Werner Herzog on the Mysteries of Pittsburgh

Apr 09, 2024

By Werner Herzog

By the time I was twenty-one, I had made two short films and was dead set on making a feature. I had gone to a distinguished school in Munich, where I had few friends, and which I hated so passionately that I imagined setting it on fire. There is such a thing as academic intelligence, and I didn’t have it. Intelligence is always a bundle of qualities: logical thought, articulacy, originality, memory, musicality, sensitivity, speed of association, and so on. In my case, the bundle seemed to be differently composed. I remember asking a fellow-student to write a term paper for me, which he did quite easily. In jest, he asked me what I would do for him in return, and I promised that I would make him immortal. His name was Hauke Stroszek. I gave his last name to the main character in my first film, “Signs of Life.” I called another film “Stroszek.”

But some of my studies I found utterly absorbing. For a class on medieval history, I wrote a paper on the Privilegium maius. This was a flagrant forgery, from 1358 or 1359, conceived by Rudolf IV, a scion of the Habsburgs, who wanted to define his family’s territory and install them as one of the powers of Europe. He produced a set of five clumsy documents, in the guise of royal charters, with a supplement purportedly issued by Julius Caesar. Despite being clearly fraudulent, the documents were ultimately accepted by the Holy Roman Emperor, confirming the Habsburgs’ claim to Austria. It was an early instance of fake news, and it inspired in me an obsession with questions of factuality, reality, and truth. In life, we are confronted by facts. Art draws on their power, as they have a normative force, but making purely factual films has never interested me. Truth, like history and memory, is not a fixed star but a search, an approximation. In my paper, I declared, even if it was illogical, that the Privilegium was a true account.

What seemed to me a natural approach became a method. Because I knew it would be hopeless to make a feature right away, I accepted a scholarship to go to the United States. I applied to Duquesne University, in Pittsburgh, which had cameras and a film studio. I chose Pittsburgh because I had the sentimental notion that I wouldn’t be tied up with academic nonsense; I’d be in a city with real, down-to-earth people. Pittsburgh was the Steel City, and I had worked in a steel factory myself.

Around the same time, I won ten thousand marks in a competition, for the screenplay for “Signs of Life,” and a free Atlantic crossing. I took passage on the Bremen, where, a few years earlier, Siegfried and Roy had worked as stewards, diverting the passengers with magic tricks. It was on board this ship that I met my first wife, Martje. After we had reached the Irish Sea, it stormed for a week, and the dining room, for six hundred passengers, was empty. Martje was on her way to begin a literature degree in Wisconsin. The heavy seas didn’t bother her. When we sailed into New York, we passed the Statue of Liberty, neither of us interested in the view; we were engrossed in a game of shuffleboard on deck. Martje is the mother of my first son, Rudolph Amos Achmed. He bears the names of three very important people in my life. Rudolf was my grandfather, a classics professor who led enormous archeological digs, involving hundreds of laborers, on the island of Kos. Amos was Amos Vogel, a writer who fled the Nazis, co-founded the New York Film Festival, and became a mentor to me. I remember him taking me aside after three years of marriage and asking if everything was all right. Of course it was all right. “Why don’t you have any children, then?” he said. I thought, Well, indeed, why not?

Achmed was the last remaining laborer who worked with my grandfather. My first time on Kos, when I was fifteen, I went to his home and introduced myself. Achmed started to cry, then threw open all the cupboards, drawers, and windows, and said, “All this is yours.” He had a fourteen-year-old granddaughter, and suggested that I might want to marry her. It wasn’t easy to get him to drop the idea, until I promised to name my firstborn son for Rudolf and him. The island, once under Ottoman rule, eventually became Greek; Achmed remained, working in the digs. I cast him in a small sequence in “Signs of Life,” which was filmed on Kos. He had lost his wife, his daughter, and even his granddaughter; all he had left was his dog, Bondchuk. The next time I saw him, he again threw open his doors and windows, but all he said was “Bondchuk apethane”—“Bondchuk is dead.” We sat together crying for a long time and said nothing.

