by Paul Cronin
German women of my mother’s generation were grandiose. In 1945, at the end of the war, they rolled up their sleeves, cleared away the rubble and began rebuilding. My mother was no exception; she always guided us children by setting a good example. One day my brother and I bought a motorcycle, and after a series of minor accidents – at least one a week – she casually stubbed out her cigarette and said, “I think you should get rid of your motorcycle because I just got rid of my last cigarette.” The following week we sold it, and though she had smoked for many years, my mother never smoked again. For a short time in the early days she thought the Nazis were a force for good in Germany, perhaps because she had grown up in Vienna, born into a military family of nationalists from Croatia – a country with a strong tradition of fighting for its identity – and in her youth had been political herself. Two of her relatives were apparently involved in the assassination of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia in Marseilles in 1934, and she was briefly in prison herself before the war. In 1933, the year Hitler assumed power, many people were deeply connected to their sense of national identity, probably more than they are today, and this impetus for independence occasionally morphed into support for fascism. My paternal grandmother was different. Although I never discussed politics with her, it was obvious she didn’t care for Hitler at all. She thought he was a buffoon, that there was something not quite right about him.
Dietrich, my father, was of French Huguenot descent, also with a PhD in biology. He had fought in the war, though I don’t think he ever saw combat, and was held captive in France for nearly two years. He was a walking encyclopaedia and could speak several languages, including Japanese and some Arabic, but was forever trying to dodge his responsibilities. He refused ever to involve himself in even the slightest productive work and would often talk about a vast, universal scientific theory he was working on. He maintained that one day it would be finished, though we all knew he hadn’t written a thing. His insistence that it had to be completed conveniently meant he could avoid getting a real job to earn a living and support his family, so it was forever up to my mother to take charge and look after everyone. One time, while he was ranting about this mammoth text, I touched his shoulder and said, “But you haven’t written anything.” He looked at me and somehow acknowledged I was right, but five minutes later was raving about his non-existent book again. It took years for my father to be convinced of the catastrophic impact the Nazi regime had on Germany, though I think for him it was partly a question of cultural supremacy. Lots of English words entered the language after the war thanks to the American Forces Network radio. American culture became a major part of German life, but my father looked back to seemingly better times. Over the years I have learnt from his deficiencies, about how not to be a father. Even at the time I knew it was a blessing he wasn’t around when I was growing up.
You came of age during the reconstruction of post-war Germany.
A couple of days after I was born, in September 1942, the house next door to us in Munich was destroyed by a bomb and our place was damaged. We were lucky to get out alive. Apparently my mother found me in my cradle, covered with debris and glass shards, but unhurt. She moved my older brother and me out of the city to Sachrang, a small, remote mountain village less than a mile from the German–Austrian border, about an hour’s drive from Munich and surrounded by forests, like something out of a fairy tale. We stayed there for the next eleven years before moving back to Munich. The Kaisergebirge in the Austrian Tyrol and around Sachrang were one of the last pockets of resistance in Germany at the end of the war. At that time the Werewolves – the fanatical SS troops of the Third Reich who led the last-gasp resistance against the Allies – were on the run and passed through the village, hiding their weapons and uniforms under the farmers’ hay before grabbing civilians’ clothes and taking refuge in the mountains. One night a man sat in front of a raging fire at the creek behind our house, his eyes and face reflecting the flames. I was aware of the dividing line between Germany and Austria because my mother would often take my brother and me across to Wildbichl in Austria; she used the two of us to help smuggle back home various things not so easily found on our side of the border. She would use sand to clean the pans and dishes, so one time for her birthday my brother and I filled a large sack with sand from a nearby riverbed and gave it to her as a gift. It took us nearly a day to carry it back to the house because it was so heavy. I don’t remember ever seeing her so happy.
Parsifal is a character I understand because as a child I had no knowledge of the outside world; we were totally disconnected. On our way to school in the village we had to cross a forest that I was convinced was haunted by witches. Even today, when I pass this spot, I still get the feeling there is something eerie about it. Sachrang was such an isolated place at the time that I didn’t know what a banana was until I was twelve, and I didn’t make my first telephone call until the age of seventeen. A car was an absolute sensation; we would all sprint after it just to look at the thing, and there is still something exciting to me about watching hundreds of vehicles swishing around on a system of interconnected freeways. I have always felt most comfortable in remote mountains, and part of me has never really adjusted to modern technology; I jump whenever the telephone rings. Our house had no running water or proper mattresses, so my mother would stuff dried ferns into a linen bag for us to lie on; she sewed all our clothes from the thickest material she could find. During the winter months I would awaken to find a layer of ice on my blanket. The outside toilet was frequently covered in snowdrifts, and there was so much snow blocking the front door we had to climb out of the window. Sometimes we went to school on skis. During the summer we children went without shoes for months, wearing nothing but lederhosen.
