Posted September 12, 2005

Second only to his singular achievements in the world's major mountain ranges may be Reinhold Messner's knack for fanning the flames of a controversy he means to extinguish. On September 4, the great Tyrolean alpinist held a press conference in Islamabad, Pakistan, producing a tattered leather boot that he claimed had belonged to his brother Günther, who died in 1970 while climbing 26,660-foot (8,126-meter) Nanga Parbat with Messner and a German team. Found with Günther's remains and near to where a fibula was recovered in 2000, Messner said the boot was further proof that he had not left his brother to die near the summit, as two members of the 1970 expedition claimed in their 2003 memoirs.
 
Since those accusations surfaced, Messner has sought to prove his side of
the story. According to Messner, he did not abandon Günther, but became separated from him during the descent and returned to search for him, finding only avalanche debris. In 2004, Messner produced as evidence Günther's fibula, found in a location consistent with his account of what transpired. What's more, he submitted the bone for DNA testing, which indicated beyond all reasonable doubt that it came from Günther's shin. But critics responded that because Messner had paid for the DNA testing and refused to release the bone for other tests, the results were inconclusive.

Now, after securing the boot, Messner has once again given his critics fodder: He says the rest of his brother's remains were cremated—effectively preventing any independent confirmation of his claims. Contributing Editor David Roberts covered the controversy in our May 2004 issue (read "Messner's Burden" below). Of this latest evidence, Roberts says, "It seems to me to be very suspect."
 —Mark Kirby


Messner's Burden

By David Roberts

Adventure, May 2004

On June 27, 1970, Reinhold Messner and his brother Günther reached the summit of Pakistan's Nanga Parbat, the world's ninth highest peak. Reinhold went on to become history's most visionary and accomplished mountaineer. Günther never made it home. Three decades after that tragedy, four of their former teammates have suddenly come forward with the accusation that Messner's ambition was the true cause of Günther's death. From his castle redoubt in Italy's South Tyrol, Messner has now launched a fierce counterattack against his accusers, brandishing as evidence a leg bone he believes to be his brother's, and the DNA tests he says confirm that claim.

As he neared the crest of the summit plateau on June 27, 1970, Reinhold  Messner felt a bursting optimism. Nothing can stop me now, he thought. Only 25 years old, the climber was on the verge of making a solo ascent, by a route never before climbed, of Pakistan's Nanga Parbat, at 26,660 feet (8,126-meter) the ninth highest summit on the globe. Beneath his boots yawned the treacherous 14,800-foot (4,511-meter) Rupal Face, the tallest mountain wall in the world. Above him, a mere thousand feet (305 meters) of apparently easy snow climbing separated him from the summit.
 
Then, as Messner leaned on his ice ax to catch his breath, he glanced down the slope and saw another mountaineer approaching from below—"climbing fast and well," as Messner would later put it, "as if he were trying to make up time." It had to be his younger brother, 24-year-old Günther.
 
Messner's initial reaction, he would later write, was irritation. His aggressive style of climbing demanded traveling as light and fast as possible. Having another climber on hand—even his own brother—would inevitably complicate the delicate equations balancing risk and survival.
 
The expedition had already spent more than 40 days surmounting the Rupal Face. Günther's unexpected arrival now represented a glitch in the climb's carefully planned logistics. The evening before, both brothers—along with teammate Gerhard Baur—had been poised in Camp 5, at 24,100 feet (7,346 meters). Because their high camp was out of radio contact with base camp, the expedition relied on colored signal rockets to convey the weather forecast. But the men had received a botched report: Someone had launched a red rocket, indicating, incorrectly, that bad weather was closing in. As a result, it was decided that Reinhold, the fastest member of the team, would push alone to the summit. Günther and Baur would stay behind to fix ropes over the steeper sections of the route, ropes Reinhold could later use to safeguard his descent.
 
Reinhold set out for the summit a little after 2 a.m. Baur, stricken with a sore throat, spent much of the day resting in the tent and then descended to Camp 4. Günther dutifully set out to rig fixed lines, but the ropes were a tangled mess. Dropping them in frustration, he impulsively set off to follow his brother. Making a long, powerful sprint on high-angle snow and ice, he caught up with Reinhold at 25,600 feet.
 
 "How did you find the route?" Reinhold asked him when he arrived.
 
"Your tracks," answered Günther. "The route is logical anyway."
 
Reinhold's irritation dissolved. His dream of a solo triumph on Nanga Parbat was gone. Instead, he thought, "We would carry on together. We belonged together and we would soon be on the summit." Taking turns in the lead, the brothers plugged upward through soft, deep snow. They reached the summit a little more than an hour before sunset.
 
***
 
By the time Reinhold Messner was invited to join the elite 1970 German expedition to Nanga Parbat, he had already forged a blazing career of first ascents in the Alps. Climbing both with Günther and with other rising stars, he had taken the ethos of "alpine style"—attacking even the hardest routes in a single push, without stocked camps and with minimal use of fixed ropes—to new extremes. He was ready for bigger things. And, to the ambitious Reinhold, Nanga Parbat was a special mountain. It was the only 8,000-meter (26,247) peak whose first ascent had been accomplished solo—in 1953, by Messner's hero, the brilliant Austrian climber Hermann Buhl.
 
