And now here was Kurt, thrilled at my determination to write the book. His enthusiasm was infectious and convincing. Had I really been annoyed a few days ago by a thoughtless remark? I had already forgotten about it. Suddenly, I saw a strange picture before my eyes. I was standing at the bottom of a high and difficult mountain face, intending to climb it solo. Then I was joined by another solitary climber who, too, stood looking up the face, just as I had stood, searching, studying, assessing. An unexpected meeting, a brief word of greeting, and a decision was born to climb the face as a pair.
Following a spontaneous impulse, I asked Kurt: “Will you help me with the book? There is so much basic material that it needs continual revision and sifting. Thoughts and questions keep on cropping up which call for definite answers. It is often very hard to provide the right answer oneself. Could you stay for a few days?”
Kurt stayed for many days. We worked like demons, from morning till night. We wallowed in reports and statements, made notes, headings, began to write things down, mostly each working on his own. But we both looked forward to the evenings, when we joined up again and shared the experiences and fresh knowledge the day had brought. Those evenings frequently extended far into the night, occupied by long conversations which always seemed too short. Everything always revolved about the North Face of the Eiger. Yet it was a focus from which our thoughts could range outwards in all directions. And from some small occurrence on the Face we often travelled directly to life’s most serious problems. Memories which I had long since thought deeply overlaid came vividly to life again. A great deal of what was eventually set down and developed in the book arose out of our nightly talks. They were good days, those, with Kurt as my companion, and both of us spiritually in the shadow of the Eiger’s Face.
I have always been disappointed when climbers who lead a first ascent on a difficult climb fail to acknowledge the support of the second man on the rope. One loses nothing by reporting that the rope moved through the safeguarding hands of one’s partner while one was mastering an overhang. And now that the book about the North Face of the Eiger is finished, I would like to shake hands with Kurt Maix, just as I would on reaching a summit.
But there are many others besides Kurt whom I must thank for their share in the completion of this book. Their role has been that of the porters and team-mates on an expedition, who pitch camps and shuttle loads, so that the assault party can push on up to the top. The late Othmar Gurtner, that great Swiss mountaineer, author and editor, provided me, out of his rich store of knowledge, with endless facts, basic sources and special Eiger-documentation. How grateful I was for my acquaintance with Guido Tonella, who wields his pen for truth and justice as bravely as any Cavalier of old his sword. How gratefully I recognised in my correspondence with Lionel Terray and Gaston Rébuffat that brotherly comradeship which unites all climbers. And what thanks I owe to all the others who helped me, by their letters and reports, in my labours of compiling this book. Anderl Heckmair, Erich Vanis, Erich Waschak, Sepp Jöchler, Karl Blach, Sepp Larch, Jean Fuchs, Karl Gramminger, Alfred Hellepart…. Technical considerations alone prevent my naming all the others to whom my thanks are due. And then there are the dead, whose memories, whose achievements and whose letters survive as living witnesses of strong and good men: Fritz Kasparek, Ludwig Vörg, Hans Schlunegger, Karl Reiss, Jürgen Wellenkamp, Hermann Buhl and Louis Lachenal.
As I write these lines, the summer of 1958 has begun. It is five years since the last party succeeded in climbing the North Face of the Eiger—the twelfth to reach the top safe and sound. So far there has been no thirteenth. I know that within the next few weeks some keen young climbers will be trying to break the barrier of Tragedy which seems to hang over the thirteenth climb of the Face. They are continually in my thoughts.1
Easy enough to say it; but I mean it in all sincerity. I mean it as seriously as I mean the warning every reader of this book can draw from its pages. Obviously I could not fail to do justice to the rare beauty and the unique size of this mighty Face and of the route which leads up it; that would have been letting myself down. But I can only hope that Kurt Maix was right when he said: “No one who reads your book can fail to know, afterwards, whether he belongs on the Face or not….”
A few days ago two climbers came to see me. One of them was young Brandler, the very same Brandler who in 1956 saw Moosmüller and Söhnel go plunging to their death near the Difficult Crack. In those two years since Moosmüller’s falling body brushed past him, a boy has grown into a man who knows what responsibility means. He has worked hard and become a good mountaineer, not only an exceptional rock-climber. This summer he wants to try the Face again. His rope-mate is to be Hias Noichl, that outstanding Tirolean mountaineer and long-distance ski-runner. Brandler asked my advice about equipment for the climb. Ought I to have dodged the responsibility, by warning him and begging him not to try the Face again?
I could see that both were well-trained and well-prepared for an attempt on the Face. I could see that the character and skill of both men would make for a harmonious rope of two. I gave young Brandler as much advice as I could. We spoke in a matter-of-fact way without a touch of sentiment. Even when we said goodbye, I refrained from voicing the hope against hope which had been welling up within me all the time—“Come back safe, my friends….”
But I watched them both for a long time, as they went further and further away down the road….
1Berge der Welt (Schweizerische Stiftung für Alpine Forschungen), Büchergilde Gutenberg, Zürich-Frankfurt, 1955. English edition: The Mountain World 1955, Allen and Unwin, London.
1The success of Kurt Diemberger and Wolfgang Stefan is described in the Epilogue.—Translator’s note.
IT is common form to congratulate people on their birthdays. It is also customary to pay a suitable tribute to buildings, cities and associations when they reach a certain age. Biographies and autobiographies are written, and historical records, from the most comprehensive tomes to the smallest pamphlet. Why, then, not write a book to celebrate the birthday of a mountain, or even of a face of that mountain?
Admittedly, it is not the birthday celebration of the mountain or the face itself, but the remembrance of the day which first brought a human being into direct personal contact with it—the remembrance of the first ascent of a peak or the first successful climb of a face.
The 13,041-foot summit of the Eiger, in the Bernese Oberland, was first trodden by the foot of man just a hundred years ago, in 1858. Its North Face was climbed for the first time only twenty years ago, in 1938, and it was the climbing of this Face that first made the Eiger world-famous. Thanks to this, its name has become better-known than that of the Matterhorn or Mont Blanc. It has become familiar to millions of readers of innumerable newspaper reports; it has been mentioned hundreds of times on the radio. It became the epitome of everything tragically sensational that mountaineering had to offer the reader. When millions, who had never seen either the mountain or the Face, formed their own picture of it, it could hardly help being a caricature. What I propose to do here is to draw a true picture of it; one which will be hardly less exciting, but whose drama will be based on truth and fact, not on the uninformed imaginings of some pen-pusher. For the true story of the Eiger’s North Face is even more terrible and more glorious than men have yet been able to discover.
I am one of the party of four who, in July 1938, just twenty years ago, first succeeded in climbing the North Face. My memory of it is like a birthday celebration of my own, and has accompanied me to this day without ever diminishing in strength. Not even my great experience in Tibet, which gave such a decisive twist to my life, has ever succeeded in cancelling it out; nor did the memory ever fade during the thirteen