We were always full of imagination, constantly inventing our own toys. I remember the feeling of flying through the air on the swing attached to the huge tree behind our house. The guns and arms caches we found – remnants of the SS soldiers – became things to play with, and one time we blew up a small sewage pipe with some explosives. I was part of the local gang of about a dozen children, including one girl who we all respected because she was so tough. Together as a group we invented a kind of flat arrow made from beech wood. I didn’t know anything about aeronautics but somehow figured out how to make it fly some distance; I would throw this thing with a whip-like action, which made it sail through the air more than 400 feet. After lunch my mother would send my brother and me outside no matter how cold it was – summer or winter – and wouldn’t let us back in for several hours. She thought it was good for our constitution. I spent a lot of time alone when I was young, and developed a strong sense of self-reliance.
Everyone thinks growing up in the ruins of the destroyed German cities must have been a terrible experience, and no doubt for parents who lost everything it was, but for us children it was glorious, the most marvellous of times. Munich wasn’t as badly destroyed as some other cities in Germany, though there were huge gaps where once had been buildings. Truckloads of debris, headed to the outskirts of the city, where vast mountains of rubble piled up, would pass by our apartment window. We children took over whole bombed-out blocks and discovered the most amazing things in cellars strewn with rubble. The remnants of buildings and factories were our playgrounds where great adventures were acted out. It was a surreal environment, and everyone I know who spent their early years in the ruins of post-war Germany raves about that time. With no fathers to listen to and no rules to follow, it was anarchy in the best sense of the word. We invented everything from scratch.
Some years ago I saw a film comprised entirely of footage shot in Leningrad before, during and after its siege during the Second World War.* Everything appears so peaceful, with no sign of imminent drama. People stroll through the streets, they chat in sidewalk cafes, and children play in parks. Nothing in their faces points to a looming disaster. Then the bombardment starts, followed by mass starvation. Death stalks those very same streets, cafes a
nd parks with unspeakable horror. When I look back on my childhood, it’s clear that Europe is currently going through a period of tranquillity rarely seen in human history.
What are your earliest memories?
One night my mother wrenched my brother and me out of bed and carried us – one in each arm, wrapped in blankets – up the slope behind our house. In the distance we saw an entire sky pulsating orange and red; it’s one of those indelible, unforgettable images of childhood. “I took you out of bed because you must see this,” she said to us. “Rosenheim is burning.” Rosenheim, which for us was the big city at the end of the world, was being bombed. Sachrang sits in a valley, eight miles from Aschau, where there was a hospital and train station. Beyond that lies Rosenheim, which as a young child was somehow the limit of my universe.† I also have a memory of seeing Our Lord himself, when I was about three years old. It was on Nikolaustag, when the holy St Nicholas appears with a book listing all your misdeeds of the year, accompanied by Krampus, a demon-like figure. I was absolutely terrified, fled under the couch and peed my pants. As if coming to my rescue, the door opened and a man stood there. He was wearing brown overalls and no socks, and his hands were covered with oil. I was sure it was the Lord himself, there to save me from Krampus, but it turned out to be someone from the electricity company who happened to be passing.
When I was five or six I fell quite ill. There was no point in calling an ambulance because we were too deeply snowed in, so my mother wrapped me in blankets, tied me on a sleigh and dragged me through the night to Aschau, where I was admitted to hospital. She visited eight days later, coming on foot through deep snow, and was amazed that I was without complaint. I had pulled a single piece of thread from the blanket on the bed and played with it for all that time. I wasn’t bored. This strand was full of stories and fantasies for me.
Do you ever get bored?
The word is not in my vocabulary. I astonish my wife by being capable of standing and staring through the window for days at a time. I may look catatonic, but not so inside. Wittgenstein talked about looking through a closed window of a house and seeing a man flailing about strangely. You can’t see or hear the violent storms raging outside and don’t realise it’s taking great effort for this man even to stand on his own two feet. There are hidden storms within us all.
American soldiers occupied Sachrang at the end of the war.
We lived in one of the last places the occupying American soldiers moved into. The GIs arrived in jeeps with one leg dangling and chewing gum non-stop; I thought it was all the Americans in the whole world. For the first time I saw a black man, and I was completely mesmerised because I had only heard about black people from fairy tales. I ran to my mother and said, “I just saw a pitch-black Moor!” He was a big, wonderful man with a tremendous voice, which I can still hear today. My mother asked how I communicated with him. “We talk in American,” I said. He gave me a piece of gum which I kept for a whole year, until my older brother found where I hid it every night and stole it. Another early flash of memory is of the white flags hanging from the windows of the houses in Sachrang. On the day the Americans rolled into town, every house had a white flag or bed sheet on view. This was a sign it was friendly, not resistant to the American occupation and not harbouring Werewolves or Nazis. I remember playing on the balcony of our house and letting this sheet fall to the ground. The scolding we got was particularly intense, like nothing I have ever experienced, which was understandable because our games meant the house could have come under immediate gunfire.
