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Outside Magazine November 2003
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Buried in the Past
Thirty years after losing his brother on a Himalayan peak, Reinhold Messner battles ugly accusations that he abandoned him at the top.

By Greg Child

THE GAMES BEGIN: Messner watching Von Kienlin (left) and Hermann Kühn, June 1970 (photo courtesy of Reinhold Messner)
JUNE 27, 1970. Two Tyrolean brothers, Reinhold and Günther Messner, stand atop 26,660-foot Nanga Parbat, in Pakistan's western Himalayas. Having snatched the first ascent of one of the biggest alpine walls on earth, the 14,763-foot Rupal Face, they shed their frozen felt mittens to shake hands and embrace.

But things turn bad when they start down. Günther, 24, has followed his brother to the top despite the 18-member team's plan for Reinhold, 25, to summit alone. Exhausted, he develops altitude sickness and, because neither brother has a rope, cannot descend by the same steep route. They blunder down the west side of the peak, succeeding only in cutting themselves off from the Rupal side entirely. After a bivouac near 26,000 feet, Günther becomes delirious. Seeing two teammates, Felix Kuen and Peter Scholz, ascending the Rupal Face, Reinhold cries for help—but they are too far away to understand his pleas. So the brothers make a life-or-death decision: They will head down the opposite side of the mountain via the less steep, but unexplored, 13,300-foot Diamir Face.

The epic that ensued—Günther and Reinhold's two-day descent down uncharted territory, Günther's June 29 disappearance in a reported avalanche, and Reinhold's frantic search of the debris field and grief-stricken escape through the Diamir Valley—is the defining experience of Reinhold Messner's life, and it's described in his 40th book, The Naked Mountain, to be published for the first time in English in November by The Mountaineers Books. What U.S. readers may not hear about is the firestorm that the German edition sparked in Europe. In books written as direct rebuttals to The Naked Mountain, two members of the expedition claim that Messner's story is a whitewash of the truth—that he abandoned his brother on the peak.

"There is a big lie behind Reinhold's story," says Hans Saler, a 56-year-old mountain guide now based in Puc—n, Chile. In his June 2003 book Between Light and Shadow: The Messner Tragedy on Nanga Parbat, he claims Messner sacrificed Günther for his own ambition, an allegation echoed in The Traverse: Günther Messner's Death on Nanga Parbat—Expedition Members Break Their Silence, by fellow team member Max von Kienlin, a 69-year-old baron who lives in Munich.

Both climbers say that Messner's descent of the Diamir Face was not an emergency escape—that, though this was his first Himalayan expedition, he planned all along to traverse the entire mountain solo and score a first on an 8,000-meter peak. Most astonishingly, both claim that Günther never accompanied Reinhold down the face at all. Instead, von Kienlin and Saler maintain, Reinhold left his brother near the summit to find his own way down, and Günther died descending the Rupal side, alone and unseen. Messner, they say, has been changing his story ever since to deflect his guilt.

This bitter controversy began when The Naked Mountain hit German bookstores in February 2002. Angered by Messner's portrayal of what happened on Nanga Parbat, the world's ninth-highest peak, and by his claims on German radio and TV that the team didn't bother to search for the missing brothers, Saler aired his long-simmering grievances in an open letter to Messner circulated on the Internet and published in German newspapers.

"In your book you play brilliantly on the keyboard of self-pity," he wrote. "Everybody kept silent about what had actually happened on the wall. Our silence had to do with loyalty, a foreign word for you. You are an excellent climber, but a good comrade? NO!"




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