by Ed Douglas
After the war, when Bauer had been through the process of denazification, he applied to rejoin the Alpine Club, having been thrown out after war was declared. This was a quandary for the Alpine Club. In the immediate, chaotic aftermath of war, the Allies had appointed Bauer to run Munich; he wasn’t judged a war criminal. The committee decided to seek opinion from the members. Charles Houston was appalled.
His letters to me during and after the German invasion of Poland so sickened me, and evidenced such a callous attitude towards human rights, that I must strongly protest.
Bill Tilman, who had spent the war fighting with partisans behind enemy lines, first in Albania and later in Italy, disagreed. It was Tilman’s argument that won the day. Bauer died in 1990, at the age of ninety-four.
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Just as Himalayan climbing was co-opted for dark political ends, Himalayan mythology offered an otherworldly metaphor to set against the spiritual dislocation of modern life. In the summer of 1936, on the other side of the world, the Himalaya was being recreated in Hollywood, as filming of James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon got underway. The director was the bankable Frank Capra, whose movie Mr Deeds Goes to Town had just opened and would win him his second Oscar, swept along on the same emotional tide that saw Franklin D Roosevelt re-elected in a landslide. Lost Horizon, on the other hand, would be an expensive failure that could have sunk Columbia Pictures. Later in life, Capra would claim credit for turning the project around, explaining how he threw the first two reels in the studio’s incinerator after a test audience found the movie long-winded. In fact, it was studio boss Harry Cohn who painstakingly cut Capra’s sprawling mess into something that had a chance at the box office. Even so, Lost Horizon was a dud compared to Capra’s earlier work, for reasons that Graham Greene caught perfectly in his review for the Spectator.
Nothing reveals men’s characters more than their Utopias. This Utopia closely resembles a film star’s luxurious estate in Beverly Hills; flirtatious pursuits through grape arbours, splashing and divings in blossomy pools under improbable waterfalls, and rich and enormous meals.
In conclusion, Greene thought it ‘a very long picture . . . and a very dull one as soon as the opening scenes are over’.
Greene had put his finger on a flaw shared by the novel: Shangri-La, the lost Himalayan world portrayed, was an idealised version of the West. The set designer at Columbia Pictures, Stephen Goosson produced a late art deco Tibetan monastery for Capra that won him an Oscar but was more stylised Hollywood real-estate fantasy than anything drawn from the immense architectural heritage of the Himalaya. Shangri-La itself was simply mindful consumerism. Capra did hire a consultant on all things Tibetan, the National Geographic journalist Harrison Forman, who had in 1932 interviewed Thubten Choekyi Nyima, the ninth Panchen Lama, when the latter was in exile at Labrang monastery in north-west Tibet. Little of this shows in the film. Beyond its vague Orientalist mysticism, Shangri-La is a colonialist fantasy, with simple ‘Tibetan’ farmers overseen by a cultured and tasteful European elite who guide them like children.
The spiritual philosophy behind Lost Horizon was rooted more in Theosophy than Tibet. The self-absorbed ramblings of Helena Blavatsky had almost nothing to do with Tibetan Buddhism as it’s practised in the Himalaya, but in the early 1890s, after the publication of Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine and before Sigmund Freud became a more persuasive draw, Theosophy became fashionable soul food in Europe and North America. The literary hostess Elizabeth Burke-Plunkett, Countess of Fingall, recalled her excitement at meeting Jiddu Krishnamurti, the Theosophist Society’s ‘world teacher’. Her friend W B Yeats described Blavatsky as ‘the most living person alive’. Later in life he was more circumspect:
They had no scholarship and they spoke and wrote badly, but they discussed great problems ardently and simply and unconventionally as men, perhaps, discussed great problems in the medieval universities.
Theosophy was successful as a catalyst, however. When Yeats visited Stanford University in 1904, he inspired a young student and Theosophist called Walter Evans-Wentz to study Celtic mythology at Oxford. There Evans-Wentz met the young T E Lawrence who recommended he go east. In India Evans-Wentz met Theosophy’s leading figures, including Annie Besant and Krishnamurti, and worked on his famous translation of what is known in English as The Tibetan Book of the Dead. Everyone from Carl Jung to Hermann Hesse to Jawaharlal Nehru took an interest in Theosophy. Its ideas about cosmic geometry, the universe rippling out from a single point to infinite complexity, was also an inspiration for generations of abstract artists, including Piet Mondrian, who searched for the utopian and universal in his work, and the Russian Wassily Kandinsky.
