K2_ Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain - Ed Viesturs [67]
After the expedition, and ever since, Wiessner was criticized for his style of leadership. Certainly his notion of his role as leader differed from Houston’s. In 1938, nearly all the decisions were made by consensus; though officially the leader, Houston was uncomfortable with that very label, referring to himself instead as the team’s “organizer.”
Wiessner was far more dictatorial, and sometimes condescending, as in the letter quoted above in which he referred to the other climbers as “the boys” (even though Cromwell and Wolfe were older than he was) and praised them when they were able to “do their duty and work hard.” But it’s here that the politics of the day—both climbing politics and the international antagonisms that were about to explode in World War II—get all tangled up with what happened on K2 in 1939.
Because he was German-born, Wiessner was all too easily stereotyped as having a “Teutonic” character and style of leadership. Writing as late as 1992, Kauffman and Putnam lapse again and again into that kind of ethnic caricature. According to them, Wiessner had a “heavy personality.” He was “hard in body, Spartan (but not invariably), stoic in outlook, ready for sacrifice, and dedicated to the achievement of what became his life’s ambition.” Even more explicitly,
German by birth and upbringing, Fritz had been reared in the school of absolute obedience to authority that characterizes much of the Teutonic ethos: the leader leads, and the troops obey, whatever the situation. He may have been ideally suited to command a German venture, but his background did not lend it-self to directing Americans….
Fritz was no humanist. Rather he preached Darwinian naturalism with its emphasis on survival of the fittest. The weak must perish so the strong may live—such was his philosophy….
To my mind, this stereotyping is completely unfair, and the qualities that Kauffman and Putnam ascribe to Wiessner had nothing to do with what happened in 1939. In K2: The Story of the Savage Mountain, the English historian Jim Curran offers an eloquent rebuttal:
It is … all too easy to fall into the trap of racial stereotyping. Undoubtedly Wiessner was a rigid, single-minded, humourless and authoritarian figure. But these are by no means exclusively Teutonic characteristics—it is not hard to think of British, French and Italian climbers who have over the years displayed the same qualities and earned themselves huge accolades in the process.
To understand the climbing politics of the 1930s, one needs a bit of background. Mountaineering was essentially invented in the Alps at the end of the eighteenth century. The first great deed was the ascent of Mont Blanc in 1786. Throughout the nineteenth century, British climbers were in the forefront of the game; Americans didn’t really take it up until the beginning of the twentieth century. By the 1930s, both Brits and Americans had adopted a conservative, rearguard approach to the pastime. The debate over “ironmongery”—the use of pitons, carabiners, and other metal devices—was a hot issue of the day. In disdaining those aids in 1938, Charlie Houston was subscribing to the Anglo-American view, while Paul Petzoldt had a more European outlook.
In the 1930s, the most technically advanced climbers in the world were Germans, Austrians, Italians, and French. The debate crystallized dramatically around attempts to climb the north face of the Eiger in Switzerland—the “last great problem” of the Alps, as many called it. The leading contenders were Germans and Austrians, and the face was so dangerous that eight out of the first ten men who tried it died in the effort.
The campaign on the Eiger provoked a virulent reaction in England and America. In 1937 Colonel E. L. Strutt, president of the Alpine Club, called the Eiger climbers “mentally deranged,” adding, “He who succeeds first may rest assured that he has accomplished the most imbecile variant since mountaineering began.” In the United States, the writer and mountaineer James Ramsey Ullman deplored how “perverted