The Return of the Bergfilm : Nordwand (2008) and Nanga Parbat (2010)

Offering viewers a filmic Vergangenheitsbewältigung of the German mountaineering past, the two recent features Nordwand (2008) and Nanga Parbat (2010) hark back to the 1920s German Bergfilm . While Nordwand features a mise‐en‐scène , character constellation, and plot strikingly similar to the earlier Bergfilme , Philipp Stölzl takes great care to imbue his film with an anti‐Nazi message. Yet Stölzl's insistence upon an Alpine space stripped of complexities and contexts in combination with his fusion of historical facts and melodrama offers German viewers a less burdened and easily digestible approach to the past. In Nanga Parbat , Joseph Vilsmaier also presents a kind of filmic Vergangenheitsbewältigung of the German mountaineering past by representing mountaineering as an act of postwar rebellion in the spirit of 1968. By presenting free‐spirited, morally upright, and ideologically untainted mountain men, both Nordwand and Nanga Parbat at once resume the moral and aesthetic continuum of the Bergfilm and tend to normalize the historically troublesome connections between mountaineering and Nazism. In this way, the films—albeit unwillingly—rehearse some of the same tropes that characterized the Bergfilm in the first place, staging the divide between nature and culture, or man and woman, as an eternal, ahistorical struggle.