Over the next two decades, Messner would go on to compile an unmatched record of mountaineering firsts on the world's highest peaks. In 1978 Messner and his fellow Tyrolean climber Peter Habeler became the first men to climb Mount Everest without bottled oxygen. Two years later, Messner climbed Everest solo, without oxygen, by a new route—a feat judged by many to be the single finest deed in mountaineering history. And in 1986 Messner became the first man to climb all 14 of the world's 8,000-meter peaks.
 
Nanga Parbat was the first of those 8,000-meter successes. Yet many of Messner's climbing companions had urged him not to join the 1970 expedition. The team was to be led by Dr. Karl Maria Herrligkoffer, an expedition leader who, though not a serious climber himself, had organized numerous Himalayan climbs and was known as a martinet and control freak. Then 54, Herrligkoffer had been obsessed with Nanga Parbat ever since losing his own half-brother, the meteoric Willi Merkl, on the peak in 1934. Herrligkoffer had returned to lead the 1953 expedition that put Hermann Buhl on top. Instead of celebrating Buhl's accomplishment, however, Herrligkoffer had denounced the climber. It turned out that Buhl's solo push to the summit had been made in defiance of an order from the leader to descend to base camp. After the expedition, Herrligkoffer would bury the climber in lawsuits, though he could do nothing to dampen Buhl's fame.

Reinhold chose to join the team, despite any qualms he might have had about Herrligkoffer. (And when another climber dropped out, Reinhold recommended Günther as the replacement.) Success on Nanga Parbat, Reinhold reasoned, might give him the fame he needed to make climbing a full-time career, and to avoid the dreaded slide into "middle-class life."
 
Nanga Parbat would indeed be a turning point for Reinhold Messner, at once a towering achievement and a shattering tragedy. Years later he would call it "the defining experience of my life." Yet for the next three decades, though he became an obsessive chronicler of his own exploits and the author of some 40 books, Messner never offered the public a full, emotionally detailed account of the events of that climb. Then, in 2002, he published Der Nackte Berg (The Naked Mountain), a thorough retelling of his Nanga Parbat ordeal. Yet by the time his book hit the shelves, several of Messner's teammates from that climb had turned on him. Accusing Messner of the worst sort of betrayal, they fiercely challenged point after point in his account. Instead of settling the questions that had hung over that expedition, The Naked Mountain only reawakened a controversy that had been smoldering for decades.
 
Over the months following the publication of The Naked Mountain, as the charges and countercharges flew between Messner and his critics, the European press gave generous play to the debate. The details proved as lurid as the plot of any crime story, including Messner's seduction of the wife of a close friend on the team, a long-secret conspiracy of silence among the teammates, an allegation of forgery, and the discovery of a mysterious human leg bone in an icefall on Nanga Parbat—a bone that might hold the ultimate answer to the controversy. "This is not anymore a climbing story," Messner told me when I reached him by phone at the height of the drama, in February 2004. "This is a thriller."
 
***
 
On the summit of Nanga Parbat, Reinhold and Günther clasped each other in a brief embrace. "The fact that Günther was there with me makes that hour on the summit so valuable to me, even now," Messner writes in The Naked Mountain. "Maybe I should have said something, but at that moment I did not know what to say."
 
The two brothers had grown up in a family of nine children in Villnöss, a German-speaking town in the Italian Dolomites. The surrounding South Tyrol crags, Messner wrote in 1989, made up a "childhood paradise." The boys' father, a schoolmaster, taught them to climb. Reinhold performed his first lead at age 12, then, a few years later, made a symbolic breakthrough on an imposing wall called the Kleine Fermeda. His father, unable to follow his son up a difficult pitch, yelled up at Reinhold, urging him to rappel off. Instead, Reinhold answered, "I'll climb solo to the top," and then untied and dropped the rope.
In The Naked Mountain, published after both his parents had died, Messner paints a much darker picture. He describes coming home one day to find Günther cowering in a dog kennel. Their father, an embittered World War II veteran, had thrashed Günther so badly with the dog whip that the boy could no longer walk. "On that day we not only became friends," Messner writes, "Günther also became my climbing partner, and soon he was climbing just as well as I was." Reinhold was the more impetuous climber, Günther more cautious, but both began making names for themselves. "We were in the process of escaping the confines of the valley and our home, into which the lottery of birth had thrown us."
 
The brothers left the summit of Nanga Parbat in dwindling light. As they retraced their steps along the summit plateau, Günther lagged behind. Reinhold began to worry that his brother was too exhausted to manage the descent of the difficult Rupal route; his long dash to catch up with Reinhold had worn him out. And since neither man had brought a rope, Reinhold would have no way to belay Günther down the hard pitches.

At this point, writes Messner, "Günther arrived and pointed with his axe to the right. . . . Down the Diamir Face? I waved back, dismissing the idea out of hand. 'No, we can't do that,' I said.
 
" 'It's easier,' he countered."
 
