Translator’s Introduction

Hermann Von Barth was a frenzied mountaineer and furious peak-bagger. He climbed for only five seasons (1868–73), yet set foot on approximately 250 summits, virtually all of them in the northeastern limestone ranges of Bavaria, Tyrol, and Salzburg. Barth occupies an important, if not unique, position in the history of mountaineering, for some of the following reasons: (1) He pioneered the practice of solo, “guideless” climbing, which eventually became a minor tradition in German/Austrian Alpinism, most famously exemplified by Eugen Guido Lammer (1863–1945) and Paul Preuss (1886–1913). (2) He was a regional if not bioregional climber, restricting his pursuits to an underexplored and geologically distinct region of the Alps far removed from the international hotbed of activity in the higher and more glaciated western part of the range. (3) In 1874 he published a colossal and multimedial, 664-page climbing narrative, and it is on this classic work of Germanophone mountaineering literature, Aus den Nördlichen Kalkalpen (From the Northern Limestone Alps), that my translation is based.

Hermann von Barth was born on June 5, 1845, in Upper Bavaria and died, at his own hand while in a delirious state of malarial infection, at the age of thirty-one on December 7, 1876, in Portuguese West Africa (Angola). His curtailed life trajectory between these two divergent territories of discovery—his native Alpine terrain and the distant African tropics—can be briefly outlined as follows. A descendent of Bavarian nobility whose lineage dates from the ninth century, Hermann Johann Nepomuk Kaspar Freiherr von Barth zu Harmating made only sporadic and tentative forays into the mountains during his youth, managing to attain only one summit, the underwhelming and now overdeveloped Wendelstein (1,838 m/6,030 ft.) in the Bavarian pre-Alps (Voralpen). Barth’s true climbing career began in May of 1868, when he moved to Berchtesgaden as a legal trainee (Rechtspraktikant), after having studied law in Munich and testing his preclimbing mettle through extreme bouts of drinking and fencing as a fraternity member of Corps Franconia. It is difficult to believe that Barth dedicated himself wholeheartedly to his new paralegal job given that he summited some seventy peaks during that spring and summer, ten of which counted as first ascents.