CHRISTIAN KIEFER

Ashland MFA Director

FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION

It is strange to have one’s first book end up being the only book anyone remembers. I am grateful for the attention Master of Mountains has received, but I also sometimes find myself confused by what is, to me, a youthful and exuberant hagiography. My publisher tells me that the cover of this new edition will include the phrase “the classic of mountaineering literature.” The Classic! I wish I could go back in time to show that cover to the naïve, unsure twenty-three-year-old who first boarded the plane to Switzerland which would change my life. I was only in Switzerland because my then-boyfriend had been awarded a Fulbright. I had just finished my graduate work in Ohio and had nothing better to do than follow a boy to Europe. So there I was, woefully ignorant about the world and its history, especially the modern history of Europe.  While I’d like to believe that I am more worldly now, certainly more adult, it is also true that at no point did I question what Jan Keller told me over the course of those many interviews.

What I have to tell you in this foreword, what I have come to learn about the subject of the book you are planning to read, felt so impossible to me that for a long time I could not believe its veracity. But it is true, incontrovertibly so. I should have done the research and found the truth back then, before publication, or even in the years since. It is a fact for which I cannot forgive myself. I have participated in an event that is more than an omission; it is a lie.

Indeed, when I think back on the initial interview sessions, I can see how Keller was prevaricating from the very start, so much so that I came to rely on Tim (that was the name of my boyfriend) to talk me through my lack of progress. There was a long period in which I did not know the basic facts of my interview subject’s life: his birthdate, his birthplace, the outline of his childhood and adolescence. Dispiriting, to say the least.

What was also dispiriting was my relationship with Tim, which disintegrated rapidly during our time in Europe. The financial burden of traveling from Cleveland proved more substantial than either of us had imagined, as was the cost of day-to-day living. While the small apartment Tim and I rented was comparatively inexpensive, we could not live with any sense of security on Tim’s Fulbright alone. For my part, I effectively contributed nothing. I had begun to wonder if I should not have remained in Cleveland, waiting for Tim’s eventual return.

In fact, I might have remained in Cleveland had Jan Keller not answered a kind of fan letter I had sent him, which I expected to disappear into silent Swiss distance. I introduced myself, told him that I was a student of climbing history, and that I was a recent graduate in writing and philosophy. I would be in Switzerland that summer; perhaps Herr Keller would agree to a cup of coffee. I had expected no response. Keller was, to me, something like a Salinger or Cormac McCarthy figure, a man whose accomplishments in the climbing world were detailed only by those who had been his partners: bold new routes in the Karakoram, the Himalayas, the Alps, the Dolomites. There had been reports of encountering him, alone, partnerless, quietly pioneering some new solo route upon a mountain of such extreme difficulty that those climbers who saw him would speak of the encounter as if it were a ghost story. As in a ghost story, he would appear in their articles and books as a kind of specter or shadow beyond understanding. That he never gave interviews only added to his mystique. And yet Jan Keller’s reputation among other climbers was that of a cordial, friendly man, bold when the situation called for boldness but also willing to retreat when his sixth sense—or anyone else’s—told of dangers to come. He was, by most accounts, a good man to have on a rope team, a man who would do more than his share upon the scoured faces of the great mountains. People talked of his smile and his warmth., Jan Keller’s quiet conversation could get one through a shivering bivouac.

I had been interested in Keller’s climbs, but I was more fascinated by the man himself. His appearance was as a kind of Zelig or Forrest Gump figure, present and often active in so many of the mid-century’s greatest feats of mountaineering and yet voiceless by design. One could see him in various spools of footage: at K2, at Gasherbrum, at the foot at the Eiger, his gaze assiduously ignoring the camera but his expression not hostile to its presence: smiling, his eyes twinkling even in the rough grains of aging film stock. I had grown up in Ohio where it was common to see Amish carts trundling down the street, and I was sometimes reminded of this when thinking of Jan Keller, as if there was some cultural aversion to speaking to a journalist or a camera. As if doing so might somehow capture one’s soul. One could make the case that Keller was simply shy, but by all accounts, he was open, kind, and friendly. But he was also, by dint of his refusal to talk to the media, a cipher.

Keller’s response arrived just a few days before Tim and I were set to travel. The subject of Tim’s Fulbright was the study of energy grids across the Alps, a subject I did not understand or care about—again part of my naïveté about the workings of the actual world. (I might also say here that Tim’s physique was that of a climber: thin, absent of any appreciable body fat, lanky and large-handed, and yet the one time I had taken him out to a local crag he had suffered a full-blown panic attack and had refused, ever since, to join me, even as my erstwhile belayer. “The thought of you falling…,” he would say. “I just can’t handle it.” My own body is not much suited to climbing. I’m short and tend to thickness across the middle. But we climb with the bodies we have.

You will forgive me for wanting to set the scene and for the laborious way in which I will reach the true subject of this writing, but I am first and foremost a novelist and so suffer from the pretention of feeling that the reader could always use a teaspoon more flavoring. In any case, I hope it might allow you to gather some sense of what it was for me to conduct these interviews and how this book came to be. And then, of course, what it means to have so much of what I thought I knew called into question.

Jan Keller’s response to my fan mail arrived just a few days before we were to depart for Europe. Tim told me I had received a letter from Switzerland and I snatched it out of his hand. Ms. Lucy Brown— I am happy to see you. Call me when you arrive. Jan Keller.

