"The father was a devoted Catholic, but in a Calvinist manner," said Reinhold's former wife, Ursula Demeter, known as Uschi, who retains warm ties with Reinhold and his family. The mother was "quiet, peaceful, fatalistic—God had given her her station. But for the father, if you did not make money, if you did not succeed, God had turned from you." Josef Messner's life was further complicated by his chosen politics. "In '38, Hitler and Mussolini came together, and they decided the South Tiroleans should take a chance to vote," Reinhold told me. "Who is voting for Italy stays in South Tirol; who is voting for Germany, for the Führer, he can leave, and he will get the same amount of land somewhere in Germany. And my father was one of the organizers of this option . . . in which 86 percent"—he leaned forward for emphasis—"of the South Tiroleans decided they would leave their homeland to go somewhere with the Nazis." He shook his head. "It is incredible." The war put an end to all such options. By voluntarily becoming a Nazi, Josef Messner had staked his hopes on a German future; ironically, his wartime duties had been to serve as an Italian translator. At war's end, he returned to his wife's house in the narrow valley and set about raising his family of nine children with their resolutely Teutonic names—Werner, Reinhold, Siegfried, Waltraud—on what was now a headmaster's salary.

"My father was an anxious man," said Hansjörg Messner, one of Reinhold's younger brothers and a psychotherapist in London. "His anxiety made him a strict man. He wasn't austere; he was a strict man in given moments, so his strictness, or even perhaps his violence at times, was, I think, a basic reaction to his anxiety." The flashes of violence took several forms—beatings, not uncommon in rural communities of that era, and verbal tirades. "My father had the ability not just to shout but to humiliate," Hansjörg said. When the young Reinhold failed his school exams because he had spent less time studying than climbing, the father had poured out the full violence of his scorn. "I remember Reinhold sitting at the wooden table in the kitchen, holding his head and just crying and crying," Hansjörg said. At that moment the father could triumph; he had been proven irrefutably right. Repeatedly, vehemently, over the years he had been telling his stubborn son that a life doing what he loved and did best—the life of a climber —was impossible.

"In the family, I told you, there was only one chance," Reinhold said. "To break, to be broken, or to be stronger than the father."