“Wen die Götter lieben – Der Alpinist Paul Preuß”

Alpine Documentation (), Lutz Maurer 24 min

“No other alpinist has ever had more importance for our activities than Paul Preuß. He has been a personality who has influenced mountaineering in a sustainable way. His ideas should become the base for the modern free climbing movement”, Reinhold Messner wrote in the prologue of his biography about this mountaineer from Altaussee, Styria. As a half-Jew, Preuß was ignored between the two World Wars in the German-speaking area; however, in the 1960s he experienced a renaissance coming out of the free-climbing movement in the USA. Messner’s book and his film documentary are a late homage to the alpinist who was born in 1886 and who died – much too early – in the late autumn of 1913 at the age of only 27, after falling to his death in the Gosaukamm mountains.