Pittsburgh turned out to be a bad idea. For a start, the steel industry was almost dead, and the shuttered plants were rusting away. Second, Duquesne University was an intellectually impoverished place. I had no idea that there were differences among universities. There was the film studio, but that was set up like a TV newsroom, with a desk for the anchor flanked by three heavy electronic cameras. Old-fashioned spotlights were affixed to the ceiling, and you couldn’t take them down or move them.

Quitting school would have meant losing my visa and having to leave the United States. So I kept my registration. There was a group of young writers clustered around a magazine on campus; I published my first short story there. In my memory, it all feels blurred, events piled on top of one another. Sometimes I slept on the library floor, where the cleaners would find me at six in the morning. I slept on the sofas of various acquaintances and of my original host, a professor, forty but terrified of his mother, who forbade contact with female students and perhaps with women in general. In front of his window were dark trees and chipmunks, which had something consoling about them. Also consoling were the calls of unfamiliar birds and the play of sharp sunbeams cutting through the thin twigs. Images formed inside me.

There were occasional bizarre scenes. The mother fed her son as if he were a little kid. More precisely, she made him eat green Jell-O, and she started to think of me as someone who might also benefit from it. I ate it uncomplainingly. This motif surfaced many years later, in my film “My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done,” where the protagonist, played by Michael Shannon, is covered in Jell-O by his mother, as if it were war paint. He ends up playing the part of Orestes in a theatre production, failing to keep performance separate from reality, and killing his mother with a stage prop, a Turkish sabre.

A freak encounter changed everything. My host lived in a place called Fox Chapel, in the hills outside Pittsburgh. The bus would take me twelve miles or so, as far as Dorseyville, and from there I would hike up the road through some woods. While walking this last stretch, I was often passed by a woman in a car, the seats full of youngsters. One day, it started raining, and the car drew up beside me. The woman wound down her window. She could give me a lift, she said. It was a two-minute drive to Fox Chapel.

Where was I from? she asked. I was a Kraut, I said. Where was I staying? I explained my situation. Oh, the woman said, she knew the man, he was a weirdo, a wacko-weirdo. She said I’d do better staying with her; she had a spare room in her attic. Her place was just a quarter of a mile from his.

And so I found myself adopted by a family. The woman’s name was Evelyn Franklin. She had six children between seventeen and twenty-seven, and she said that a seventh would be good, seeing as her oldest daughter had just married and moved out. Her husband had died an alcoholic, which must have meant years of misery for Evelyn. She mentioned him only in passing, and always as Mr. Franklin. The youngest kids were twin girls, Jeannie and Joanie; then there was a brother, Billy, who was a failed rock musician; then two more brothers, one of whom—the only one!—was a bit boring and bougie, while the other, twenty-five, was a little slow and had a soft heart. As a child, he had fallen out of a moving car. Then there was a ninety-year-old grandmother and a cocker spaniel who went by Benjamin, as in Benjamin Franklin. I was put in the attic, where there was an old bed and junk. It had a pitched roof, and it was only in the middle that I could stand upright.

I straightaway became part of the daily madness. Evelyn commuted into the city, where she had a job as a secretary in an insurance company. The twins came back from high school in the afternoon, often with friends in tow. Long before that, though, from eight o’clock on, the grandmother would try to rouse Billy, who had usually been rocking in some bar until 3 a.m. She would pound on his locked door, trying to convert him from his sinful life, reading him Bible quotes. The dog, who had a kind of symbiotic relationship with Billy, lay forlornly outside the door. In the afternoon, Billy would emerge stark naked, stretching pleasurably. The grandmother would flee, and Billy would smite his chest and in Old Testament tones bewail his sinful life. Benjamin Franklin would howl an accompaniment, then kick his back paws into the air. Billy, switching to an imaginary canine language, would grab the paws and start dragging Benjamin Franklin down the stairs. At each carpeted landing, he stopped to lament his sins in dog language. Down in the living room, the twins and their squealing girlfriends fled the naked youth, who then set off in pursuit of his runaway grandmother.

