MOUNTAIN PEOPLE
“Unfortunately the film won at the Trento Film Festival and went here and there into the cinema, so now everybody thinks I’m finished. Mostly people don’t like it because they don’t want to see me like that. It’s an anti-heroic film”.
Nowadays Diemberger is re-energised and meets me at my hotel, strong-arming me into the back of a hatchback driven by his wife Teresa. There is something theatrical about the short and powerful Austrian who is a jolly, obliging host and endearingly, self-consciously portly. But he is also clearly fit and recognises last year’s illness as “just another phase in my life”: he is recently back from the Andes where he went to nearly 5,000m and keeps fit by walking up the long hill to his Bologna home.
That Diemberger should lay himself open like this and invite me to his home is a generosity you expect after reading the classic account of his life, loves and losses – and high jinks in the death zone. The three books translated as The Kurt Diemberger Omnibus often contain all of these elements in the same story.
Sometimes they make for uncomfortable reading, as with the
harrowing account of the black summer on K2 in 1986 when his climbing partner Julie Tullis died in her tent and Diemberger crawled off the mountain alone. The missing fingers of his right hand bear witness to this ordeal. This tragedy brought rare comment from outside the world of mountaineering and raised a few eyebrows in the wider media; it became a women’s rights issue; sometimes Tullis’ death seems confused with that of fellow British mountaineer Alison Hargreaves. Some commentators have stressed Tullis’ relative inexperience and found the idea of a married woman in a tent with a man who was not her husband problematic, and this adds a moral dimension to an already tragic tale. But these complicating elements make Diemberger’s account of what happened on K2 so gripping and so draining. “It was an incredibly hard book to write”, he tells me at the beginning of our interview, “and I wrote it as a memorial to Julie”. When Diemberger then describes Julie Tullis as his “climbing
partner” it is not to devalue her or evade tabloid questions about their relationship, but to define from the outset a preoccupying ideal of partnership you feel is central to his idea of life. In his books Diemberger is honest about his attractions to women and there are diversions along the course of his narrative journey which place his mountaineering achievements in relation to his loves. His account of youthful success on the North Face of the Matterhorn in Summits and Secrets, for example, is interspersed with an account of a seduction (“I asked her to go to the ice-falls with me… The seracs glimmered”), all of which suggests a man whose appreciation of the finer things in life goes beyond rock and ice.
It’s easy to envy Diemberger: as being from a halcyon, hippyish age when anything was possible and very little had been climbed. I put it to him that the sort of swinging Austrian post-war childhood he describes in Summits and Secrets, free- ranging over the hills and crystal hunting, is almost impossibly romantic. He dismisses this idealised version as we sit down to talk, his resonant Germanic-English suddenly pan-flat: “When the war was over my father was in a prisoner’s camp for two years and we only could see him once every month, even then at a distance. That was hard. Then my mother died in 1947. My sister, who two years younger than me, managed the whole household for my father and me at 13 years old. She didn’t have an easy life. My father only came back home not long before my mother died.
“My father was a biologist teaching in the high school. Many 32 | CLIMB. WALK. JOIN.
people were imprisoned at the end of the war because one had to find out whether they had to do with racism. During the war, if you wanted to feed a family you have to be in the political party; almost everybody was in the Nazi party whether they wanted to be or not. If you were also teaching biology then, my god...”
R The young Kurt. When he was 20, he climbed the Matterhorn, Breithorn, Bernina-
Biancograt and Piz Roseg on a bike tour.
If a tough streak was born in Diemberger during this period then it would serve him well in the years which followed, as he made impressive early repeats of the Eiger Nordwand, Matterhorn North Face and Walker Spur, as well as a prodigiously imaginative ascent of the ‘Giant Meringue’ on the Königsspitze North-East Face - “the finest ice wall in the Alps” – which earned him the attention of Herman Buhl whom Diemberger describes as “a kind of idol of mine”.
Diemberger was only 25 in 1957 when he was invited by Buhl to join an ambitious four-man expedition to Broad Peak in the Karakorum along with Marcus Schmuck and Fritz Wintersteller. After nearly a month of effort the small party were first to succeed on an 8,000m mountain in alpine style, using no high-altitude porters and no oxygen, via direct route to the summit made possible by their lightweight approach. This was Herman Buhl’s vision and motivated in part by his success on Nanga Parbat in 1953, when he soloed out of his expedition’s highest camp to complete the first ascent in a 41-hour odyssey which included exciting high-altitude rock climbing and a standing bivouac at 8,000m in his shirt. The Broad Peak team’s streamlined success was a rejoinder to the prevailing siege-style expeditions of the time, such as the British success on Everest, and did much to establish an idea of good style in mountaineering.
“HIS ACCOUNT OF YOUTHFUL SUCCESS ON THE NORTH FACE OF THE MATTERHORN IN SUMMITS AND SECRETS IS INTERSPERSED WITH AN ACCOUNT OF A SEDUCTION.”
19 32
Diemberger’s account of his time on the summit of Broad
Peak with Buhl does much to suggest the ultimate end of this alpine approach. He sketches a luminous, almost transcendental scene, with the sanctity of the summit and its romance maintained:
“There we stood, speechless, and shook hands in silence. Down on the horizon a narrow strip of sunlight flickered – a beam of light reached out above and across the darkness towards us, just caressing the last few feet of our summit. We looked down at the snow underfoot, and to our amazement it seemed to be aglow. Then the light went out.”
Like Julie Tullis, Herman Buhl was destined not to return from a trip to the high mountains with Diemberger: Buhl fell through a cornice during a hasty retreat from Chogolisa on the same 1957 Karakorum trip. When I suggest that he might be a hard man to keep up with, Diemberger just shrugs his shoulders. Despite his obvious physical resilience the effect of these lost friends on a man of his sensitivities is clear. Diemberger loops back constantly to the subject of Tullis and Buhl as if still trying to come to terms
PHOTO COPYRIGHT: KURT DIEMBERGER
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