Another Russian artist immersed in Theosophy would become firmly rooted in the actual Himalaya. Nicholas Roerich was born in St Petersburg in 1874, a polymath who studied art at the city’s university and became part of the group orbiting the impresario Sergei Diaghilev. Roerich’s early work focussed not on abstract geometrical shapes but Russia’s mythical past and he became famous designing sets for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, including Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. In 1901 he married Elena Ivanovna Shaposhnikova, who introduced him to Hindu mystics and writers like Rabindranath Tagore. She also translated Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine into Russian.
Following the Russian Revolution, the politically moderate Roerichs left Russia for Europe, arriving in London in 1919, where they joined the local branch of the Theosophy Society and befriended the young Christmas Humphreys, a barrister and formidable prosecutor who later founded the Buddhism Society and wrote widely on the subject for the rest of his sometimes controversial life. The civil war in Russia had for the Roerichs a millenarian dimension, as would their interest in Tibetan mythology: both believed that the king of Shambhala would eventually return to destroy the wicked and reignite mankind’s creative spirit. Nicholas continued to work as a set designer in London for the conductor and impresario Sir Thomas Beecham and later in the United States, but what he and Helena (as his wife was now known) really wanted was to travel in the Himalaya and find Shambhala: ambassadors for Western Buddhism returning to the root of the mystical teachings that enriched them. He also offered to do a little light spying for the Soviet Union if the Bolsheviks covered some of his costs on what would be an expensive expedition. The savage suppression of Buddhism in Russia’s eastern provinces was not yet underway, but the Soviets were still suspicious of Roerich’s utopian mission. Nonetheless, they did support him logistically when he came within their sphere of influence.
The journey, which included Helena and their adult son George, a famous Tibet scholar who studied at the Sorbonne under Paul Pelliot – he of the Dunhuang Caves – and the Indologist Sylvain Lévi, began in Sikkim where Eric Bailey was still political officer. (He called them ‘my Russian artist friends’, but confessed he ‘did not like [Nicholas’] pictures very much’.) Because of the lull in relations between Tibet and British India, news of the Roerichs’ progress on this epic adventure was often patchy; in the summer of 1927 they fell out of contact altogether and remained so for almost a year: they were thought to be dead. In fact, they were merely in prison, detained by the Tibetan authorities despite their passports and passion for Buddhism. After their release in March 1928, the Roerichs hastened to India where they established the Himalayan Research Institute, or Urusvati, the ‘light of the morning star’, first in Darjeeling and then permanently in the Kullu valley in the far north-west of India.
After the Second World War, Helena Blavatsky’s more occultist ideas resurfaced in a rash of books exploring National Socialism’s esoteric interest in Tibet. The French writer Louis Pauwels claimed communities of Tibetan Geluk monks were living in Germany from the 1920s at the invitation of Karl Haushofer, a German soldier and professor of geopolitics who had taught Rudolf Hess and remained on good terms with him. Haushofer was also the supposed founder of the Vril Society and a friend of the mystic George Gurdjieff. The truth in such stories is almos
t indiscernible. A few of those at the heart of the Nazi project were intrigued by occultist myths and racial theories involving Tibet. Others were demonstrably hostile. Alfred Rosenberg, for example, was a racial ideologue close to Hitler, a rival of Heinrich Himmler, executed for crimes against humanity. For Rosenberg, Tibetan Buddhism had been a malign influence like Catholicism. If it hadn’t been for the Protestant Reformation, he believed,
Europe today would have reached the condition of holy men of India and Tibet, thick with dirt, a condition of the most complete stultification.
The adoption of the swastika as a Nazi emblem didn’t arise from its ubiquity in the Himalaya. Its status there is more good-luck charm than sacred symbol and was used in Europe before the Great War: Kipling put it on the cover of his books. (In fact, it was the swastika’s discovery at Troy by the German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann that intrigued Nazi racial theorists: if the swastika represented a link to an ancient past, it was this one.)
