By John Flinn
One of the greatest travelers and adventurers of the last century died a few months ago, and hardly anybody noticed. His passing rated only the briefest of mentions in this newspaper. I missed it completely. I was out of the country at the time and just learned about it the other day.
Heinrich Harrer led such an amazing life that the fact that he was part of the first team to climb the suicidally dangerous north face of the Eiger in Switzerland — one of the most significant feats in the history of mountaineering — is merely a footnote in his biography. Olympic skier, anthropologist, author of a dozen books, maker of 40 documentary films, explorer of Papua New Guinea — all his accomplishments are overshadowed by the Austrian’s greatest adventure.
In 1944, when Tibet was one of the most unknown, forbidding, secretive places on earth — only a handful of Westerners had ever seen its capital, Lhasa — Harrer and a friend escaped from a British POW camp in India and walked across a Himalayan pass onto the rooftop of the world.
They had no maps and no firm idea of what lay ahead. They shielded themselves from the cold with tattered sheepskin coats; they ate only what they could scrounge from the land. To keep foreigners out, Tibetans were forbidden to help them in any way. The two Austrians hiked for 21 months and 1,000 miles through deserts and snowdrifts, but eventually they found themselves gazing up at the golden-roofed Potala Palace, which crowns an entire hilltop. They’d achieved a feat that had eluded so many of the West’s most determined explorers and adventurers: They’d reached the forbidden city of Lhasa.
There Harrer became the tutor, friend and confidante of the Dalai Lama, who was merely a teenager at the time and ravenous for information about the outside world. The unlikely pair became lifelong friends, and Harrer spent the rest of his years championing the Tibetan cause.
He died at age 93 in January in Austria, and next month the Dalai Lama will travel to Harrer’s hometown to honor their friendship by laying the foundation for an International Center of Higher Tibetan Studies, the only one of its kind outside the Dalai Lama’s home in Dharamsala, India.
All in all, one of the more remarkable lives of the last century. So why didn’t Harrer’s passing get more attention? Maybe it was because he was a Nazi.
His secret came out in 1997, shortly before the release of the film adaptation of his book, “Seven Years in Tibet,” starring Brad Pitt. The German magazine Stern revealed that Harrer had become a storm trooper in 1938 and joined Hitler’s secret police, the SS, as a sergeant in 1938. When the story broke, Hollywood quickly revoked Harrer’s invitation to the premier.
Harrer maintained he was merely a sports instructor for the Nazis and had joined mostly to further his mountaineering ambitions. Membership was necessary, he said, to join the 1939 German expedition to unclimbed Nanga Parbat in Kashmir. Harrer was still in India when World War II began, and spent five years as a prisoner of the British.
He dismissed his Nazi past as “youthful opportunism” and a “stupid mistake,” and initiated a meeting with famous Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal, who agreed that Harrer was innocent of any serious wrongdoing. The Dalai Lama stood by his friend.
“My personal political philosophy grew out of my life in Tibet,” Harrer wrote. “It is a belief that reflects many tenets of Buddhism and places great emphasis on human life and human dignity. And it is a philosophy which leads me to condemn as strongly as possible the horrible crimes of the Nazi period.”
There’s a great story here about the transformative power of travel, about how exposure to different cultures turned a onetime Nazi into a champion of peace and human rights. It’s hard to think of a better tale of redemption.
But I want to focus on another aspect of Harrer’s life: He was the world’s last true adventurer. It is no longer possible to walk off the edge of the map, as he did so many times. There are no more mysterious kingdoms hidden from the world, no more uncharted rivers, no more undiscovered mountains. No place on the Earth’s surface is so remote or unknown that CNN can’t get a live shot of it.
I get the sense Harrer understood that all the blank spots on the map were rapidly filling in, and that he strove to make the most of his time. He’s always popping up, Zelig-like, in tales of 20th century adventure.
Hidden in the jungles of New Guinea is a 16,000-foot, glacier-covered mountain called Carstensz Pyramid. Well into the last century people refused to believe it even existed, and nobody managed to reach its summit until 1962. The first on top? Harrer. He slashed through the nearly impenetrable jungle of Brazil’s Mato Grosso to make contact with the indigenous Xingu Indians, sailed to obscure islands in the Andaman Sea and shared a near-fatal bout of malaria with his explorer friend, Belgian King Leopold. He explored Greenland and Sudan and made notable first ascents in Alaska. At the age of 46, he even took up golf and became Austria’s amateur champion.
Adventure in Harrer’s day meant severing your lifeline and living for months or years off nothing but your wits and resourcefulness. Those days are gone. Today polar expeditions routinely stay in touch via satellite phone, and Everest climbers rush back from the summit to update their blogs. The notion of adventure travel has become so diluted that we now think of it as something we buy from a glossy catalog, like a coffee table from Pottery Barn.
Harrer was the last of a breed in a world that no longer exists. When he passed away, his family announced: “Heinrich Harrer departed for his last expedition with a great calm.”
John Flinn is the executive editor of Travel. E-mail him at travel@sfchronicle.com.
