Heinrich Harrer (1)Rezensionen

A very poignant memoir/travel writing / biography. Better than the movie!

The story jumps right in with Harrer being arrested and detained as a POW and his efforts at escape. Once the escapees make it to Tibet, there are beautiful descriptions of the Tibetan people with their prayer flags, monasteries, and prayer wheels. In the midst of this interesting culture, the escapees encounter life threatening dangers and must be vigilant about their provisions. Harrer and his friends finally establish themselves in Tibet where they meet the Dali Lama’s parents and siblings, establish homes, and purposeful work. Gradually, Harrer developed a very close friendship with the Dali Lama. I loved reading how their relationship progressed from performing rather complicated tasks, such as taking videos of community events to building a movie theater. While teaching His Holiness English, their friendship blossomed. In 1951, the Chinese bestowed tragedy upon Tibet and its peaceful people and forced Harrer and the Dali Lama to flee the city. So heartbreaking! Harrer’s book definitely educates readers about Tibet and their Buddhist traditions. The book closes nicely with a biographical piece of Harrer.

Magnificent.

Mr. Harrer did a good deed by writing this memoir as it raised the awareness of Tibet and its oppression under the Chinese far and wide.

However, I must admit to being surprised that he accomplished his mission. The makings of a riveting tale were there, but the manner in which Harrer tells his story could not have been more dull. I'm not sure how he managed to make two years of mountainous travel and seven years in a completely foreign land so boring, but he did.

The first moments of suspense came in the last 40 or so pages where the Chinese invade Tibet and it is unclear what might happen to the Dalai Lama. These last pages also detailed the teacher/student relationship between the author and the Dalai Lama, and I did find it interesting to hear how someone so young was so intellectually curious.

Other than that last portion, the book is no more than a diary. This happened and then that happened. A recitation of facts, dates, places . . .no "characters" were brought to life. Even his travel companion was rendered flat. Somehow with all the hardships they endured together, there wasn't one instance of an argument or tension or an example of how they worked together to solve problems.

It's the difference between writing like this:

She typed her book review on the computer. It was negative.

and

She agonized about what to write in her review. She couldn't fathom that they actually made a movie of this book. Starring Brad Pitt! How? She was dying to write something scathing, but a big part of her felt alone. How could no one else think this book was so boring? How could she have been the only one? The author clearly was a great man even if he couldn't write well. Maybe she should give the book 3 stars just to reward him for his greatness. She tried to add that last star, but she just couldn't bring herself to do it.

You get what I mean. It's ten times worse because this man went on a HUGE ADVENTURE. It should have been absolutely scintillating. A missed opportunity by any measure. Curious what the movie makers did to bring this book to life . . .I'm sure in the hands of professional writers it probably came out great.

A classic, and up to the end of Harrer's own ascent, excellent and gripping. The rest of the book, detailing the further history of the face from an observer's perspective gets a bit dull (hence 3 stars overall).

CRAZY travel memoir, spent roaming through Tibet, on foot, nearly starving and half frozen.

I've always been fascinated by Tibet – especially pre-takeover by China in the 1950s. Seven Years is an exploration into that coupled with a book on war (escaping it), travel, mountaineering and making friends along the way. It's quickly become one of my favorite books. While Heinrich the man is obviously shown in the best light in this book, it's hard to forget his background. He was a Nazi and husband who ran away from both to climb mountains in the Himalayas. Seven Years is in many ways the "Eat, Prey, Love" of the 50s – both with characters dashing off to adventures. In Harrer's case, he ate whatever he could find (or be given), pray to not be caught and dragged back to internment in India and fall in love with Tibet. In many ways Tibet is the main character and the cause for all good and bad within his time there.

Richard Graves

An interesting account by a former Wehrmacht soldier of his stay in the 1940s in Tibet; certainly one of the few detailed accounts of life in Tibet just before the Chinese takeover. Generally sympathetic, though slightly condescending, to the Tibetans. Longtime readers of the National Geographic will recognize some of the material. This edition, alas, has no photographs, and the maps are poor.

