Werner Herzog: The Bavarian

Werner Herzog: The Bavarian
by Paul Cronin

Even the most cursory inspection of the films of Werner Herzog will bring a viewer swiftly to the understanding that Herzog is no armchair-spectator in this life. His work has always sprung from a passionate engagement with the world, and a unique and iconoclastic eye for what is vital within it. As one would expect, Herzog's childhood and formative years were not of the humdrum variety either, as Paul Cronin uncovered in his definitive interviews with the director, published by Faber and Faber as Herzog on Herzog, from whence the following abridged extract comes.

PAUL CRONIN: You were born in 1942 in Munich, the largest city in Bavaria. What was it like growing up in the immediate post-war era?

WERNER HERZOG: After only a couple of days in Munich the house next door to us was half-destroyed by bombs. We were lucky to get out alive – my cradle was sprayed with flying glass – so my mother moved me and my brothers out of the city to Sachrang, a small mountain village on the German/Austrian border. The region in the Tyrol, the Kaisergebirge mountains in Austria and around Sachrang, was one of the last pockets of resistance in Germany at the end of the war, one of the final places the occupying American soldiers moved into. At that time the SS and the Werewolves were on the run and passed through the village, taking off their uniforms and hiding their weapons under the farmers' hay before taking refuge in the mountains. As a child I was very aware of the border between Germany and Austria, something that was very strongly reinforced as a result of my mother often taking me and my elder brother across to Wildbichl in Austria. She used the two of us to help smuggle various things back to Germany, the things that couldn't be found on our side. In the post-war period smuggling was quite an accepted thing to do, and even the border police were involved in it.

As a child, cinema really didn't exist for me, nor did telephones or television, and a car was an absolute sensation. Sachrang was such an isolated place at that time – though it's only about an hour and a half drive from Munich – that I didn't know what a banana was until I was 12, and I didn't make my first telephone call until I was 17. Our house had no water flush toilet, in fact no running water at all. We had no mattresses, my mother would stuff dried ferns into a linen bag and in winter it was so cold I'd wake up in the morning and there'd be a layer of ice on my blanket from frozen breath.

Was it tough growing up in post-war Germany?

Everyone thinks that growing up in the ruins of the cities was a terrible experience, and for the parents who lost absolutely everything I have no doubt that it was. But for the children it truly was the most marvelous of times. I had a childhood totally separate from the outside world, but the kids in the cities owned whole bombed out blocks and would declare the remnants of buildings their own to play in where great adventures were acted out. You really don't have to commiserate with these kids. Everyone I know who spent their early childhood in the ruins of post-war German raves about that time, it was anarchy in the best sense of the word. There were no ruling fathers around and no sets of rules to follow, so we had to invent everything from scratch.

When did you first realise that filmmaking was something you were going to spend your life doing?

From the moment I could think independently I knew I was going to make films. I never had a choice about becoming a director. At the age of 19 in 1961, immediately after my final exams at high school, I bought a truck in Munich and left Germany for Greece. When I got there I sold the truck and with that money planned to take a boat to Alexandria in Egypt. In August my mother sent me two letters – on consecutive days – which I received when I was on Crete. In them she wrote that my father, Dietrich, was anxious to dissuade me from becoming a film director, as before leaving Munich apparently I had made some pronouncement that I was going to do just that upon my return. I had already written several short screenplays and had submitted various proposals to producers and TV stations from the age of about 14 or 15. But my father was quite convinced that my idealism would be crushed within a few years because he thought I would never achieve what I wanted to. He thought I didn't have the energy or perseverance and sense for business to survive in the intrigue and hard milieu of the film business.

Many of your films have been made outside of Germany. Yet even a film like Fitzcarraldo, filmed in the Amazon in Peru, was famously called 'Bavaria in the Jungle'. You haven't lived in Germany for many years, but do you feel you've retained your German sensibilities? And what does it mean to be Bavarian?

It doesn't really matter where the films were physically filmed. Geographically I have travelled widely, but I do feel that all my films are not only very German, but are explicitly Bavarian. There is a different culture down in Bavaria. It's an area that never considered itself part of Germany historically. My first language was Bavarian and it was a real culture shock for me when I went to school on Swabia where the kids spoke a different language. I was teased and mocked by the kids at school who would imitate my thick accent and at the age of eleven I had to learn Hochdeutsch – 'high German' – which was a painful experience for me. Irish writers write in English, but they are Irish. I might write in German, but I am very much a Bavarian. Being Bavarian means as much as it means to be Scottish in the United Kingdom. There is a different sort of human being in Bavaria. Like Scots, Bavarians are very hard-drinking, hard-fighting, very warm hearted, very imaginative. The most imaginative Bavarian of all was King Ludwig II. He was totally mad and built all the dream castles that are so full of this quintessentially Bavarian dreaminess and exuberance. I always felt that he would have been the only one who could have done a film like Fitzcarraldo apart from me. You see this kind of baroque of imagination in Fassbinder's films, the kind of un-stoppable and ferocious creativity he had. Like his work, my films are not thin-blooded ideological constructs that we saw a lot of in German cinemas in the 1970s. Too many German films of that era were thin gargling water instead of real thick stout.