The Diamir Face, which plunges away to the northwest, opposite the Rupal Face, had been climbed only once (in 1962, by members of yet another Herrligkoffer-led expedition). But for the Messner brothers, the wall was virtually terra incognita. In general, a blind descent of an unknown face on an 8,000-meter peak is unthinkably perilous—and all the more so on the Diamir, a wall festooned with hanging glaciers that regularly shed huge avalanches of ice and snow. Fortunately, there was an alternative to descending the entire face. Both men had seen a notch on the southwest ridge, which had been dubbed the Merkl Gap in honor of their leader Herrligkoffer's lost half-brother. If the Messners could angle down the Diamir to that notch, they might be able to find a shortcut back to the ascent route and the stocked camps below.
 
As darkness fell, the exhausted brothers settled into a snow hollow for a wretched bivouac, only 50 yards (46 meters) from the Merkl Gap. The temperature plunged as low as minus 40 degrees Fahrenheit, and the wind howled all night. The two men had only thin foil space blankets for shelter. Their toes froze solid. Günther snatched at the ground, hallucinating that a warm blanket was lying there unused.
 
In the morning, Günther, half out of his mind, stamped in a circle, moaning out loud. Reinhold traversed to the Merkl Gap, hoping to call for help. He knew that from that notch he would be able to see down the Rupal Face to the point where the ascent route crossed close below the ridge before angling back toward the summit.

What happened during the next three hours, on the morning of June 28, is at the crux of the contradictory accounts of Nanga Parbat 1970. According to Messner, he saw two of his expedition mates climbing slowly toward him. They were Felix Kuen and Peter Scholz, intent on being the second party to reach the summit.
 
The face directly below the gap was too steep to downclimb. But Messner saw that if his teammates could only reach him with a rope he and his brother could regain the ascent route with a single rappel. "Hello!" he shouted. "Give us a rope!" Kuen, in the lead, was barely a hundred yards away, but the wind confused the men's exchange of words. To Reinhold's horror, he saw Kuen turn away and plod upward to the right, following the brothers' tracks of the day before. Reinhold cried for help again and again, but Kuen apparently heard nothing.
 
Reinhold returned to the bivouac site to tell his brother they had been abandoned. They now had no choice but to descend the Diamir, making a full traverse of the mountain. Such a feat would make mountaineering history; at the time, only one other 8,000-meter peak—Everest—had ever been traversed. According to The Naked Mountain, however, the decision was a bid not for glory, but for mere survival.
 
By now, Günther was having trouble walking. Reinhold led the way, brilliantly working out a descent route from his memory of pictures of the face he had studied before the expedition. That night the brothers survived another bivouac. By midday on June 29, they were low on the Diamir, but each time Reinhold plunged ahead to find the way, Günther trailed farther and farther behind.
 
Now Reinhold started to hallucinate.
 
"I was a split personality," he writes, "viewing myself in the third person." At some point he became convinced that a third man was climbing down the mountain with him and his brother, just out of his field of vision. Reinhold could even hear the creaking of the ice under the third man's crampons.
 
The brothers had had almost nothing to eat or drink for 40 hours. But salvation seemed at hand, as Reinhold worked out the last part of the route off the glacier.
 
In hurrying ahead, however, he passed out of sight of his brother. At last Reinhold stepped off the glacier. He collapsed in a meadow, found a freshwater spring from which he drank to satiety, took off his boots, and waited for Günther.
 
The minutes passed, and Günther did not come. Finally, Reinhold pulled himself together and, though utterly spent, commenced a search. Climbing back onto the glacier, he came upon a fresh pile of snow and huge, jumbled blocks of ice; it was the debris of a recent avalanche. Still Reinhold searched. He called out for Günther, but in his hallucinations saw his mother at home in the family kitchen and front yard. He spent the night wandering in circles, "like a madman."
 
Only gradually did Reinhold accept the conclusion that Günther must lie buried beneath the avalanche rubble.
 
It took another full day for Reinhold to stagger down the Diamir valley. There was no sign of the search party he had hoped his comrades might have sent by now. What kept him going was a personal mission: "I had a duty to fulfill: to get home and tell my mother what had happened."
 
By the time Messner encountered the first residents of the Diamir valley, he could barely walk. A series of sturdy villagers carried him on their backs down to the lowlands.
 
Only on July 3 was Messner reunited with his teammates, as they drove up in a jeep, 20 miles outside the village of Gilgit. "At first, Karl was very careful with me. He was sensitive and not at all dismissive," Messner writes of his first meeting with the imposing Herrligkoffer. But by the time the expedition had reached the city of Rawalpindi, Messner could see that their expedition leader had turned on him: "Herrligkoffer, that despiser of mankind, no longer needed me. We had become complete strangers."
 
True to lifelong form, after the 1970 expedition Herrligkoffer would criticize Messner just as he had castigated Buhl, never granting him more than a modicum of credit for his astounding ascent. In attempting the traverse, Herrligkoffer wrote, the Messner brothers "blatantly broke the number one rule, never to indulge in extravagances." And in Germany, Herrligkoffer would bring a relentless series of legal actions against Messner.
 