"Seven Years in Tibet," by Heinrich Harrer is an interesting and inspirational read on several levels. First it is an autobiographical account of Harrer's life from his internment into a Indian British POW camp in 1939 and his subsequent escape until his return to India in March 1951. Harrer was an accomplished mountain climber, explorer, and world class athlete whose physical discipline and strength enabled him to suffer and endure considerable challenges during his long trek through Tibet. Then, after arriving in Lhasa completely destitute and worn out physically, managed to become a successful and useful member of Tibetan society. Like a Renaissance man, Harrer had many talents and he brought progressive developments to the near primitive technology of the Tibetans.
Harrer became the teacher and confidant of the young Dalai Lama. Through Harrer, we are able to follow the heart wrenching early life of this remarkable holy man.
The book is also a fascinating view of Tibetan culture during a time when the country was nearly completely cut off the rest of the world.
Because of the authors expertise in mountaineering, his descriptions of the magnificent beauty of the Tibetan country are fully detailed and alone worth reading the book.
The author describes Lhasa- " Behind these cloister walls the hands of time's clock seemed to have been put back a thousand years." Thanks to him, we too can glimpse this strange and distant place.

This is an excellent book. While reading this book, I did feel rather sad that I have not yet read his earlier book, "Seven Years In Tibet". This is an omission that I must, and will, correct.

In this book, Heinrich Harrer returns to Tibet after a long gap of thirty years. During this time, Tibet has changed. It has changed politically. It has changed culturally, with the advent of the Chinese Communist Party and its people taking charge. The landscape has changed, as many of the old temples and structures have been demolished.

In this short book, he describes these changes in a style that is simple. While he does try to be dispassionate, his emotional turmoil is evident.

It is a beautiful book, written by a man who did count Tibet as his second home.

In this vivid memoir that has sold millions of copies worldwide, Heinrich Harrer recounts his adventures as one of the first Europeans ever to enter Tibet and encounter the Dalai Lama.

Seven Years in Tibet told the incredible story of an idyllic life on the "roof of the world," before it was destroyed by the invading Chinese army. Now Austrian adventurer Heinrich Harrer revisits the people and places he left behind, in the extraordinary Return to Tibet. Against a backdrop of ruined monasteries and the beautiful, mysterious Himalayas, Harrer vividly evokes both a free Tibet, in which religion and faith were central features of daily life, and the present-day occupied nation, in which a profoundly spiritual culture is threatened with disappearance. He reflects on the country's problems, and in a reunion with his former pupil the Dalai Lama discusses ways of preserving the Tibetans' national character and their homeland.

I enjoyed reading The White Spider, because I, too, love mountains, though I have never had the agility to begin to think about climbing them. Later, my school was one of the first state schools to offer "outdoor pursuits" as an option, and the woman mountaineer Alison Hargreaves was just a couple of years below me, and got her love of mountains from my school and the climbing experiences it offered. It was to lead to her death on K2 in 1996; but as The White Spider sets out unequivocally, those who go to climb mountains accept the danger; it literally goes with the territory. You might say that it wouldn't be possible to climb mountains without embracing the risk.

An old mountain man recommended this book to me many years ago, and I have been looking for a copy ever since. Well, now I have one and I have read it. It is very much one of those books that reveal a whole world unknown to the ordinary person in the street; Harrer reels off a litany of names of great mountaineers whose names mean little to those who have not shared the glory and the terror of doing one-on-one combat with the high places of this world. Only as we get into the last part of his narrative, with the advent of some British climbers, do names like Chris Bonington and Dougal Haston ring a bell with the British reader.

