Below the Zugspitze and the Wetterstein massif there are quite a few people who are very intensively involved with the G-7 summit at Schloss Elmau. For weeks, thousands of police officers and other civil servants from Bavaria and all over Germany have been working overtime in the Garmisch-Partenkirchen district, fire brigades and rescue services have prepared, and the staff in the hotels, which have long been fully booked, are toiling away. And yet before the summit, which begins this Sunday, very few people have dealt with the event as intensively as Fabian Rößler and Peter Reindl.
When, in mid-January, the first police helicopters hovered next to the hikers’ parking lot in Elmau, which was now paved and marked with landing pads: Rößler stood there and pressed it. A 16-kilometer fence is built around the castle: Rößler and Reindl record everything. Down in Mittenwald, someone tells us that the police have repaved an almost forgotten path up to the Ederkanzel: Rößler and Reindl are on their way.
Soon they have found the spot on the steep mountain flank where the path branches off. After a few meters, Fabian Rößler takes the camera out of his backpack and photographs the red ribbon with which the trail is marked in the branches. This photo will hardly make it into the next summit book, and probably not onto the homepage that Rößler and Reindl operate either. But that’s how it was seven years ago. The two certainly took a million photos at the first Elmauer G-7 summit in 2015 – a mistake, Rößler thinks today, because there were far too many to select 300 or 400 motifs afterwards.
The G-7 summit in Elmau 2015 had many faces: there were the magnificent, snow-covered Alpine peaks with barbed wire…
(Photo: Fabian Rößler/Peter Reindl)
…and the gathered political celebrities, back then with Angela Merkel and Barack Obama.
(Photo: Fabian Rößler/Peter Reindl)
Maybe it was even a kind of rookie mistake back then. The two Mittenwalders, who have been friends since childhood and are now 41 and 43 years old, took photos before 2015. The year before, they were just exhibiting their nature photos in the ice cellar of the Mittenwald brewery when a friend called on his cell phone and congratulated them on the summit. He had happened to see how Elmau was officially named as the venue for the first time. “Something has to be done,” was the first thought. And not necessarily something for or against it, but they just didn’t want to miss such an opportunity.
And because Rößler is a graphic designer and studied communications and Reindl is an IT system administrator, they first checked whether suitable Internet domains were still available. They were free, to their own surprise. The Federal Press Office, in turn, was soon surprised that two men from Mittenwald had already registered the good addresses. At first it demanded that it be handed over, but after a personal encounter at the first public information event in Krün – and presumably after a thorough security check – everyone was quickly at peace with each other. And that’s how it stayed.
Because Rößler and Reindl are still the ones who are always there anyway. Rößler rarely shaved perfectly, always with a ponytail and always on foot. He wipes the slightly cracked screen of his mobile phone and checks the pedometer. In the first three weeks of June he walked 325 kilometers to various locations. In April it was 422, in May 450. Peter Reindl sometimes takes his car, which is pretty full.
He likes to come in outdoor clothing with a cap, already slightly gray in his red beard, and when he’s on call with the Mittenwald mountain rescue service, the radio antenna sticks out of his trouser pocket. At some point, many police officers and security guards will know who they are dealing with. Rößner and Reindl still do without the last few meters from the new police patrol trail above the Isar valley to the guarded official radio mast, which was placed on a hilltop in the mountain forest for the summit. The explanations are probably not worthwhile in this case. Rößler thinks these masts all look the same anyway.
The mission is just to map the event
The two amateur photographers will of course have access to the countless press events before the summit – even without a press card. This is only for full-time journalists. If he doesn’t go to sleep, Rößler has been busy for weeks with little else but the summit, and Reindl, who otherwise drives the fiber optic expansion abroad for Telekom, has also taken vacation. But they wouldn’t consider themselves journalists, even though the castle graphic says “G7-2022.de Presseportal” in large letters on their business cards.
And if you really shouldn’t be in the press yourself: your portal is popular with summit reporters, and people in the region are also busy clicking if they want to know what’s going on. With all of this, Rößler and Reindl have declared that they only have one mission: to depict the event – and if the region looks good, they should be fine with it. She often looks good, and so among the many shots with more documentary value there are also quite a few things that would have been suitable as postcards in the past and would look good on Instagram today.
All of this takes time, and it cost Rößler in particular much more in 2015. Not only did he neglect his small company for LED light frames, but also his partner, leaving him without a job and without a girlfriend. He now designs websites and promotional materials and collects rare minerals. That didn’t stop him from doing the same thing again seven years later with the summit. They could hardly have done otherwise, says Rößler, after all they asked everyone around. Peter Reindl, who has just chosen a wedding ring, is aware of the risk. The vacation he has now taken was actually intended for the wedding in September. But there are still a few days left. “One time it’s fine,” he says, and there will hardly be a third summit in Elmau.
“You can sell anything but yourself”
Rößler and Reindl had thought the same thing before this second one, until the first rumors surfaced in the fall. Both of them were certain that they would also document this German summit, just as they photographed the G-20 meeting in Hamburg in 2017. There is also a photo book, but Rößler calls the fact that it could have covered the travel expenses “utopian”. They didn’t make big profits in 2015 either, with a few hundred copies sold. “You can sell anything but yourself,” says Roessler about her business acumen on her own behalf.
Sure, they still have t-shirts and other summit souvenirs. But even if they only charged one euro for their hour of work, they would still be in the red, he calculates. After all, a number of police officers are asking about the book from back then, and there is already interest in the next one. This time, for example, the company that supplies the containers for the improvised justice center in the ski stadium asked. Rößler has also taken photos there.