Recovered from the virus, our columnist Rocko Schamoni does appreciate life. And wonders about those who are different.
I just had Corona. My old friend Koze recommended that I listen to the audio book of Jon Krakauer’s Frozen Heights, an eleven-hour account of a 1996 Mount Everest climb in which 5 people died, for the endless hours in bed. I listened to it in my downy igloo and began to ponder the reasons why people would endure such hardships when, in many cases, the reward for all the torment is simply death. Why do people climb this mountain of corpses, where more than 300 alpinists have already died, of which at least 200 stayed? The corpses lie, sit, crouch, hang around in full clothing, mostly colourful/cheerful and cannot decompose due to the low temperatures, they remain unchanged for ever as they were at the moment of their death, while their friends and relatives, those who stayed behind, grow older at home and complete their arc of life. A four-year-old daughter becomes an old woman over the years, while her father in a light green Northface snowsuit with a forever 35-year-old face stares into the distant Tibet.
Other mountaineers who are still alive have to climb over their dead colleagues (there are at least ten on the northern route), sometimes they cannot tell exactly whether the figure squatting a little further on a plateau is still alive or has already become a corpse. These people do all of this with the awareness that their own chances are very high of also being stuck here for all time as a colorful corpse, since salvage is fundamentally too complex.
At the very top of the highest ridge in front of the summit – after the legendary Hillary Step – long queues of people waiting in trashy clothes form, sometimes 50 or 60 people hoping that those in front of them have finally completed their summit intoxication and leave. But since life at 8800 meters proves to be extremely delicate and unstable, people keep tipping over in these snakes, dying of brain and pulmonary edema and lining up in the colorful rows of corpses, which the other people present find uncomfortable and annoying, they but that doesn’t stop her from pursuing her goal.
What is all this for? For which God, which politics, which knowledge are these people willing to give up their precious life – that unbelievable and unique miracle that was given to them? For standing on that stupid mountaintop for two minutes, taking a selfie, feeling nothing but exhaustion and tiredness, and then rushing on so as not to stop the line? To prove himself capable of withstanding such hardship? To be very special? No – it is the sheer closeness to death that these mostly wealthy western people seek that makes them feel life, because they already had everything else. It is the same nearness to death that makes young men on German streets bully their environment and fellow human beings with souped-up screaming machines; in the face of death, life only appears to them in all its glory. And it is also the same longing for death that makes men go to war – Ernst Jiinger speaks of the “adventure of male probation in the face of death”. Volumes have been filled with the accounts of this phenomenon from the First World War.
Personally, I find this kind of rendezvous with death to be asocial egoism, because the encounter of the death-seeker often also pulls those around him into the maelstrom of doom. And I would like to emphasize that it is mostly men who seek this fatal encounter, since women are busy with more important things, such as creating life. As a woman, I would consider whether I would continue to produce male successors to this snake of idiocy. Those who do not appreciate life should perhaps not be burdened with it in the first place.
PS Regarding the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, I would like to reiterate to you all the important book “On Tyranny – Twenty Lessons for the Resistance” by Timothy Snyders! The “Spiegel” wrote: “A highly political incendiary writing that reads like a final warning of the impending apocalypse.”
Author photo by Kerstin Behrendt