The political changes in Europe have also left their mark on the history of the Section. What cuts were there?
It should be mentioned, for example, that we lost all our huts in South Tyrol after the First World War. The Nuremberg Race Laws from 1935 were also a turning point. As a result, we lost Jewish members or were not even allowed to admit them.
At the end of World War II we lost our remaining “Dresdner Hütte” in Tyrol. In addition, the Dresden section of the German Alpine Club in the Soviet occupation zone was deleted from the club register and was then not allowed to be revived in the GDR. It was not founded again until 1953 by exiled Dresdeners in Wuppertal, to which I belonged as a young boy.
How did it feel to found a section in Dresden in the West?
My parents had to leave the GDR for political reasons and of course I went with them as a child. It was therefore of course nice to found the section in the West again. For me personally, however, staying at the “Dresdner Hütte” in Tyrol was even more important. Die I spent my first holidays there after fleeing in 1953 and thus regained a piece of my lost homeland. We were greeted as if we owned the cabin again. But that wasn’t the case at the time.
How is the current situation? How many cabins and members do you have today?
We currently have the “Dresdner Hütte” (2,308 meters high) and the “Hochstubaihütte” (3,173 meters high). The latter is one of the highest huts in the Alps. In addition, we have a shelter hut that is on the way to the “Hochstubaihütte”. There are currently around 6,700 members in the Dresden Section. This makes us a medium-sized section in the German Alpine Club, which has a total of 1.4 million members. In the section, we are growing in membership by four to five percent every year.
Are you able to recruit enough young members?
Yes, that works quite well. There are currently 150 children and young people in our active climbing group. We try to introduce them to mountain sports through climbing. We also cooperate with various climbing gyms in Dresden.
What challenges do you see in the coming years?
Next to recruiting young people, it is above all environmental protection. This is very important to us because we want to preserve the environment that we use for our sport. Nevertheless, we also have to make our CO₂ balance more positive and want to be largely climate-neutral by 2030. To this end, we prefer to use public transport wherever possible, drive to our mountain huts in carpools, use solar energy and supply our guests with products from the region, to name just a few specific things.