For a time my father worked as a supply officer in the army and sent food packages home whenever he could, but we were constantly hungry and looking for things to eat, forever hanging on our mother’s skirt, crying. “Children,” she once told us, “if I could cut a piece of flesh from my own ribs, I would.” She was constantly searching for food and would sometimes skim the cream from the top of the milk churns when the farmers weren’t looking. Anything that helped fill our stomachs. Once the farmers had harvested their nearby fields we would go in and collect the small potatoes they left behind. On the way to school we tried to catch trout in the creek with our bare hands. If we got one, we would put it in a tiny pond near by and pick it up after school. To this day I know the value of food and have always had great respect for whatever is on my plate. One time I stumbled across some workers who had shot a crow and were cooking it in a pot on the side of the road. For the first time in my life I saw fat floating on the surface of a soup; it was a sensation for me. Later I tried to shoot a crow, using one of the sub-machine guns we found in the forest, but I was thrown to the ground by the recoil. I was surprised that my mother wasn’t angry. She took me into the forest and shot a single round into a thick beech log, causing splinters to fly out the other side. “This is what you should expect from a gun,” she said to me. “You must never point even a toy gun at anybody.” I was so stunned by this violence that I was immediately cured of my preoccupation with such things. She showed me how to secure and unload the weapon, telling me I could keep it so long as I learnt how to carry it safely.
What were you like as a child?
I was a taciturn and hot-tempered loner, usually withdrawn and known to brood for days on end, after which I would erupt in violent fits of rage. It took me a long time to get my behaviour under control, notably after an unspeakable disaster when I attacked my older brother with a knife. When I was eleven we moved back to Munich, where I learnt to concentrate because the whole family lived together in a single room. There were four of us in this tiny place, everyone doing their own thing. I would lie on my back on the floor reading for hours, no matter how much talking and activity was going on around me. Often I would read all day, incredibly focused, concentrating on my book, and eventually look up to discover everyone else had left hours ago. One of the first books I owned was a copy of Winnie the Pooh, which arrived in an American care package. It’s still one of my favourites, and along with cornflour was an excellent way to pull Germany back into the civilised world. Many considered cornflour chicken feed, but my mother was able to fool us by saying it had lots of egg yolk in it, and all of a sudden we found it delicious. Long live the Marshall Plan. All these years later I remain full of gratitude and have held America in high esteem ever since. Later, during my adolescence, the American influence in West Germany was strong, but not for me. I never wore jeans and was never that interested in Elvis, though I did go to see the first of his films released in Munich. In the middle of the screening everyone got up and calmly shook the rows of seats until they came loose from the floor. Eventually the police were called to restore order.
It was my brother Tilbert – who is a little more than a year older than me – who took charge once we moved to Munich. He was very smart, always the leader of the gang and epicentre of mischief. He was thrown out of school after a couple of years and immediately started in business, rising like a comet. At the age of fourteen he became an apprentice at a firm that imported tropical wood, and by sixteen was the primary breadwinner in the family. It was because of him I was able to continue in school, though I would work myself whenever I could. I owe a great deal to Tilbert; even today he remains the boss of the family. My younger brother Lucki is someone with whom I have worked closely over the years. We have different fathers but for me he is a full brother. He had great musical talent as a youngster but quickly realised he wasn’t good enough to compete with all the other pianists out there, so he also went into business, also rising quickly through the ranks. I think that shook him up because he quickly took off for Asia, visiting India, Burma, Nepal and Indonesia. I wrote him a letter asking for help making Aguirre, and he crossed the Pacific, making it to Peru to give us much-needed assistance. Eventually Lucki started working with me full time, and for several decades has run my production company. He was always better than me when it comes to the financial aspects of filmmaking.
Is Herzog your real name?
It’s my father’s name. My p
arents divorced when I was five or six, at which point my legal name became Stipetić, which was my mother’s maiden name. I always felt much closer to my mother but chose to work under the name Herzog in part because it means “duke” in German. I thought there should be someone like Count Basie or Duke Ellington making films. It’s hostile and murderous out there in the universe; what looks friendly to us is actually two hundred thousand atomic explosions every second. The sun is a tiny grain of sand and there are many even nastier suns out there. Down here, we humans are living proof that things have gone warped. Perhaps changing my name has somehow protected me from the overwhelming evil of the universe.
What were the first films you saw?
I didn’t know cinema existed until I was eleven years old and a travelling projectionist for remote provincial schools showed up with a selection of 16mm films. Although I was stunned such a thing was possible, I wasn’t particularly taken with the first film I saw, about Eskimos constructing an igloo. It had a ponderous commentary and was extremely boring. Having had to deal with a lot of snow as a child, I could tell the Eskimos weren’t doing a very good job; they were probably just actors, and bad ones at that. There and then I learnt that the worst sin a filmmaker can commit is to bore his audience and fail to captivate from the very first moment. The second film, about pygmies building a liana bridge across a jungle river in Cameroon, was better. The pygmies worked well together, and I was impressed with their ability to construct such a well-functioning suspension bridge without any real tools. One pygmy swung across the river on a liana like Tarzan and hung from the bridge like a spider. It was a sensational experience for me.