Nazis, communists, and an ETA flag: when mountaineering is political

BarcelonaPablo Batalla (Gijón, 1987) sips a decaffeinated coffee in the cafeteria of the Hotel Regina, in the center of Barcelona. Outside, everyone is busy, but inside the establishment, everything seems quieter. Batalla probably appreciates this, as he prefers to take things slowly so as not to miss the details. This Asturian historian, translator, and journalist, who lives in a town of 40 inhabitants in León, has just published The Flag on the Summit: A Political History of Mountaineering (Captain Swing), a magnificent work that explains how flags and every possible political cause have risen to the top. He fell in love with the mountains in the most beautiful way. Thanks to a father and a teacher who, in his free time, took public school children to the Asturian mountains. "A vocational teacher. He did something very beautiful: he left little messages all along the route, tucked into a small film canister. We children had to search for them, and inside the canister, we found questions and games to learn about nature," he recalls. Now he still talks to that retired teacher and tells him what he discovered while making the book.

"Sometimes you write the book you'd like to read, since it didn't exist. And it's obvious that mountaineering also has a political side," he explains. Batalla begins the book by quoting The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. It was a time when everything was changing, including the way we viewed nature. "The train brought nature closer to people, shelters were built... more and more people were taking up mountaineering," he says. And it was a time of full nationalist explosion. States dreamed of planting their flags on top of peaks. But it wasn't just nationalist movements that would climb peaks. "There were mountain organizations linked to socialist, anarchist, and communist parties and unions that began to take workers to the mountains. In Austria, they shouted, 'Berg frei»("Free Mountains") because there was a struggle over who deserved to be on the mountains. As opposed to a conservative alpinism that despised these working-class crowds and wanted private spaces in nature," the author reflects.

Europeans began to look at the summits differently in the late 19th century. And so they came into contact with the Sherpas because they needed them to reach the summits." of European climbers who explain that they see a Sherpa crying and treat him like a little child. Like a savage. When that person cried because their toes would be amputated and they would probably not be able to work anymore. They would lose their livelihood in a very poor area. The Sherpas are an ethnic group, very poor people who had no choice but to work for the climbers. People just as poor as the Swiss peasants of the 19th century, who also worked as guides to earn a living," he reflects. And the Sherpas already had their own perspective, different from that of Westerners. "The mentor of Tenzing Norgay, the first Sherpa to climb Everest, believed he was committing a sin by climbing there; he was already committing a sin by climbing. Every people views the peaks differently, and tensions arise." From the first expedition to summit Everest in 1953 "It's not said that it begins with the Sherpas and the porters literally defecating in front of the British Embassy, because they had been forced to sleep on the floor of a damp garage, without a bucket to do their business, while the Western climbers slept in luxurious rooms," Batalla recalls.

"Everything is political. For example, the lives of the two heroes who first reached the summit of Everest. Norgay was a Sherpa born in Tibet who was of no interest to anyone until his success. Afterwards, Tibetans, Indians and Nepalese fought over who was one of their own. Sir Edmund Hillar, who at that time was not yet independent. The lives of many mountaineers are full of contradictions, such as the first man to summit all the peaks over 8,000 metres, Reinhold Messner. "He was born into a German-speaking family in South Tyrol, an Italian region. Austrian, Tyrolean and Italian nationalists all wanted to use him, so he said that his only flag was the handkerchief he carried in his pocket. Now, he would end up playing a politician, because he was a Green MEP."

Batalla has discovered that nothing is known about the first man to reach two different peaks of over eight thousand meters: he was a Sherpa named Gyaltsen Norbu. Nor has he been able to discover what happened to some of the first Afghan female alpinists and climbers. Some may still be hiding from the Taliban. And he tells us about stories that need to be rewritten, like that of Vinhamala, a peak in the Pyrenees where it is said that the first to climb was an aristocrat, the Prince of Moskowa, when in fact it was a feminist woman, Anne Lister. The book dedicates a delightful chapter to the women who used mountaineering to fight for their rights. "But there is a double invisibility. A man who makes a woman invisible, for example, in the case of Lister. But she was a woman who also made the shepherds who had climbed before her invisible. carriers," she reasons.

Pioneering Women

The book reclaims half-forgotten stories, such as that of Soviet woman Elvira Shatayeva, who "wanted to always open a route with her own footprint in the snow, not follow the tracks of others, to make it clear that she didn't depend on everyone." In 1974, she led an expedition of eight women who died in the assault on Mount Lenin, in Tajikistan, in conditions in which anyone would have given up on the climb. "It's full of fascinating stories. But what struck me most was discovering how the mountains have been, for many women, a way of gaining awareness of their own strength. Weak women who were always sick, whose doctor at one point recommended they go to the Alps to breathe the fresh mountain air and the fresh mountain air of Mont Blanc. They gain an awareness of their strength. And this is an awareness that can later be transformed into an explicitly feminist demand."

Everyone has wanted to carry their flag to the highest peaks. To be the first. The first Catalan expedition to Everest in 1985 had a clear nationalist component. Batalla has found surprises in his search, such as a flag with the ETA symbol on Everest. "It used to be customary to leave something behind if you reached the summit. And you'd take what the others had left behind, to prove you'd reached the summit. And a Pole recovered a Basque flag with an unfamiliar symbol in the middle. The Pole explained that they gave him strange looks when he tried to return it to the Basque climbers. ETA," he recalls about the 1980 Basque expedition. Just another flag in a long list of symbols that have been taken to Everest, be it Palestinian, Israeli, or stateless nation flags.

But what happens when everything has been done? "Nowadays we can claim a kind of mountaineering that, we could say, is resigned, that accepts that everything has already been done. There are people who claim to enjoy climbing the same peak 50 times close to home, because each time is different. Just to enjoy it, not to boast about anything. All the peaks have been climbed, everywhere... all that's left is to beat. People who have never reached summits and climb to the top of Everest to take a selfie. Now the revolutionary thing is to be content with loving the peaks close to home.