Nordwand (North Face in English) was released in 2008, and gives a dramatized account of The Tragedy of Tony Kurz chapter, in The White Spider. It is not based on the book, but more than half of the movie takes place on the wall of the Eiger, playing out with varying accuracy the scenes depicted in The White Spider. The movie depicts the events on the north face of the Eiger accurately for the most part, except with the key part concerning Toni’s death at the very end. Although the movie depicts one of the most tragic stories in historical alpinism, it does a mediocre job of not overdoing the drama of the story. The movie is centered on Toni Kurz and Andi Hinterstoisser, played by Benno Furmann and Florian Lukas, and gives attention to a romantic narrative between Toni and Luise Fellner, a real person but not mentioned in The White Spider. The story takes place right before the onset of World War Two, and although after the technical end of the Golden Age of mountaineering, it still fully embodies the nationalistic fervor of competing European nations to climb the most difficult routes in the Alps.

At the beginning of the movie Toni and Andi are shown as being two disinterested conscripts in the Third Reich. As they are scrubbing toilets and climbing ten-foot walls during training, they are constantly talking about climbing the Eiger. Toni is depicted as being the more mild-mannered of the two, and not the out-going, people loving Toni that Heinrich Harrer describes in The White Spider. Toni takes some convincing to climb the north face because he thinks it is too dangerous. After some pensive starring at the mountains and then back again at his scrubbing brush, he decides to go surprise Andi, who had already pitched his tent below the mountain.

The movie follows the drama of the climb through the German and Swiss news agencies at the time. The lead female character, Luise Fellner, mirrors the audience’s excitement, and also distress at how the Nazi propaganda is portraying the adventure. At first she is only a secretary at the news agency, eager to report on a good story. After they learn that her childhood friend Toni Kurz is attempting to climb the hardest unconquered face in the Alps, they send her and the editor along to cover the story. What ensues is a cacophony escalating reporting at the base of the mountain in the town of Grindelwald. As it becomes clearer to her that the people surrounding her don’t care about the lives of the men at stake, she becomes increasingly disenfranchised with what she has come to view as a publicity stunt.

When Toni and Andi first meet the Austrian climbers, they are instantly competitors instead of allies, as is somewhat implied in The White Spider. Soon after their first encounter, one of the Austrians, Angerer, is hit by a rock knocked loose by Toni, and a sense of foreboding begins to build, at almost the very beginning of the climb. As the team of four now begins their way up in earnest, so too does the press team start to develop drama, until it is a full on spectacle. One man asks; “If they fall, will you rescue them?” (53:10) “We are not required to, no” is the response. Luise tries to take a look at the action through the magnifying glass, but her editor puts her in her place, and tells her to go take pictures of the spectators.

Nordenwand creates an interesting type of drama around the climb on the Eiger. Down in the valley, people seem to have an even greater time viewing the spectacle after each successive disaster strikes the climbing crew. Luise becomes increasingly distressed for her lover Toni, and she becomes increasingly fed up with the people spectating and covering the event. Once the team starts their emergency climb down the mountain, it becomes clear that they are truly in dire straits. Shortly after that, the team gets to the Hinterstoisser traverse, and see that their rope is no longer there for the traverse. Hinterstoisser is unable to make the swing going back the other direction, and soon after the team is hit by an avalanche, and Andi is left dangling below, with the two dead Austrians. At this point the drama of the narrative truly unfolds, and the filmmakers intent at stirring up drama is ironically mirrored with the Nazi propaganda he is depicting; Andi tries to climb back up, but the piton is coming loose. In order to save Toni, he cuts himself loose, saying “see that you get home.” (1:35:17)

Nobody dares to go up and save them until the weather clears, except Luise. Luise is one of the only female characters in the movie, and she goes beyond the daring of any of the professional Swiss and German climbing guides. She takes the train up to the outlook, and climbs out the window until she can see Toni on a distant ledge up above. She tells him he must wait and they will come for him when the weather holds. Then she valiantly spends the night on the face of the Eiger in solidarity with Toni.

Once the rescue team is near to Toni, the story diverges from what actually happened. Instead of Toni not having the strength to pass the knot, therefore rappelling down, a situation occurs where they pass a rope up to Toni, but they happened to give him too small of a rope. Presumably this is done to bolster the image of Toni Kurz, a mountaineering legend in Germany. The movie ends with Luise climbing up to Toni, who is dangling in mid air only feet away from her.

One cannot expect a mountaineering movie concerning one of the most dramatic mountaineering disasters to not employ its own set of facts to create drama. At first, it seems the movie is poking fun at the overdramatic sensualization of the Nazi propaganda machine. As the story unfolds though, fiction is added to make the story more dramatic. Nordenwand clearly depicts the national fever at the time for climbing the last of the Alps. It also depicts the drama that was the driving narrative of such adventures through the use of the Nazi propaganda. However, it proves that drama is still the driving narrative today in such adventures, because of the way it utilizes fiction to increase the potency of the story. Today, we might be as bad as the Nazi propaganda machine at stirring up fiction and lies to create drama and draw attention, but we still need drama, and little bit of fiction as well to bolster that drama in order to tell a good mountaineering story that people will pay to go see.