“Mountain of Destiny”: Nanga Parbat and Its Path into the German Imagination by Harold Höbusch (review)

Harold Höbusch’s “Mountain of Destiny”: Nanga Parbat and Its Path into the German Imagination is three books in one: a history of the German exploration of the Himalayan mountain known as Nanga Parbat; an analysis of the relationship between the ethos of mountaineering and the ideology of National Socialism; and a critical discussion about why mountains became such a common referent in German popular culture in the middle decades of the twentieth century. Though the title suggests the book’s common thread will be Nanga Parbat, in fact Höbusch has given us something far more wide-ranging. “Mountain of Destiny” is a deeply sourced account of the co-development of mountaineering culture and Germany’s modern self-identity, hinged around the rhetoric and trauma of National Socialism.

Höbusch opens by laying out a theory of the interrelation of mountains and cultural identity, tracing how the ethos and ideology of mountaineering was increasingly depicted and valorized in German popular culture between the 1920s and 1950s. “The various representations of these [Himalayan] expeditions to the German public in print, film, and audio—[are] in my opinion the crucial segments of Nanga Parbat’s path into the German imagination,” he writes (13). This widespread use of mountaineering as a means of depicting communal values he calls, somewhat awkwardly, “the cultural phenomenon Nanga Parbat.”

This theoretical lens (“the cultural phenomenon Nanga Parbat”) overshadows, however, Höbusch’s most incisive and compelling findings. It is not that Nanga Parbat the mountain plays such a role in German cultural identity. Instead, it is the spirit of expedition, of brotherhood on the icy slope, and of attaining a prize (reaching the summit)—these qualities permeate German mass culture. Höbusch, it often seems, is writing two equally compelling though at some level quite different books. Either this is a history of Nanga Parbat (the ninth-highest mountain in the world) and the German men who climbed it, or it is a study of mountaineering as a social and ideological phenomenon, an analysis of the way that climbing as an ethos became a cipher for German angst, self-glorification, and moral education before, during, and after National Socialism.

It is the latter book, buried inside the former, that has the most consequence for historians of twentieth-century Germany. For reasons not entirely clear, Höbusch avoids placing “Mountain of Destiny” into conversation with others works that discuss the cultural preludes and propagandist exploits of National Socialism. Yet some of the most fascinating and disturbing moments in “Mountain of Destiny” describe the way mountaineers and their texts were easily (and often happily) appropriated by the Nazi state. Analyzing the language of mountaineers from the 1920s Höbusch repeatedly points to the aspects of the sport that allowed its cooptation by the Nazis: the idea of the mountain as spiritual alternative to modernity; the valorization of struggle as the central character of the endeavor; and the description of the forging of non-egocentric bonds in the midst of extraordinary circumstances in order to achieve success. “Mountain of Destiny” is an excellent account of how NS ideology infiltrated (or perhaps merely accentuated) one more aspect of prewar German life. Höbusch describes how willingly German climbers were to adapt their seemingly apolitical culture to fit Nazi ideology.

Why, then, does Höbusch not situate the book as part of the history of National Socialism? The answer lies, perhaps, with Höbusch’s other, primary research area: the history of sports. By describing this book as a history of sports and its effect on national popular culture—rather than on the way political ideology coopted or manipulated the language of mountaineering—Höbusch allows himself the space to give a richer, fuller account of mid-twentieth-century German mountaineering and the men who defined it. It also allows him to show that, though the tenets of...