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Steve Grossman
Trad climber
Seattle, WA
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Dec 12, 2009 - 10:34pm PT
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Primo historical material Randisi! Thanks for posting this stuff up!
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Dec 13, 2009 - 12:47am PT
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Terrific, randisi! Many thanks for your efforts. I always found it interesting that Preuss learned his ice work largely from Britain's finest boulderer!
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survival
Big Wall climber
A Token of My Extreme
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 13, 2009 - 01:49am PT
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Wow Randisi, You are totally making this thread. I just started out with some of the standard about one of my earliest heroes, and here you are bringing the real goods out!!
I could care less about the perfection of your translation, since my German is non-existant!!
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Steve Grossman
Trad climber
Seattle, WA
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Dec 13, 2009 - 01:56am PT
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John- Your website has some really fascinating history on Eckenstein! He sure liked getting climbers together for the betterment of the sport.
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Captain...or Skully
Social climber
Top of the 5.2-5.12 Boulder
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Dec 13, 2009 - 02:12am PT
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Whoa. That's some good stuff on Preuss.
Thanks for throwin' that out there.
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Tarbuster
climber
right here, right now
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Dec 13, 2009 - 02:32am PT
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Good stuff Randisi!
I understand neither the value of the feelings nor the value of the achievement, if one swindles oneself thus up a face.
If one cannot also make a section of climbing without protection – from the alpinistic and sporting point of view, – one ought then not to make it at all.
A significant role should fall to the roped belay of the leader, yet daring everything and carrying out everything through trusting in roped belays and pitons is imprudent, unjustified and without style.
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klk
Trad climber
cali
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Dec 13, 2009 - 11:43am PT
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randisi:
Doubtless by "ideality" he means the "beauty," the aesthetics of the line. The aesthetics of the alpine lines are prized by the alpinist, whereas the mere rock-climbing lines are "anything but ideal” – or at least not as concerned with the beauty of the line. No doubt he'd admit rock-climbing is also concerned with the beauty of the line. Thus aesthetics and difficulty would play a similar role in both, with this difference: alpinism values aesthetics over difficulty and rock-climbing values difficulty over aesthetics, hence the roles are played in contrary senses.
Yes, that's on the money, and no, you aren't reading too much into it. It's just the German grammar that makes it a bit murky, that and the distance between us and Preuss. He was a biologist by training, not a philosopher or an essayist, so neither his writing nor his philosophical work approached his ability in the mountains. And "idealism" here, is not the ordinary American meaning, but rather a gesture toward technical idealism, although Preuss's philosophy is pretty amateurish.
Two caveats. First, it is easy-- but misleading --for us to read "artificial aids" as a denunciation of aid climbing. Then we can feel warm and fuzzy so long as we're not whipping out the aiders. But our distinction between "aid" and "free" climbing didn't exist yet.
Preuss's critique applied to all placements of gear-- each bolt, each cam, each and every rappel point, and even each and every time you descend by any route other than the one which you just ascended --you are straying from the path. Bachar-Yerian? Into the flames!
Second, Messner's return to Preuss is meant to bolster Messner's own polemics about clean climbing, but it also grows out of a different politics.
Had he not died when he did, Preuss would've been in trouble. By the mid-1920s, the German-Austrian Alpine Club had become a staging ground for right-wing thugs and terrorists, political anti-Semitites, and, quickly, Nazis. Preuss was half-Jewish. Had he lived, he would've had to flee or else he'd have gone to the ovens. After the 1930s, he was read out of the German mountaineering canon.
Messner went to the EU as a member of the Green Party, even though he was elected from a notoriously conservative region. His return to Preuss, then, is partly a polemic against the remaining right-wing tendencies in his home region and the German and Austrian Alpine Clubs, and a shot at those remaining "stars" like Harrer, who refused to renounce or even acknowledge their Nazi pasts.
It'd be nice if we could have a good selection of period pieces in translation. For those of you who read the German, there's stacks of the period journals in the reading room at the AAC Library.
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Rick A
climber
Boulder, Colorado
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Dec 13, 2009 - 11:59am PT
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Thanks everyone for this thread. It is remarkable how the ethics themes repeat themselves over 100 years.
Preuss reminded me of a passage from Patey in his 1960's classic, The Art of Climbing Down Gracefully. This is from Ploy number 14, quoting Patey's character, "The Old Man of the Mountains".
"Play up and play the game--but learn the rules first. Ignore the rules and the game is not worth playing. Present-day rock acrobats don't accept exposure as part of the game. They protect themselves every yard of the way with ridiculous little gadgets of all shapes and sizes...Gone are the days of Kirkus and Edwards, when a leader had sufficient moral conviction to run out 150 feet of lightweight hemp before taking a hitch...My race may be run, but never let it be said that I helped beget a generation of Cream-Puff climbers."
