Heinrich Harrer (; July 6, 1912 – January 7, 2006) was an Austrian mountaineer, sportsman, geographer, and author.
He is best known for his books The White Spider and Seven Years in Tibet.
Athletics
Heinrich Harrer was born in the Austrian city of
Hüttenberg,
Carinthia, to a postal worker. From 1933 to 1938 Harrer studied
geography and
sports at the
Karl-Franzens University in
Graz. Harrer became a member of the traditional
student corporation ATV Graz. made headlines around the world and is recounted in Harrer's book
The White Spider of 1958.
Nazi involvement
Immediately after the
Anschluss of March 1938, Harrer on April 1, 1938 joined the
SS where he held the rank of
Oberscharführer (Sergeant), and on May 1, 1938 he became a member of the
Nazi Party. After their ascent of the Eiger's North Face the four climbers were received by and photographed with the
Führer which may have been unexceptional and unavoidable. But when in December 1938 Harrer married Lotte Wegener, daughter of the eminent explorer and scholar
Alfred Wegener, he did so in SS uniform. In his application for the marriage license that he as an SS Mann had to obtain from the
SS-Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt, Harrer had declared himself a member of the
Sturmabteilung (SA
stormtroopers) since October 1933, i.e. years before the
Anschluss of 1938, when the SA was still illegal in Austria. Harrer later explained this as mere boasting: if already an SA Mann he wouldn't have had to become a member of the
Nazi Party when joining the SS.
After returning to Europe in 1952 Harrer was cleared of any pre-war crimes and this was later supported by
Simon Wiesenthal. In his memoir
Beyond Seven Years in Tibet Harrer called his involvement with the Nazi party a mistake made in his youth when he had not yet learned to think for himself.
Internment in India
In 1939 Harrer joined a four-man expedition, led by
Peter Aufschnaiter to the Diamir Face of the
Nanga Parbat with the aim of finding an easier route to the peak. Having concluded that the face was viable, the four mountaineers were in Karachi at the end of August, waiting for a freighter to take them home. The ship being long overdue Harrer, Chicken and Lobenhoffer tried to reach
Persia with their shaky car, but several hundred kilometers northwest of
Karachi were put under the "protection" of British soldiers and escorted back to Karachi, where Aufschnaiter had stayed on. Two days later war was declared and on September 3, 1939 all were put behind barbed wire to be transferred to a detention camp at
Ahmednagar near
Bombay two weeks later. They considered escaping to
Portuguese Goa but when further transferred to
Dehradun, to be detained there for years with 1,000 other enemy aliens, they found Tibet more promising, the final goal being the
Japanese front in
Burma or China.
Aufschnaiter and Harrer escaped and were re-captured a number of times before finally succeeding. On April 29, 1944 after lunch, Harrer and six others, including Rolf Magener and Heins von Have (disguised as British officers), Aufschnaiter, the Salzburger Bruno Treipel (aka Treipl) and the Berliners Hans Kopp and Sattler (disguised as native Indian workers), walked out of the camp. Magener and von Have took the train to Calcutta and from there found their way to the Japanese army in Burma. The others headed for the closest border. After Sattler gave up on May 10, the remaining four entered Tibet on May 17, 1944, crossing the Tsang Chok-la Pass (5,896 metres or 19,350 feet) and thereafter split into two groups: Harrer and Kopp, Aufschnaiter and Treipel. On June 17 Treipel, exhausted, bought himself a horse and rode back to the lowlands. Several months later, when the remaining three were still without visas for Tibet, Kopp also gave up and left for Nepal (where he was handed over to the British within few days).
Seven years in Tibet
Aufschnaiter and Harrer, helped by the former's knowledge of the Tibetan language, proceeded to the capital of
Lhasa which they reached on January 15, 1946, having crossed Western Tibet (passing holy
Mount Kailash), the South-West with
Gyirong County and the Northern
Changthang Plateau.
Harrer became a friend of the young
14th Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso, who had summoned him to the
Potala Palace after having seen him repeatedly in the streets below the palace through his telescope. He taught the Dalai Lama (who was eleven years old when they met) much about the outside world and effectively served as his tutor, in subjects ranging from geography to English. The Dalai Lama has often credited Harrer's later writings about Tibet as having helped focus international attention on the Tibetan people after the
Communist Chinese gained administrative control.
After the Communist army took control in Tibet in 1950, Harrer returned to Austria where he documented his experiences in the books Seven Years in Tibet and Lost Lhasa. Seven Years in Tibet was translated into 53 languages, was a bestseller in the United States in 1954, sold three million copies and was the basis of films by the same title in 1956 and 1997. He was portrayed by Brad Pitt in the latter film.
Later years
He also took part in a number of ethnographic as well as mountaineering expeditions:
Alaska, the
Andes,
Ruwenzori (Mountains of the Moon) in Africa. He explored the
Amazon with the former king
Leopold III of Belgium. Harrer made the first ascents of
Mount Deborah and
Mount Hunter (both in
Alaska) in 1954. In 1962 he was the leader of the team of four climbers who made the first ascent of the
Carstensz Pyramid (Puncak Jaya) in western
New Guinea, the highest peak in
Oceania. This and his pioneering expedition to reach the
Neolithic stone axe quarries at Ya-Li-Me are recorded in his memoir
I Come From The Stone Age.
Harrer wrote more than 20 books about his adventures, some including photographs considered to be among the best records of traditional Tibetan culture. In the early 1980s, he visited Tibet again, and wrote a sequel to Seven Years in Tibet titled, Return to Tibet. Harrer died on 7 January 2006 in Friesach, Austria at the age of 93.
References
Bibliography
Seven Years in Tibet (1953)
Lost Lhasa
The White Spider: The Classic Account of the Ascent of the Eiger
Ladakh Gods and Mortals Behind the Himalayas
Return to Tibet
Tibet is My Country, autobiography of the Dalai Lama's older brother, Thubten Jigme Norbu, as told to Harrer
I Come from the Stone Age (1965), the story of his ascent to Carstensz Pyramid in Netherlands New Guinea in 1962
Denk ich an Bhutan (2005)
Beyond Seven Years in Tibet: My Life Before, During, and After (2007), his full autobiography published in English
External links
Heinrich Harrer Website
Obituary in The Times, 9 January 2006
Obituary in The Guardian, 9 January 2006
Obituary in The New York Times, January 10, 2006
Obituary CBS, January 7, 2006
Seven Years in Tibet, Book Review at The Open Critic (1956)
Harrer Museum Huettenberg
Category:1912 births
Category:2006 deaths
Category:People from Sankt Veit an der Glan District
Category:SA personnel
Category:Austrian explorers
Category:Austrian mountain climbers
Category:Austrian travel writers
Category:Austrian Nazis
Category:Austrian escapees
Category:Explorers of the Himalayas
Category:Memoirists
Category:People from Dehradun
Category:Tibet
Category:Escapees from British military detention
Category:SS non-commissioned officers