It was by no means unusual in this atmosphere for the twins to then pursue me, squirting me with eau de cologne from Woolworth’s. One day, I spotted them plotting an ambush behind the door that led down to the garage. I crept into the top-floor bathroom, intending to jump all the way down and, coming through the garage, attack them from behind. My own preferred weapon was shaving foam. It had been snowing, and there was an inch or so of loose snow, which I thought was enough padding. I landed on a spiral concrete staircase near the garage. My ankle made a penetrating sound that I can still hear, like a wet branch snapping. The fracture was so complicated that I was encased in a plaster cast up to my hip. After a month, I was given a walking cast, which went up only to my knee.

I did get some film experience, working for a producer at WQED in Pittsburgh. His name was Matt, short for Mathias von Brauchitsch; he was related to a former commander-in-chief of the German Army, who in 1941 fell out with Hitler. I kept quiet about the fact that I didn’t have a work permit. Von Brauchitsch was overseeing several documentaries for NASA about alternatives to rocket fuel. I had neither training nor references, but he seemed to be convinced of my capacity. That kind of pragmatic optimism is something I admire about America to this day.

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The film I was making was about theoretical research on plasma rockets, which was happening principally in Cleveland. Put simply, superheated plasma was being tested as fuel, but the temperatures melted any sort of solid container, so the experiments used nonmaterial vessels formed from extremely powerful magnetic fields. At the time, Cleveland had one of the most powerful magnets in existence. Right next to it was an experimental atomic reactor. I remember corridors with open doors and mathematicians working in empty rooms. Once, I watched a group of young men doing nothing, just thinking. Finally, one of them got up and drew a dot on a green chalkboard, then an arrow pointing to it. Then silence.

I had bought a rusty Volkswagen, which Grandma Franklin called the Bush Wagon. (She could never get my name right, either: she would call me Wiener or Orphan.) I drove to Cleveland several times a week. In one building, there was a vacuum chamber built out of steel, so big that several technicians could go inside it. The door to the chamber was operated electrically and moved very slowly on rails. After the engineers prepared their experiment, they left the room, the door closed silently, and shrill alarms signalled that testing would begin.

One day, there was shouting from the chamber and a desperate hammering against the walls. One of the technicians had been left behind. It took minutes for the door to open again. The man inside was deathly pale. No one knew what to do. A very young man, the only Black man among the scientists present, walked up and embraced the technician. He held on to him for a while, then the shocked man laughed, and everyone else started laughing as well. The mishap resulted in the hall’s being shut down and the incident’s being investigated.

Ten days later, I received a summons from the immigration authorities, demanding that I bring my passport. I knew what that meant. Because I had violated the conditions of my visa, I was about to be deported to Germany. Planning to make a break for Mexico, I quickly bought a Spanish dictionary and drove off. The parting from the Franklins was painful, but we knew that we would see one another again.

I drove almost non-stop to Texas, crossing the border at Laredo. On the bridge over the Rio Grande, something ground in my VW engine, as though the United States didn’t want to let me go and Mexico wasn’t quite ready to take me in. I pushed the car into Mexico to be repaired. For a few weeks, I worked at the charreadas, or rodeos, in Guanajuato. That came to an end after a bull pinned my bad leg to a wall.

I started importing stereos and TV sets for a few well-off rancheros I had met at the charreadas. Those things were much more expensive in Mexico because of the duty. I was able to import them because there was a gap in the border between Reynosa and McAllen. Day laborers crossed into McAllen in the morning and went home at night. Three lanes of the widened highway were set aside for them, and their cars were identified by stickers on the windshields. I managed to get hold of some Mexican plates and one of the stickers. My beat-up old car looked the part. Early in the morning, I was simply waved through on the special lanes; it sounds incredible now, but back in 1965 there was very little in the way of drug smuggling. In a few instances, I also brought Colt revolvers into Mexico, ornamental weapons with mother-of-pearl inlaid handles. The wealthy rancheros liked to show off with them.