The White Spider has the benefit of being written by someone who is deeply connected with the hills, who lived for them all his life, and was prepared to do anything so that he could indulge his passion for climbing. Heinrich Harrer was one of the first team to successfully scale the North Face of the Eiger in 1938. And that involved getting very close to some political figures of the time who are now considered well beyond the pale. Only by ending up in Tibet and developing a close personal friendship with the Dalai Lama was Harrer able to come to some sort of reconciliation with his past. Whether others can do that is going to be a very personal matter.

Nonetheless, this is the definitive book on the story of the North Face of the Eiger up to the early 1960s, written with the authority of one who was there. The book dates from 1959, with extra chapters added in 1965, and it shows. Harrer goes on at length about the nobility, comradeship and fraternity of those who climb. (I chose the word 'fraternity' carefully. The first woman climber made her successful ascent in 1964; Harrer's treatment of this has an air of condescension about it.) He also does not hold back on the horror of the deaths of those who perished on the North Face, without becoming graphic (and this is all the more horrible for it). This is also emphasised by his stilted writing style, though it should be noted that a lot of that is down to the translator, who translated it into equally stilted English. Other reviewers have commented on the ellipses; this is actually a fairly accurate rendition of an Austrian style of conversation, and some of the circumlocations in the text are equally typically Austrian. A new translation in conjunction with a decent editor would solve these problems.

There is one fly in the ointment; the 1957 dual ascent and the one climber out of four who survived it, the Italian Claudio Corti. That August, two teams made simultaneous attempts on the North Face, a German and an Italian one. When Corti was injured in a rock fall, his partner, Stephano Longhi, left him in a bivouac below the summit to await rescue whilst Longhi attempted to continue to the summit as conditions were so poor that retreat was impossible - the only way off the hill was via the summit and then via a (comparatively) easy descent route. Longhi then fell from a ledge higher up the face, and was unable to get off the mountain, perishing from the cold. Corti, meanwhile, had passed his climbing equipment on to the other team on the mountain, the Germans Gunther Nothdurft and Franz Meyer. They made the summit, but then fell to their deaths on the descent; their bodies were not found for four years.

Corti was rescued in a pioneering effort by the local guides; but afterwards made some ill-judged statements to the press through a highly unreliable narrator who claimed to be acting in his best interests but who actually wanted a sensational story. Gossip and wild accusations followed, and multiplied; and in writing this story down, Harrer seems to have sided with the mob rather than the mountaineer, engaging in some serious character assassination of both the Italian climbers and (writing before their bodies were discovered) making veiled accusations that Corti was somehow implicated in the deaths of the two German climbers. Even when Nothdurft and Meyer's bodies were recovered, with proof that they had achieved the summit and that Corti was in no way responsible for their deaths, Harrer would not recant. It was almost as though, having surrendered to the elements and having waited passively for rescue, Corti had somehow broken the unwritten code of the mountains that Harrer had spent the entire book building up. The link will take you to an examination of Corti's life after the North Face, written by Luco Signorelli in 2010 on the occasion of Corti's death at the age of 81: https://www.ukclimbing.com/articles/features/claudio_corti_a_life_in_the_shadow_...

The other problem with this book is the packaging. Behind this (2005) edition's graphics-savvy cover, there's a 1959 book lurking within. There are regular footnotes that either talk about the fates of some of the climbers named, or refer the reader back some pages to an account of some other climb; these are completely superfluous. There is one graphic showing the North Face, and a handful of black-and-white photographs, including a three-page one showing the North Face and annotated with some of the places mentioned in the text. But only some of them. This book is crying out for a proper re-packaging, with modern graphics and a better selection of photographs. (Some of the historic views in this edition should be retained but could use some serious digital retouching.) A repackaging would also enable the footnotes to be replaced with a biographical appendix of climbers mentioned in the text, with their histories, especially (for those who survived) their climbing histories after 1965. This 2005 edition has a section at the back of the book with an interview, a timeline of Harrer and a short article by him; this is in the spirit of the extras on a DVD but they are really tacked on the end and don't feel integrated with the rest of the book. The sort of repackaging I have in mind would need to go much further.

