Seven Years in Tibet
(Note: "Life and Art"
is an occasional column that compares fiction, in various media, with the
real-life facts on which it is ostensibly based.)
It has been widely reported
that Seven Years in Tibet , the tale of Austrian mountaineer Heinrich
Harrer's trek through Tibet and his relationship with the Dalai Lama, was
nearly released with an embarrassing omission. It failed to mention that Harrer
had been a sergeant in Hitler's SS. The news, revealed by the German magazine
Stern this June, took the movie's cast and crew by surprise. At a press
conference this fall, Brad Pitt declared: "You say 'Nazi,' and all these
connotations like concentration camps come up. That was not the case. [Harrer]
was an athlete who spent the entire war in Tibet." Director Jean-Jacques Annaud
subsequently made a few changes. For instance, when, at the beginning of the
film, Harrer and an expedition party leave Austria for the as-yet unscaled
Himalayan mountain Nanga Parbat, a journalist calls Harrer "a distinguished
member of the National Socialist Party." (The year is 1939.) Someone else hands
him a Nazi flag to place atop the peak. Toward the end of the film, as Pitt's
Harrer contemplates the takeover of Tibet by the intolerant, totalitarian
Chinese, he says in a voice-over, "I shudder to recall how once, long ago, I
embraced the same beliefs."
Harrer
certainly lamented the Chinese takeover. Whether that meant that he renounced
previously held beliefs (or what exactly those beliefs were in the first place)
is harder to ascertain. Harrer, who is 85 now, kept quiet about his Nazi past
until the Stern article was published. This summer, one day after
meeting Simon Wiesenthal in Vienna, he issued a statement. It read, in part:
"My personal political philosophy grew out of my life in Tibet ... and [it]
places great emphasis on human life and human dignity. ... It is a philosophy
that leads me to condemn as strongly as possible the horrible crimes of the
Nazi period." Having already made Harrer's character an unappealing egotist
interested only in mountain climbing until the Dalai Lama changed his life, the
filmmakers were able to incorporate Stern 's unpleasant revelation into
the story line quite easily. The press material for the movie talks of Harrer's
"emotional transformation" and then says that the Stern piece helps us
understand the "extent" of this transformation.
Whether Harrer was transformed by his voyage and his
connection to the Dalai Lama is unclear; there is some evidence to suggest that
on crucial issues, he wasn't. But otherwise Seven Years in Tibet does
conform to the record of Harrer's trip--although it should be noted that much
of what we know of that trip comes from Harrer's own memoir, from which the
movie takes its title.
In life, as on-screen, Harrer
and his fellow expeditioners were placed in a British prisoner-of-war camp in
India at the start of World War II. Harrer and several other prisoners escaped
in 1944 (the movie has the escape take place earlier). He set off alone, but
ended up traveling with Peter Aufschnaiter (David Thewlis), the head of the
Nanga Parbat expedition. They made their way across the border and into Tibet,
contending with treacherous terrain, frostbite, hunger, robbers, and an
interdiction against foreigners. Finally, they reached Lhasa, the "forbidden
city," in part by duping officials along the way with an out-of-date travel
permit. And Harrer became a tutor to the 14 th Dalai Lama.
In the
movie, this relationship looks suspiciously like a fairy tale. Harrer not only
teaches the Dalai Lama about radios and time zones but also befriends the "god
king" and is apparently his sole source of informal contact and entertainment.
Can Harrer really have helped build a movie theater for the Dalai Lama? Well,
if we consider the Dalai Lama's three-paragraph foreword to Harrer's memoir
some sort of guarantee of its accuracy, the answer is yes. The Dalai Lama also
writes in his autobiography, Freedom in Exile , that Harrer had a
"wonderful sense of humour" and that "as I began to get to know him better ...
he became very forthright. ... I greatly valued this quality."
The movie does embellish somewhat the intensity
of the Austrians' relationships with the Tibetans. Aufschnaiter did not marry a
Tibetan during their stay. Harrer was not the Dalai Lama's only partner in play
(for instance, it was someone else who helped him tinker with old cars). And it
wasn't the explorer who proposed an escape plan to the Dalai Lama in 1950, when
the Chinese invaded, though he did urge him to leave Lhasa.
As for
the invasion, the film understandably simplifies events--it leaves out, for
instance, the unheeded pleas for help made by Tibet to India that preceded the
invasion and the unheeded pleas to the United Nations that followed it--but on
the whole, the movie is fairly accurate. Tibet did fall to the Chinese in 11
days, and an incident shown in the film as crucial to the success of the
invasion was indeed definitive--when, in a startling act of cowardice, Ngabo
Ngawang Jigme (played in the movie by B.D. Wong), a Tibetan minister in charge
of defending the town of Chamdo, not only abandoned it but also ordered the
destruction of ammunition supplies before he left. Moreover, the film's
foreshadowing of Chinese atrocities (as reflected by a dream in which the Dalai
Lama sees his native village being pillaged and monks shot) reflects the
historical facts all too well. As the written epilogue to the film states,
almost all Tibet's monasteries--more than 6,000--have been ransacked under the
occupation.
Seven Years in Tibet ends with the Dalai Lama's
enthronement in 1950 at age 15 and his assumption of the role of political as
well as spiritual leader of the country. The film's epilogue mentions that he
fled Tibet in 1959, though it mentions neither that this took place in the
middle of an attempted rebellion against the occupiers nor that his Buddhist
beliefs had previously led him to cooperate with the Chinese. The Dalai Lama's
life as exiled leader is beyond the movie's time frame (for more on this, see
Slate's "Assessment" of the "Ambassador from Shangri-La").
However, the film is really
less historical drama than personal epic--the story of how a European was
changed by Tibet and its philosophy. We are supposed to believe that Pitt's
Harrer has learned to be a better person; offered as proof is his changed
attitude toward his son, Rolf (whose name in real life is Peter). In life and
in the movie, Harrer left for Nanga Parbat when his wife was still pregnant.
(In the movie, Harrer knows she's pregnant. Time reports that Harrer
denies having known she was.) She divorced him while he was gone. At various
points in the film, Harrer thinks longingly of Rolf and writes him letters. His
overtures are rebuffed; his son has come to think of his stepfather as his true
father. ( Vanity Fair reports that Peter actually was abandoned by his
mother, too; he was raised by his grandmother during Harrer's absence. Harrer's
memoir, which covers the years 1939-1952, never mentions him.) Pitt's Harrer
finally returns to Austria, dropping a music box--a gift from the Dalai
Lama--in his son's bedroom. The last scene shows father and son climbing a
mountain in the Alps. The Nazi flag of the opening scene has become a Tibetan
one, which they place on the summit.
However, this climb never
happened. Peter, who wasn't invited to either of Harrer's subsequent weddings,
told Vanity Fair , "We didn't have much of a relationship"--though he
also claimed he has no hard feelings toward his father, whom he now sees
occasionally. The friendship between Harrer and the Dalai Lama continues to
this day.