I crumpled the note to my breast and did a little spiraling dance on the carpet. Then I handed the note to Tim.

“Who is this again?”

“Jan Keller. The climber I talked about? The one who doesn’t ever give interviews?”

“Ah right,” he said. “That Cormac McCarthy guy.”

“I get to meet Jan Keller,” I said. “Holy shit.”

“You’re so cute,” Tim said. “You’re probably the only person in the country who would get this excited about meeting some obscure Austrian climber.”

“He’s a legend,” I said. “One of the greatest climbers in the world.”

“So you’ve said.” Tim smiled. I thought his look was something akin to what a parent might offer a child. Patronizing. I tried not to be angry.

###

The first meeting was at Keller’s residence, a half-timbered Tudor-style home on the edge of a Swiss village that was something from a storybook: the streets made of crooked cobbles and the houses like rows of cuckoo clocks. Keller himself completed the picture: a bright, blue-eyed, clean-shaven octogenarian, his hair thin and white, his simple clothing marked by a green woolen vest that looked as old as the man who wore it. He greeted me with a smile and a half-bow and then ushered me inside.

The room in which we met was like a microcosm of the town itself: a living area surrounded by folksy bric-a-brac—wooden birds and tiny carven figures—and stacks of folded maps, journals, books, and photographs, most in black and white, a few in over-saturated color.

“Well, Ms. Lucy Brown,” Jan Keller said once we had passed through niceties. “How have you found me?”

“Found you?”

“I’m sorry, my English is poor. I mean, why have you come to call?”

“Oh, Herr Keller…”

“Jan, please.”

“Okay, then. Jan, I just, you know, I’m interested in climbing and I’ve read pretty much everything, and I just…”

“You’re a writer then?”

“Well, I’d like to be, but that’s not why I wanted to see you.”

“No? I’d not make a good subject for you?”

“It’s not that. I mean, I just…I know you don’t give interviews so…”

“I think I’d be the one to decide that, no?”

“Of course,” I said. This was not going as I expected, although in truth I did not know what I expected.

“Tell me about yourself,” Keller said now. “Your address was in Ohio. Not much climbing there, I think.”

“No, hardly any,” I said. “It’s just where I went to graduate school.”

“In writing and philosophy.”

“That’s right.”

“You wrote a dissertation?”

“I did. On…um…Foucault.”

“Oh Foucault,” he said, nodding. “I saw him speak once in Paris.”

“Wow,” I said, exhaling. “How was it?”

“I don’t know. My French is worse than my English. I just sat there, like so…” For a moment he mimed a slack-jawed, wide-eyed expression, a moment so incongruous to me that I giggled. “He’s better for me in translation.”

I had been thrown off balance some by Keller’s initial volley but his anecdote about Foucault opened a different tone, one in which the mountaineer’s sense of humor began to shimmer through what felt like an interrogation. My answers only led to more questions, each of which I tried to answer as succinctly as possible, although it quickly became apparent that this tactic only led to more and more questions. Where was I from? Where did I grow up? Where did I go to school? What did my parents do for a living? Where were they now? Then questions about my writing, the novel I had begun but not finished, the few poems I had published in obscure literary journals, and so on. And then questions of a more philosophical nature: What was I most proud of? What would I tell my children about the world? What was the meaning of life?

This final question I did not answer, pausing for a long moment before saying, so quietly I could hardly hear myself: “I think that’s a question I should ask you.”

For a time, Keller’s expression was blank, as if the animated figure I had been talking with for nearly two hours had become frozen in place. Then he nodded, so slowly that it was, like my own voice, barely perceptible. “I think we save that for next time.” He rose to his feet. Despite his age, the movement was quick.. “Let’s say Monday, after lunch, not before.”

It did not sound like a question. This first meeting had been on a Friday, and I had plans to tour the area with Tim across the weekend and into the following week, the last span of time he would have free before his Fulbright research started in earnest. I suppose I could have told Jan Keller that we’d need to move the date to further in the week, but I did not do so, instead telling Tim that I’d need to be back by Monday. This precipitated the first big fight we had while in Switzerland, the first of many. At the time I felt guilty, although now I wonder at Tim’s apparent feeling that he was the only one in Europe who would have plans while I would be waiting for him at home, the dutiful pseudo-wife, dinner on the table. As it turned out, Tim decided to spend the weekend exploring alone, rather than bothering to return a few days early to accommodate my schedule. I should have thrown his things into the street and lit them on fire, but I sat alone in the little flat, weeping into the well of my guilt, spending long moments thinking I should just skip the meeting with Jan Keller—this would be a way to show Tim that I was committed to our relationship—but two days later I found myself once more at his door.

A cleaning woman was in the house this time, a bustling, barrel-shaped figure who clanked around the kitchen while Keller and I settled in the living room. Keller seemed not quite at ease until the woman departed a half-hour later, speaking to him briefly in German before letting herself out.

“I’m glad that’s done,” Keller said. “I don’t like anyone in the house, but it’s necessary.”

I did not comment on the fact that I was an anyone in this context.

“Now, to business, I think,” Keller said. “I wonder if you would be interested in being my writer.”

I blinked at him. “What do you mean?”

“I mean I will give you my story and you will write it down.”

“But you don’t…why would you do that?”