Whilst reading this, I watched Clint Eastwood's 1975 thriller The Eiger Sanction. I was amused to see the climbers in the film use the same annotated photographs of the North Face to plan their own route; and many of the events of some of the early climbs were reflected in the action of the film, including the Hinterstoisser Traverse and the death of Toni Kurtz in 1936. I suspect Eastwood read this book when the film was in development, as the coincidences seem too close to be accidental.

Despite all these criticisms, I enjoyed The White Spider; but that was despite the physical book's many drawbacks.½

Fascinating book, not lest because there is so little information about Tibet before the Chinese invaded. This is a record of a life that doesn't exist any more. Be aware that the Dalai Lama is only a small part of the book. Most of it is about the writer's efforts to reach Lhassa in the days when foreigners were forbidden to enter Tibet at all. It's a strange land of kind individuals and heavy bureaucracy. It's also about surviving a very hostile environment with severe winters, and the lure of the mountains to an experienced climber.
It's about the skills that a Westerner can bring to a feudal culture, but also about the things that he can learn from that culture.
Also a heart-breaking awareness of the need for political allies in a world of military powers. Tibet's isolationism meant that it had no one to call on for help when the Chinese invaded, and the results of that invasion were of tragic proportions, both to Tibet's people and her culture.
Definitely worth reading.½

> Babelio : https://www.babelio.com/livres/Harrer-7-ans-daventures-au-Tibet/67935

> MIEUX QUE LE FILM. — J'ai adoré le film de JJ Annaud lors de sa sortie, et j'avais alors découvert comme beaucoup l'existence et le parcours de H. Harrer. L'envie et la curiosité de pousser plus en avant la connaissance de cet explorateur, en plus de la lecture de maints ouvrages relatifs à la récente histoire du Tibet, m'ont amené à me plonger dans ces sept années vécues par H. Harrer.
Lu d'une traite en peu de jours, j'ai eu du mal à m'arracher à la fin de l'ouvrage. Sa narration fut quelque peu controversée voire raillée par Pekin, il n'empêche qu'elle apporta un autre éclairage de l'intérieur, à Lhassa, où les errances et les erreurs du gouvernement d'alors permirent à l'armée chinoise d'entrer et de s'installer au pays des Neiges, avec la complicité et le soutien d'une partie du Kashag (conseil exécutif restreint du Tibet), de certaines populations, mais aussi et surtout par la silence et la complicité implicite de l'Inde de Nehru et de la Grande-Bretagne, le monde est alors en pleine Guerre froide et l'Inde vient d'accéder à l'indépendance.
Ces sept ans passés au Tibet ne sont pas une leçon d'Histoire, tout simplement l'histoire d'un homme brinquebalé par l'Histoire. A lire pour apprendre et voyager. (Daniel ROBERT)
—le 20 nov. 2016, (Sur Amazon.fr) 5/5

An amazing journey to Tibet in the circumstances of war and then flight from under the fear of war -- and in between Tibet transforms from a backwards third-world country to a rich, intriguing adopted home. The anthropological insights into Tibetan culture and spirituality make this book incredibly fascinating. Although written many years ago, His Holiness' personality sounds much the same today as when he was younger. I envy the author for getting the chance to experience a beautiful, free Tibet!!!

I found this quite hard going, with unexciting prose. Possibly a poor translation of what promised to be an interesting book?½

Heinrich Harrer's own account of the unsuccessful attempts to climb the North face of the Eiger mountain in Switzerland and his own successful one provide excellent drama told by an expert. The subsequent climbs of the North face are less interesting to read. Harrer naturally scrubbed all parts of his Nazi past from the story. Why and from whom they received generous support in Germany is not mentioned, neither that he carried a Nazi flag to the top nor that he afterwards had a personal meeting with Hitler nor that he was an early Nazi when this was still illegal in Austria. Some say he personally took part in destroying the synagogue of Graz.

