Valleyer Tom Dauer publishes a tribute to his idol Reinhard Karl

Created: 08/11/2022, 07:02

Homage to the idol: Tom Dauer and Sandra Freudenstein have published a book about mountaineering legend Reinhard Karl, whose books the Valleyer devoured as a teenager.

© Thomas Plettenberg

He was a role model that inspired him.

Now the Valleyer Tom Dauer honors the alpinist Reinhard Karl with a homage in book form.

"Reinhard Karl - The Art of Climbing a Mountain" has now been published.

Valley

– Everyone knows it.

This film, this song or book that touched you so much as an adolescent that it shaped you and became a model.

For the Valley alpinist and publicist Tom Dauer it was Reinhard Karl's "Mountain Experience - Time to Breathe" that he devoured in one gulp and used as a model for many things.

He has now dedicated a book to the man from Heidelberg, who died in 1982, which is intended to keep the memory of the special mountaineer and climber alive: "Reinhard Karl - The Art of Climbing a Mountain".

Dauer still remembers exactly how his mother gave the book with the dedication to his father for his birthday in 1981.

"I can remember that day well," he says, "because I grabbed the book and read it in one go." The then twelve-year-old was so fascinated by the reading that he couldn't put the book down.

Even more.

It fascinated him, who had just started climbing, with all his recordings and descriptions.

"That's where I wanted to go," explains Dauer the magic of Karl's book.

"Yosemite, Pakistan - I always had these images in my head."

The first German on Mount Everest

Among other things, Karl climbed the north face of the Eiger in just one and a half days in 1969, was a pioneer of free climbing in the 1970s and was the first German to climb the summit in May 1978 as part of the famous Mount Everest expedition of Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler Mount Everest.

Like his role model, Dauer slept on the window sill as a teenager to get used to the limited space on the vertical rock.

He put emery paper on the boxes to familiarize his fingertips with rough material and alcohol was taboo for him even at the age of twenty, because Karl too had lived an ascetic life until he was in a camp in 1982 at the age of 35 during an expedition on Cho Oyu in Nepal died in a tent under an ice avalanche.

It was a long time ago, and yet the work of the alpinist, photographer and writer is still easy to read, modern and a source of inspiration for a large fan base.

If you don't have a Karl in your bookcase yet, you have a problem.

"It's not even available as an antiquarian anymore," says Dauer, who dealt with the model in his thesis, among other things, and ended the graduation speech with a quote from his idol.

"Looking back, that was pretty precocious," he says, laughing, and recounts how, right out of high school, he traveled to Yosemite Valley to see the captivatingly described walls of El Capitan and Half Dome for himself, and was disappointed at how everything had changed .

Timeless thoughts and reflections

What has remained timeless are the thoughts and reflections.

"Reinhard Karl wrote with the dissecting knife" describes Dauer the style of the man whose life he filmed on behalf of Bavarian Radio - to be seen in the current program of the Alpine Film Festival, with which he and Sandra Freudenberg are touring through Germany until December.

Together they are also editors of the new book, which is intended to close a gap after two previous publications for the Zurich AS publishing house – 2002 “Reinhard Karl.

A life without ifs and buts” and 2006 “Reinhard Karl.

The new image of the mountains” – are no longer available.

Salewa founder Hermann Huber has promised financial support for the printing costs.

They shoulder everything else themselves. Out of conviction, so as not to let a great alpinist fall into oblivion.

And also a bit as a test balloon, whether it could become a series of biographies based on the Anglo-Saxon model, because Karl is by no means the only mountain personality whose thoughts deserve a larger audience.

The book “Reinhard Karl – The Art of Climbing a Mountain” (ISBN 978-3-00-072919-5) is available for 30 euros in local bookshops, at www.

alpenfilmfestival.de/buecher/ and fw-bookstore.

de or directly from the author Tom Dauer (tomdauer@me.com).