was sent up the line, carrying four guides. On arriving at Allmen’s gallery the rescuers climbed onto the face and learned what had happened from a shouted conversation with Kurz. Hinterstoisser, in the lead, had detached himself from the rope to give Angerer behind him greater freedom of movement. In doing so he had fallen off the mountain. Angerer in turn had also slipped and, by evil mischance, the rope had wrapped itself around his neck. The jerk pulled Rainer off his feet jamming him tight against the piton to which the rope was attached. Unable to move, Rainer froze to death. Kurz, the last man on the rope, was left dangling against the face, one corpse pinned to the cliff above, another hanging by the neck below. The rescuers did their best to reach him but were driven back by icy rocks and fading daylight. Reluctantly they retreated to the gallery, pursued by Kurz’s shouts of anger and despair.
When they returned the next morning Kurz was still alive but his condition had worsened. That night, his fourth on the face, had been cold: icicles eight inches long hung from his crampons; he had lost a mitten and his left arm was frozen into near immobility. The rope, meanwhile, had swollen and stiffened into a thick, unwieldy cable. The four guides reached a point 130 feet below him, but were prevented from going higher by an overhang. Using rockets, they tried to get Kurz a line which he could then use to haul up a rope. But they were too close to the overhang: the rockets flew out from the face, within Kurz’s view but tantalisingly out of reach. Calling up to their invisible quarry they instructed him to climb down, cut Angerer from the rope, then climb back up and cut the rope beneath Rainer. Once he had done that he could unravel the rope, join the strands together and let down a line. In normal circumstances this would have been a difficult task. For Kurz, it was well nigh impossible. Incredibly, however, he began to hack his way across the face, first to Angerer - whose body had frozen to the face overnight - and then to Rainer, clutching the rope in his disabled hand and swinging the axe with his other.
The rope having been salvaged, Kurz faced the task of unravelling it. For five hours he picked at the strands, using his one good hand and his teeth. As he did so an avalanche swept past the rescuers, followed by a block of ice that narrowly missed one guide’s head. In its wake came Angerer’s body, which had unglued itself from the rocks. Then, unbelievably, a narrow line slithered down the overhang. Kurz was alive. The rescuers fastened a rope and pitons to the line, shouted an OK, and watched it creep slowly upwards. The rope, however, was too short, so they spliced a second rope to the end of the first and, once that had been accomplished, Toni Kurz began his abseil to safety. An hour later he slithered over the lip of the overhang. At that point, within ten feet of safety, the splice snagged on a piton. Kurz could go no further. He hauled on the rope but the knot was firmly stuck. The rescuers, who could touch his crampons with their ice axes, told him to pull harder. Kurz replied slowly and very clearly: ‘I am finished.’ He swung out into space, dead.
Three days later the European press gave its judgement. For once, notions of Wagnerian glory were cast aside. ‘When the search for notoriety and obstinate will-power conspire to bring a man to grief, one cannot really register regret,’16 said one newspaper. Ugly rumours spread that the ascent had been deliberately planned to coincide with the Berlin Olympics. It escaped nobody’s attention that Hinterstoisser and Kurz were both members of Germany’s 100 Jager Regiment and, under the headline ‘Climbing to Orders’, a correspondent wrote from Grindelwald that ‘A report is current here that the four climbers had been ordered to make the ascent. It has been said that they were very excited on Friday evening; that they would never have taken such a grave risk as free agents.’17 Without naming names the Alpine Club also put the blame on Hitler.
