From when I was very young, I wanted to fly. Not in an airplane but by myself, with my body, without any gear. We were put on skis as infants, but in the Sachrang valley, there are no slopes worthy of the name. And so we started ski jumping, built ourselves ramps, and had amazing crashes. On one such crash, my brother landed with the points of his skis drilled so deeply into the snow that they stuck there, and he came out of both his boots. He tumbled down the rest of the way without skis or boots. A neighbor lad, Rainer, and I tried out another ramp outside the village. It seemed gigantic to us at the time, but when I look at it now, it seems tiny, paltry. We dreamed of one day becoming world champions and borrowed proper jumping skis. They turned out to be more than seven feet long, miles longer than we were, and they were wide too, with five rills grooved into the underside to keep the ski on course going down the ramp. This one had a natural approach; it was a natural slope, not an artificially constructed tower. Right at the top was a big pine tree that you could lean against at ninety degrees to the ramp, then, with the cumbrously overlong jumping skis, you pushed off into the icy twin tracks of the descent. Here, my friend had the most terrible mishap. I was standing on the slope below the ramp and watched him leap into the tracks. But he didn’t get the skis properly inside them, and there was, of course, no way you could stop on the icy descent. I can still see him as though it were today, struggling all the way down the descent to get his skis into the tracks. But he spilled off headfirst into the woods. There were some rocks there as well. The sound of the collision still shakes me even now. I found him with terrible head injuries, too bad for me to be able to describe them. I was convinced that he was either dead or would shortly die. He tried to speak, but the crash had knocked out all of his molars. It took long minutes that are hideous in my memory before he finally, by some kindly grace, lost consciousness. I found myself in a quandary, uncertain whether to run to the village for help, leaving him alone, or stay by him even though there was nothing I could do for him. I finally decided to carry him even though he was heavier than I was. It was a very steep slope down to the landing area. I was lucky, or rather he was, because a farmer came by with a pony and sleigh. My friend was delivered to the hospital; he was in a coma for three weeks or maybe less; he finally came around and recovered. He suffered no serious long-term damage except that most of his molars had to be replaced by silver dentures. In addition, he suffered from headaches all his life each time there was a change in the weather. Decades later, after we had completely lost touch, there was a curious sign of life from him. In the ZDF sports program called Sportschau, which screened highlights from German soccer league games, there was a feature called “Goal of the Month.” It must have been the beginning of the eighties; anyway, the goal that was chosen and played again in the show was selected on the basis of which of the short-listed candidates was chosen by the most viewers who wrote in on postcards. A studio celebrity selected one card from some two hundred thousand, and the lucky entrant got a free trip and a pair of tickets to the next Germany game. The postcards lay there in great mailbags in a semicircle on the studio floor, and the guest reached into one and pulled out a card. The name of the lucky winner was read out: Rainer Steckowski, Sachrang. The sheer statistical improbability is so staggering that no one will believe me, but I remember the moment. My dream of ramps and flying was already over at a stroke with Rainer’s accident. It was many years before I wanted to go anywhere near a ski jump again.
Later, in 1973, I made a film about ski jumping called The Great Ecstasy of Woodcarver Steiner. I had by then watched downhill races and ski jumping many times on television. At the ski jump on Kulm in Austria, one of the most imposing sites in the world, I even took photographs in a large black-and-white format with an ancient-seeming mahogany camera, using a tripod, a squeeze bulb, and plates. To adjust the focus, I had to disappear under a black cloth the way nineteenth-century photographers did. Among the hundreds of professional photographers with modern cameras and huge telephoto lenses, I provoked astonishment even though I wasn’t there to catch the athletes in full flight like the others but at the moment before they plunged into the tracks when there was no more going back. In all of them there lurked a secret dread, but no one talks about it; at the most they’d pay lip service to “respecting the ramp.” And it’s never the athletic musclemen who fly away from the pack; usually it’s seventeen-year-olds with pale pimply faces and an unsteady gaze. I first noticed one such person in 1970—Walter Steiner, a Swiss woodcarver and artist who lived and worked in Wildhaus in the canton of Appenzell. Sometimes he would go up into the mountains all alone and shape fallen trees into strange faces, usually with an expression of terror on them, but he kept the places secret for climbers or hikers to stumble upon. When he started entering international contests, he always finished way behind the competition, but I saw something in him that impressed me. This quiet young man had something ecstatic in the way he flew, though technically he still had flaws. I told my friends: “This is a future world champion.” His shape was unusual too; he was very tall and thin, with legs that were far too long; he seemed clumsy on the ground, like a crane picking around on bony legs with knobbly knees, but once airborne—he sailed like a crane. His element seemed to be the air, not the earth.