When that line of business came to an end, I moved inland, to San Miguel de Allende, a beautiful little colonial town now completely spoiled. Vast numbers of confused and prosperous Americans have descended on it, all wanting to get in touch with their creativity. I kept on moving farther south, until, near the Guatemalan border, I got sick. It was hepatitis, but I didn’t know that. I had heard of attempts to form an independent Mayan state in Petén, and was obsessed with the idea that I would help. I still remember the asphalt road through the jungle, the clear streams and the big boulders where women washed clothes. The frontier was the river near Talisman. I wanted to cross into Guatemala, and a few hundred yards upstream of the border post I found a likely spot. For a flotation device, I stuffed an old inflatable soccer ball inside a shopping net, and then I swam out with my few belongings on my head. I treaded water for a while, then noticed a couple of young soldiers carrying rifles. They had stepped out of the jungle and were grinning. I waved in greeting and very slowly swam back.

Secretly, I was relieved that I hadn’t managed to cross. It was becoming clear that I wasn’t well. I made my way back up to Texas almost without stopping, this time minus the fake plates and sticker. What had I been doing in Mexico? I claimed to have been on a short research trip, and was allowed back in. From then on, everything is a fevered blur. I drove and drove, stopping now and then to lay my sopping head on the passenger seat for a few hours’ sleep. I remember a village in Native American territory in Cherokee, North Carolina. I stopped for gas and ate a hamburger. Did I actually see dancing chickens just across the way? Everything was dancing: my plate, my parked car, the tip I’d left on the bar. Years later, I went back there to shoot “Stroszek”; the dancing chickens in that film are perhaps the craziest thing I’ve shown on-screen.

I made it to Pittsburgh. The Franklins delivered me to a hospital and, after a couple of weeks, came to pick me up. Two days later, I flew back to Germany.

I loved the Franklins. With them, I got to know some of the best and deepest things about America. Later on, I invited them to Munich and took them to a party in Sachrang, the remote Bavarian village where I grew up. Hugs, beer, squeals. Contact became harder as much of the family, Billy included, seemed to fall further into religion. When I played the villain in a 2012 Hollywood action movie—it was called “Jack Reacher,” and the star, Tom Cruise, wanted me—the filming took place in Pittsburgh. But I couldn’t find the Franklins. I drove out to Fox Chapel. Almost everything in the area had changed; there were new buildings everywhere; it was very depressing. The Franklins’ home was mostly unchanged; the lawn had the same old broad-leaved trees, but the path down to the garage was overgrown with flowering shrubs. There was no one home. I tried the neighbors, and learned that the house had changed owners several times. I knew that Evelyn Franklin had died. Two years later, I heard that Billy had died, too. He had been like a brother to me.

I remember the twins and their girlfriends going wild with excitement because a new British band was playing the Civic Arena. It was called the Rolling Stones. So far, all these groups—and pop culture as a whole—had passed me by, with the exception of Elvis, whose first film I had seen in Munich. The twins took a piece of cardboard to the concert with the name of their favorite, Brian, on it. He was the band’s leader; not long afterward, he was found drowned in his pool. I still recall my astonishment at the commotion and the girls’ screams. When the concert was over, many of the plastic bucket seats were steaming. It seemed that a lot of the girls had pissed themselves. When I saw that, I knew this band was going to be big.

Much later, in my film “Fitzcarraldo,” Mick Jagger played the lead alongside Jason Robards, but then Robards got sick and the filming had to be suspended halfway through. Everything would have to be done over, this time with Klaus Kinski. I had Jagger on contract for only three more weeks—the Stones had a world tour coming up—and he was so peculiar, so unique, that I didn’t want to recast his part, so I wrote it out of the script altogether. He was to play Wilbur, an English actor who had lost his mind and turned up in the Amazon. The origin of the character, at least in part, was the stark-naked Billy Franklin in Pittsburgh. The part of the dog, Benjamin Franklin, was taken by a timid ape called McNamara. ♦

(Translated, from the German, by Michael Hofmann)

This is drawn from “Every Man for Himself and God Against All.”