Heinrich Harrer

Heinrich Harrer was an Austrian mountaineer and explorer whose Seven Years in Tibet — a memoir of his years in Lhasa after escaping a British internment camp — became one of the most celebrated and widely read travel memoirs of the twentieth century.

Heinrich Harrer was an accomplished Austrian mountaineer — part of the first team to climb the north face of the Eiger in 1938 — who was in India on a climbing expedition in September 1939 when the Second World War began. As an Austrian citizen, he was interned by the British in a prisoner of war camp at Dehra Dun. In 1944, after several escape attempts, he and Peter Aufschnaiter successfully broke out and crossed the Himalayas into Tibet — a journey of extraordinary physical difficulty.

Seven Years in Tibet (1952) is the account of that journey and the seven years Harrer subsequently spent in Lhasa, where he became a tutor and friend to the young Fourteenth Dalai Lama. The book captures a world — the Tibet of the 1940s, the last years before the Chinese occupation — that was already vanishing at the time of writing. Harrer’s access to the Dalai Lama, and his account of Tibetan court culture and religious life, gives the book a historical value that transcends its adventure narrative.

The memoir was adapted as a film in 1997 with Brad Pitt, which renewed interest in the book. Harrer’s reputation was complicated by the revelation in the 1990s that he had been a member of the SS, a fact he concealed for decades. He acknowledged the membership while disputing its significance to his subsequent life and convictions. He died in 2006 at ninety-three. Seven Years in Tibet remains one of the most vivid accounts of Tibet before its absorption into China.