The picture is in the can, the photographer is happy, the snowboard can be cleaned up again – there isn’t any snow far and wide anyway. Instinctively you want to take the unwieldy trunk off the old gentleman, but he pushes the helping hand aside. “I do everything myself, I’ve never asked anyone for help,” says the 90-year-old, “at some point it won’t work anymore. But until then…” Says it, the bulky board gets stuck under the skinny little arms and put away put it back in its place, behind the front door, next to the snowshoes. “So,” says the super senior, “and now we’re going down to the Weisses Rössl to eat. I’ve got a lot to tell!” Says it, gets into the car, which has obviously skidded along somewhere quite violently on the passenger side, and steers down the steep and winding road to Thiersee as quickly as if it were a flat, straight stretch. Only when parking does he bounce across the sidewalk into the parking space – fits.
All his life he didn’t give a damn about conventions – let the others drive the normal route, I drive the way I like it! And with that, welcome to the cosmos of Manfred Threimer, whom everyone just calls Fritz and who can be considered one of the oldest snowboarders in the world.
Unfortunately, we didn’t see him on the board, spring was too far advanced for that and his favorite slope was already green. It’s right outside the front door: a very gently sloping piece of meadow in front of his mountain hut high above Hinterthiersee, between Bayrischzell and Kufstein. No elevator? “I don’t have the strength for that,” explains Threimer, “I just run up and then slide down comfortably. Running up is more fun for me anyway – and it certainly kept me fit.” It must be a very special picture when this Gandalf lookalike with white long hair and an equally long white bushy beard boards across the meadow, two ski poles in his hands to be on the safe side. Because one thing is clear to him: “If I fall up here and break something, it will be difficult…” Cell phone reception? none. The neighbours? Only there a few weekends a year. The sons? life in Munich.
He knows that old bones can no longer take a lot of strain, so Threimer takes good care of himself, chop wood every day and even practices on a modern balance board. His horror scenario: femoral neck fracture, hospital and then to a nursing home. Then he would die like the famous primrose, he said: “What am I supposed to do there? Stare at the telly? I’m on the move every day, always need something to do.” And so he has set himself a program for 2023: “First the tree house for the newborn grandson, then a small cable car from the sheepfold over to the terrace, in May preparing the hot tub outside and finally the 1000-metre-high tour with my sons to the Spannagelhaus And then you should make sure that you somehow get it to a reasonable end…” He means his life, this packed full life that began in January 1933 in Johannesthal, a small village in the Sudetenland.
Threimer, whose family had operated a mill on the border with Silesia since the 16th century, had two older brothers. That ended in April 1946: “The Czechs came and drove us out of the house and yard. Everyone was only allowed to carry 50 kilos with them, the rest stayed behind.” The unfortunate past of the so-called young people also remained behind. “My eldest brother was drafted into the Air Force when he was 17,” says Threimer, “I wanted to be a hero like that! Ever since I was ten, they’ve been consistently raising us for war – a crime! But back then I would have given my life for Hitler .” Packed together in cattle cars, they traveled with many other families by train for umpteen days to Dachau, where they were deloused and sent to a farm in Grünhofen near Amerang. Little Fritz, named after godfather Friedrich, went to the Wasserburg high school – a bad time: “For the locals we were displaced people, gypsies, the last people.” The father, mechanical engineer and master miller, was suddenly only an assistant. Formative experiences that Threimer recorded 70 years after the expulsion on 400 book pages, title: “The Lost Life”.
He left school early, did an apprenticeship at Siemens, including a fitter exam, received a scholarship and studied at a technical college. Soon he was head of the fitters’ squad in Münster and Essen, but a thoughtless sentence at an anniversary celebration sent him falling off the career ladder: “Oh, I’d love to go to Munich again,” he said – and a little later he was , but no longer as a manager. Never mind, being back in the mountains was more important to him anyway.
Threimer has saved many of his skis.
(Photo: Leonhard Simon)
From an early age, the brothers had sped down the hills of the Sudetenland on skis, but of course it was a whole lot better in the Alps. Even a broken bone – suffered in 1955 in Rosengasse am Sudelfeld – and a three-month stretch bandage didn’t let him deter him from his passion. The ski cellar of his hut: almost two dozen gems from several decades that every ski museum would lick its fingers for. He didn’t get into snowboarding until he was 65, through his sons, one of whom even took part in competitions, and is now Commercial Director of a snowboard brand. In any case, Papa Threimer said: “What they can do, I can do too!” And so he poses for the photographer in jeans, an Adidas jacket and a woolen headband, with his 1.57 meter long board in his hand, which has now almost overtaken him in terms of length – as straight as a colleague, Gandalf, the magician “Lord of the Rings”, Fritz Threimer is no longer there. The weight of the years slowly but surely causes even the strongest spine to buckle.
