Willi Rickmer Rickmers

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Wilhelm Gustav Rickmer Rickmers (born May 1, 1873 in Lehe , today a district of Bremerhaven , † June 15, 1965 in Munich ) was a German mountaineer , ski pioneer , explorer and collector .

biography

Youth and education

His father Wilhelm was a businessman and his father, Rickmer Clasen Rickmers , founder of the well-known Rickmers shipping company . The participant in the failed Hitler putsch of 1923 Johann Rickmers (1881–1923) was his brother. He saw the light of day in the Villa Nizza in Bremerhaven, built by his father . Rickmers attended the commercial school in Bremen and completed an apprenticeship in the family business from 1891 to 1893. In 1893 Rickmers studied animal and plant science and geology at the University of Vienna , where he became a member of the academic section of the Alpine Club . In 1894 he climbed the Ararat (Caucasus) with his guide Posharski .

Research trips

His first acquaintance with Turkestan he made during his trips to Samarkand and Bukhara in 1894 and 1895. On his third and fourth trip in 1896 and 1898, he traveled deep into the mountains east of Bukhara and Dushanbe , Baldschuan and Khovaling he reached the top Jachsu -Tal in Tajikistan . Here he began to mine gold until an edict of the tsar forbade foreigners to mine for gold. Another important expedition was the first trip to the Caucasus in 1903. Many peaks were climbed, including the southern summit of the Uschba (4698 m) on July 26, 1903 by Adolf Schulze , Robert Helbling , Federico Reichert, Anton Weber and Oscar Schuster . A noteworthy participant in this expedition was Cenzi von Ficker (married Sild), one of the pioneers of alpine “women's mountaineering”. Together with Willi Rickmers, her brother and Adolf Schulze, she was involved in the first attempt to climb the 4737 m high Uschba south summit, which was then the heaviest mountain in the world. After Adolf Schulze fell badly in the lead, with her brother seriously injuring himself as his backup partner, she and Willi Rickmers and a porter hid the two injured persons and secured the descent and cared for them in the high camp. At Schulze's second and successful attempt just a few days later, however, she was not there. In recognition of her work on the mountain, the local prince Dadeschkeliani of Svaneti gave her the mountain Ushba for personal property. The relevant deed of gift with signature and seal is kept in the Museum of the Alpine Club in Munich. In connection with this expedition Willi R. Rickmers became a member of the Academic Alpine Club Zurich .

His 1906 trip with his British wife Mabel (nee Duff), a mountaineer and trained orientalist , took him deep into the Fan Mountains and on to the Serafshan Glacier, from which he made significant contributions to glacier research. The journey also took him to Kala-i Khumb, very close to his long-cherished destination, the Pamir .

In 1908 he worked in the Austrian Ministry of Labor in the tourism sector. In 1909 he was commissioned to travel to Tyrol and Vorarlberg for the purpose of winter sports. Rickmers found what he was looking for in Kühtai and thus laid the foundation for the place in Tyrol to thrive on tourism today. Perhaps he benefited from older successes: On December 15, 1902, Franz Reisch and a few ski friends founded the Association for Winter Sports . This was the hour of birth of the Kitzbühel Ski Club . In the same year Willi Rickmer Rickmers accepted the call from Reisch to Kitzbühel . He succeeded in expanding the English ski colony, and by 1909 he had trained over 1,000 people to ski. In 1908 he became an honorary member of the Kitzbüheler Ski Club (KSC).

In 1913 he led the first Pamir expedition of the German and Austrian Alpine Club with the task of exploring the mountains and passes of the southern slopes of the Garm Valley, the Khingob Valley and the Garmo Glacier , as well as the mountain passes leading to Vanch and Muksu led. On this expedition he took the first picture of Pik Ismoil Somoni . The expedition carried out the first precise measurements by means of photogrammetry of a part of the NW Pamir in the mountains of eastern Bukhara . In addition to an overview map with contour lines, a map of the Tuptschek plateau was also created. In 1914 he reported in detail about this expedition in the DOeAV magazine; Raimund von Klebelsberg explained them from a geological point of view.

The summit that Willi R. Rickmers photographed was regarded by him as the Garmo summit . However, the map made by Raimund von Klebelsberg (another member of the expedition) in 1914 showed him as a Sandal. The Sandal is really the highest peak you can see from Ters Agar and the two were seen as identical. Until 1928, Lenin Peak was thought to be the highest mountain in the Soviet part of the Pamirs. The mistake was revealed in 1932 by a Soviet expedition, which also determined the real positions and heights. The higher peak was renamed the Stalin Peak . In 1962 he became Pik Communism and in 1998 was named Pik Ismoil Somoni . It was climbed for the first time by Yevgeny Abalakov in 1933 .

Rickmers took part in the First World War and settled in Munich in 1918 . Here he worked as a translator of English-language mountain books and expedition reports.