At that time, I had seen a few films on television in a series called Grenzstationen, or Borderline Situations, that featured people in extreme predicaments. These films stood out from the usual run of TV offerings, and I noticed they all came from the same broadcaster, the Süddeutscher Rundfunk in Stuttgart, and that one editor was responsible for them all. His name was Gerhard Konzelmann and he was for a long time the Middle East correspondent for the Erstes Programm. I often saw him on the news, a stout man with a slight Swabian accent who sent in incredibly good bulletins from all over the Middle East. He sweated profusely and looked a little unhappy in that desert climate, but at the same time, he was more clear-sighted than anyone else. I remember how in 1981 the Erstes Fernsehen broadcast a breaking news special report from Cairo; Konzelmann to camera; behind him was a stage with upset chairs, soldiers, confusion, chaos. Only moments earlier, in the course of a military parade, some soldiers had leapt down from a convoy of trucks, sprinted up to the platform, and shot President Sadat. Eleven other guests on the rostrum had been killed, and there were many injured. Konzelmann improvised a report on what had just happened; it was by no means even certain that the shooting was over or if Sadat was still alive; he had been taken away by security forces. Calm, concentrated, and sweating, Konzelmann gave the best analysis of the inner contradictions of the Egyptian state that I have ever heard and reported on the origins and role of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, the probable force behind the assassination. So this was the man I had called up a few years before over the documentary series he was producing and had gone to meet in the canteen in Stuttgart. I had a film in mind that would fit perfectly into his series, and Konzelmann, during our lukewarm lunch, immediately came on board. The disadvantage of it for me was that his series was not given an anonymous off-air commentary; each of the filmmakers had to appear as the narrators of their films, and speak to camera. So I would have to appear. I resisted the idea for a long time, but it led to my never leaving my voice-over to some speaker or other but each time recording it myself. This was a step the full gravity of whose implications I did not see right away. It led to my finding my voice, my stage voice, if you like.
The Konzelmanns of the world are no longer with us. Decisions nowadays are made by committees, and ratings are everything. When I was working on the cutting of a feature film, my editor, Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus, always fixed up the cutting table in the morning and lined up the little rolls of film on shelves for the work of the day ahead; while she was doing that, I would usually read her small news items from the newspaper; among them, on several successive days, were reports from the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, where a volcano, La Soufrière, had given increasingly menacing signs of an imminent eruption or even explosion. The geological structure of the volcano indicated that the entire summit was likely to blow off before the lava could emerge. Therefore, the entire southern end of the island had been hurriedly evacuated, some seventy thousand inhabitants, but evidently one man, a poor Black peasant, had refused to be evacuated. He surely had some unusual and, to me, unfamiliar understanding of death, which interested me. I casually mentioned that one surely ought to make a film of the volcano with him. Toward lunchtime, Beate switched off the cutting table, turned to me, and said out of the blue: “Well, why not?”
“Why not what?” I asked.
“Why don’t you go there and make the film?”
I called Süddeutscher Rundfunk and asked to speak to Konzelmann, but he was at a meeting of all the regional broadcasting stations. I asked for permission to put one question to him. Someone slipped him a note, and Konzelmann came to the phone. “Short and sweet,” he said. I told him in thirty seconds what was going on in Guadeloupe and asked him if he’d commission such a film. “All right,” he said. “Off you go, but I want you back alive. The bureaucracy’s too slow; we’ll do the contract afterward.” Two hours later, I was on my way to the West Indies. Konzelmann left the station before retirement age, I think, to write an opera. He had always composed the music for his own films.