Keller frowned, the expression almost comic in its intensity. “Ah I see,” he said.

“No, I just—you haven’t…I mean…” I paused and breathed. “I’m not a real writer.” This was something I strongly believed at the time.

“According to whom?”

“According to anyone.” I was wringing my hands, something Tim occasionally commented on, and I released them and ran the palms across the tops of my thighs.

“I don’t much talk about my life. Not to writers,” Keller said. “And yet you wrote me from Cleveland, Ohio, and came here, without any credentials, without any real publications. And here you are, and we’ve had a good conversation. You answered my questions. So I think maybe this is the time.”

“The time?”

“To…how do you say…set the record.”

“As an interview?”

“No, no,” he said. “Not that. You’d need to write it as a story. A kind of biography. You understand?”

“You’re asking me to write your biography?”

“That’s exactly right.”

I almost did not agree, not because I did not want to do it but because the feeling of my own inadequacy was so deeply rooted that I did not feel I was up to the task. For me, it was like going from climbing plastic holds at the local gym to suddenly finding myself on Fitzroy in Patagonia. Furthermore, there were, I was soon to find out, certain conditions to the project. I was not allowed to actually record anything Jan Keller said. (“If I wanted a recording I’d just purchase a recorder and do it myself.”) Our meetings were to be held every other day for exactly two hours. I was not to interrupt him, although he informed me there would be time later for questions. It was essential, he told me, that he be able to talk through his memories in whatever order he saw fit and that I would, naturally, put them into some kind of order as I saw fit. “That’s your skill, not mine,” he said.

In the end, I said yes. You know I did.

“I can’t believe it,” I told Tim. “I’m Jan Keller’s biographer. Just like that.”

Tim was smiling and friendly, having apparently forgiven me. We had rented a tiny apartment above a local pub—just a single room with a bed, a desk, and a primitive bathroom—a location so cramped that, if either of us were using the desk, moving from one side of the room to the other required climbing over the bed, upon which Tim was now seated.

“Good things happen to good people,” Tim said.

“I can’t believe it. Things like this…they don’t happen to me.”

“They do now.”

The view through the window behind Tim was a picture postcard: the sagging, tiled roof of the adjacent building beyond which, illumined in orange alpenglow, rose the Alps.

In truth, my experience of Switzerland thus far was akin to something out of the Heidi books my grandmother had read me. It was, I realized, not just a place, but a kind of gravitational center, one imbued with a sense of history that no city in America could ever have, its history not held in a museum or as a park but continuing as spaces in which people lived, worked, raised their families, wrote their books, and from which they climbed their mountains.

I would have to see what Jan had to say about such things, for he was, I had already learned, an educated and erudite man. He was liable to spin into digressions. Sometimes I came away from the interviews realizing that he had not actually told me anything specific about himself, his life, or his climbs. I still had not even uncovered the location of his birth, nor, I realized now, his birthdate. One moment he would be talking about the quality of Russian food and then Polish textiles and then field labor in Austria and the political system of modern Scandinavia, with further micro-digressions on subjects of natural history dotting the monologue. Only on occasion did he mention a recognizable climber’s name or mountain peak. My notes at the end of such sessions were a mess of words without referent or connectivity, such that I could make no sense of any of it.

“Why won’t he let you record him?” Tim asked one night as we lay in bed, each of us looking over the paper evidence of our day’s work.

“He asked me not to.”

“But why? Did you ask him?”

“I just agreed to it. I didn’t want to…I don’t know, I guess I just thought…”

“I mean you could ask him. Maybe he’ll change his mind.”

“I’m not really supposed to talk. I mean, that’s what I think he wants.”

“But that’s absurd,” he said, laying the papers he had been looking at on his lap. “He’s the one who’s asked you to do this. And it’s not like he’s paying you or anything. You’re free labor to him.”

“I’ll be able to sell the book when I’m done.”

“Ever since you started on this, you’ve done nothing but complain,” Tim said. “This was supposed to be fun.”

“You’re gone all day at your power plants.”

“Not always,” Tim said sullenly. I hated this aspect of him, the quiet that descended when things did not go his way.

And yet, what irritated me most was that Tim was at least partially right. I had been to see Jan Keller every other day, two hours at a time, for two weeks. That made for fourteen hours and what I had in my notes looked as if I had wandered a great library’s card catalog writing down subject areas at random. That day’s list: water works, Catholicism, metallurgy, shale, the salt mines of Czechoslovakia (I had not bothered to mention that this country no longer existed), types of grass for the feeding of sheep.

And so, two days later, and perhaps encouraged by Tim’s admonition, I paused at the end of our interview. “Can I ask you something,” I said tentatively.

“Of course.”

“I could probably use a kind of chronology of your life, important dates and such, your climbs.”

“A chronology,” he repeated.

“You know, a list of dates and what you were doing. Like, I don’t even know when you were born. You mentioned Makalu today but when was that expedition?”

“Ah so,” he said. This was his characteristic exclamation, sometimes a question and sometimes a statement or interjection.

“You’ve repeated a few things, and I’m trying to figure out where they fit.”

“I’m repeating things, am I? I didn’t realize I was so addle-brained.”

“No, it’s not that. It’s just a lot of information and like you said I’ve got to put the puzzle together. It would be easier if I knew which were the edge pieces.”

