Mountain of Destiny

Nanga Parbat, located in today’s Pakistan, occupies a special place in German history. After a German–American expedition failed to claim the mountain’s first ascent 1932, Nanga Parbat turned into a prestige object of the Nazi regime. Declared as the ‘German mountain of destiny,’ twelve German and Austrian alpinists and even more local porters perished on the world’s ninth-highest peak during the course of five German expeditions. After the war, in 1953, Austrian alpinist Hermann Buhl succeeded to climb the peak solo, as part of a German–Austrian expedition. This book seeks to explain how the perpetual defeats and the eventual success on Nanga Parbat were appropriated into German political and cultural discourse during the Nazi period and the early Federal Republic. Synthetizing his earlier work on the German ‘mountain of the mind’, Höbusch aims ‘to reveal the various means and mechanisms employed by German mountaineers, mountaineering officials, politicians, writers, and filmmakers to pave the path of Nanga Parbat into the German imagination’ (p. 14) by analysing representations of Nanga Parbat expeditions in print and film.

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Destiny (ISS module) · German · Nazi Germany · Nazism · Political science · Politics · German Colonialism and Identity Studies · History · Law · Literature and Cultural Memory