Messner spent a month in an Innsbruck hospital, suffering the amputation of seven toes and the tips of several fingers. Max von Kienlin, Messner's best friend on the expedition, moved into the next bed to watch over his comrade. Later, von Kienlin invited Messner to come live at his ancestral castle in southern Germany, as the climber regained his health. There Messner became entranced by von Kienlin's striking wife, Uschi. The attraction was mutual. Within months, Uschi had abandoned her husband and children and gone to live with Messner.
 
Three decades later, the friendship long since shattered, von Kienlin would go public with a devastating allegation: Instead of leading his brother down the Diamir Face, von Kienlin charged, Messner had more likely left his younger brother to fend for himself somewhere near the summit, while he, tempted by glory, proceeded on alone. In von Kienlin's The Traverse: Günther Messner's Death on Nanga Parbat, published in 2003, he included his own account of the reunion between Messner and his teammates. In von Kienlin's view, Messner's first words suggest not the certainty that Günther lay beneath the avalanche debris on the Diamir glacier, but the hope that his brother had been found high on the mountain by his teammates:
 
"I run ahead, and see Reinhold in the back of the Jeep.
 
"He sees me, he seems to reach out for me from the truck.
 
"We hug.
 
"He looks at me with wide-open eyes, seems to sob, and screams at me, 'Where is Günther?'
 
"I am shocked, I press him against myself, what? Günther is not here with you? I can't bring myself to ask.
 
"Reinhold yells again, 'Where is Günther?'
 
"I look around. The comrades stand around stock still, looking at themselves and me. No one speaks. Where is Günther, if not here with Reinhold?"
 
***
 
Today, at 59, Messner still has a commanding presence. His tangled black hair, full beard, and moustache give him the same shaggy look he had when he was a young vagabond in the Alps. His eyes stare through you. Even when he is not angry, his baritone voice has a declamatory tone. The face, no longer youthful, bears the ravages of his campaigns, but women still fall in love with him at first sight. One New York editor, on seeing her first portrait of Messner, announced, "It's Zeus!"
 
He is, along with Sir Edmund Hillary, one of the two most famous climbers in the world. A prolific and wealthy author, and a Green Party member of the European Parliament, Messner has in Europe the kind of celebrity usually reserved for Formula One drivers and soccer stars. At the point in his life when he might have expected that he could bask in the undisputed magnificence of his mountaineering record, however, Messner instead finds himself defending his reputation against the accusations of his Nanga Parbat teammates.
 
The controversy erupted several months before the publication of The Naked Mountain, at an October 2001 press conference in Munich. The occasion, oddly enough, was a celebration of a new biography of Herrligkoffer (who had died in 1991), for  which Messner had written the foreword.
 
Two of his former teammates from the 1970 expedition, climber Jürgen Winkler and Messner's Camp 5 tentmate Gerhard Baur, were in the audience.
 
Recounting Nanga Parbat, Messner mentioned the mistaken firing of the red rocket. According to Winkler, he went on to say, "I tell you today, it was not a mistake by Herrligkoffer [that caused the loss of Günther]. It was the mistake of the team members who did not go into the Diamir valley [to search for us]. . . . Some of them, older than I, wouldn't have minded if neither Messner came back. That is the real tragedy."
 
Hearing these remarks, Winkler and Baur interrupted to protest. But Messner was unrepentant, later complaining about a "Munich mafia"—climbers from that city in league to discredit the great man from the north of Italy.
 
Remembers Winkler, "I was astonished at what Reinhold said. Later, I telephoned him. He was very aggressive, yelling into the telephone. It was the last time we spoke."
 
Today, Messner denies that he ever made such an accusation at the press conference. "No, no, no, no, no!" he insisted over the telephone when I paraphrased his detractors' report of what he had said in Munich. "No, never! I hope that you have my book." Messner's contention: Nowhere in The Naked Mountain does he blame his teammates for the loss of Günther.
 
(Strictly speaking, this is true. Yet clearly Messner's bitterness over the expedition's failure to send a search party into the Diamir valley still lingers. Recounting his solo stumble down the valley, he writes: "I finally returned to the company of human kind. When I finally saw all the others again, the people I had expected to rescue me, Nanga Parbat seemed far away. . . .")
 
In any event, the Munich disturbance might have ended there, a spat among aging climbers. But word of Messner's comments soon reached other teammates from 1970, spurring von Kienlin's decision to publish his attack on Messner, and inspiring Hans Saler, another climber on the team, to write his own, equally critical, account. As von Kienlin's The Traverse and Saler's Between Light and Shadow neared publication, Messner filed injunctions trying to stop the books from appearing, or at least to force wholesale changes in their texts. In May 2003, both books were published anyway.
 
By now four members of the 1970 team—von Kienlin, Saler, Winkler, and Baur—had come forward to challenge Messner's account of Nanga Parbat. They claimed they were breaking a silence of 33 years during which they had tacitly corroborated Messner's version out of loyalty to their comrade, and out of distaste for Herrligkoffer's attacks on Messner.
 
The famous climber sprang into furious counterattack. From his restored 13th-century castle high in Italy's South Tyrol, Messner issued thunderous statements and flung lawsuits at his detractors. In press conferences and TV interviews all over the continent, he hammered home his version of the 1970 tragedy. In Europe, where the public follows mountaineering with the same avidity that Americans bring to football or basketball, the controversy received breathless coverage in the press.
 