He nodded. For a moment I found myself wondering if they even had puzzles in Switzerland but then shook the thought away. Of course they had puzzles. They probably invented puzzles.

###

I had, by this point, reached such a level of familiarity with Keller that I no longer waited for him to answer the door but instead knocked while opening it, calling, “Jan, I’m here,” and then heading into the living area with its bric-a-brac and knickknacks. Most often he would already be seated and waiting for me, but occasionally I would find myself alone in that room. Many of the photographs were old studio portraits of men with enormous mustaches and fierce, piercing eyes. Others were from the fifties or sixties, fuzzy images of men in earth-colored clothes upon unidentified snow slopes. I thought I could see Reinhold Messner in one. Heinrich Harrer in another. But I could not be sure and when Keller appeared he would not answer my questions. “For another time,” he would say.

What I thought then was that Keller always had a narrative agenda to share, that he entered the room with a topic in mind and did not want to become sidetracked by wistful remembrances of his photographic past, despite the fact that his entire discourse was one of near-constant digression. Lately, I’ve begun to wonder if the entirety of his style was ultimately the prevarication of a man caught between wanting to tell a certain version of his story while leaving a great and important swath of it undiscovered. What he was trying to do was hide a mountain in plain sight. He almost succeeded.

Sometimes he would offer me a wink, as if we shared some secret. And after all these years, I can still hear his sonorous, kind voice: “Ah so, Lucy Brown,” he would say. “What shall we talk about today?”

Once, after three months, when it had become clear that my relationship with Tim was coming to its end, I burst into tears when Keller asked that simple question. Tim’s Fulbright research involved increasingly distant forays into the surrounding region, often taking days at a time. Or so he said. When he returned, he seemed little interested in anything I had to say about Jan Keller or any other topic, nor was he particularly forthcoming about his own time. “You’re not interested in any of that,” he might say in response. And although I would press him, trying to claim that I was interested because he was interested, he would mumble something about this or that hydroelectric or nuclear plant. In a situation where we had some space in which to separate, if only briefly, even two rooms so that one might retreat and allow the other a modicum of space, we might have made out better. The flat was so cramped that we could not avoid each other, even for a moment.

That situation hit its boiling point that summer. Tim was gone from the flat for an entire week and when he returned he suggested, in an emotionless monotone, that I should return to Cleveland.

“You’re kicking me out?”

“You know this isn’t working,” he said. “It’s no one’s fault. It was just a mistake.”

He looked, in that moment, like a stranger to me. “What do you mean it’s no one’s fault?” I shot back. “I’ve been here. You’ve been…God knows where.”

“I don’t want to fight,” he said.

“No, you just want me to leave.”

He paused a long moment, staring out the window at the cobblestone street below. Then he said, “Yes, that’s what I want.”

I had actually gone to Jan Keller’s earlier that day with the intention of telling him that I needed to leave Switzerland but that I would return as soon as I could. Yet, his simple “what shall we talk about today” brought the whole Tim thing to the surface: all the weeks I had been in that village, together with Tim and yet all the while alone. (The following year, a mutual friend would tell me that Tim married a Swiss woman and brought her to Chicago, where he had secured a job. Later still, I heard rumors he left his wife for a much younger graduate student. I don’t know what happened to the Swiss woman.)

Sitting with Jan, I managed to blurt out between gasping sobs that I had to leave Switzerland, that things with my boyfriend were not working out, and that there was nothing else I could do with no resources of my own. Jan Keller did not move from his seat, although he was now leaning forward, perched on its edge, his hands folded between his knees. “Lucy Brown,” he said quietly. “You are very sad?”

“I just feel like a failure,” I said, still gasping.

“A failure because your boyfriend is an idiot?”

This made me laugh. My face was a mess of snot and tears. I wished Jan Keller might slide across a box of Kleenex or something, but this was not his way. He just sat there, watching me.

“We have work to do,” he said.

“I know, Jan. And I’m sorry.”

“No, no, it’s a commitment you made. And so you must keep it.”

I almost snapped at him then. One man had cast me aside, and now another was harping on me about, of all things, commitment. I had traveled across the Earth. Who was more committed than I?

But Jan Keller had not stopped speaking. “And so you will stay here,” he said, “and we will finish what we started.”

Keller had told me, very early on, that he did not like people being in his home, and so I told myself that he did not really mean “you will stay here” in the way we would use that phrase in America. He just meant that I was to stay in Switzerland. He was ordering me to do so.

“I can’t stay here.”

“Why not? I have a spare room.”

“A room?”

He continued as if not hearing me. “There must be some rules, of course. I do not like to be disturbed, and I do not like noise, so no radio if you please. You will be on your own, but you can take your meals here and such. And we will continue our work, yes?”

“You mean I’d be…living? Here?”

“An arrangement,” Jan Keller said, his bright eyes shining. “For our working. That’s all.” He paused and leaned back, his hands on his knees. “Or you can go back to Cleveland, Ohio, if that’s what you’d prefer to do.”

“I don’t want to go back there.”

“It’s settled then. Go get your things.”

“Now?”

He shrugged as if the answer were obvious.

