A review of the autobiography by Ines Papert: An honest but tedious evidence of ambition and independence. Don’t wait for a translation, check her CV and photos of her homepage instead. Unless you are a fan. You should be. 

Cover photo and design is almost identical to the book by Will Gadd. End of similarity. This is 300 pages German prose. She’s got 10 pages per year of her life and that’s pretty much the way she spends it, including driving directions for birth and growth locations, year of marriage for her parents and tourist information on local castles.

Brand exposure is not too annoying. You won’t find a line such as “toss me a Red Bull”. Still, she is dangerously detailed about sponsors. Skip that chapter. Also skip the initial pseudo-poetry on the spirit of ice climbing. Shadow, sun, milk, turquoise, mushrooms, flow, focus. What remains is a chronological account of every aspect of her life without deliberate angle.

The second half ends up with a lot of hard bolted mixed cragging and monster sport routes (considered alpine). Honest, with no cynicism, no sarcasm. Notoriously serious; of course with climbing but also in private life, exposed in detail. Every consideration for her own part, with respect kept for everyone else involved. Very brave. Not so brave to use the opportunity to clear any possible difference of opinion and give courtesy to everyone she ever met, at the expense of surviving readers.

Out of 41 photos less than 10 are about ice climbing, all (?) previously published in articles by herself and on her own homepage. Surely crowds of photographers must be sitting on hundreds of photos that would easily qualify and make the book worth buying and reading.

There is an extensive listing of routes interspersed in the prose (few illustrated). Her own “highlights” on her homepage gives away most of it and is necessary to keep on track for a reader. This book is a tedious way to get her CV. Any ice climber who didn't know about the festivals of Kandersteg, Ouray and Canmore (even the rock festival of Squamish) should find out, not necessarily through this book. For a fan or competitor, there is an extensive report on each move in the ice world cup.

The progress of several projects are dissected down to the last crimp. A term like “crimp” would be carefully explained for any non-climber surviving into the depths of the chronicle, bringing down any climber about to be carried away by the evidence given. The subtitles of the photos illustrate the same issue: “The red sandstone towers of Castle Valley require a quite special climbing technique, where hands and feet are squeezed into the crack.”  - Oh, you actually have to squeeze your hands into the rock?

Then there is more than I can eat about weekly routines, both as a mother and an athlete. A mother with a professional career is still a modern phenomenon in Bavaria. Writing in German effectively cuts of most potential readers, although the portrait of herself might benefit. It didn’t save the narratives, though. Stereotypes lurk in the accounts of feelings and settings. How about a cliché like “a normal life would be too boring for me”? The subtitle of the book is symptomatic: “how I found my way in steep routes”. Witty at best.

Ehrgeiz, ambition, is a central and frequent word. Ehre means glory. Geiz means closefistedness. Her ambition is slowly ground against male-dominated surrondings. She laconically notices ambitions of gender equality in Bavaria are neglected in comparison to the otherwise despised DDR. Taliban attitude prevail among Berchtesgaden alpinists. But feminism seem to be off-topic. Just get the rucksack packed every Thursday night.

In the media gender makes her outshine her mentors. They can’t suffice with being proud of her or even tolerate it. Step by step she realizes the importance of independence. She has got talent to leap to the next raising wave in time. Then there is zealous discipline in physical outdoor exercise, only lately developing into passion for climbing.

Although quick to reproach herself of any setback, she remains naïve in attitude. Without counting, I get the impression (probably wrong) that a contributing cause to her accident on Marmolada is this route being her second major trad route (the first being The Nose, where she dropped a few of her own cams and cleaned in situ others). On Marmolada, she rips two badly placed cams after placing a third behind an expanding flake. That would make any weekend trad climber raise an eyebrow. On the other hand, no male climber ever had the guts to put the story like that.

Text David Hässler