In December 2003, I attended a gala reception for Messner, held at the Italian Consulate in Paris. About a hundred guests, including some of the most famous climbers in Europe, sipped champagne and nibbled hors d'oeuvres before gathering in a small auditorium. The occasion was the publication of a deluxe French edition of The Naked Mountain. On being handed the microphone, however, Messner did not bother with polite formalities. Instead he launched straight into a 40-minute recitation of his experience on Nanga Parbat in 1970.
 
I had known Messner for more than 20 years, having first interviewed him in 1982. But I had never seen the man wound so tight. The narrative seemed to pour out in a nonstop burst of barely controlled fury. At times he was almost shouting, and when he alluded to his detractors' theories, his eyes blazed with rage. When he had finished his recitation, I asked Messner what could have induced four of his former teammates to come forward with such a personal attack.
 
"I don't know," Messner answered. "I don't know." Then he mentioned the German Alpine Club (Deutscher Alpenverein, or DAV), the powerful organization that supervises most of the hiking and climbing in that country and that Messner sees as a haven for small-minded bureaucrats. "There are 700,000 members of the DAV," he said, "but I am bigger than them all."
 
***
 
One could argue that Messner has openly invited the kind of personal scrutiny that now threatens to tarnish his good name.  Unlike Edmund Hillary, who, after the first ascent of Mount Everest in 1953, managed to keep his personal affairs intact from an onslaught of media attention such as no climber had ever before faced, Messner wears his private life on his sleeve. His books are full of romantic agonies over wives and girlfriends, who sometimes wait at base camp for him to return from his next odyssey into the Death Zone. The voices and hallucinations of what Messner calls a kind of "schizophrenia" that comes over him at altitude are laid out on every other page.
 
And unlike Hillary, famous for his modesty, Messner has always been just as famous for his arrogance, for his condescending dismissals of the mountaineering rivals who vie with him for Olympian laurels. In his book about climbing Everest without oxygen in 1978, he boasted that his and Peter Habeler's attempt was so radical a proposition that "in the Middle Ages we would have been burned as heretics." Anticipating a solo ascent of Nanga Parbat eight years after Günther's death, he wrote, "This is my last great alpine dream. Indeed, it is the last great alpine idea."
 
Messner's peers in the climbing world, most of whom seem inclined to take his side in the current controversy, have long noted—and accepted—the mountaineer's megalomaniacal bent. "He certainly arouses a lot of controversies, doesn't he?" laughs the British climber and mountaineering historian Doug Scott, when asked about the latest flare-up. "Messner was always so far ahead of his time—the greatest high-altitude climber ever," says alpinist Ed Viesturs, who will return to Nepal's Annapurna this spring in an attempt to become the first American to tick off all fourteen 8,000-meter peaks. "He's a bit arrogant, yes, but incredibly talented. I think of him like Muhammad Ali—he walked his talk."
 
***
 
Yet if Messner's peers are willing to support him in the debate, what are we to make of the four members of Nanga Parbat 1970 who seem convinced that his entire story is a fiction?
 
Reading von Kienlin's and Saler's accounts of the climb is like entering a Himalayan Rashomon: For every key point in Messner's version of the tale, they offer a radically different interpretation.
 
While Messner claims he led his flagging brother down the Diamir Face as a last resort, some teammates charge that he had planned a solo ascent and traverse of the mountain from early on in the expedition. He had even talked openly about it to his teammates (though not, of course, to expedition leader Herrligkoffer). Americans Willi Unsoeld and Tom Hornbein had become instant legends with their traverse of Everest in 1963. To complete a comparable traverse of Nanga Parbat—solo—would make Messner a mountaineering celebrity on a par with his hero Hermann Buhl. Messner's critics believe he was so focused on that goal that he placed it ahead of caring for his flagging brother. They offer several scenarios: that Günther died near the summit, or during the bivouac at the Merkl Gap, or that Reinhold might have simply sent him to find his own way back down the Rupal Face.
 
Messner describes shouting for help from the Merkl Gap to Kuen and Scholz, the two climbers ascending the Rupal Face on the morning of June 28. But, according to von Kienlin, Messner did not ask for help or a rope and gave the impression that everything was fine. He also claims that Messner called out to Kuen, "I will rejoin you at base camp." It was for this reason, von Kienlin went on, that other teammates lingered at base, giving up their own chances for the summit as they awaited Messner's arrival.

Some teammates say that they expected Messner, after appearing at the Merkl Gap, to descend not the Diamir Face, but the southwest ridge, which divides the two great walls—a route that would first be climbed in 1976. I asked Messner why he had not taken this apparently obvious line, from which base camp would have been readily accessible. "This route would not be possible for someone coming from upwards," he said. The ridge has several towers, one as high as 200 meters, that a descending climber would need to climb up and over. "Nobody can go up 200 meters after a night like we had at the Merkl Gap," he said. "Impossible. Not thinkable."
 
