Collaboration or complicity… The White Hell of Pitz Palü (1929)

 

This is probably the peak of Bergfilm in the Weimar period, with the audacious physical cinema of genre market-maker Arnold Fanck combined with the directorial intensity of G. W. Pabst it’s no surprise that we get a balance between the epic outdoors and the emotional highs and lows of the main players. Pabst had the best actor on screen with Gustav Diessl who had first worked with him in Im Banne der Kralle (1921) and of course, in Pandoras Box released ten months before White Hell and he is superbly focused as the mountaineer Dr. Johannes Krafft who is haunted by the loss of his wife on the mountain he cannot escape.

There are genuinely stunning views of the mountain ranges and terrifying shots of avalanches which look far to close for comfort to Fanck’s intrepid camera men, Sepp Allgeier, Richard Angst and Hans Schneeberger. There are long sequences inside the glaciated nooks and crannies as men with hand-held torches search for lost climbers, a grim, unreal underworld of fleeting reflections, dark shadows and compacted unforgiving edges on which bodies would crack. There are torch-lit rescue parties whose light floods through the villages growing in intensity as the cause is joined: humanity working together in service of the injured and possibly still living.

Then there are two thrilling appearances by World War I pilot Ernst Udet whose bi-plane speeds through the valleys at first performing impressive loops and dives and then in desperate search for three missing climbers during which he flies as close to the ledge on which they cling as possible, props again to those magnificent men with their whirring machines. You climb three thousand metres, set your tripod close to the edge and then capture a plane buzzing metres away from a snow-encrusted rock face prone to sudden stoßentladungen.

Of course, we always have to contend with Leni, the elephant (in the room) but she is not the only one with questions to answer after 1933. Fanck, Diessl and Pabst all had their own deals to make once their country was under Nazi rule and yet our slide-rule judgements may now be passed too rigorously after the facts, even as a new era of enabling complicity cracks the World order and, influential American broadcaster Tucker Carlson says he cannot understand why the Second World War was ever fought.

When this film was made the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, formed in 1920 after a renaming of the German Worker’s Party, had seen their share of the national vote reduced from 1924 to 1928 when they got 810,000 votes (2.9%). By the time of the 1930 election, they had jumped to some 6,400,000 following the global financial crash and would more than double that by 1932.

The party and its ideas were rooted in certain strands of thought which can be seen in Fanck’s work with Bergfilm – a belief in physical heroism and the natural beauty of the “pure” landscapes versus the bourgeoise cities. But, you might find similar sentiments in Hollywood films of this era too, not to mention British in fiction and fact with their determination to climb Everest and cross the poles.  The fascist’s agenda was broader and could be all things to all men as they tried to lure followers away from the traditional parties on the right and left. It was initially an urban phenomena – the party being formed in Munich – but in the countryside many were sympathetic to the idea of conflating the power of nature with the power of the mind to paraphrase a warning from the very urban Immanuel Kant in The Critique of Judgement (1790).

Siegfried Kracauer in From Caligari to Hitler (1947) claimed the Bergfilm were “rooted in a mentality kindred to the Nazi spirit” and it is true that Hitler was a fan and also that Fanck remarked to Riefenstahl during the filming of The Holy Mountain (1926) how much the nationalists would appreciate her performance: athletic perfection and beauty, daring and a will to power.

This is something the actor, dancer and director recalled in The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (1993) – made when she was 90 years old – as well as being featured in Andres Veiel’s Riefenstahl (2024). If the former documentary was an attempt to explain her life in broader terms than the eight years of her collaborations with the Nazis that never reached a definite conclusion, the latter film, including an interview she gave aged 100 and with access to her archives, has more focus on the 1930s but leaves us little the wiser before then. She comes across as incredibly intelligent but also sly and defensive… it’s a painful watch.

She was found not guilty of war crimes and “de-nazified” by a French tribunal in 1949: designated a “fellow traveller” of, and sympathiser with, the regime but not a formal member of the party. She fought the battle for the rest of her long life a singular totem representing a society and culture of unresolved conflicts before and after the events.

Once Hitler was in power, Arnold Fanck initially resisted pressure from Joseph Goebbels to produce propaganda as he also refused to join the party as many were pressured to do. He had changed his tune by the time of A German Robinson Crusoe (1940), the story of a man who returns from self-imposed isolation to a Germany with a “new hope”.  Oddly enough, Riefenstahl, despite producing the major works of propaganda, never joined the party and neither did Gustav Diessl who appeared in the 1945 propaganda film Kolberg and never stopped working throughout the period in Germany and Italy. His final film was directed by Pabst and was The Trial (1948) about antisemitism and he died soon after of a stroke, aged 49.

As for Pabst, there’s a new novel based on his life by German novelist Daniel Kehlmann, The Director which paints him as a Hollywood failure who was so desperate to make films that he compromised himself to bits on his return to Germany in 1939. Sounds sensational… but another version is that he was caught in Austria visiting his mother when war was declared and had no choice but to remain and work through it. Kehlmann’s characterisation doesn’t sound like the director we know and who was once known as “Red Pabst” for his anti-war films and social commentary such as in The Joyless Street (1925) with Garbo and Asta Nielsen.

