For the Werner Herzog exhibition in the Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin.
It is an exhibition covering just two halls – plus a couple of cabinets. But you can get lost in it for hours. I assume it’s an exhibition for fans of Werner Herzog’s films. I can’t judge that. I was never one of them. So I can trumpet it out into the world: go to this exhibition, all of you who have been bored with his films. We, who didn’t recognize Werner Herzog in his films, will recognize him here as a great artist. Werner Herzog will be 80 years old on September 5th. So just time to discover him.
The first room in the exhibition is called “Nature”. There is a video installation showing excerpts from Herzog’s films. At 14, Herzog explains in an interview, he not only joined the Catholic Church, but also discovered walking. His most famous course started in November 1974. A friend called him to say that Lotte Eisner (1896-1983) was doing very badly. She had lived in Paris since 1933 and had been chief curator of the Cinémathèque française since 1945. She couldn’t die, Herzog decided. He immediately set off. But not the fastest. So he didn’t board a plane, he walked to her. From Munich to Paris, more than 1000 kilometers away as the crow flies. A procession on ice. Herzog’s relationship to nature always includes his own body, including the spirit, which is no less connected to everything than each of the atoms that make up our body.
The exhibition makes one thing clear: what Werner Herzog knows, he has experienced. No: He fared. When he reads something, he doesn’t stop at imprisoning it in his memory, but gets up and moves in order to comprehend it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s about the structure of the universe or the abysses of our soul life. He wants to understand. With all your senses.
His mother wrote her dissertation on hearing in fish. Living beings, in other words, which the language still assigns to a “silent” underwater world. Herzog has repeatedly tried to get the mute, even those who have been silenced, to speak. A large part of his work, as the exhibition impressively shows, is based on interviews he conducted with a wide variety of people. When Guadeloupe was evacuated in 1977 because of an impending volcanic eruption, a man refused to leave. “He had to have a different, unknown relationship to death that interested me,” Herzog writes in his memoirs “everyone for themselves and God against everyone” (Hanser). So Herzog flew to this man. The exhibition shows parts of a conversation that Herzog had with a US prisoner five days before his execution.
Looking at the extremes makes it easier to understand the world. Both must be taken seriously: the insight that there is a reality and the knowledge that it depends very much on our point of view what we can recognize as reality. In this dilemma we move. No: we have made ourselves comfortable in it. Werner Herzog, on the other hand, keeps running into certainties and certainties. No wonder volcanoes play such a big role in his life and work. They show that the earth itself can tremble and break apart. That things are raging among us and forces are at work over which we have no power. Not a chance.
You can’t beat death. But then sometimes it is. Like when he walked to see the moribund Lotte Eisner or when his mother found him, he was just a few weeks old, in his cradle, buried under a “thick layer of broken glass, bricks and rubble”. Houses in the area had been bombed. Detonation waves had also affected the house in which he had just begun to live, Herzog writes. The windows of the studio where he, his mother and his older brother lived were shattered. But the child in the manger was unharmed. It had also survived this catastrophe. Werner Herzog grew up with this story.
Not because he remembered her, but because he was probably reminded of her over and over again. The awareness of being something special probably accompanied him early on. Maybe even the realization that each of us is special. That nature out there will kill us if we don’t learn to deal with it, but that we also have to learn to deal with the piece of unbridled nature that we are ourselves – that’s what Herzog understood at the latest after he pointed a knife at his brother had gone off. Not only do we stand in each other’s way, we also stand in our own way. Werner Herzog teaches us that.
In the exhibition, for example, this becomes clear when presenting his work with Klaus Kinski. It’s in the “Controversies” chapter. So in addition to questions like these: “exploitation or sensitive portrayal of people with disabilities?”, “mourning or aesthetics of terror?”, “curiosity about the foreign or (post)colonial view?” Kinski probably lived out what Herzog already as Young people learned to discipline: the irascibility. But Herzog knows he’s got him in him, and he could use Kinski as an alter ego.
Just like Kaspar Hauser was probably also a path that Herzog had in store for a long time. His film from 1974 shows the process of civilization as a passion story by Kaspar Hauser. The film has the same title as Herzog’s memoirs: “Each for Himself and God Against All”.
In one of the contributions shown in the exhibition, Werner Herzog wonders what it would be like if he could write so well that he no longer needed a camera, because he could move the reader’s imagination with mere words. It will probably never come to that, he adds regretfully. It’s the old question of what makes an artist.
For centuries it was named after a Raphael without hands. The 20th century invented the conceptual artist. Speaking to cosmologist Lawrence Krauss, Herzog explained, “By the age of 14, I knew I was a poet and I knew my destiny was to make films.”
This is the description of a dilemma. It was first formulated by the Greek poet Pindar (522-445 BC): “Become who you are by learning”. This is Herzog’s work and pleasure, his burden and joy. This can be seen everywhere in the exhibition. It encourages you to follow him and do it on your own, with your own limited means, courage and will to get an idea of the world in which we all live together, but each at his own location. So everyone for himself and the God responsible for the whole against everyone.
Herzog is a poet who ended up in the art of film. He runs against them. In the exhibition there are scenes in which he explains to the students in a film course in Lanzarote that he is enthusiastic on the set and that this is passed on and that is how an exciting film is made. With text it would be easier. There would not be so many mediation steps, not so many possibilities for friction between poet and reader, reader. But there wouldn’t be so much fellowship, so much real, physical happiness. The poet sits at his computer. He doesn’t show his performer how to approach the water, nor does he learn from how to face the camera from a turn. The poet is alone. The director is embedded in a commune of helpers and accomplices. They enrich him, but they may also prevent him from becoming who he is. Werner Herzog, who will soon be 80, is thinking about this today, and the visitor leaving the exhibition thinks a little too aggressively.
There is a very nice catalog (Könemann Verlag) that not only shows the exhibited objects, but also a Werner Herzog ABC that ranges from “Akademiker” to “Zoon politikon”.
Deutsche Kinemathek, Berlin: until March 27, 2023. www.deutsche-kinemathek.de