###

People who know this part of the story often ask me what it was like to live with Jan Keller. I tell them that it was like living with some benevolent old gentleman from a previous age, which was exactly true. Keller was quiet during the day, reading the newspaper and then going for a walk, a gnarled walking stick clutched in his gnarled grip, then he might have lunch in town or come back for something simple: rye bread and cheese, a small glass of wine, not much else. Often he would return from his walk with wild game: a pair of partridges, a hunk of boar or red deer. This he would prepare in silence upon the butcher block that rested next to the sink, chopping or slicing, seasoning, putting it into the oven or into a cast iron pan for frying. It was not until we sat together at the table that he would speak to me at last: “Ah so, Lucy Brown, how has your day been?”

For the next half-hour or so, we would talk about whatever he or I had been reading, seeing, thinking about. He asked me questions sometimes, mostly about life in America, and sometimes too about the kinds of climbing I had done. I had been thinking of doing something in the Alps but would need to find some partners, which I mentioned to him once only to have him give me the name and phone number of Erik Piola, an Italian climber who was to become my primary partner for the next ten years until his death in Alaska, not climbing but, like so many others, in an automobile accident.

But that is another story. It is strange to say yet what I remember most about Jan Keller was his smell. I thought at first it might have been some kind of cologne and later I realized it was the smell of his pipe, which he puffed only while on his walk around town. I never saw him with the pipe in the house—I suppose it lived in his vest pocket—then once, when I too was strolling through the alleys, I caught the same scent strongly upon the air and turned the corner to find him stepping out of a small café, the pipe, smoking, held in one pale hand. “Ah so, it’s Lucy Brown,” he said, winking at me.

“Ah so,” I rejoined, “it’s Jan Keller.”

He nodded, I nodded, and we went our separate ways.

It was an odd arrangement, but it felt both familiar and friendly. The cliché now would be to identify him as some kind of surrogate father- (or grandfather-) figure, and honestly this is not far from the truth. Like a father or grandfather—or at least like mine—he seemed both present and absent, physically close and yet emotionally distant. He only seemed interested in anything I had to say during that half-hour of our evening meal together; otherwise, he ignored me entirely. But during that evening meal he was utterly and completely present in a way that no one else had ever been, at least not for me,.. He would not stop looking at me, directly into my eyes, as if I were the only person on earth. It thrilled me, and please do not take that to mean anything sexual, for there was nothing of the sort in my relationship with Jan Keller. There was no wolfishness in his gaze, nor did I ever see him looking at me with anything that resembled desire. Perhaps I was but a daughter or granddaughter to him, or perhaps just a writer who had come to lodge in his spare room.

###

The book you hold in your hands is the fruit of the next five months living at Jan Keller’s home until well after I was originally slated to return to the States. I wrote most of the first draft of the book there, reading the pages to him in the evenings, mostly so we could jointly determine if there was material missing. This was how we combed through the first chapters, those leading up to, but not including the war years. I recall asking him for some additional details on the period between 1938 and 1945. “It was the war,” he said. “We were soldiers and did little climbing.”

“But that means you did some, right?”

“Not really.”

“Well, can you at least tell me where you were when the war started?”

“Near the Zugspitze.”

“Climbing there?”

“No,” he said simply. “Not climbing. Just following orders. We were soldiers so we did what we were told.”

My questions about the war were answered with dismissal. “Dearest Lucy, there’s nothing to talk about. Just a blank space. There was no climbing so it was just getting through the days.”

He would not be specific about his unit, where he was stationed, or what his soldiering tasks were. I did not know if he was infantry or motor pool or a typist, and when I asked him about other climbers during that time he told me that it was the same for them: a period without climbing and therefore a time to be forgotten.

That I did not question such answers, nor did my editor when the book was finally to be published, is inexcusable, although in truth I do not know if I would have discovered anything amiss even were we to have done our due diligence.

###

As Virginia Woolf put it: time passes. Master of Mountains has remained in print every year since its initial publication, and I went on to other kinds of writing, mostly novels although I’ve written articles for National Geographic, The New York Times, and elsewhere on subjects of interest to me, a few which had to do with mountaineers. I kept in regular touch with Jan Keller right up until his death five years after the publication of the biography. It may seem strange to you, but Keller never once mentioned the book to me, although I know it appeared in German translation and was likely sold down the street from his home in Switzerland. If he read it, I have no idea. Sometimes I like to imagine that he did, although it would not surprise me to find out he did not. He was not a man very interested in the past, although I think he assumed that someone would write about him and that he might either participate or not. Participating, of course, meant he could leverage some sense of control on the narrative of his own life. This is not a concern one can easily dismiss. Would you rather tell your own story or allow it to be assembled by someone unknown to you? I think we all know the answer to such a question.

I would have no reason to write this foreword were it not for a letter I received two years ago, unbidden, from a stranger. Michael Hawkes is an independent researcher based in Michigan. I don’t think Mr. Hawkes will be offended if I call him a hobbyist military historian, a variety of pseudo-academic that both plagues and supports the discipline of history, self-publishing books on obscure and dusty corners of their subject area. Such tomes are most often so detail-heavy that they are impossible to read, although my historian friends tell me that they do have some value in terms of uncovering primary sources otherwise neglected or forgotten. Hawkes’s letter was both brief and polite, indicating that he had some information that might be useful to me and enclosing a reproduction of a black and white photograph in which a group of soldiers stood on an unknown European street, the background blurred but comprised of a stone wall and some distant trees. I did not know what the make of the photograph. It appeared that the leftmost of the men was preparing to pin a decoration on a soldier partially obscured by the angle from which the photograph had been taken and beside which stood another soldier, peering directly into the camera lens.

