BURSTReinhold Messner looks back on eight decades, summit controversies, and his lasting legacy of climbing for the experience and the journey. In his new memoir, Against the Wind, Messner looks back on a life of accomplishments and recounts some of the most important episodes after turning 80.
He also addresses darker times and infamous controversies, including being discredited as a young mountaineer, his divorce and remarriage, Guinness stripping him of his world records in 2023, the recent revisions to measurements of 8000-meter summits, and the discovery of his brother Gunther’s remains on Nanga Parbat.
Messner, born in 1944 in Villnöss, South Tyrol, Italy, is one of the world’s most accomplished climbers. He made the first solo ascent of Mount Everest in 1980 without supplemental oxygen, and became the first person to climb all 14 peaks over 8,000 metres, known as the eight-thousanders, between 1970 and 1986. His climbing career includes roughly 100 first ascents, spanning the Alps, Himalayas, and Andes. Beyond mountains, Messner crossed Antarctica, Greenland, Tibet, and the Gobi and Takla Makan deserts on foot.
He served as a member of the European Parliament from 1999 to 2004, advocating for environmental and cultural preservation. Messner founded the Messner Mountain Museum, a network of six museums dedicated to mountain culture, history, and exploration. His foundation supports mountain peoples worldwide. Messner has faced challenges over the decades, including the loss of his brother Günther on Nanga Parbat in 1970 and disputes over his climbing records.
Excerpt from Against the Wind
Note: In German, Lebensfreude translates to the desire to live life to the fullest. This is the spirit Messner has channeled throughout his life and climbing.
Free Spirit: A Climber’s Life is the title of my first autobiography. Was the price I paid for living the life I have as a free spirit perhaps too high? I’m now eighty years old. I know what it means to experience complete isolation. I’ve stumbled from one death zone to the next. Up there, it’s the oxygen that is lacking; down here it’s meaningfulness. I survived at the top of the world’s highest mountains without reaching for a bottle, so hitting the bottle here at the bottom would just be avoiding matters. And how long could I keep that up? I’ve withstood the downward spiral of despair, and seen the absurdity of life dissolve to turn into possibilities, into visions to be nourished. Was this not how I have led a successful life for so many years?
Each time I asked: Should I risk it? Turning a cable car mountain station into a cultural meeting space. Incorporating a house into a mountain, invisible from the outside and harmonious with the rock. Upcycling unusable structures and useless land. Now that’s sustainability. Reusing stone, concrete, and steel, not throwing them away.
Sense grows out of sensuality. Understanding grows out of feeling and experience. It’s only in death that we lose all of our senses. Which is why we do not need to fear it. Everyone should have the freedom to seek happiness. This search underpins all the values that shape how we live together. And this freedom to seek happiness is something that we should be able to renegotiate.
The pursuit of happiness will not carry us to the summit. Nor will honor, fame, wealth, or power. The only thing that makes our dreams come true is enthusiasm.
And by being in touch with yourself, you can share your electric enthusiasm and your Lebensfreude, your spirit, with others.
I don’t want to modify the world just so that it fits with my Weltanschauung [worldview]. Yes, I have benefited from the economic booms that my generation has lived through and from the hard work and commitment of previous generations. I was able to travel the world to pursue my passion for experiencing adventures. I’ve been privileged. In my lifetime, I’ve only really experienced economic upturns.
And now as things are going downhill in Europe, I’m signing off. I’ve reached my destination.
The many times people have tried to put me down, their techniques were always the same, twisting my own words and then turning them against me. Or putting words into my mouth.
I was made a target, and various organizations turned against me many times during the different phases of my life.
I have no desire to criticize the youth of today. The Sherpas have my total respect. Today, they understand the role that they have played in Himalayan mountaineering. I helped to set up the Sherpa Himal museum in Namche to underline this. Their achievements are remarkable.
I plan to continue to contribute to the discussion.
Where I come from, people have written that I’ve always “had lots to say and an extremely critical mind.” Michael Fink on the news website Südtirol Online (stol.it), on February 19, 2022, went on to say:
“[Messner] still has lots of plans and ideas for a good future for South Tyrol and its inhabitants—especially for the narrow-minded ones. Sometimes his suggestions are green, the next day they stink of petrol. It’s all one and the same. The ‘other’ South Tyrol is also flexible—the good, open-minded, cosmopolitan, intelligent, far-sighted, even visionary South Tyrol. The opposite, as it were, from the clumsy, backward, stupid, and small-minded South Tyrol. The mob seems to live in the latter, somehow. Those who look after their front gardens, water their geraniums, plant their potatoes, but apart from that have no other interests or hobbies.”
People who would like to be involved in public debates, but who are not formally invited to contribute or participate, often express themselves in letters to the editor, at regulars’ tables in inns and cafés, and on the internet. Social media exchanges have become increasingly problematic, because people are less accountable: nobody knows who’s behind them or which interests they represent.
I’m glad to have led an active life, to have grown up in an age without the internet, and to remain off the grid to this day. Genuine discussion and debate are important; they encourage the cultivation of language and taking responsibility.
Ten years earlier, Dr. Michl Ebner deservedly received the same award that I received, the Medal of Honor of the province of Tyrol. Nevertheless, for over fifty years the Athesia publishing house, which Dr. Ebner heads up, has never missed an opportunity to oppose my actions. He finally praised me, after all this time, in his position as president of the Chamber of Commerce of Bolzano: “The award of this high honor is an expression of recognition and thanks for your commitment as a mountaineer, museum founder, and museum operator. I am very grateful for everything that you have done over all these years.”
Even in gale-force winds, I learned to keep moving forward and not to look back when the mob—incited by the media—was coming up close behind me.
I would look to the wide, open world and wait until the rabble-rousing and mockery subsided. Just as a mountaineer does on Mount Everest, when the monsoon meets the jet stream.
Only then would it be time to set off again—to find peace as an air walker. I learned to take off against the wind—and to soar when the wind dies down.
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