What impressed me was not only that he had had all these incredible adventures, but that between expeditions he had written 40 books about them—including one arguing that the Abominable Snowman of Himalayan lore is actually a rare species of long-haired Tibetan bear. The reactions to My Quest for the Yeti ranged from skepticism to outright ridicule when it was published, in 1998. Several critics invoked an old charge against Messner—that his brain had been damaged by anoxia, or lack of oxygen, during all those high-altitude climbs. But five years later a Japanese scientist presented evidence that had brought him, quite independently, to a similar conclusion.

Now in his early 60s, Messner has a thick, wavy head of hair that is starting to turn gray. He wore his shirt open, with a clutch of Tibetan good-luck beads at his throat. There was nothing wrong with his mind that I noticed, except that he had a tendency to say whatever was on it, sometimes making life more difficult for himself. In fact, I found Messner to be one of the sharpest and most focused people I've ever met, with a photographic memory of all the major routes and who climbed them and when. Maybe we should all undergo a little oxygen deprivation.
 
 

To understand what this was really all about, Messner explained, I had to go back to the Nanga Parbat expedition that the German Alpine Club sponsored in 1934. With more than 600,000 members, the German Alpine Club is the largest organization of its kind in the world and a bastion of conservatism and "good German values." It was known for its anti-Semitism and in the 30s became associated with National Socialist ideology. The Nazis wanted all Germans to be comrades, and mountain climbing, which forges Kameradschaft (camaraderie), was the perfect model.

The leader of the 1934 expedition was a man named Willy Merkl. He expected unquestioning obedience from his climbers and had a Wagnerian obsession with conquering Nanga Parbat, "with its bright golden adventures, its manly struggles and austere mortal dangers," as Merkl wrote. He tried to get eight climbers to the top, but they all died, as did Merkl. The bodies that could be recovered were brought down wrapped in flags with swastikas, and from then on Nanga became synonymous with the idea of Kameradschaft.

In 1953, Willy Merkl's much younger half-brother, Karl Maria Herrligkoffer, led another German expedition to Nanga Parbat. A doctor, Herrligkoffer regarded the climbers as little more than chess pieces to be moved up and down the mountain from his command center at Base Camp. But his strongest climber, Hermann Buhl, was a soloist and soon found himself at odds with the cold, aloof expedition leader. Buhl ended up taking off for the summit alone, and Herrligkoffer sued him for disobeying orders and writing his own book. Herrligkoffer, who always made the climbers sign the rights to their stories over to him in his expedition contracts, would sue Messner for the very same reasons in 1970.

Herrligkoffer had led a second successful ascent of Nanga, by the Diamir Face, but he had failed three times on the Rupal Face. His career was on the line in 1970, so he had little patience for the insubordination that the Messner brothers soon manifested. The Field Marshal, as the brothers nicknamed him, tried to separate them and put them on different ropes, but they refused. When, midway up the face, they got word that the Field Marshal was thinking of aborting the assault because he was having doubts about its success, they told Gerhard Baur and von Kienlin that they would stay and do it themselves—and maybe even go down the Diamir Face. "But there was no plan to do the traverse," Messner assured me. "It was something I discussed like a future dream, like something that would be nice to do someday if it was possible."

Part of the conflict was a culture clash: South Tyroleans aren't as regimented as Germans from the fatherland. Messner hates rules and Teutonic nationalism. "I am not an anarchist, but I am anarchistical," he told me. "Nature is the only ruler. I shit on flags." His personal philosophy is not unlike Nietzsche's idea of the Übermensch—the "self-overcoming" person who approaches life on his own terms—which the Nazis appropriated and spun to their own Aryan-supremacist ends.
 
 

Messner was undoubtedly affected by what World War II did to his father. Joseph Messner had joined the Wehrmacht, along with thousands of other naïve young South Tyroleans, and came home embittered, a shell of his former self. Young Reinhold began to think that blind obedience, the Führer principle, was the tragic flaw of German culture—a conviction that was reinforced when he learned about the Holocaust. When Reinhold returned to South Tyrol from his triumph on the Rupal Face, some local politicians had gathered a crowd to give him a hero's welcome. After one of them said, "What a victory this is for South Tyrol!," Messner took the microphone and said, "I want to correct something: I didn't do it for South Tyrol, I didn't do it for Germany, I didn't do it for Austria. I did it for myself." After that, Messner was spat on in the street. He received death threats and letters containing feces. The local newspapers called him a Heimatverräter (a traitor to his homeland) and a Nestbeschmutzer (someone who besmirches his own nest).

So it was inevitable that friction would develop between Messner and the German Alpine Club. In 2001, a new biography of Herrligkoffer was presented at the club's museum in Munich, and Messner, who had written the foreword, was asked to say a few words. He started magnanimously, saying, "It is time for me to bury the hatchet with Herrligkoffer. He was wrong to accuse me of leaving my brother on Nanga Parbat, but he did bring three generations of German climbers to the Himalayas." Yet Messner could not stop himself from adding, "But I do blame my former comrades for not coming to look for us."