We may never know precisely what was said—or understood—in the wind and confusion of the Merkl Gap. Von Kienlin says his version is based on conversations with the ascending climbers Kuen and Scholz. But both men were dead within a few years of the expedition, Scholz in a climbing accident, and Kuen by suicide. So von Kienlin's account of their words rests mostly on a diary he kept during the expedition, and which he reproduces at length in The Traverse.
 
Messner says he's convinced that two crucial pages of von Kienlin's diary are fake—written in 2002 or 2003 on "old paper" and stitched into the journal as if penned in 1970. Charlie Buffet, one of Europe's leading mountaineering journalists, asked Messner about the diary during an interview for Le Monde in late January 2004. (Buffet also assisted in reporting this article.) Messner's response was blistering: "Yesterday, I was on television in Berlin, and I said publicly that this liar has falsified his journal. If that's not true, he can sue me. And show his journal, so that I can prove he falsified it and he will go to prison."
 
The most devastating charge in von Kienlin's book, however, concerns the conversations he says he had with Messner himself. The diary describes an anguished talk the two friends had, soon after being reunited in Gilgit, in which the distraught Messner says: " 'I've lost Günther! I called for him. I don't know why he couldn't hear me. Maybe he was in bad shape. Maybe he didn't manage [to climb down]. Maybe he even fell. My God, I didn't want that!' "
 
The diary depicts Messner as having been overcome with doubts and regret, wailing, " 'Perhaps I should have gone with him, because alone, he wasn't capable of it. Why did he follow me? Why?' He hides his face in his hands."
 
Then von Kienlin's account adds a stunning twist: Since the tortured Messner is almost incapable of talking, von Kienlin writes, "I feel obligated to guide him." Messner doesn't know what to say to their leader, Karl Herrligkoffer, so von Kienlin proposes a face-saving fabrication: " 'You must not tell K that you intended to make the traverse.' "
 
According to von Kienlin, he himself proffered the fiction that Günther was lost in an avalanche low on the Diamir Face—and understood that he must keep an eternal silence about the ruse.

Messner's response, as recorded in the diary: "R pulls himself together. 'You're right.' He looks at me with clear eyes."

Messner and von Kienlin are scheduled to appear before a Hamburg tribunal in May. There Messner hopes to pressure von Kienlin to produce the contested diary pages, pages Messner believes even a cursory examination will reveal as forgeries.


***

All through the summer and fall of 2003, as the two sides traded allegations and raised the stakes, Messner was keeping an ace up his sleeve. On January 26, 2004, he laid the card on the table.

Since 1970, Messner had returned at least five times to the foot of the Diamir Face to search for his brother's corpse. On such an expedition in 2000, a teammate had returned from a short outing in the Diamir icefall carrying a human fibula—a shin bone—he had found amid other debris. Another of Messner's seven brothers, Hubert, a doctor, was at base camp. Günther had been a rather short man, about five feet seven inches. Hubert held the fibula next to his own leg and declared, "This is too long for Günther."

Messner concluded that the bone most likely belonged to a Pakistani climber who had died on the Diamir Face in 1982. Nonetheless, he took the bone home with him, where it sat in his library for three years.

Until recently, Messner's search for his brother's remains had been a quest for personal resolution. But when von Kienlin and the others went public with their attacks, the hunt took on a new urgency. Since his critics suggest that Messner left his brother near the summit, finding Günther's body on the Diamir glacier at the mountain's foot would almost certainly destroy their case.

"I always knew that if I found my brother," Messner says, "or even a piece of my brother, then that would prove this is all a conspiracy."

Messner made yet another trip to Nanga Parbat in October 2003. This time, he was told by villagers that the intact skeleton of the Pakistani climber had been discovered. The fibula could not be his.

Back home, Messner took the bone to the University of Innsbruck, Austria, to be studied by Richard Scheithauer, of the prestigious Institute of Forensic Medicine. A swab from Messner's own mouth served for DNA comparison with the bone. The results came back in late January 2004. According to Scheithauer, "it is 60 times more probable that the bone comes from Messner's brother than from someone else."
The finding was a resounding victory for Messner. "As a non-scientist," he announced, "I can say—this is my brother."

Nonetheless, forensic expert Howard Cash, president of Gene Codes, an Ann Arbor, Michigan, research firm that was instrumental in determining the identities of World Trade Center victims, notes that it is important to keep these numbers in perspective. "A probability likelihood of 60 sounds pretty good, but you couldn't take that into a court of law. With the World Trade Center victims, to be sure we had the right person, we wanted a ratio of a million to one, or more."
(Meanwhile, Scheithauer has started work on the far more precise analysis of the bone's mitochondrial DNA, which has the potential to settle the question definitively. The results are expected this spring.)

But even the DNA evidence did not win over Messner's doubters. To them the announcement was almost too perfect—a veritable "os ex machina" to extract Messner from the nastiest controversy of his career.  "When it was first found, the bone was too big to be Günther's," von Kienlin gibed to a reporter. "Suddenly it's not so big. Perhaps it shrank. It's become a holy object."