Beyond the propaganda value of German mountaineering, Nazi interest in the Himalaya was restricted to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler’s ‘research’ group the Ahnenerbe, meaning ‘ancestral heritage’. Himmler himself took an interest in Indian philosophy and was said to read the Bhagavad Gita. His interest in Tibet was likely sparked by his acolyte Karl Maria Wiligut, whose passion for esoteric paganism was matched with mental instability: Wiligut fell from favour when Himmler discovered he had once been committed to an asylum by his own wife. Among Wiligut’s fantasies was a supposed journey he had made to a Tibetan Buddhist monastery and a complex network of energy beams linking ancient sites across Eurasia, including Tibet, a geomantic worldview that chimed with Himmler’s own. While scientifically spurious, the purpose of the Ahnenerbe, founded in 1935, was to dress the darkest Nazi policies, including the eventual extermination of the Jews, with some kind of academic respectability. In 1938, it was part-sponsor of a scientific expedition to Tibet, which got permission from the Tibetan government via the British after Himmler’s personal appeal to the Foreign Office in London and the intervention of the pro-Hitler British admiral Sir Barry Domvile.
The leader of this expedition was the naturalist Ernst Schäfer, whose fascination with Tibet had been inspired by his boyhood hero Sven Hedin. When Schäfer joined the SS in 1936, he had just returned from his second expedition to eastern Tibet with the American academic Brooke Dolan. (Dolan would visit Lhasa in 1942 on behalf of the American intelligence services along with Ilya Tolstoy, grandson of Leo.) Much of the work Schäfer’s team undertook was recognisably scientific: natural history, geophysics and meteorology. Himmler was particularly interested in the meteorological work, since independent reliable weather forecasts were essential preparation for war; his interest extended, for the same reason, to horse-breeding, echoing William Moorcroft’s journey in the early nineteenth century. The exception to all this was the spurious anthropology performed during the expedition by Bruno Beger, a former student of the eugenicist Hans Friedrich Günther, who in the late 1930s was teaching Nazi racial theories at the University of Berlin. (Hitler had four copies of his influential book Racial Science of the German People and put it on his recommended reading list for party members.) Günther held that the ideal of the Nordic type, the Herrenrasse or ‘master race’, would be found most readily among society’s elite. This is why Beger paid most attention to Lhasa aristocrats as the most likely stratum of Tibetan society in which to find evidence of a common Aryan ancestor. Unfortunately for him, Lhasa’s aristocrats all refused to let him take measurements of their heads in the way that he did with hundreds of ordinary Tibetans. (During the war, Beger worked with the SS anatomist August Hirt, selecting victims from various ethnic groups at Auschwitz. They were then gassed and defleshed for the Jewish skeleton collection, a gruesome attempt to display Jewish racial degeneracy. Beger was convicted of war crimes in 1971 and sentenced to three years in prison, reduced to probation on appeal. He died in 2009, aged ninety-eight.)
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The murderous racial theories of the Third Reich meant about as much in pre-war Lhasa as Hollywood’s version of Shangri-La, or the fertile imaginings of the Theosophists. These were simply orientalist fantasies projected onto the Himalaya. The rise of the nation state on the other hand, in its way another kind of utopia, was a burning issue. It was nationalism that would drive the coming storm and have a lasting impact on the people of the Himalaya.
The thirteenth Dalai Lama and his Buryat follower Agvan Dorzhiev had once had a vision of a pan-Central Asian Tibetan Buddhist stronghold. Now Stalin’s purges were underway and Buddhism was being supressed in Mongolia. Dorzhiev himself died at the hands of Soviet torturers. The Dalai Lama, prematurely aged, saw the same fate engulfing Tibet itself.
In the future, this system will certainly be forced either from within or without on this land that cherishes the joint spiritual and temporal system. If in such an event we fail to defend our land, the holy lamas, including their triumphant father and son [the Dalai and Panchen Lama] will be eliminated without a trace of their names remaining . . . my people, subjected to fear and misery will be unable to endure day or night.