“The man on the left is Oberstleutnant Josef Saliminger,” the letter read, “head of the 1st Mountain Division of the Wehrmacht. The medal in his hand is an Iron Cross, although I have been unable to determine which level. The man on the right has been identified as Felix Müller, who was decorated with the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves on the 20th of August 1943 near the village of Kommeno in Greece. I believe this photograph was taken the same day.”

I had no idea what to make of it. It had been nearly thirty years since Master of Mountains was first published and Keller himself had passed away two decades before. I had never written another piece of extended nonfiction, nor had I written any fiction that took place during the Second World War, so Hawkes’s letter and accompanying photograph felt random, and his words didn’t indicate why he thought I’d be interested in this subject. I was not, nor am I now, a scholar of military history, which has always seemed a kind of male-centered fantasy of aggression, violence, and power. I wanted none of it.

Nevertheless, for some reason I did not throw Hawkes’s letter away but merely folded it and its photograph back into the envelope and tossed it to the pile on the far corner of my desk. About a week later a second letter appeared in the mail, also from Hawkes. This one included a single photograph that made me yelp with surprise. A young man stood in a military uniform, a rope coiled around his shoulders, ice axe in one hand, rifle slung so that it extended above the top of his rucksack. The soldier peered directly into the camera, his attitude fierce, his eyes sparking.

The note from Hawkes read, simply: “I believe this to be Jan Keller. Do you concur?”

Oh yes. There was no question. This was my friend, dressed in his uniform, looking like a boy playing at being a soldier. I felt a strong desire to bring this photograph to him, somehow, beyond the grave, to see his lined face break into an embarrassed smile. “Ah so, Lucy Brown,” he would say. “You found me at last.”

I wrote Michael Hawkes a note and thanked him for the photograph, telling him that yes, it was most certainly an image of Jan Keller during the war, the only such photograph I had ever seen. I asked him where he had found it and if I could be of any further help to him, politeness more than anything as I had little interest in those years of Keller’s life. He did not think those years interesting enough to report them in any detail, and so I had more or less erased that period from my mind.

Michael Hawkes, on the other hand, was more insatiable than I might have anticipated, being one of the hobbyist war aficionados. His next letter included another copy of the second photograph, this one a duplicate but a very good one. And the note: “The insignia on his shoulder is the Edelweiss, indicating 1. Gebirgs-Division, Wehrmacht.”

And all I thought was, OK great. 1st Mountain Division. I knew, of course, that Jan Keller must have served in the German army during the war years. He was an Austrian, after all, but I never had any sense that this was an important period for him. Every able-bodied man served in Hitler’s army. There was no other choice for the men of that era. So of course Keller wore the Wehrmacht uniform. And it made sense that they would have placed him in a “mountain division,” although in truth I had no idea what that meant.

I still had Hawkes’s first letter and the enclosed photograph, and when I retrieved it from the pile on my desk I peered more closely at the man upon which the Iron Cross was being pinned. Now it seemed obvious that I was looking at a young Jan Keller in the moment of receiving a medal for, I assumed, bravery. I felt a flush of irritation at the realization that Keller had willfully left out this information. If he had received the Iron Cross (an Iron Cross, I should say, although I did not yet know there were levels), then surely he had done something other than sitting behind a desk somewhere. But what had it been?

One of the pleasures of teaching at a big research university is access to scholars in a wide variety of fields. The following day I called upon a colleague in the history department: Dr. David Trimble. David is a historian deeply invested in the rise of fascism in Europe who has recently turned toward the rise of fascism closer to home. He looked over the photographs and the letters, took a few books down from the shelves, flipped through pages, referring to indexes and tables of contents, and then returned to run his finger down the text. “Yeah, this is bad stuff, Lucy,” David said.

“What do you mean?”

“This whole unit was hardcore. War crimes. The whole thing.”

“War crimes?”

“I wasn’t sure, but I thought the unit rang a bell. These guys were famous for killing civilians, burning towns. Look here. They executed all but four people in this Greek town.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

David looked up from his books. “These are bad, bad guys, Lucy. The worst.”

I took the materials David gave me and read through what I could. None of the books were specifically on the 1stMountain Division but they made their appearance, nonetheless. What I learned was the story of a unit devoted to Hitler’s aims, a unit that ran from Poland to Yugoslavia to Albania and Greece, killing civilians and prisoners without pardon or mercy. One article told of the murder of five entire families in Albania, the youngest member of whom was four months old. Obviously, this was not military in nature, but rather mass murder on a staggering scale.

Of course I still could not believe that Jan Keller, my Jan Keller, had anything to do with war crimes. He had been photographed in uniform, menacing the camera with an ice axe and rifle, but to me the image looked foolish: a boy acting the part of a man. There was no indication that Keller himself had participated in these executions of men and women, children and babes in arms. I could not believe otherwise.

And yet there was the evidence of the second photograph, the one showing the pinning of the medal. This was hard to ignore, although I tried to for months, attempting, instead, to return to the book upon which I had been working. But the specter of that photograph continued to haunt me. In such a unit, what could Keller have been decorated for other than accomplishing its terrible aims?

A month or so after receiving that second photograph, I called the phone number included in Michael Hawkes’s letters. The voice that answered was cordial. “Oh, what an honor that you’re calling me, Ms. Brown,” he said, and there was real warmth in his voice.

