Norman Dyhrenfurth

Swiss Himalayan Expedition, autumn 1952

Norman Günter Dyhrenfurth (born May 7, 1918 in Breslau ; † September 24, 2017 in Salzburg ) was a US-American-Swiss mountaineer, expedition leader, cameraman and director. His greatest merit was leading the American Mount Everest expedition in 1963.

Life

Norman Günter Dyhrenfurth was the son of the geologist and Himalayan expedition leader Günter Oskar Dyhrenfurth (1886–1975) and the mountaineer Hettie Dyhrenfurth (1892–1972), who had held the height record for women for 20 years after climbing Sia Kangri at 7,315 meters . After the National Socialists came to power, his father resigned his professorship in Wroclaw and settled with his family in Switzerland.

Hettie Dyhrenfurth emigrated to the USA in 1937, where she was followed by Norman, then 19. Norman, who had climbed Mont Blanc and other Alpine peaks with his father before leaving for the USA , worked in America as a ski instructor, mountain guide and cameraman. His father had already financed his Himalayan expeditions through films and aroused his son's interest in filming.

During the Second World War , Norman Dyhrenfurth took part in the battle for the Aleutians on the side of the American troops . After the war, he became director of a film production company and was appointed lecturer at the University of California at Los Angeles , where he eventually became director of the UCLA Film School. In this position he came into contact with many famous directors such as Alfred Hitchcock and Fred Zinnemann .

Himalayan expeditions

Through his father's mediation, Dyhrenfurth became a member of the second Swiss Mount Everest expedition in 1952. At the last moment he joined the expedition as a cameraman. He did not reach the expedition until they had already set up camp on the Khumbu Glacier . He was slow to acclimate and suffered from a cold. Nevertheless, he was able to contribute impressive panoramic shots to the expedition film. The Swiss could not reach the summit, but with their expedition they laid the foundation for the first ascent by Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay the following year. After returning to the USA, Norman Dyhrenfurth resigned from the management of the UCLA Film School in order to devote himself only to the Himalayas.

In 1955 he led an international Himalayan expedition to Lhotse . In 1958 he was the deputy head of a scientific group looking for the " Yeti ". In 1960 he went to Dhaulagiri as a cameraman with a Swiss mountaineering team , which was first ascent on this expedition.

For 1963, he convinced the National Geographic Society to fund the American Mount Everest Expedition . He was commissioned to lead this expedition. He looked for participants with advertisements in the magazines of American mountaineering clubs. Numerous scientists joined the expedition, including a sociologist and a psychologist who, on behalf of NASA, studied the group's reaction and cooperation under stressful conditions. For NASA, the results were important in the preparation of the Apollo program for the first moon landing . The expedition was financed through fundraising. "I raised half a million dollars," said Dyhrenfurth in an interview with the Neue Zürcher Zeitung.

During this expedition, James Whittaker became the first American to climb Everest. Together with the Sherpa Nawang Gombu , the nephew of Tenzing Norgay , he reached the summit via the route planned by the Swiss in 1952 and followed by the first climbers in 1953 via the southeast ridge. Three weeks later, two more rope teams managed to climb Mount Everest via various routes. Tom Hornbein and Willi Unsoeld followed the west ridge, but then had to move to the north face and climbed to the summit in the gorge, which has since been known as the “ Hornbein Couloir ”. “When I visited Tom Hornbein in San Diego before the expedition, I mentioned my dream of crossing Mount Everest. At first Tom was skeptical, but over time he became a West Ridge fanatic who would have loved to give up the route over the Südsattel, ”said Norman Dyhrenfurth in an interview with the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Hornbein and Unsoeld then crossed Mount Everest for the first time and followed the team that had climbed the standard south route on their descent. This crossing was also the first crossing of an eight-thousander at all. "You did something completely insane," commented Himalayan chronicler Elizabeth Hawley 50 years after the event in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.

Upon their return, Dyhrenfurth and his crew received the rarely-awarded Hubbard Medal from the National Geographic Society at a reception in the White House from President John F. Kennedy . Dyhrenfurth also successfully campaigned for the Sherpa to be honored in the expedition team.

