From Der Berg ruft to The Challenge: Adapting a Bergfilm for the English Market

Piercing the sky on the Swiss-Italian border, the Matterhorn, with its memorable pyramidal shape, is almost certainly the world’s most recognized mountain. Its first ascent in 1865 remains one of mountaineering’s most dramatic stories. This climb is generally considered to have marked the end of an era in mountaineering history, that of the so-called Golden Age of Alpinism, since the Matterhorn was the last of the major Alpine peaks to be climbed. Not surprisingly, the mountain has played a role in film history as well. The earliest known footage of an Alpine film is a short reel shot on the upper slopes of the Matterhorn by an unknown cameraman in 1901 (König 105). While the Matterhorn has become a cultural icon as the epitome of what a mountain should look like, inspiring everything from Jamaican cigarettes to a rollercoaster at Disneyland, it has had a fairly limited presence in film. Most prominently, the Matterhorn is the setting of three films by Luis Trenker (1892–1990), all of which revolve around the first ascent of the mountain by Edward Whymper in 1865: Der Kampf ums Matter-horn (silent film version 1928, sound version 1934), Der Berg ruft, and The Challenge (both 1937/1938). Trenker himself states that the latter two films are versions of the same film (Alles gut gegangen 367). I will argue, however, that they differ significantly from one another. For one, the two films have almost entirely different casts (Trenker and several of the Swiss mountain guides are the only actors who appear in both films). Furthermore, while the plot of the films is generally identical and based on the historical record, many significant differences exist between the English-and German-language versions. Premiering as they did at the beginning of 1938, the films stand at a precarious historical moment, years after the National Socialist takeover of power in Germany but before the beginning of the Second World War. Der Berg ruft and The Challenge thus present an opportunity to investigate how a supposedly quintessentially Germanic film genre could be adapted for a foreign market shortly before the Second World War. These two films are positioned at a unique nexus in both political and film-making history. Analysing Der Berg ruft and The Challenge affords insight not only into the Bergfilm but also into the brief filmic phenomenon of the multiple-language version (MLV). In addition, the details of this German-English co-production shed light on an often forgotten chapter of Nazi cultural and foreign policy regarding England, as well as on film in the Third Reich in general. The Challenge differs from Der Berg ruft in ways that are meant to be flattering to the English, for the sake of not only commercial success but also the perception of the Third Reich in Great Britain. I will discuss these differences and their significance for a new, more political reading of the two films after I give a brief overview of the genre of the Bergfilm and the occurrence of the MLV films. I will argue that Der Berg ruft and The Challenge are important films precisely because they show the semantic malleability of films as cultural artefacts. Their interpretation and reception cannot be separated from the national and cultural contexts in which the films were viewed.

Mountain films can be found from the beginnings of cinema, located in many different mountain ranges, made by people of many different nationalities. The most exhaustive listing of these films, the book Cinema delle Montagne compiled by the curators of the Alpine museum in Turin, Italy, lists four thousand films (Museo Nazionale della Montagne and CAI-Torino). Yet the classical Bergfilm is aspecificsubsetofthese films and a genre that is almost exclusively German. The combination of dramatic on-location filming and the often melodramatic plots that characterize the Bergfilm remained a uniquely German phenomenon. Pioneered by Arnold Fanck and then continued by his former actors Leni Riefenstahl and Luis Trenker, Bergfilme were some of the most popular films in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. Indeed, in...