“I’m sorry it’s taken me this long to reach out. To be honest, it’s taken me a bit to get my head wrapped around what you sent.”

“I wasn’t sure if I should send it.”

“Why’s that?”

 “It’s just that, you can tell how much you liked Jan Keller in the book. It’s very clear that you admired him.”

“I did,” I said. “I do.”

“There’s nothing wrong with that,” he said.

This annoyed me, the male propensity to lecture any woman on what she can or cannot feel. “No there’s not,” I said simply. “I wondered if you might help me with something, though.”

“Of course.”

“The photograph of the Iron Cross,” I said. “I wondered if you’d have any way of determining why that was awarded. Specifically, I mean.”

“I’m not exactly sure, but I do have contacts in Germany who might be able to help.” He paused and then said, “It’s a big network, us military history nerds.”

“I’d appreciate that,” I told him. “I’m still trying to make sense of it.”

“That's what we’re all trying to do.”

###

I managed to move on to other things in the weeks that followed, the book I was then working on beginning, once more, to roll forward in a way that felt organic and pleasing. And yet somewhere in the back of my mind, the ghost of Jan Keller seemed to point at my heart. The mischievous smile in my memory had morphed into a kind of leer that spoke of a history that I did not know and did not want to know. I had been in his home, under his roof, had loved him as a friend and father-figure, had eaten at his table and now I realized that I might not have really known him.

Earlier in this foreword I spoke about how naïve I was. What did a young woman from Ohio know about the horrors of the Second World War? I was raised in a WASP household, my parents were middle-class conservatives with no real religious or political feeling. What I knew of history had come from high school and a couple of broad overviews in college. I knew that Jan Keller had served in the military, but my assumption had been that he had worn the uniform without any commitment other than that pressed upon him by the times. He had told me that everyone had been in the military and this I could believe. Was it not the same in the United States at the time, that every able-bodied man signed up and was flown to Europe or the South Pacific? Germany would have been the same, only more so.

And yet I was still unprepared for the phone call. I had finished my writing for the day and had just plugged the phone back in when it immediately sprang into a cacophony of ringing.

“Ms. Brown? Michael Hawkes here.”

“Mr. Hawkes, it’s good to hear from you.”

“I’m not sure you’ll feel that way after I tell you why I’m calling.”

“Oh my,” I said, mirth in my voice, for I had not yet adjusted myself to the reality of the phone’s abrupt ring. “Is it terrible?”

“Well, I did track down…well, I mean a friend, a German friend, in Berlin…”

“Yes, go on, Mr. Hawkes.”

“Right,” he said. His mouth made a small smacking sound. “Okay, so I have some information on that Iron Cross.” There was a long pause. “The thing is, there were two Iron Crosses given out on that day. You’ll remember that one was given to Felix Müller. I had identified him in that photo, so that’s how we got the date.”

“I remember.”

“Right, the problem is that the other cross was given to a man named Josef Keppler.”

“Not Jan Keller?”

“No. In fact, no one has been able to find Jan Keller’s name in the records. It’s like he doesn’t exist.”

I felt myself deflate with relief. I had not understood just how much I had been dreading hearing from Michael Hawkes until that moment. It was not Jan Keller but someone else. Mistaken identity. That’s all it was.

“Thank you, Mr. Hawkes,” I said. “That’s a relief.”

“Is it?”

“Of course,” I said, “now I can put Keller back to bed and tuck him in.”

A long pause. “I’m not so sure of that.”

I waited. “All right, Mr. Hawkes. I’m listening.”

“Well, I don’t know if you know much about the First Mountain…”

He went on to tell me, in great detail, about the various crimes perpetrated by this fearsome division, most of which I already knew: whole villages massacred, prisoners of war summarily executed, and babies slaughtered. Michael Hawkes had the numbers and the data: 317 civilians murdered in Kommeno, Greece. 107 in Borovë, Albania. When 5,200 Italian soldiers surrendered on the Greek Island of Cefalonia, the First Mountain Division executed them and buried them in a pit grave.

“Do you understand what I’m getting at?” Michael Hawkes said then.

“I don’t think so.”

“I mean…well…why someone might want to change their identity after that, change their name and so on.”

“Wait, so you think…are you suggesting that Jan Keller and this Keppler man are the same?”

It was, I realize now, an absurd question. Both photographs were clearly of Jan Keller; not even I could argue otherwise. The best I can say for myself is that I was still in a kind of suspended shock, balking at the idea that my friend had been this other man, this soldier, a member of an organization that committed war crimes at the behest of Adolf Hitler. My God. I did not know Jan Keller, and I had been his biographer.

Michael Hawkes and I spoke several times over the subsequent weeks. I continued to come up with reasons—mostly implausible ones—as to why it may not have been Jan Keller in the Iron Cross photo, my heart asking for some way to excuse my deceased friend from culpability, to excuse myself. Perhaps he had been in the unit but had not done much of anything. Perhaps he was a kind of secretary or aide-de-camp. Perhaps there had been nothing for which he would have received a commendation. But Mr. Hawkes was methodical in his research. He did not know for what reason the award had been given, but he did reveal, after several phone calls, that the second man in the photograph, Felix Müller, was still living, although in bad health in a Bavarian nursing home.

