Fritz Eske

Fritz Eske (born May 19, 1935 in East Prussia ; † July 21, 1967 in the north face of the Eiger ) was a German climber and mountaineer. Until his death on the Eiger he was one of the best climbers in the world. He was the first climber in Germany to manage a route in the ninth Saxon degree (UIAA scale VIII−) .

Life

Fritz Eske was born in East Prussia and came to Meißen in the course of being expelled from the East . He was a trained chimney sweep and later a master chimney sweep. Like many others, he emigrated to the western part of Germany in 1956. Fritz Eske lived and worked first in Stuttgart and then in Munich. He climbed in Corsica , in the Wilder Kaiser and also in the Oberreintal . In 1957 he returned to the GDR. A little later he was elected to the management of the German Association for Hiking, Mountaineering and Orienteering in the GDR and was chairman of the ZFK Alpinistik (the specialist committee for alpinism in the GDR) from 1961 to 1966 . He was a member of the GDR's national alpinism team and, as such, practically a professional athlete.

In his youth, Fritz Eske became the district master in gymnastics. He was also able to use his gymnastics skills while climbing. In 1953, he climbed the old route to the Raaber Tower near Rathen in Saxon Switzerland as the first solo route .

In 1965 he succeeded with the first ascent of the route Königshangel am Frienstein (Saxon scale IXa, UIAA scale VIII−) one of the hardest climbing routes in the world at the time and the hardest climbing route in Germany at the time. The route was officially repeated for the first time only 17 years after Bernd Arnold's first ascent .

In the summer of 1967 Fritz Eske was able to undertake an ascent into the Western Alps with a five-person team from what was then the Center for Mountaineering and Alpinism in Dresden. After the successful ascent of the Matterhorn north face via the Schmid route , Fritz Eske and his comrades Günter Warmuth, Günter Kalkbrenner and Kurt Richter climbed the Eiger north face on July 21 . In the late afternoon of the same day they were last seen shortly before the Hinterstoisserquergang, before fog enveloped the wall. Shortly afterwards, the four-man party must have crashed . The causes and course of the accident remained unexplained, probably falling rocks led to the accident. The corpses of Fritz Eske as well as Kurt Richter and Günter Warmuth were found below the broken pillar the next day and identified by those accompanying them. Günter Kalkbrenner was found ten days later by a Czech rope team.

Fritz Eske was married and had a daughter who was one year old when he crashed.

Well-known first ascents

Saxon Switzerland

• Königshangel am Frienstein (IXa)
• Herbstweg at the Free Tower (VIIIa)

Bohemian Switzerland

• Dresdner Weg at the Kastenturm (VIIIa)

all difficulties in the Saxon scale

literature

• Waltraud Weber: Fritz Eske and the "Rock Sons Coswig". In: The New Saxon Mountaineer. Newsletter of the SBB . Volume 18, No. 3, September 2007 (PDF file; 1.5 MB), pp. 32–34