After Austria had been absorbed by Nazi Germany, Harrer had joined the SS in 1938 and had asked Himmler permission to marry, certifying that he and his fiancee were pure Aryans. As is often the case, he wasn’t that clean. He fled just before the Chinese came in 1950.Īt the time, Harrer offered the prospect of a “clean” German/Austrian, a man who had the moral stature to depict Communist abuses. Crossing the Himalayas by foot and yak, Harrer spent the late Forties in Tibet’s capital city, Lhasa, befriending and tutoring the young Dalai Lama, designing structural improvements for the city and chronicling in journals and photographs life in the last years of independent Tibet.
He was acting as a remnant of old Germany, the land of mountaineers and mapmakers, of the Wandervogel, the German naturalist movement which the Nazis had plundered for members and imagery, then banned. While he’d escaped in 1944, he didn’t try to join the Nazi army but instead ventured into Tibet, spurred by curiosity about a country considered off limits to the West. Heinrich Harrer, an Austrian mountaineer, had been in a British prisoner-of-war camp in India for the length of the war. The idea of transience, and that there is nothing to hold onto pragmatically, that we do at some point or another have to let go of that which we consider most dear to us, because it’s a very short life.īowie, interview, Daily Telegraph, December 1996. So much of what first appealed to me about Buddhism has stayed with me. Seven Years in Tibet (acoustic, radio broadcast, 1997). Seven Years in Tibet ( The Rosie O’Donnell Show). Seven Years in Tibet (with Dave Grohl, 50th Birthday Concert). Seven Years in Tibet (first performance, fragment, 1996).
0 kommentar(er)