My initial thought was to write Herr Müller a letter, or perhaps email the nursing home, but I could think of no way in which to voice my questions. Did you know Jan Keller? How about Joseph Keppler? What did you receive the Iron Cross for? Such questions felt absurd given the length of time that had passed and my status as a foreign stranger. Why would he answer me? Why would anyone?

And so, as strange as it may seem, a week later I stepped off a plane and into an oppressively humid German afternoon. The nursing home was not particularly difficult to find, nor was my travel there important enough to relate. Suffice it to say that a few days later I sat in front of a staggeringly ancient figure in a pale blue bathrobe. Any resemblance to the man in the photograph was lost—thin flesh stretched over a pocked skull—but when I introduced myself and lifted the photograph to Felix Müller’s rheumy eyes, a great smile creased his face. “Cefalonia,” he said. And then his shaky finger pointed to the man next to him in the photograph. “Ah my friend. That’s Joseph. What a day that was.”

“You remember that day?” I said.

I was not sure of the condition of Herr Müller’s intellect. Had he simply remained silent, I would have assumed his mind was addled by age, for he must have been close to one hundred years old at that time. And yet when he spoke, his voice was clear and true: “Of course I remember.”

“What can you tell me about it? I’m interested in your friend.”

“Josef? Why?”

“I think he might have been someone I knew.”

“Impossible,” Herr Müller said. “There is no Josef. He died during the war.”

I breathed a sigh of relief. “Are you certain?”

“Oh yes,” Müller said. “We were best friends. Did everything together. Side-by-side. We did what we were ordered to do, and we both got the Iron Cross.”

“What were you ordered to do?”

“Everything,” he said. “It was war. We followed our orders.”

I felt a sickening. Cefalonia, he had said. Later I would go back to my notes and read again about the tiny island in the Ionian Sea, its limestone cliffs running with blood. Of the 5,200 Italian soldiers that surrendered to the 1st Mountain Division, not a single man was left alive.

We talked for a long while, not because I wanted to but because I continued to feel as if there was something he might be able to tell me even though now I knew, definitively, that the man in the photograph could not possibly be my friend. A lookalike. Rare but possible.

Meanwhile Müller had warmed up a great deal and spoke now with a fluidity that reminded me a bit of my days with Jan Keller, jumping from topic to topic with erudition and grace. He told me of the great love of his life, a woman named Heidi (Heidi of all things!) and how he had lost her to cancer a decade earlier. After an hour or more, a nurse appeared to let Müller know that it was TV time if he wanted to join.

“And here I leave you,” he said to me. “I never miss my show. New episode tonight.”

“Thank you for your time, Herr Müller,” I said.

The nurse had already come behind to shuttle Felix Müller’s wheelchair into the hall.

“Can you tell me how your friend Josef was killed?”

Müller’s eyebrows raised, the plaster of his face sloughing in various directions. “Killed? He wasn’t killed.”

“I thought you said he died during the war.”

“Josef did. But he wasn’t killed. He just sloughed off that name like a skin.”

All at once: cold.

“Went and made himself into someone else. Became famous even. And never spoke to me again.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Not everyone makes it out alive,” Müller said. Then he waved at the nurse and was gone.

###

And so, dear reader, that is the true story. Of course I do not know what, specifically, Jan Keller did during the war, and cannot, for example, pin him to the slaughter of the entire villages of Lyngiades, Mousiotitsa, or Borovë, nor of the many executions of prisoners of war the unit was responsible for, although one can surmise, quite easily, that Keller must have been a significant instrument in the executions on Cefalonia.

What had Keller said to me in his living room so many years before?

Not climbing. Just following orders. We were soldiers so we did what we were told.

Not climbing, but instead mass murder. Just following orders. Even now, my stomach clenches at the thought of that dismissal, that unwillingness to tell anything about those years in which the 1st Mountain Division had ranged from the foot of the Zugspitze and into Poland and the Balkans, a military unit that carried with it a reputation of unheralded violence. A death’s head disguised as an Edelweiss.

And yet I also think that Jan Keller was not Josef Keppler, not really. The man I knew was a kind, gentle figure, bright-eyed and witty, ready with a smile. The man who had been Josef Keppler really had perished in the war. I know I am apologizing for a war criminal, and I know that such a stance puts me in a terribly difficult position but read these pages and tell me that you would not sit across from Jan Keller, a fire blazing in the hearth, regaled with the stories he tells in these pages. And remember that I might have simply left this to myself, burying it with Felix Müller, who passed away just a few months ago at the age of 102, very likely the last man who could connect Keller and Keppler, who knows what they had done when they were just following orders. But I chose not to. I chose not to. And you must do with this information as you wish. Keppler never set foot in the Karakoram, the Himalayas, the Alps, never felt the cold rush of sub-zero air whistling across the glaciers of those far-flung places, never huddled for warmth with climbing companions from Italy, Japan, France, and America. That was Keller. And so was this: We were soldiers so we did what we were told.Or as Müller said: Not everyone makes it out alive.

__________

Christian Kiefer is the director of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing Program at Ashland University, and the author of The Infinite Tides (Bloomsbury), The Animals (W.W. Norton), One Day Soon Time Will Have No Place Left to Hide (Nouvella Books), Phantoms (Liveright/ W.W.Norton), and The September 2023 release The Heart of It All (Melville House).