But he really likes the posing thing. His mountain hut is paved with souvenir photos, he printed out the story about him in a snowboard magazine in large format and placed it in a waist-high gold frame. In the middle of the room: a kind of tree of life called Manidu, with the most important milestones of the past nine decades. You don’t have to converse with him for long to know that December 1958 holds a prominent place in his life. That’s when he met the man in his life, Ursula, on the tram at Stiglmaierplatz. A little later, the mountaineer was on a ski tour at the Spannagelhaus in the Tux Alps, he wrote his first love letter, which was to be followed by many more and two years later, marriage, two children, a house in Pöring near Zorneding and since 1992 the hut in the Bergen, which he “wouldn’t sell even for a million”. A fulfilled time that came to an abrupt end seven years ago when his “much younger” partner suffered a brain hemorrhage in the car and died. To this day, he still hasn’t gotten over her death, he says, so he’s getting one job after the other: “As skin as I look on the outside, I’m the same on the inside.”
The “Tree of Life” in the hut with stations from a 90-year life.
(Photo: Leonhard Simon)
What does he have left in terms of meaning in life? The grandchildren, of course. He carved lots of wooden toys, spoons and whistles for them – grandpa was a master carpenter – set up trampolines outside and used to always have chickens and ducks running around. His credo: “Children must grow up with animals!” But now the little ones are already 13 and 15 and not so often with grandpa. It’s good that there is now a new grandson, Karli. “I’m still a kid inside,” says Threimer, “I can deal with children much better than with the representatives of my age group.” The huskies Winn and Shatt – exactly: named after Winnetou and Old Shatterhand – are long gone: “They just shot me in Canada,” says the Karl May fan. In the 90s, he and his huskies visited an expatriate friend in the wilderness of British Columbia – and bought a 1.6 million square meter ranch on the spur of the moment. “My wife and my sons weren’t even surprised. They know: Fritz is just a little crazy.” He spends half the year there, with wolves, coyotes and black bears, 350 kilometers away from the nearest supermarket. Initially, he enjoys rancher status, which saves on taxes, but once that’s gone, it becomes unprofitable. He never found the partner he wanted to share the farm and work with him, so he sold everything again in 2014.
To this day, the area around his mountain hut is Little Canada. Especially in winter he prefers to be up here on the Schneeberg than in the flat Pöring. “I feel a lot freer in the snow, it’s a completely different sequence of movements,” he says over a shot of raspberry spirit in the wonderfully wood-scented room. He fell twice with his snowboard this year, and then it takes a while before he stands up again: “I can hardly get to the binding.” No wonder, this is not an easy exercise even for younger people.
He looks like the wizard Gandalf from “Lord of the Rings”. Threimer himself says: “The way I look on the outside is the same on the inside.”
(Photo: Leonhard Simon)
How many more winters will he be on the board? Who knows. “Sometimes life is difficult for me in the morning. I do everything in slow motion,” he admits. Older Fritz can’t get more than four or five hours of sleep, and since he doesn’t like lying up at four in the morning, it’s often well past midnight before he goes to bed: “The winter evenings are really long.” There’s a chaotic one-man kitchen with an electric stove, but he prefers to cook on the old stove in the living room, and an old radio plays Bayern 1, that’s all there is to distraction. He likes to write letters often, which keeps him mentally fit, he says, “but I can’t do it every evening either.”
He made two little boxes: the green one contains the important texts, which posterity should please take a look at, and the red one contains the less important ones, which you are welcome to throw away. He has already talked to his sons about how he could leave this life, keyword euthanasia in Switzerland. He says: “God gave me my life – why can’t I decide my life if it’s no longer possible?” Talks, takes the last sip of shandy in the Weißer Rössl, pays for the round for everyone, takes a while for the bones to start playing again after sitting for a long time and then tries to get into the jacket. There it is again, the helper instinct: you can help him into his jacket, right? But no, as long as it still works…