No cream puff, Preuss, and "moral conviction" in spades. Here is a picture of his 1911 route on the Cima Piccolissima. It is the obvious chimney line facing the camera. At the time, we heard it was about 5.8. If anyone has done it, it would be good to hear about it.
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klk
Trad climber
cali
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Dec 13, 2009 - 12:28pm PT
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Is there anyway to access your essay? I have university acess privileges to many periodicals. I promise to ignore spelling errors! Interesting point of view on Messner's motivations. Why do you suppose he left Eckenstein's influence on Preuss out of the work?
Randi-- check yr email.
The article I did on the Mauerhakenstreit appeared in an Austrian journal that isn't easily available in the US. I'm writing a longer piece for the J. of Historical Sociology that will appear online through the usual range of library subscriptions. I can't post articles here because of copyright issues. But I am going to start up an alpine history blog as part of a book I'm writing on the history of alpinism.
So far as Eckenstein is concerned, I've seen little evidence that he really was a serious influence on the continent, outside of his role in creating 12-point crampons. He simply didn't have the vita of big first ascents behind him. But he was one of the very few period Alpine Clubbers of German descent, and that would've made him visible to German, Austrian and Swiss climbers anxious to highlight the ways that Germans were taking over from the Brits as the cutting edge of alpinism.
By 1912 the German-speaking Alps and alpinists had really taken over from the Brits and the French Alps as the avant garde. Preuss, Dulfer and Piaz were part of that shift.
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klk
Trad climber
cali
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Dec 13, 2009 - 01:15pm PT
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So then whoever Survival was quoting in that first post is mistaken. I suppose that is what you meant when you wrote that the Wikipedia article "has some problems." JoGill will be disappointed.
No, John's doing yeoman's work.
History is handcraft, and like any other handcraft, it has imperfections and small mistakes. Some of those involve translation or place names or other minor factual details. We have to trust that other historians will follow us, catch those errors, and correct them. Just a normal part of the process.
I'm spending my day editing an earlier draft of my own work to try and account for comments and criticisms from colleagues who caught either errors or obscurities. Then the editor will go through it, then the copy editor. Finally, it will appear. And the damn thing will still have some mistakes!
Preuss's time and place are really difficult, especially for North American English speakers. The German journals were a witches brew of amateur idealism, jingoism, neo-Paganism, Aryan occultism, Catholic mysticism, political Anti-Semitism, and German nationalisms of all kinds. Even the simplest word choice could imply all sorts of weird politics, many of them truly ugly.
One of the things we do with folks like Preuss is try to make them relevant to us, or even to try and imagine that they were really just like us: That they climbed for the same reasons, experienced the same feelings, shared the same basic sentiments and psychology as us. And we like to believe that climbing is universal, apolitical, and transcendent.
But they didn't, and it isn't.
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Bob D'A
Trad climber
Boulder, CO
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Dec 13, 2009 - 02:07pm PT
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Waste of young life. Quite sad when you think about it.
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survival
Big Wall climber
A Token of My Extreme
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 13, 2009 - 02:32pm PT
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Klk, very interesting points.
The whole social situation in Germany was the furthest thing from my mind.
I just dredged up some material that seemed to jive with what I had read in the past.
Too bad that he carried his ethic to the bitter end. I mean, I appreciate it, but it would have been cool if he would've lived to be an old scholar of the game too. My ideas have definitely softened as my middle has....
I agree with purity, until I get too gripped. The my desire to live to climb another day gets the better of me. Ding, ding diNG, DING!!!!
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klk
Trad climber
cali
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Dec 14, 2009 - 01:17pm PT
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I don't recall him making this specific claim. Isn't his position a little, albeit not much, less extreme, viz. that you should be able to downclimb the route ascended and as comfortably as you ascended it, not that you actually have to each and every time.
Preuss had a pretty rigid set of principles for the ideal. Even he seldom met all of the criteria and was known to compromise. But the ideal was fairly stark. He and Piaz did climb together at least once (with at least one piton, as i recall), and one of Preuss's friends, Hans Dulfer, was probably the most famous proponent of pitons and even aid climbing. Dulfer popularized tension traverses and pendulums and the Dulfersitz rappel, along with new free technique . (Dulfer is still a word for layback.)
Eugen Guido Lammer belonged to an earlier generation of Viennese alpinists, and he was one of those who popularized guideless climbing and soloing, thereby making Preuss's style possible. He saw the mountains as a refuge from the political warfare emerging in Vienna. In retrospect, that vision was fairly naive, but to his credit, he was one of the few who, in 1924, spoke out against the expulsion of the Jewish Donauland Sektion from the Alpenverein.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Dec 14, 2009 - 09:08pm PT
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Regarding Oscar Eckenstein's possible influence on Preuss, (in addition to Preuss mentioning Eckenstein's inventions: 12 point crampons and short ice axe),from the obituary of Preuss in the Alpine Journal (1914), Dr Gunther Freiherr Von Saar has this to say:
"In the last two summers he [Preuss] went to the western alps, where under Eckenstein's tuition he learnt modern ice craft, and then devoted his attention, with enthusiasm, to the great problems of the 4,000 meter peaks in the Mont Blanc range."