After the Dalai Lama’s death in 1933, China sensed an opportunity and the nationalist government in Beijing sent a mission of condolence to Lhasa under the command of General Huang Mu-sung, a member of president Chiang Kai-shek’s National Military Council. He was welcomed with far more ceremony than any British official ever had been and the Tibetan government allowed the Chinese to establish a wireless transmitter, obviating the need for China to use British telegraph wires, which were easily monitored for intelligence. Huang was patient but his aim was clear: to have the Tibetans declare their country a republic and themselves as one of the ‘five races’ and so part of China. He brought with him a large cash reserve to bribe important officials, but despite this the Tibetan leadership politely told him that they had been ruled by thirteen Dalai Lamas and weren’t about to change. Tibet was an independent nation and would remain that way. They also asked about the return of the Panchen Lama, who had been in exile since Eric Bailey’s time as political officer, but without the large escort of Chinese troops that the Kuomintang insisted he bring with him. This show of unity and resolve disheartened Huang Mu-sung and he returned home without achieving China’s overall aim. Yet the direction of travel was clear: since their expulsion in 1912, the Chinese had been trying to reassert their power in Lhasa, no longer as the Qing Empire but as the republic of China. It was only a matter of time before they tried again.
The permanent presence of Chinese officials in Lhasa triggered alarm in India. Charles Bell had reasoned that the British didn’t need a legation in Lhasa unless China returned: now they had. Huang Mu-sung’s mission, monitored on behalf of India’s foreign service by the long-serving political agent Norbu Dhondup, prompted a new British mission to Lhasa. Like the one from China, it would become a permanent feature without ever admitting that this was its intention. Basil Gould arrived in Lhasa on 24 August 1936, a week after the Berlin Olympics closed and a week before Bill Tilman climbed Nanda Devi. Gould had been political officer in Sikkim since the start of the year and was cut from the same cloth as Charles Bell, under whom Gould had served twenty years previously. Bell had been a presence on the frontier in the mid 1930s, warning the Tibetan government that ‘bit by bit, Britain is giving more power to India, who will hardly show the same friendship . . . or have the same power to help Tibet’.
Gould now had the opportunity to reignite relations with Tibet and offer reassurance in the face of increasing Chinese pressure. With him came two telegraph operators, a medical officer and the mountaineer Freddy Spencer Chapman, whom Gould had encountered by chance and invited as his personal secretary. Chapman had with him the latest Dufaycolor film stock and he made a stunning colour record of Lhasa, capturing the city as it was, little more than a decade before the Chinese invasion of 1950 changed everything. The final member of Gould’s team was Hugh Richardson, the
new trade official based at Gyantse, halfway between Lhasa and Gangtok, a tall Scot from St Andrews who had developed an interest in Tibet at Oxford. He would spend eight of the next fourteen years in Lhasa, first for the British and then the Indian governments, in the process becoming a valuable and scholarly expert on Tibet as well as a potent champion for its independent status in the maelstrom that was to come. It was Richardson who would monitor the activities of the Schäfer expedition two years later, relieved when Tibetan opinion turned against the Germans for their careless intrusions with cameras and hunting of animals for their zoological collection. Luckily for him, Himmler’s idea for a high-altitude insurgency force, led by Schäfer, aimed at disrupting the British in Central Asia, came to nothing.
As a way to build bridges, Gould encouraged football matches between the British, the ‘Mission Marmots’, and anyone who wanted to join in. They played a team from the Nepali embassy, another from Lhasa’s longstanding Muslim community and a team of Tibetan soldiers, who offered the toughest opposition, drawing two matches. ‘The Tibetans play [a] hard clean sporting game,’ Gould reported. The teacher Frank Ludlow’s influence had clearly survived. The season only came to an end that November when the goalposts were used for firewood. Jampal Yeshe Gyaltsen, the tulku or reincarnate lama of Reting monastery who, aged just twenty-three, had been appointed regent of Tibet, asked Chapman if he could borrow the football, which Chapman took as a good sign of the mission’s progress. (The resumption of football in Tibet proved popular and there were more than a dozen teams playing regularly in Lhasa when Tibet’s conservative monastic elite blew the final whistle in 1944 and banned it. The fourteenth Dalai Lama’s younger brother Gyalo Thondup recalled ruefully how he was beaten at school along with the rest of his team for playing illicitly.)