Heinrich Harrer - The White Spider

But the lads didn’t come in a minute or two.

Long after the tea was ready, they hadn’t come. Albert set the golden-brown drink on a low flame, just enough to keep it hot without getting stewed.

Still the lads didn’t come; and the Sector-Guard, this man whose age it was impossible to guess, had time for second thoughts….

In truth, one could not hold it against a public avid for sensation that it should be thronging inquisitively about the telescopes. These climbs on the Eiger’s Face had been worked up into a publicity feature. The Press and the Radio had taken charge of the “Eiger Drama”. Some of the reports were sound enough, informed by the heart and mind of true mountain folk behind them, others displayed a woeful lack of knowledge of the subject.

1936 had started badly. The first to arrive had been the Munich pair, Albert Herbst and Hans Teufel, who were already at Kleine Scheidegg before the end of May. Had they come to look for last year’s victims? The thought may have been there, but their secret aim was certainly the ascent of the Face. They were splendid climbers, to be sure, but perhaps lacking in that calm and relaxation which is the hall-mark of the accomplished master-climber.

They did not come to grief on the Eiger’s Face. They knew that to start up that gigantic wall so early in the year, in almost wintry conditions, would be nothing short of suicide; but the waiting about became unbearable. According to the calendar it was summer by now, but storms and snow didn’t seem to mind about that. So Teufel and Herbst decided as part of their training to climb the as yet unclimbed North Face of the Schneehorn. This was purely an ice- and snow-slope. Conditions were far from favourable. The heavy falls of new snow had as yet failed to cohere firmly with the old snow beneath. In spite of this, the pair tackled the ice-slope on July 1st and succeeded in reaching the summit cornice, beneath which they were forced to bivouac. They suffered no harm from their night in the open and, next morning, reached and traversed the summit. Everything seemed to be going well; but on the descent, while they were crossing a snow-slope, an avalanche broke away, carrying them with it for some six hundred feet. Teufel struck the lip of a crevasse, breaking his neck. Herbst got away with his life.

That was a bad enough beginning….

A few days later two Austrians, Angerer and Rainer, arrived and put up a tent near the Scheidegg, both proven climbers, especially good on rock. As such, they were particularly outstanding at route-finding on vertical cliffs. They remembered how difficult the great rock-step below the First Ice-field had proved, and how Sedlmayer and Mehringer had taken it out of themselves on it. They felt sure there must be a direct route over to the right—up what later came to be known as the “First Pillar” and the “Shattered Pillar”—towards the smooth, perpendicular, unclimbable wall of the Rote Fluh (the Red Crag, a long-established feature of the Eiger’s base). Below it, there must be some means of traversing across to the First Ice-field. Would such a traverse be possible?

On Monday, July 6th Angerer and Rainer started up the Face by their newly conceived route.

What did the wall look like at that particular moment?

The late Othmar Gurtner, the great Swiss climber and well-known writer on Alpine matters, wrote the following on July 8th in a Zurich paper, Sport.

An unusually changeable period of weather has hampered the progress of glaciation during the last few weeks. Heavy falls of snow and cold, raw days have preserved powder-snow down as far as 8,000 feet…. If one examines the North Face of the Eiger thoroughly for its conditions, one is led to the following possibly deceptive conclusion: on account of the heavy covering of snow the lower parts of the Face, and also the two great shields of ice above Eigerwand Station, invite climbing in the cold hours of early morning, when the snow ruined by the evening sunshine has become crusty again. It is possible to kick safe steps without use of the axe and to move forward very quickly in such snow; at the same time it lacks solid glaciation, i.e. firm consolidation with the old snow beneath. Because of the slight amount of sun on the Eiger’s North Face it behaves like typical winter snow. Higher up on the Face and especially on the almost vertical summit-structure itself, the powder-snow is plastered on the rocks like sweepings from a broom. And, in between, there is the glitter of water-ice … this ice has its origin in the melting water which runs down from the mighty snow-roof of the mountain. So long as there is water-ice hanging from the summit structure, the whole Face is seriously threatened by falls of ice. Then one can actually see whole torrents coming down and craters made by them very closely situated in the snow. The Face is at the moment in the terrifying conditions which persist between winter and summer….

As we write this report, the Rainer-Angerer rope is moving “according to plan” up the death-dealing wall on whose actual conditions we have reported above….

The warning expressed in that report was written by a very great expert.

But Angerer and Rainer were no suicide squad; they, too, were well aware of the great danger, transcending all human strength and courage. They succeeded in opening a new route up the lower part of the Face to just below the Rote Fluh, where they bivouacked; next morning, July 7th, they climbed down again, and reached their tent wet through and tired, but safe and sound. “We shall go up again,” they said, “as soon as conditions improve.”

The papers scented a coming sensation. Now that climbing attempts have been focused in the limelight of public interest, their readers had a right to be kept informed in detail about proceedings on the Face of the Eiger. The reports were almost like communiqués of the General Staff during a war, even down to the constantly repeated titles: “The battle with the Eiger Wall”, “The Acrobatic Contest on the Eiger’s Face”, “New Life on the Face”, “Lull in the Eiger Battle”, “The all-out Investment”, “First Assault Repulsed”. And sometimes they even went to the length of puns, such as Mordwand for Nordwand. 1

The ill-fortune of Herbst and Teufel appeared in many papers under the common headline of “Accidents and Crimes”. Many sarcastic comments appeared on the subject of “extreme” climbers and the public, avid for a show. But was it really surprising that people who knew nothing of mountains should make pilgrimages in their thousands to savour a shiver of horror while standing in perfect safety at the eyepiece of a telescope? The Eiger’s Face had become a magnificent natural stage.

The newspapers of July 7th and 8th certainly carried widespread expressions of delight at the safe return of Rainer and Angerer. All the same, every word and movement of the two men was recorded, and interpreted however it suited best (for gladiators must needs bow to the wishes of their public); yet the climbers themselves wanted only to be left in peace and, finding they were not, defended themselves after their own fashion. Many high-sounding phrases were uttered and accorded more weight than is normally given to the pronouncements of V.I.P.s. “We are having another go!” they said. What presumption, after the grim bivouac, which many papers had described as a life-and-death battle, while Angerer and Rainer laugh it off scornfully with: “Grim? No, only just a trifle wet!”

And since these were no men of worldly affairs, but just ordinary lads, who did not weigh every word in the balance, and certainly didn’t suspect that under the tension of the moment it would be given undue emphasis or be wrongly reported, they gave this answer to the barrage of questions as to why they came here bent on such a venture: “We have to climb your Wall for you, if you won’t do it yourselves!” Or, still more in keeping with their pathetic youthfulness and the age in which they lived: “We must have the Wall or it must have us!”