Others took a less partial view. According to one paper,
Perhaps these young men have nothing more to lose … what is to become of a generation to which Society offers no social existence and which has only one thing left to look to, a single day’s glory, the swiftly tarnishing highlight of a single hour? To be a bit of a hero, a bit of a soldier, sportsman or record-breaker, a gladiator, victorious one day, defeated the next… The four recent victims of the Eiger’s North Face were poor creatures. When some kindly folk in Grindelwald invited them to dinner, they tucked in to the proffered meal like true warriors; afterwards, they said they hadn’t had such a good meal for three years. When asked what was the purpose of their risky venture, they replied that its main object was to improve their positions. They believed that such an exceptional feat would bring them honour and glory, and make people take notice of them.18
Had the dead men been victims of a propaganda drive that went wrong? Probably not. They may have been suffused by the nationalism of the decade and they may well have been supporters of Hitler. Every German newspaper lauded them, and the frenzy for conquest was exactly the same as that which drove Whymper’s Italian opponents - and Whymper himself - up the Matterhorn. On the other hand Hinterstoisser’s commanding officer had sent a cable instructing him to desist - it arrived too late - and if the team had been climbing under orders it would surely have been better provisioned. Compared to Sedlemayer and Mehringer who, prior to departure, had climbed the Eiger by the standard route to deposit a cache of food on the summit, Hinterstoisser’s men were dismally ill-prepared. Rope, tent and pitons aside, their supplies - for what they knew could not be a climb of less than five days - had comprised per person, one pound of bread, half a pound of bacon and a tin of sardines. They may have been afflicted by the mood of the time, but the image of ‘poor creatures’ hoping for a bit of fame, rings truer than that of four daredevils risking all for the Reich. Perceptively, one Swiss academic likened the rush for the Eigerwand to the Children’s Crusade.
Later that year rescue parties picked up the remains. Angerer and Rainer were easily identifiable. Less so were the two heaps of bones which had once been Sedlemayer and Mehringer. A German team took precedence in Kurz’s retrieval and cut his body free with a knife attached to a pole. German radio promptly stated that they had been responsible for the whole rescue operation, a claim that was greeted by widespread jeers. One commentator remarked tartly that in the worst conditions it had taken the slowest Swiss guide forty-five minutes to reach Kurz from the gallery window; the Germans had struggled to complete the distance in four hours.
The ‘suicidal follies of the Eigerwand’,19 as the Alpine Journal put it, continued into 1937. On 15 July two Austrians, Franz Primas and Albert Gollacher, braved the Eiger in a display of monstrous incompetence. Gollacher, merely 18, was quite inexperienced, forgot to take any food with him and after five days on the mountain went mad and tried to throw Primas over the edge before freezing to death. Primas, who had neglected to bring a tent, was rescued from a snow cave on 20 July, suffering from severe frostbite. In a separate attempt two Italians also had to be rescued. Another Austrian team made it to Death Bivouac and returned safely - collecting Hinterstoisser’s body en route - therefore earning the dubious accolade of being the first to return intact from such a height. A Swiss woman accompanied by a guide climbed a few thousand feet before retreating unscathed. And two Germans who had tried to extort free drinks and food under the pretence of being Eiger men were expelled from the country. Meanwhile, telescopes swivelled to and fro, as ‘the proletariat, herding around the base, awaited events with the same deplorable expectancy as in 1935-6’.20
The Alpine Club spluttered with rage. ‘The Eigerwand … continues to be an obsession for the mentally deranged of almost every nation,’ the President said on 6 December 1937. ‘He who first succeeds may rest assured that he has accomplished the most imbecile variant since mountaineering first began.’21 In Grindelwald the authorities forbade any further attempts on the Eigerwand, with the rather feeble sanction of a fine. Later, realising that dead men could not pay, they withdrew the notice and substituted a threat that no rescue operations would be mounted if climbers became stranded. It had not the slightest impact. At the next Nuremberg Rally, Hitler invited the Reich’s foremost climber, Anderl Heckmair, to stand with him on the balcony. The spotlights swirled, the stadium cheered and the Eigerwand became a tacit part of the Nazi dream. Meanwhile, scraps of the banning notice drifted forlornly over the Eiger’s lower slopes.
In 1938 the usual collection of hopefuls arrived in Grindelwald, erecting their tents in the meadows, sleeping in hayricks or lurking in the forest. Fearing public condemnation, they were more secretive than before, and avoided the press. But nothing could hide their voracity for the Eigerwand. The season started on 21 June with the deaths of two Italians. Bartolo Sandri and Mario Menti were youngsters of 23 who worked in a wool factory and had no experience of ice. Sandri was discovered in a patch of snow at the foot of the face; Menti was recovered a few days later from the bottom of a 150-foot crevasse. Then, on 21 July, four Austrians emerged from the trees and started up the Eigerwand. Two of them later dropped out, but the other two, Heinrich Harrer and Fritz Kasparek, carried on. They were at the rock pillars when they realised they were not alone. Heckmair, of Nuremberg fame, had also been hiding in the trees and had sprung up the face with incredible rapidity. He and his partner Ludwig Vörg were waiting when Harrer and Kasparek arrived. Harrer had no choice but to continue the ascent with them. It was as well he did, because Heckmair was a phenomenal mountaineer. Taking the lead, he vaulted up the face, at times seeming to levitate himself over insurmountable cliffs.