There’s complicity and self-preservation, but I’m not sure a work of fiction* is the best way of analysing the actions of a real person especially when dealing with a figure some know so well in creative terms. Pabst made two films under the Nazis, both historical dramas, The Comedians (1941) and Paracelsus (1943) and a third which was abandoned. After the war, he made the above film in an attempt to show solidarity with the Jewish cause and he also made The Last Ten Days (1955) about the end of Hitler’s regime, Duel with Death (1949) about the Austrian resistance to the Nazi’s and It Happened on 20 July (1955) about the attempt to assassinate the Fuhrer.

We’ll never truly know where any of these people’s sympathies actually lay but they are all a lesson in how people cope with authoritarian regimes and opting out of your earning capacity is a simple enough equation after the event but – let’s say it’s early 1933 right now – who’s doing good work and who has got their heads down?

Anyway… back in 1929 it was definitely heads up for the location shoot in in the Bernina Range in Graubünden, Switzerland as our directors and their players climbed up to act out this tale of peril against the stunning backdrops of those forbidding mountains. I enjoy Fanck’s films, not just for the scenery but also the sense of actual adventure and the bravery of the leads taking on the actual crags and scrambles. There were no stunt people, the actors had to make the climbs and cower for safety as explosions were used to trigger avalanches.

It was his foundational Der Berg Des Schicksals (Mountain of Destiny) (1924), that inspired 21-year-old dancer Leni Riefenstahl to get in touch with its pioneering director, who then featured her in The Holy Mountain (1926) and The Great Leap (1927) in which his lens sees her climb and dance her way up the mountains in a celebration of vitality and spirit. In The White Hell of Pitz Palü she is called upon to act a lot more and Pabst brings out her best work in this respect although it certainly helps to have better actors to react to than the granite-faces Luis Trenker star of so many Fanck films (and who dodged the interventions of Goebbels by moving to Italy in 1940).

The story begins with Dr. Johannes on the north face of Piz Palü with his new wife Maria (Mizzi Götzel) along with their friend, Bergführer Spring (Swiss mountain guide Christian Klucker who does a good job on the acting front). Diessl’s vibrancy conveys the confidence of well-seasoned climbers yet fear soon overtakes them as an avalanche sparked by the regions vicious föhn winds, leads to Maria falling as the rope Johannes so confidently grasped, snaps and she is lost to the frozen caverns below.

Time passes and another young couple, Maria Maioni (Riefenstahl) and her fiancé Hans Brandt (Ernst Petersen), arrive at the Diavolezza-Hütte overlooking the mountain range with Pitz Palü, elevation 3,899 m (12,792 ft) imposing in the centre. The Hutte is still there and has been expanded from the basics of 1929 but still comfort enough for Maria and Hans. Their pilot pal Udet flies his biplane overhead to celebrate their engagement holiday and drops a bottle of champagne via parachute.

They are joined by an almost wordless Johannes who has spent the last four years searching for Maria’s body on the mountain. Maria is drawn to him, sensing his pain, and he finally melts and tells all as she holds his hands in the hut. Bergführer Spring arrives and tells them that a group of students will be attempting to climb the north face the next day, Johanne resolves to try again to beat them to it and, after hearing that this is no climb to attempt on your own, Hans agrees to join him. As they set off, Maria joins them following on skis, not wanting to miss out on the adventure.

At first things go to plan but then, needing to prove himself in the face of Maria’s wandering gaze, Hans insists on leading only to be swept away by a sudden avalanche. Johannes rescues him a great cost, breaking his leg as the three become stranded on an icy ledge. The students are less fortunate as all are consumed by the mass of snow and fall to their doom in the glacier.

Bergführer Spring finds the note made in the hut’s climbing log and sets off to find them as well as the missing students and after being forced back by a blizzard created by those föhn winds, he calls the village out to help in the search and thus begins Fanck’s epic depiction of the night time mobilisation of the search and rescue team. The mountain is huge and the conditions get worse, finding anyone alive over this vast area is going to be unlikely and yet Johannes and Maria cling to life even as Hans goes mad with the strain. It’s a race against time and the limits of human endurance: mind over mountain?

There’s a vast difference between making Triumph of the Will thereby playing a major part in creating, not just promoting the Nazi visual aesthetic and continuing to work in a cinema industry under Goebbels’ control. There’s also a difference in working conditions once the war had started and the madness truly set in. To paraphrase Naomi Klein**, you don’t have to wait for the genocidal endgame to call out fascistic behaviours as they develop and in terms of enabling the regime Leni has a lot more to answer for than her three main collaborators on this film.

For The White Hell of Pitz Palü, the adventure was surely less political than philosophical and certainly more commercial than both. You also start wondering how John Ford or DeMille would have been viewed had they been making films in Weimar Germany at this time or how their films would be viewed had post-Depression America gone bad. But sure, ignore History at your peril.

 

 

*A different perspective on Pabst is offered by the documentary Pandora’s Legacy (2024) made with contributions from the director’s family and focusing also on his wife Trude. A new biography is also in the works again with the family’s co-operation. And yes, I am reading The Director which has Pabst’s two sons merged into a third fictitious character who joins the Hitler Youth… judgement reserved till completion though… but it’s not looking good.

Pandora’s Legacy is available through the True Story website – link here.

It describes Pabst as the founder of realism in German cinema and he certainly deserves more credit than he’s getting.

**Naomi Klein’s new book written with Astra Taylor, End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World is out now and available from all good bookshops and the very best are independent!!

 

 

The Diavolezza-Hütte still overlooks Pitz Palü...