It was no small sensation when, on May 1, 1999, a team of scientists found the body of mountaineer George Mallory on the Tibetan side of Mount Everest.
The tweed jacket and leggings were torn to pieces by wind and weather, but the body had been eerily preserved by the icy cold, white and shiny like a marble statue, just as if the mountain had wanted to erect its own monument to it.
“I have the best view of getting to the top.
I can hardly imagine not getting up there;
also impossible to surrender to the role of the vanquished ”, Mallory had written in 1924 shortly before his third summit attempt in only four years.
He was last seen on June 8th, on the north ridge at an altitude of about 8,250 meters.
Then he and his rope partner Andrew Irvine disappeared into the clouds.
Freddy Langer
Editor in the features section, responsible for the "Reiseblatt".
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Hardly any other mountaineer had a greater myth developed than that of George Mallory.
That had to do not only with the ghostly disappearance and the question of whether the two had made it to the summit.
It was also down to Mallory's character and demeanor, which was ultimately bundled in a particularly useful sentence from a marketing point of view, one of the most famous quotations in mountaineering.
When asked by a journalist why he wanted to climb Everest so badly, he replied tersely: "Because it is there."
The career of the mountains
Robert Macfarlane, literary scholar, essayist, critic, one of the most respected nature writers of our time in England and an experienced mountaineer himself, dedicates not only the penultimate chapter of his book "Berge im Kopf" to George Mallory - in fact, he dedicated the entire book to him, because he, too, asks the question: “Why climb to the summit?” However, he needs almost three hundred pages for the answer, and of course goes back a long way to a time when people in the western world did not yet know anything about the Himalayas and generally know nothing about mountains wanted, because the value of a landscape was measured according to the possibilities of agriculture and snow-capped peaks were perceived as repulsive even from an aesthetic point of view.
Strictly speaking, Macfarlane looks even further back: namely to the beginnings of the world, when the granite sloshed around in liquid form - as he puts it. First of all, at Macfarlan, the science of geology receives its history before culture and art, philosophy and sport reach the mountains. And in the end he was much less interested in a story of mountaineering than in a story of how people's attitudes towards the mountains have changed - from the fear of cheesy programs in Victorian entertainment halls to the willingness to try their own for a summit To risk life. Not only widespread among cross-border commuters, as the extreme adventurers call themselves, but also among tourists,who want to let off steam on the mountain - but often out of stupidity there.
British perspective
For his investigation, Macfarlane, who is otherwise out and about in England's marshes, forests and caves or in the loneliness of the Scottish highlands, especially penetrated the depths of libraries, where he rummaged through the old manuscripts of adventurers as well as the classics of aestheticians Literature or the great theories of aesthetics.
Religious zeal and criticism find a place in his book as well as the fashion to look for sublime moments of shudder in the face of a threatening wilderness or to enter into an engagement with nature in times of romanticism.
As a Briton, Robert Macfarlane seeks his examples of early nature worship, especially between the Highlands and the Lake District, and repeatedly calls countrymen to the stand. He deals with Edmund Burke and John Ruskin without mentioning Kant. And relies on the Scotsman James Hutton for comments on granite, without referring to Goethe. One looks in vain for Alexander von Humboldt in his book. Nietzsche remains a footnote. When, of course, the British chose the Alps as their adventure playground in the second half of the nineteenth century and gradually climbed every summit, Switzerland in particular became his home game. “The British,” he writes at one point, “were evidently more inspired than any other imperial power by the desire to scout the entire globe.”