Several journalists wondered why, if Messner was initially convinced the bone could not be Günther's, he had kept it in his library for three years. Messner answered that he believed the bone could belong to one of only three people—Günther, the Pakistani from 1982, or Alfred Mummery, the greatest climber of his day, who had vanished on the first attempt on the Diamir Face in 1895. (Records actually indicate that at least 17 climbers have perished on the Diamir.) "I thought it might be Mummery's bone—I hoped it was," Messner says, "because Pakistanis don't interest me, in terms of alpinism. Mummery, I adore."
Scheithauer also used the bone to estimate the height of the man it came from. 

He deduced a figure of between 1 meter 70 centimeters and 1 meter 75 centimeters—a range that would include the 1-meter-70-centimeter Günther (notwithstanding Hubert Messner's casual calculation in the field).
In the end, the only possible proof that von Kienlin and his allies have the story right, it seems, would be if Günther's body were recovered on or below the Rupal Face. But as of 2004, the 1970 line on the tallest mountain wall in the world remains unrepeated, and relatively few climbers have trodden the glacier that flows from its base.


***

Though the dramatic DNA evidence offers powerful support to Messner's account (especially if it is confirmed by the mitochondrial testing), one can't read The Naked Mountain without noticing its undercurrent of defensiveness. Perhaps Messner's critics have a point on the psychological—if not the purely factual—level: That, even if his account of the tragic climb is utterly accurate, Messner nonetheless feels a deep sense of responsibility for Günther's death. Interviewing Messner for Le Monde, Charlie Buffet pressed the climber on a certain telling detail in The Naked Mountain. At the moment when Reinhold notices his brother approaching from below, there is a puzzling remark: "I looked down again and watched him, a little irritated, then decided to wait."
Why "irritated," Buffet asked Messner. "My plan was a rapid assault," Messner said. "Solo, one is freer to decide. I can accept an important risk. With two, one is more limited as to taking risks."

It's not hard to see how Messner—a climber with an almost preternatural ability to calculate just how far he could push himself—might resent having to take on that challenge for Günther as well. And one could sympathize with how difficult it might be to acknowledge that resentment.

As Buffet pushed him on the point, Messner turned his wrath against the writer. "You don't have the intelligence to understand what I'm saying," Messner said. "I don't know why you journalists are so stupid. I say stupid, for not understanding that von Kienlin is a liar and leads you all around by the point of the nose."
 
Even as the evidence emerges that he believes will vindicate him, Messner seems to be growing more obsessed with defending his place in the pantheon. From the very start of his career, he had a vision of himself that verged on the grandiose.

When Messner was still in his 20s, his climbing articles tended to take the form of manifestos. A widely admired early plea for purist ethics in the mountains was ominously titled "The Murder of the Impossible." An early book of his, The Seventh Grade, was a thinly disguised polemic proclaiming that his own deeds in the mountains required the invention of a new degree of difficulty. By 1970 he would claim in print, "The Alps had become too small for me."

Yet as Messner began publishing book-length accounts of his Himalayan expeditions, he unveiled another side of his complex personality. One of the most confessional of mountaineering writers, Messner projects a contradictory persona: At times he seems a Nietzschean Übermensch, issuing such Zarathustran mottoes as "The truly free climber is the one who obeys no rules." At other times, he comes across as a self-pitying Young Werther, writing obsessively about his loneliness, his vulnerability, his fears of dying, even his thoughts of suicide.

In 1971, the year she left her husband and children, Uschi von Kienlin accompanied Messner to the bottom of the Diamir Face to look for the body of his brother. The following year, the two were married. But after five years together, Uschi was far from happy with Reinhold's mountain obsession. On an expedition to Nepal's Dhaulagiri in 1977, Uschi decided to leave base camp while Messner was still high on the mountain.

Back home in Italy, Messner found an empty house. Uschi had not even left a note. Writes Messner's 1982 biographer Ronald Faux, "Reinhold was filled with the most overwhelming black despair he had known." Yet Messner found himself unable to blame Uschi. "Once she asked him directly," writes Faux, " 'If you had to choose between the mountains and me, which would it be?' and he had not replied."

Messner has gone through many such ruptures, not only with lovers, but with some of his closest teammates. In the 1970s, Messner and Peter Habeler seemed to have forged a golden partnership, with their three-day ascent of Pakistan's Hidden Peak (the first alpine-style ascent of any 8,000-meter summit), their astonishing ten-hour record on the famed North Face of the Eiger in Switzerland, and their bottled-oxygen-free ascent of Everest. But after 1978, the pair suffered a much publicized schism and never climbed together again.

The breach had nothing to do with antagonisms in the mountains but seems to have sprung from Habeler's daring to write his own book about Everest. In Lonely Victory, 99 percent of the narrative details the harmonious teamwork of two of the strongest climbers in the world. But there are a few passages that must have made Messner squirm. According to Habeler, the two men had agreed beforehand that if one of them got in trouble, the other would save himself. On regaining the South Col after the summit, however, Messner found himself snowblind. Habeler records him pleading through the night, " 'Don't leave me alone, Peter. Please, you must stay with me. Don't go; don't climb down alone without me!' "
 
For Messner, with his separation of those around him into loyalists and traitors, such a passage must have seemed tantamount to betrayal. At the heart of his emotional makeup, as revealed in his books, there may be a fundamental contradiction. Intimacy, after all, that nagging monger of responsibility and compassion, is the great enemy of freedom.
 