The Emergency Community of German Science in Berlin and the Russian Academy of Sciences in Leningrad, with the support of the German and Austrian Alpine Associations, sponsored the German-Soviet Alai-Pamir Expedition in 1928 under the joint leadership of Willi R. Rickmers and Nikolai Petrovich Gorbunow - an unusual collaboration in that time. The tasks were divided among the Germans and Russians. The latter took over mineralogy, petrography and the strategically important geodetic-astronomical work. The Germans were left with geology, surveying and mapping, glaciology and language research. The main mission of the expedition was the exploration and cartography of the unexplored center of the Pamir Territories, then known as Sel Tau . They succeeded in determining the length of the Fedchenko Glacier for the first time and thus confirming that it was the longest mountain glacier in the world.

He arrived in Tashkent at the beginning of June 1928 . The expedition, which advanced from the Alai Valley to the highest peak in Russia, the 7134 m high Lenin Peak, formerly known as the Kaufmann Peak, returned in December 1928. The three German mountaineers Karl Wien , Eugen Allwein and Erwin Schneider managed the first ascent of Lenin Peak . At 7132 m it was the highest peak on earth that was climbed by humans. Today there are 16 routes to the summit, nine on the south side and seven on the north side.

Rickmers had a book published by FA Brockhaus in Leipzig in January 1930 about this joint scientific work by German and Russian scholars , entitled Alai! Alai! . He published the scientific results of the Alai-Pamir expedition in 7 volumes.

When Jews were excluded from the Alpine associations in 1921 , he put up bitter resistance.

Willi Rickmer Rickmers made great contributions to the introduction and spread of skiing in the Alpine countries. He left his collection of Bukhara carpets to the Berlin Museum of Ethnology . In 1901 he offered his private alpine library with more than 5000 mostly valuable volumes to the Central Committee of the German and Austrian Alpine Association (DuOeAV) as the basis for a library to be established in Munich.

In 1930 he published his autobiography Cross Section Through Me .

He lived in Munich since 1930.

Honors

  • In 1930 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Innsbruck University of the Alps in recognition of his services to the exploration of the high mountains in Central Asia .
  • In 1935 he was awarded the Patron's Medal by the Royal Geographical Society in London.
  • The Berlin Geographical Society awarded him the Nachtigal Medal.
  • On the occasion of his 70th birthday, on May 1st, 1943, he was awarded the Goethe Medal for Art and Science in recognition of his services as a researcher in Asia . The Royal Geographical Society in London honored him with the King's Medal.
  • The Rickmers Glacier in Antarctica has been named after him since 1959 .
  • With Gloydius rickmersi , Wagner et al. (2016) named a species of snake from the Alai after him.

Works

  • Alai! Alai! Work and experiences of the German-Russian Alai-Pamir expedition. Brockhaus-Verlag, Leipzig 1930.
  • The pilgrimage to the True Jacob. Mountain hikes in Cantabria. Brockhaus-Verlag, Leipzig 1926.
  • The Ushba in the Caucasus. Separate print from the magazine of the German and Austrian Alpine Association, year 1898, vol. XXIX.
  • Alai (Pamir) expedition 1928 (preliminary reports from the German participants). From the work of the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft (German Research Foundation), Issue 10, K. Siegesmund Verlag, Berlin 1929.
  • The Duab of Turkestan . Cambridge United Press, 1913 - openlibrary.org full text (English)

See also

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b John Stewart: Antarctica - An Encyclopedia . Vol. 2, McFarland & Co., Jefferson and London 2011, ISBN 978-0-7864-3590-6 , p. 1299 (English).
  2. ↑ bergnews.com bergnews
  3. ^ Austrian Alpine Club (ed.): Austrian Alpine newspaper. Annual overview . tape 49 . Innsbruck 1927.
  4. ↑ Directory of Members. In Ruedi Kaiser: 100 years of the Academic Alpine Club Zurich 1896–1996. Academic Alpine Club, Zurich 1996, p. 212 ff.
  5. ↑ dradio.de Kühtai
  6. ↑ Kitzbühel. ( Memento from July 11, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) In: www.bad-soden.de. Retrieved May 23, 2019.
  7. ↑ Note: There is a letter that Willi Rickmer wrote to his friend Henry Hoek in December 1914.
  8. ^ Kundt, Klaus (2002). "Jews and members of the Danube Country section undesirable". A chapter of DuÖ.AV history in the Third Reich ". In: DAV-Panorama 1/2002. P. 32–34.
  9. ↑ (DAV library) (PDF; 206 kB)
personal data
SURNAME Rickmers, Willi Rickmer
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Rickmers, Wilhelm Gustav Rickmer (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German mountaineer, ski pioneer, explorer and collector
DATE OF BIRTH May 1, 1873
PLACE OF BIRTH Bremerhaven
DATE OF DEATH June 15, 1965
Place of death Munich