Introduction
When I was young, few climbers captured my imagination as deeply as Hermann Buhl. He was one of those rare alpinists whose achievements seemed almost beyond belief. Recently, after many years, I took his autobiography from the shelf and opened it again. The old admiration returned at once.
Hermann Buhl was born in Innsbruck, Austria, in 1924. On June 27, 1957, after climbing Broad Peak, he set out for Chogolisa but was killed when a cornice collapsed beneath him high on the mountain in storm conditions. He was only thirty-two. The greatest summit of his career, however, remains the first ascent of Nanga Parbat, achieved alone in forty-one hours on July 3, 1953, during the final stage of the German Himalayan Expedition.
This book is the story of how a frail boy, driven by longing, discipline, and an indomitable will, became one of the greatest climbers of the twentieth century.
A Young Dreamer in Innsbruck
The preface to the book, written by Kurt Maix, describes Buhl not as a superman but as a warm-hearted and sensitive man. He was slender, gentle in appearance, and possessed eyes that suggested imagination rather than conquest. There was, Maix writes, an inner flame in him—the flame of an artist.
As a child, Hermann was weak and often ill. His family was poor, and he even spent part of his early years in an orphanage. Yet the mountains already called to him. Around the age of ten, his father first took him into the hills near Innsbruck. A few years later he was going out almost every Sunday, learning to climb by trial, error, and instinct.
He had no money for climbing shoes, so he climbed in wool socks. His first abseil was done on a laundry rope. On another day, having no proper footwear, he climbed difficult rock in ski boots. Though slight in build, he gradually gained recognition among local climbers.
Learning the Craft of Climbing
As he tackled harder routes, Buhl developed into an exceptional rock climber. He mastered severe overhangs and winter walls of ice and stone. Some of his descriptions are astonishing: crossing overhangs by the last strength of his fingers, with the rope hanging in a wide arc below him.
Yet he was never merely reckless. His principle was simple: First observe—then climb. A climber must see what others overlook. Technique matters, but so do balance, judgment, friction, and careful reading of the rock.
Even so, accidents came. He suffered rockfall injuries and serious falls. Once he plunged sixty meters when a stone platform inside a chimney suddenly collapsed. Miraculously, he survived, jammed in the crack, bruised and bleeding but alive. Later he wrote that during the fall he felt a strange sense of release, as though gravity itself had vanished.
War and Recovery
Then Europe was consumed by war. Buhl served as a soldier and later spent two years in a prisoner-of-war camp. When peace returned, he was weakened, undernourished, and far from his former strength. Recovery was slow. Food was scarce, and each small gain required patience.
Still, the mountains never left his mind. He trained on nearby cliffs and for a time also turned to skiing. Gifted with courage and natural athletic ability, he entered downhill races almost casually and even won prizes. But crashes, broken skis, injuries, and plaster casts soon ended that chapter. He returned to climbing, where he truly belonged.
Rise in the Alps
In 1948, Buhl finally received an invitation to Chamonix from the French mountaineering school. It was his long-awaited debut in the Western Alps. The summer was stormy, yet he climbed difficult faces such as the North Face of the Triolet and first encountered the mighty Grandes Jorasses.
He initially retreated from the Jorasses in bad weather, but he trained relentlessly and later returned successfully. In 1950 he added another major achievement in the Dolomites: the North Face of the West Cima, then regarded as one of the hardest climbs in the range.
During one desperate moment on that overhanging wall, exhausted and close to falling, he somehow threw himself into a chimney and held on. It was climbing at the very limit of human endurance.
Love and Solitude
At Hochkönig, near Salzburg, Buhl worked as a ski instructor. From there he often crossed the border into Bavaria for races—and for love. In Ramsau he had fallen for the daughter of the inn where he stayed. The distance was about fifty kilometers, yet he made the journey every Sunday. Eventually they married. His wife also loved the mountains.
Friends joked that Hermann was finished as a climber. Marriage, they thought, would tame him. They were mistaken.
Piz Badile and the Eiger
In July 1952, while his wife was visiting family, Buhl set off alone by bicycle for the Northeast Face of Piz Badile. It was one of the great walls of the Alps, first climbed by Riccardo Cassin after three bivouacs. Two previous climbers had died of exhaustion on the summit.
Buhl, with little money in his pocket, rode to the mountain, climbed the wall solo in four and a half astonishing hours, and then cycled back toward Innsbruck. Exhausted and half asleep, he eventually crashed into the River Inn near Landeck and had to be rescued with his damaged bicycle.
Only weeks later he was in Grindelwald for the North Face of the Eiger. Conditions were dreadful: loose rock, thin ice, falling stones, unstable gullies, and storms. Several parties converged on the face, including Gaston Rébuffat and Guido Magnone. Buhl later admitted that, among such famous climbers, he suddenly felt small and insignificant.
Yet when the weather worsened, nine climbers from different teams united in a common struggle. After days of hardship, all reached the summit safely. It was not only a climbing success, but a victory of solidarity.
Nanga Parbat: The Greatest Climb
Then came the defining chapter of his life: the 1953 expedition to Nanga Parbat under Dr. Karl Herrligkoffer. The mountain had already taken thirty-one lives and was feared as the Mountain of Fate. Avalanches battered the camps. Storms buried the tents. Porters rebelled or fell ill. Orders came from below to abandon the climb.
At the highest camp, only four climbers and four porters remained. Otto Kempter and Buhl were chosen for the summit attempt. But on the morning of July 3, Otto would not rise. So Buhl left alone after 2 a.m. Ahead of him lay twelve hundred vertical meters and six kilometers of distance—an almost unimaginable undertaking at that altitude.
He crossed the Silbersattel, traversed the forepeak, climbed exposed ridges and steep rock barriers, and finally surmounted the last great obstacle. At 7 p.m. he stood on the summit of Nanga Parbat, 8,125 meters high. Alone.
The descent was even worse. His crampons came loose. Darkness fell. Too exhausted to continue, he spent the night standing, leaning against rocks in an open bivouac. At dawn he staggered downward, half stumbling, half falling, until he saw the tents below. That sight restored his will to live.
At 7 p.m. the next evening he reached camp, where Hans and Walter embraced him in tears of joy. His feet were frostbitten, but his spirit was triumphant.
Yet at base camp there was no celebration. Because he had gone on despite orders to retreat, the expedition leadership greeted him coldly and ordered immediate return. It remains one of mountaineering history’s strangest endings to a great success.
A Brilliant Life Cut Short
This should have been only the beginning of Buhl’s second great chapter. In 1957 he climbed another eight-thousander, Broad Peak. Then, together with Kurt Diemberger, he turned toward Chogolisa. Near the summit, in storm conditions, a cornice collapsed beneath him. He fell to his death and never returned.
His brilliant future vanished with him.
Final Thoughts
The story of Nanga Parbat would later be carried forward by another giant of the mountains, Reinhold Messner. Yet Hermann Buhl remains something unique: not only a climber of immense courage, but a man of imagination, discipline, and fierce devotion.
Mountains, he wrote, shine in our memories as milestones of the past and beacons for the future. It is a fitting farewell from one of the purest spirits ever to enter the high places of the world.
At last I stood on the summit of Nanga Parbat, 8,125 meters above the sea. From my anorak I took out the little Tyrolean flag and tied it to the shaft of my ice axe.
Forty-one hours after leaving this place, I returned once more near the tent. Hans Ertl came out to meet me and took my photograph. My throat was so completely parched that I could not even speak. Hans was simply overjoyed that I had come back alive.
— Hermann Buhl (1954)