In 1971 Dyhrenfurth organized another expedition to Mount Everest. Like his father, who had led mountaineers into the Himalayas on behalf of the League of Nations , he wanted to assemble an international group on Everest without nationality disputes. Thirty climbers from thirteen different nations took part, including Chris Bonington , Don Whillans , Dougal Haston , Naomi Uemura , Toni Hiebeler , the Austrians Wolfgang Axt and Leo Schlömmer and the four "Latins" from Romance-speaking countries, the French MP Pierre Mazeaud , the Italian Carlo Mauri and the Geneva couple Yvette and Michel Vaucher.

But the expedition was not a lucky star. “Like prima donnas” - this is how Chris Bonington later described his colleagues - the prominent mountaineers traveled to. Mazeaud and Mauri had the main goal to be the first person of their nation to stand on the summit, as was Yvette Vaucher as the first woman. In contrast, the summit had already been climbed by the British, Americans and Japanese, so that their and Dyhrenfurth's interest was in the more difficult routes over the west ridge and the south-west flank. The food organized by Axt, who was a vegetarian, met with little approval from the other mountaineers. Bonington, who was intended as a leader, withdrew from the planning phase because he was concerned that his own authority would not be enough with climbers of this caliber and self-confidence. He did arrive, but shortly afterwards he left again because his premonition seemed to be confirmed. Later, at the beginning of a ten-day period of bad weather , the Indian Harsh Bahuguna froze to death in a snow storm. A vote on how to proceed was manipulated to the detriment of the "Latins" by including the Sherpas, who usually did not have voting rights, who refused to reschedule the routes already laid out to the normal route through the technically easier, but objectively dangerous, Khumbu Icefall . Mazeaud refused to take part in carrying the luggage of Anglo-Saxons and Japanese, calling this request an insult to France. Yvette Vaucher threw snowballs at Dyhrenfurth and called him "Salaud" (bastard). Finally, a heated argument in base camp culminated in the saying "Fuck off, Mazeaud" by the British James Roberts. The day after this scandal, the four "Latins" left the expedition. After another unsuccessful attempt over the southwest flank, Dyhrenfurth finally broke off the expedition prematurely.

He later made award-winning documentaries on Tibet and Buddhism as well as mountain films such as Am Rande des Abgrunds ( Five Days One Summer ) with Sean Connery , directed by Fred Zinnemann and On behalf of the dragon ( The Eiger Sanction ) with the participation and direction of Clint Eastwood .

literature

• Andreas Nickel: Himalaya. Norman Dyhrenfurth: Expeditions and Films 1952–1971. AS Verlag , Zurich 2007, ISBN 3-909111-41-6 .
• Peter Steele: As a doctor on Everest. International Himalaya Expedition led by Norman G. Dyhrenfurth and James OM Roberts. Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, Munich 1974, ISBN 3-485-01758-2 .
• Norman G. Dyhrenfurth: What else is heaven for? Memories of my time at Himalaya.Tyrolia-Verlag, Innsbruck 2018 , ISBN 978-3-7022-3689-2 .

Movies

• André Roth, Norman Dyhrenfurth et al .: Mount Everest 1952 . Condor Film SA, Zurich 1952
• Andreas Nickel and Jürgen Czwienk: To the third pole. Documentary about the Dyhrenfurth family, Germany, 2007

Web links

• Norman Dyhrenfurth in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Literature by and about Norman Dyhrenfurth in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Mountaineer Norman Dyhrenfurth died , obituary by Stephanie Geiger, in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of September 27, 2017, accessed on September 27, 2017.
2. ↑ ^{a b} Stephanie Geiger: A thirst for adventure is something else. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , May 7, 2013, accessed on May 7, 2018.
3. ↑ ^{a b} Stephanie Geiger: "The team spirit was incredibly good". Interview in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , May 3, 2013, accessed on April 5, 2014.
4. ↑ cf. Walt Unsworthals: Everest: the mountaineering history. Baton Wicks Publications, London 2000, pp. 393-422 (Chapter 17: Not a private affair. ) In a similar form in Walt Unsworthals: Courage and misfortune. In: Mountaineers anthology series, Volume II. The Mountaineers Books, Seattle 2001, pp. 31-69.
5. ↑ Youtube: Mount Everst 1952 with Raymond Lambert, Tenzing Norgay, Historical Films of Condor Films Zurich