The Yeti Society. Martin Sexton
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given you a different attitude towards death?’
Messner replied, ’I have a different attitude towards death in general because of climbing and perhaps because of my brother's death. Even though I still have the feeling he is alive, and not just in dreams, but say when I look at the mountains we climbed together. We were together in the hardest climb I have ever been on, we were in the tough situations and one was responsible for the other if we fell, and that welded us together so intensely that we can never be separated again. And whenever I look at that rock face today…I have the feeling he is still alive and I feel those hard, dangerous, so intense moments again, just as he feels them as if he were with me. I don't have that feeling he died in my place. I have the feeling that I myself died in that expedition.’
Although Messner was used to controversy in as much as anyone could be, the insults he received around the death of his brother were even harder to take, as they not only came from those whom he set out with on that fatal day but these same fellow climbers formed the small group that both he and his brother always looked for some support from. Reinhold and Gunther were brothers but something even deeper bound them. Their father Joseph was a World War I veteran, who returned to the small alpine village in the Villnoss Valley, shell-shocked, unable to come to terms with his war fatigue or to safely process his violent rages either against the dogs they kept, his nine children, or their long-suffering mother. One day Reinhold went looking for his younger brother Gunther and found him, after much searching, cowering in the dog kennel. Their father had beaten him so badly with the dog whip he was unable to walk. He helped him and tried to protect him from his father's later rages. Reinhold learnt to stand up to his father so by the age of 10 his beatings were not as severe. Together they shared this terrible secret about their father whom they also tried to love, but Gunther and Reinhold had also become wise children and bonded allies against the injustices of the world.
As they grew up, young Reinhold and Gunther impressed the older, more established climbers and were invited on what would turn out to be this most fatal climb in 1969/70.
Neither Gunther nor Reinhold knew that this climb was organised because of an obsession by the team leader regarding his half-brother Willy Merkl who had led a fatal expedition financed by Nazi Germany in 1934 and the particular Nazi fantasy around all things mountainous and epic. An attempt in 1932 by Merkl had failed, as he was hopelessly unprepared for the challenges of the Himalaya. This time, despite Nazi funding and to add to the delusion, Merkl had wanted the entire team, including two other climbers and six sherpas, to immediately arrive at the summit in a grand finale fitting of a Leni Riefenstahl film starring or directed by her. Riefenstahl happened to be a favourite of Hitler, as indeed were all ‘Bergfilme’ or mountain films produced under the rise of the Nazis. This time Merkl was one of many German climbers who wished to turn fantasy into fact. His mob-handed ascent proved fatal when all the climbers and the sherpas died. In 1938, another German expedition found his frozen body, along with a sherpa, in a snow cave. The 1932 and the 1938 teams were members of the German and Austrian Alpine Club, both nationalistic and rife with anti-Semitism and with a notorious ‘Aryan paragraph’ going back as far as 1899 in its club documents.
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