His passion for mountaineering, however, spared him from getting involved too deep as he was in India on the way to Nepal when the Second World War broke out and interned by the British there. In the camps, he is said to have remained a staunch Nazi who also escaped and recaptured a number of times while trying to march out of India to join the Japanese - a futile endeavor. He managed to get to Tibet, though - which became the story for the bestseller "Seven Years in Tibet" and his re-definition as an explorer and adventurer post WWII.

A good read that needs a thorough introduction.

Wasn't expecting to like this book, but I did.

While I have never understood the motivation of people who willingly place themselves in harm's way by doing all sorts of bizarre things like hanging from ropes above precipices
with rocks falling on their heads and winter blizzards forcing snow down their necks, I must admit they make fascinating reading.

The Eiger, a particularly nasty rock face, was not successfully climbed from the north until the author and his team succeeded (where many others had failed) in 1938. This astonishing book is the saga of the many who failed and the
few who succeeded. Even today, with modern equipment, the north face of the Eiger represents an extraordinary challenge to even the best climbers. I must say, however, that Harrer is oftentimes defensive, rarely attributing anything but the best of motives to the climbers.
Surely, some of them must have been climbing for the glory. Perhaps the most tragic of all the climbs was that, in 1936, of four climbers, two of whom were Mountain Rangers (the call from their commanding officer forbidding the attempt came after they had already left) who had made quite good progress until one of them was hit by a falling rock — a constant source of danger — and his colleagues decided to attempt a return down the face. They all perished on the return trip. What happened is not entirely clear. Harrer speculates that the most experienced of the four fell while trying to traverse back across a sheer face to install some pitons to make the way for the rest. They had hauled up their lines behind them, a necessity evidently to get across this particularly bad section. His fall dragged the injured
man down with him and killed one of the others. The fourth man was left hanging 300 feet in the air, almost above the Jungfrau railway station that carries tourists up through the mountain to a ski resort on the other side. Even though
alpine guide policy was to never attempt a rescue because of the danger — something helicopters managed to do only many years later — several guides tried to help. Despite a
truly heroic attempt to splice together two ropes,
a difficult task with two warm hands, the remaining
climber, Toni Kurz, had only one free hand, was dangling in the air, and was almost frozen stiff. He might have made it, except that a knot became jammed in one of the snap rings that it traveled through and he lacked the energy to
free it. His would-be rescuers heard him plead for help through most of the night before he died.

After a while, the litany of cold, rock falls, and Harrer's unrelentingly hagiographic description of mountaineers wears a little thin. Only the Italian Claudio Corti comes in for some oblique criticism. He was attempting to climb the face
with an older climber, another Italian. They clearly had not prepared and, after a false start that consumed several days, met up with two German climbers (who completed the climb of the face and died on the way down the west
side) who went with them for some distance despite a language barrier. The Germans gave Corti their tent following a fall by Corti's partner whom he was not able to save and who died several days later hanging from a rope, despite tremendous efforts to save him. Corti himself was
rescued only by winching a guide down from the summit on a steel cable. The guide then carried Corti on his back the remaining thousand feet up the face. Corti's confused and contradictory account of what had happened and where the Germans were — they had disappeared and their bodies
were not located until several years later — made skeptics of many in the mountaineering community.

The Germans' loan of their equipment to Corti probably sealed their doom. Harrer includes a route map of the face for those idiots willing to contemplate such an adventure.
All sorts of security measures and new equipment have come on the market since Harrer's successful climb, but in spite of these new advantages, "the North Wall of the Eiger remains one of the most perilous in the Alps." Other climbs may be more difficult technically, "but nowhere else is
there such appalling danger from the purely fortuitous hazards of avalanches, stone falls, and sudden deterioration of the weather as on the Eiger."