‘He treated us to an acrobatic tour de force,’ wrote Harrer, ‘an exhibition exercise, such as we had rarely witnessed before. It was half superb rock-technique, half a toe-dance on the ice - a toe-dance above a perpendicular drop. He got a hold on the rock, a hold on the ice, bent himself double, uncoiled himself, the front points of his crampons moving ever upwards, boring into the ice. They only got a few millimetres purchase but that was enough.’22 The weather worsened but Heckmair forged on. They climbed by day and during the shadowy pre-dawn light - ‘Fear’s friendly sister,’23 Harrer called it. They slept upright on the narrowest of ledges, buffeted by winds, held in place only by their ropes. Gales shrieked around them, snow fell, water poured down their necks and came out at their ankles. After one meal Heckmair was poisoned by a bad sardine, but still he continued. He led them higher and higher, beyond Death Bivouac, beyond the third ice field, beyond the White Spider and onto the final stretch. They slipped and cut each other with their crampons. Vörg almost lost his hand when the man above trod on it. At one point Heckmair fell, ripping a string of pitons from the cliff before the rope stopped him. Undeterred, he climbed up and hammered every piton back in place. They watched avalanches and timed them to take advantage of the intervals between falls. And then, at 3.30 p.m. on 24 July 1938, they chopped through the final cornice. It had taken them eighty-five hours, but at last they had beaten the Eigerwand.
Victory brought only numbed acceptance:
Joy, relief, tumultuous triumph? Not a bit of it,’ wrote Harrer. ‘Our release had come too suddenly, our minds and nerves were too dulled, our bodies too utterly weary to permit of any violent emotion … The storm was raging so fiercely on the summit that we had to bend double. Thick crusts of ice had formed around our eyes, noses and mouths; we had to scratch them away before we could see each other, speak or even breathe. We probably looked like legendary monsters of the Arctic … This was no place in which to turn handsprings or shriek with joy and happiness. We just shook hands without a word. Then we started down at once.24
The descent was nothing compared to what they had already endured but it was nevertheless ‘full of spite and malice’.25 The blizzard closed visibility to a small circle; the ice was treacherous and overlaid by three feet of snow. As they slipped and staggered through the murk they lost their way and, heartbreakingly, had to climb back hundreds of feet. Heckmair, who had been sustained by nervous energy during the ascent, now collapsed; unable to take the lead, he trudged mechanically behind the others.
When snow gave way to rain they realised they had climbed below the storm. But by this time they were all more or less dazed. They saw black dots coming to greet them and wondered what so many people could be doing out on the glacier. They saw the Kleine Scheidegg hotel and thought how nice it would be to have a bed there - if only they had remembered to bring money. A boy swam into view, stared at them as if they were ghosts, then ran away shouting, ‘Here they are! They are coming!’26 Down they trudged, still not quite connecting what was happening with what they had done, until they were surrounded by well-wishers. There were friends from Vienna and Munich, guides from the Rescue Service, reporters, tourists and Grindelwald locals. They offered to carry their rucksacks, lit cigarettes for them, gave them flasks of brandy and promised free accommodation in any hotel of their choice. They would have carried them on their shoulders had they been allowed. Harrer was overcome: ‘For the first time, we felt the intense satisfaction, the relaxation, the relief from every care, and the indescribable delight at having climbed the North Face … In the rush and whirl of everyday things, we so often live alongside one another without making any mutual contact. We had learned on the North Face of the Eiger that men are good and the earth on which we were born is good. And now that earth was welcoming us home.’27
Back in Berlin, Harrer, Heckmair, Kasparek and Vörg became heroes. Medals were awarded, and Heckmair was once more paraded before the party faithful. Hitler shook his hand and, to the popping of flashbulbs, gave him tickets for a free cruise of the Scandinavian fjords. Harrer was rewarded by a place on Germany’s 1939 Himalaya expedition, the results of which were his wartime internment in India and, following his escape, seven years’ seclusion in Tibet. Kasparek received nothing and fell off a Peruvian cornice in 1954. Vörg was promoted to an elite mountaineering regiment and died on the Eastern Front in a wasteful attack on a Russian position.