Eckenstein probably didn't have a significant impact in the alps apart from his introduction of new equipment and ice climbing techniques. He was not known for leading bold first ascents, even in the British Isles. But he did have a considerable reputation in England as a boulderer . . . possibly the first documented true master of the sport. Remarks from his colleagues imply he introduced "balance climbing" as we know it now.
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Steve Grossman
Trad climber
Seattle, WA
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Dec 14, 2009 - 09:26pm PT
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Interesting history on who is credited with inventing front points between Eckenstein and Laurent Grivel. They worked together and I wonder if they jointly came up with the notion of horizontal front points?
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survival
Big Wall climber
A Token of My Extreme
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 15, 2009 - 12:07am PT
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Piaz reply is very informative. I must admit to agreeing with most of it.
I want to be bold, but not dead. Some days that line is a little further this way, some days a little further that way.
Preuss ego almost had to be huge after some of those routes. People calling him nuts, and yet pulling off some huge significant things that were hard to argue with. Right up until he didn't pull it off....
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survival
Big Wall climber
A Token of My Extreme
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 15, 2009 - 12:19pm PT
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I don't know...what's an Oscareckensteinstreit???
Interesting about a pin on Trisselwand, I didn't know that.
I WANT to climb in the best style possible, but I also WANT a bit of courage in my rucksack.
Once I have surrendered to the idea of needing a few pins on a route, I see no dilemma with having a good selection of them. There is one of the pitfalls. But I am still driven by my admiration for people like Preuss, and it keeps the techno-welding down to a dull roar on most routes.
Yin and Yang...light and dark?
Bravery vs chicken?
Life vs death???
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klk
Trad climber
cali
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Dec 15, 2009 - 12:51pm PT
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No Oskarstreit.
Eckenstein probably deserves credit, as John says, for what we think of as friction climbing. Before Eckenstein began leaning back over his feet, and trusting to friction, everyone used to climb slabs by grovelling on their bellies. And he is usually credited with introducing 12-pt crampons.
But he never turned these technical innovations into major first ascents, which in those days, were the criterion by which all innovations were measured. It took decades for 12pt crampons to become the norm. Anderl Heckmair wore a pair on the Eigerwand, and that showed, once and for all, that 12pts were the real deal.
Eckenstein, though, was one of the last remaining social links between the English Alpine Club and the Alpenverein. The English, along with the French and msot of the Swiss guides, closed ranks against pitons and pitoncraft. And the rise of German nationalism and political Anti-Semitism meant that the Brits and French had reasons to be suspicious of other German innovations. Even before WW1, the relations between the AC and the DOAV were fraying. And WW1 fairly drew the boundary lines.
And of course, Eckenstein's Jewish connections didn't improve his standing in either Club.
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jogill
climber
Colorado
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Dec 15, 2009 - 09:01pm PT
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Although continental European climbers may have associated the British Eckenstein with the venerable Alpine Club, he may not have been a member of an organization he detested. I could be wrong, but I've come across several references that O.E. was loath to associate with the aging Victorian mountaineers, who, themselves, would certainly think twice about associating with a East End Jew. He was, of course, a friend of G. W. Young and several "modern" alpinists who may have been members of the AC at the time.
In the May,1900, issue of Sandow's Magazine of Physical Culture there appeared an article written by Eckenstein entitled "Hints to Young Climbers". It concludes . . . "By the time you are yourself expert you will have acquired a large circle of devoted enemies. Every weapon that falsehood, scandal, and misrepresentation can forge will be raised against you. The 'Authorities' will refuse to recognize any new climbs you have made; and the Alpine Club will have none of you. All this will amuse you."
From O. E.'s friend Aleister Crowley's Confessions:
"My other climbing friends, with hardly an exception, came to me and warned me to 'have nothing to do with that scoundrel Eckenstein'. 'Who is he anyhow? A dirty East End Jew.' (I quote Mr Morley Roberts, the cobbler of trashy novelettes, who said this to me at Zermatt.)"
"He hated self-advertising quacks like the principal members of the Alpine Club with an intensity which, legitimate as it was, was almost overdone. His detestation of every kind of humbug and false pretence was an overmastering passion. I have never met any man who upheld the highest moral ideals with such unflinching candour."
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survival
Big Wall climber
A Token of My Extreme
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Topic Author's Reply - Dec 15, 2009 - 11:48pm PT
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Randisi, WOW!
That one will take me a moment to digest.
jogill, how many of these guys were you hip to and reading about before you started pushing your envelope so far? Were you a history buff before, or did your interest in those pioneers develop over time?
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