Translator’s Introduction

Arnold Fanck (1889–1974), pioneer of the specifically German genre of the Bergfilm (mountain film), began life as a sickly child with breathing problems. As he recounts in his 1973 autobiography Er führte Regie mit Gletschern, Stürmen und Lawinen: ein Filmpionier erzählt (He Directed Glaciers, Storms, and Avalanches: A Film Pioneer Recounts), his early years gave no indication that he would later direct and film movies under demanding conditions in the Alps and Greenland. Fanck was so prone to asthma attacks that he was homeschooled until the age of nine, at which point his wealthy family sent him off to a boarding school in Davos, Switzerland. There, in the town immortalized for its sanatoria in Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain, 1924), a local physician told Fanck’s father, “it is said that the children never have problems with asthma.”

This change from the “sooty factory town” (11) of Frankenthal in the Palatinate to the high Alpine air of Davos was, in Fanck’s words, a “ Wende,” a turning point, or, more simply, a turn. Turns are important in Fanck’s autobiography both literally and as metaphors; indeed, he repeatedly returns to the word “ Wende” to describe the vicissitudes of fate that led him from his hometown to Davos, then, as a teenager, to Freiburg im Breisgau in southwest Germany after his father’s death, all stations on a circuitous route to what became Fanck’s career achievement: “to show people the beauties of the mountains with the help of the newly emerged idiom of the moving picture—of film” (12). Turns, however, do not just signify changes in Fanck’s life; they are also, concretely, the thousands upon thousands of turns he made as a young, enthusiastic, and talented skier. These turns, in turn, led him into photography, for he wanted to show his mother, who could not ski, the beauty of the Black Forest in winter (48). Later, his skiing and ski mountaineering skills would precipitate an invitation to his first film, which would lead to his own illustrious film career as a director. I highlight the role of skiing here, because in most accounts of the Bergfilm the focus is, quite rightly, on mountaineering, usually the classic alpinist practice of rock climbing, glacier travel, and the ascent of steep firn slopes by means of ice axe and step-chopping.