Inevitably, there was resentment. The Alpine Journal offered little in the way of congratulation and gave the most grudgingly bland account of their triumph. A Frenchman famously remarked that ‘C’est pas de l’Alpinisme, ça, c’est la guerre. ‘28 And then, of course, there were accusations that they had been climbing for the benefit of the Third Reich. Harrer rejected the charge angrily. ‘To ascribe material motives and similar external rewards of success to our climb would be a lie and a slander. Not one of us improved his social position one whit thanks to a mountaineering feat which excited such general admiration. Nobody dangled Olympic or other medals before our eyes … As to the report that we climbed on the orders, or even at the wish, of some personage or other, it is absolutely off the mark. We followed the dictates of our own will solely.’29 (But from where had those dictates sprung?) Heckmair spoke more bluntly. Of his official reception he said, ‘It could have happened to a dancing bear.’30
In a way, it did not really matter whether they had been sponsored by Hitler or not. They had climbed the Eigerwand and, whatever their motives, nothing could diminish this extraordinary feat. Indeed, it would have been beautifully apt if they had been offered inducements; for their triumph was part of a process that had started some 175 years before when Horace Bénédict de Saussure first put a price on Mont Blanc’s head.
The Eigerwand did not mark the end of Alpine exploration. In years to come there would be other last problems as climbers sought new approaches to old hills and tackled them from different angles. Its conquest, however, was definitive when the Alps still wore a cloak of mystery - albeit a tattered and increasingly threadbare one. Tourism was growing during the 1930s but it was restricted to a few major resorts, such as Zermatt, Grindelwald, Chamonix, and St Moritz; away from the major destinations individuals could still wander across barren glaciers and through untouched valleys whose villagers and chalet-dwellers were not much different from those of the previous century.
After World War II the Alps changed irrevocably. Ski resorts proliferated as entrepreneurs devoured the empty spaces. The discovery of antibiotics killed the sanatoriums almost overnight; those few that survived did so only because they were well placed to exploit the winter influx, their expensive medical facilities catering to injury rather than illness. Pylons for ski lifts, gondolas and cable cars marched across every slope. Gradients were bulldozed and forests were cut down to create pistes. Ropes were pinned to the Matterhorn to make life easier for those wishing to conquer the Big Rock. Tunnels were blasted through obstructive mountains to facilitate the flow of traffic between Italy and the rest of Europe. In the postwar years more people travelled through the Alps, more people came to stay in them and more business was conducted there than at any time in the area’s long history.
This well-groomed wilderness was no place for dragons. Yet its upper levels retained a strange fascination. Climbers still strode across passes, clambered over glaciers and struggled with dangerous new routes. Far fewer in number than the thousands who rushed to the Alps every winter, they preserved a glimmer of the old romance. They could not enjoy the freshness which had been the trademark of the Golden Age - up to a hundred a day were known to climb the Matterhorn - but they could experience the same sense of accomplishment. Like their predecessors, they were trespassers in a hostile environment; they were adventurers in an old tradition.
The pioneers were driven to climb the Alps for varied and complex reasons. Scientific inquiry played a part; sheer egotism was an even stronger motive. Some of them were escaping modern life; others saw Alpine achievement as the culmination of modernity; others, still, considered climbing a spiritual necessity. And, of course, some went just for the hell of it. Swirling in their wake came painters, poets and pedants, each of whom imagined the Alps in their own particular way. But if one had to choose a single sentence to encapsulate the essence of Alpine exploration, the magic which drove men and women to the peaks again and again; if one sifted through the archives, from Master John de Bremble, Leonardo da Vinci, Conrad Gesner, Bourrit, Saussure and Forbes, to Wills, Whymper, Tyndall, Conway, Coolidge and beyond, no words are better than those of Harrer on returning from the Eigerwand. Echoing a sentiment that was shared by hundreds of climbers across two centuries, Harrer said, simply: ‘We had made an excursion into another world and we had come back.’31