While reading Seven Years in Tibet, Heinrich Harrer's sublime work of travel literature, I was struck by a disturbing question. Has the epitaph for travel literature already been written?

For centuries, armchair travelers have marveled at the tales of adventurers who have traveled to distant lands. From the works of Marco Polo and Ibn al-Battuta to the invaluable works of Charles Darwin to the amazing stories of Thor Hyerdahl, travel writers have taken readers to places they could only imagine, told stories of exotic people and extraordinary cultures.

But with the relatively recent advent of cheap flights, social media, the Internet and, most devastatingly, globalization, is the era of travel... real exploratory travel... finished? Well, until the advent of interplanetary travel, I think it just might be.

Let introduce the book and then let me explain.

In Seven Years in Tibet, Heinrich Harrer takes us inside one of the most insular cultures ever to exist on this planet. Not only was the Tibet that Harrer visited suspicious of outsiders, it had the luxury of being nestled on the other side of the almost impassable Himalayan mountain chain. When Harrer entered the country in the middle of the Second World War as an escaped POW he became one of only a handful of Europeans who had ever gained access to Tibet. Over his seven years in the country (just in case the title wasn't clear on that) he would meet less than a dozen other Europeans (conversely, I met over a dozen western expats on my first night in taiwan in 2002). There is literally no place on earth left that hasn't felt the impact of Western culture (aka globalization). In that sense, Harrer was given the rare opportunity to see one of the last nations on the planet completely untouched by the Western world prior to the Great Flattening.

To read the rest of this review please visit my blog: http://www.taiwaneastcoaster.blogspot.tw/2013/07/seven-years-in-tibet.html

A quick read, though unsatisfying either due to Harrer's wooden and often hackneyed prose or the translation, maybe both. (What's with all the ellipses?) The book is weighted down with a bizarre defensiveness. What would be most interesting-- the texture of life on the mountain face-- is left out completely, replaced with logistic discussions which become repetitive. Though, I suppose in wanting the vicariousness of a sensory narrative I'm one of the "rubberneckers" he seems to have such disdain for.

Being a brave adventurer doesn't exactly make one a natural storyteller- this book is proof of that.

Also, the passages on the women climbers are deeply sexist, which sealed my dislike.

I came at this book from an unusual direction, having owned Harrer´s ´Seven Years in Tibet´ for decades, but never having got around to reading it. In the sense that it has inspired me to go back to the original, ´Return..´ has served some good purpose. And as a postscript to the original (for those reading the two books in their proper order), it will be essential, but depressing reading.

But as a book in it´s own right it doesn´t stand up well. Harrer writes with passion and color, but the real impact of the decay in the life and fabric of Tibet can possibly only be appreciated when it is held up to the original depicted in his earlier book (where he describes his life in the inner circles of Tibet in the 1940´s with the young Dalai Lama). In ´Return..´ Harrer´s descriptions of what is no longer there, what is no longer celebrated, and what is no longer felt has a kind of numbing effect on the reader.

Harrer´s thesis, is that Tibet will ultimately survive whatever the Chinese throw at it. He suggests that it might perhaps prosper and re-embrace its spirituality (though noting the danger the former poses to the chances of the latter). And that is an uplifting thought - except that ´Return..´ was written in 1983, and as Harrer noted in a postscript the Chinese repression of Tibetan religion and society has gone up several notches since then. This contradicts Harrer´s observations (in 1983) that things seemed to be getting better, and that there seemed to be some prospect (then) for a reconciliation between the Chinese and the Dalai Lama. So in the end ´Return..´ points to a failure of hope. But as the Tibetan´s point out (and Harrer relates it but seems not to quite believe it), it may take hundreds of years to re-establish Tibet, but that is a small amount of time in their history and they can endure in the meantime.

Essentially this is an powerful extended postscript to Harrer´s ´Seven Years in Tibet´ and is a must-read in that context.½