***
 
From the beginning, I had wondered what could have induced four of Messner's former teammates to challenge him in such a public way. Whatever exactly Messner said at the 2001 press conference, his former comrades clearly came away feeling that they'd become targets for his bitterness over his brother's death. Messner had stirred up a hornet's nest that had remained tranquil for 31 years.
 
For me, the strongest reason not to dismiss Messner's detractors was that the four men were sticking to essentially the same story. Fraudulent accounts of expeditions are usually the work of solitary megalomaniacs. Even in the rare case when the perpetrator of a hoax enlists a confederate, the half-willing accomplice usually cracks and eventually tells the truth.
 
But even in the face of the new DNA evidence, the quartet of naysayers is sticking to its guns. On German television, Gerhard Baur and Hans Saler reiterated their claims. Baur: "I know precisely and clearly that Reinhold had talked about the traverse beforehand." Saler: "He wanted to make the traverse alone—from overblown ambition." Saler, too, insists that Messner's first words outside of Gilgit, as he hung sobbing from von Kienlin's neck, were: "Where is Günther? Where is Günther?"
 
When I talked to Messner on the phone in February, at first he sounded much calmer than he had in Paris in late December. "I decided in the last days that it's over now," he said philosophically. "For me the thing is clear. If people don't like to believe me, OK. I have no problem with them." But as we talked on about von Kienlin, Saler, and the "stupid journalists" who believe their stories, Messner's voice rose again to a denunciatory pitch.
"Now it's a business to bring up this story," he said of von Kienlin's book. "He was planning to have a best-seller."
 
The jury of Messner's Himalaya peers seems willing to accept his story of Nanga Parbat as the truth. British climber Doug Scott traveled with the prickly mountain journalist Ken Wilson to Germany in the early 1970s to interview Messner about Nanga Parbat. "We sat and talked about the red rocket and all the rest of it," says Scott today. "I remember assuming that he was telling us how it was. I had no disquiet about him telling the truth."
Ed Viesturs says, "I heard about the claims of Messner's teammates. But then I read The Naked Mountain. It seemed like a very honest book. I didn't think he was making anything up."
 
Most significantly, perhaps, Peter Habeler—despite the feud that sundered his friendship with Messner—vouches for his former partner's veracity. "I think the truth is what Reinhold says," Habeler told me. "I've been on the Diamir Face. I don't know if he planned to do the traverse beforehand. For sure I know that Reinhold got Günther down. We talked often about Nanga Parbat. Why would he lie to me?"
 
Perhaps in the long run, however, the detective story is less interesting than the epic out of which it grows, a mere episode. Mitochondrial DNA may prove where Günther lies, but it cannot explain the peculiar genius of the difficult man whose mountaineering achievements will still be celebrated centuries from now. For years after the 1865 disaster on the first ascent of the Matterhorn, pundits vigorously debated whether Edward Whymper had cut the rope, sending four teammates to their deaths, or whether the rope had broken under the strain of four men falling. Queen Victoria seriously considered outlawing mountaineering. Today, the cut-rope hypothesis is relegated to the dustbin. We remember Whymper, and the Matterhorn tragedy scarcely dims the crowning achievement of the finest mountaineer of his generation.
 
One could argue that the whole Nanga Parbat drama issued from a simple but profoundly consequential mistake on the part of one or both of the Messner brothers. The mistake was to climb a route that was too difficult to descend without a rope, at least in the depleted state in which Günther—and perhaps Reinhold as well—found himself an hour before sunset on June 27. "My mistake as an alpinist was to go out ahead," Messner says today. "It was too dangerous. It was too late, we were too slow, we didn't have a rope. The return became difficult."
 
Yet the history of exploration and adventure is full of avoidable catastrophes that turn into triumphs of survival. Who remembers that Sir Ernest Shackleton's 1914–1916 Antarctica expedition was a colossal fiasco? Intending to traverse the southernmost continent, Shackleton's party never even reached its coast. Instead, the Endurance was crushed and sank, launching the odyssey of escape for which Shackleton (another of Messner's heroes) is celebrated almost a century later.
 
To lose one's brother on the boldest climb of one's life would be a terrible blow for anyone. No matter how Günther died, no matter how much Reinhold did to try to save him, we can be sure that the famous mountaineer still carries on his strong shoulders the heavy burden of a guilt that will not go away.
 
As Reinhold lay recovering from his injuries in the hospital in Innsbruck, he was convinced his climbing career was over. In truth, he had only just begun his dazzling campaign among the highest mountains on Earth. If the loss of Günther was the defining moment of Reinhold's life, perhaps it was also the spur that drove him to become the preeminent practitioner of the most deadly of all games climbers play.
 
In 1996 Messner wrote, in a characteristic mix of hubris and humility, that he didn't believe anybody would be able to traverse Nanga Parbat in the way he and Günther did in 1970. "I am sure," he added, "that I could never survive those days a second time." Who are we to disagree?