I felt such an immediate kinship with Walter Steiner. At the traditional Vierschanzentournee Tournee, or Four Hills Tournament, at the end of 1973 and the beginning of 1974, he was way back in the field because he was still struggling with an injury, a broken rib. When people wondered if I was backing a lame horse, I kept faith. I told him at the ski-jumping event at Planica in Slovenia that he would trounce the others. Perhaps that gave him confidence, but it was more than that; often, moments of physical closeness proved critical in my work with actors or the subjects of my documentaries. With Bruno S., the lead in two of my films, The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and Stroszek, there were moments when he became agitated at the dreadfulness of the world he had experienced in his childhood and youth. I would grip his wrist, and that calmed him down. The day before his event, Steiner was depressed and worried about his form. I had four camera people there, and on our way out to the place he was staying, I gave a signal and we all together hoisted him onto our shoulders and carried him down the lonely snowy street at shoulder height. Someone took a blurry photograph of it; I found it the other day. But the moment itself I remember with great precision because it was a simple physical gesture that confirmed our trust in one another. The following day, at the early practice sessions, Steiner was extraordinary. No one had ever soared as he did then. In his photograph album, I found a not terribly eye-catching shot of a raven that he didn’t want to talk about, dismissing it with a casual remark. But after he had been hoisted onto my shoulders, he began to talk. When he was ten or thereabouts, he had found a young raven that had fallen from its nest, and with great care, he raised it himself. The raven survived and, because Steiner was a bit of a loner, it became his best friend. The bird liked to sit perched on the boy’s shoulder. At the end of the school day, the bird would be waiting for him in the branches of a tree, Steiner would whistle, and his raven would come flying down and sit on his shoulder as the boy bicycled home. But his raven started moulting and was attacked and bullied by other ravens, and it was hard to watch. Finally, Steiner could bear it no longer, and he shot his raven with his father’s hunting rifle. Now that his raven no longer flew, he, Steiner, flew in its stead.
In Planica, Steiner was so extraordinary that he several times almost flew to his death because the ramp was not built for a flyer like him. To explain: when the skier jumps, he lands on a steep downward slope and the kinetic energy is tapered off. Even dramatic-looking falls are usually not too bad. But if, following an extra-long jump, one were to land on the flat, which no one has reckoned on, then the deceleration is instantaneous, just as a jump from a twentieth-story window onto a paved road is deadly. The vast ramp at Planica and almost all other ramps in existence had a sector-shaped radius that goes rapidly from steep to level. Where the radius begins is the critical point on the course, and it is always marked by a red line on the snow. If a jumper flies past that point, the technical people responsible are obliged to interrupt the competition immediately and carry on with a shorter descent so the jumpers will no longer breach the red line. Steiner, however, sailed so far past the critical point that he broke the existing world record by about ten meters. There were no more measuring boards where he landed. The compression was so powerful that the violence of his landing caused him to crash-land.
He suffered a concussion, and for an hour, he didn’t know where he was and what had happened. But in the course of the two remaining days of the competition, the Yugoslav judges four times allowed him to start from too far back and fly into the death zone. They wanted to see the new world record and damn the consequences. The ski-jumping event drew fifty thousand spectators. “They want to see me bleed; they want me smashed to little pieces,” said Steiner. He won the event with the greatest lead ever recorded. Steiner then demanded—he now had the authority to do so—that the courses be redesigned; above all, he insisted on a differently calculated mathematical curve in the transition from slope to level. Today, so far as I know, none of the great courses have a sector-shaped level but have instead a curve calculated from Fibonacci numbers—in other words, like part of the spiral curve that one sees in fossilized ammonites. The curve is far longer, so it’s no longer possible to fly straight down onto level ground.
Today’s ski-jumping events are normed, synthetic events in contrast to the days of Steiner’s ecstasy. The profiles of the slopes are adapted to the ballistic curves of the jumpers; no one ever flies as high as the treetops but stays relatively low to the slope. In Steiner’s time, no one wore crash helmets and there were no suits like today’s either. Everything has been calculated down to the last millimeter now, like the suit’s distance from shoulders to crotch relative to the size of the athlete because too low a crotch would be something like carrying an additional sail. The air permeability between front and back is measured by committees because, at the time of the Innsbruck Winter Olympics, the Austrian team introduced suits whose backs were almost airtight, which resulted in the formation of a kind of artificial hunchback that had the effect of wings. I think all the gold medals that year went to Austria. The most clearly visible difference is in the body position of the jumpers. Today they all go with their skis in a V shape, which makes for stability and superior aerodynamics. Steiner in his day jumped with skis parallel and close together because the judges gave points for that. It had been known for a long time from wind-tunnel experiments that the V shape had advantages, and all at once, a solitary Swede started jumping like that. His name is Jan Boklöv, a stubborn visionary character. He was marked down by the judges at every event, but he carried on incorrigibly and so has earned his own place on my list of secret heroes. The next winter, some jumpers copied him, and before long, they were all at it, and the entire system of judges and points had to be revised. The skis we borrowed as kids were not nearly as wide or as flexible as eagle feathers in the air, and we didn’t have ski fastenings that allowed you to lift your heel right out. With all that, the competitors fly through the air horizontally, riding on a pillow of air, and in the case of the very boldest of them, you can see their ears literally between the points of their skis.