My heroes have a lot in common. Fabius Maximus, who is mocked to this day as a cunctator, or delayer, but who saved Rome from Hannibal’s Carthaginian army; Hercules Seghers, a painter of the early Rembrandt era who was barely noticed but is considered the father of modernity and made paintings of a kind that would not be seen for several centuries. Or Carlo Gesualdo, the Prince of Venosa, who composed music fully three hundred years ahead of its time—I’m thinking here principally of his sixth book of madrigals—not until Stravinsky, who went on pilgrimages to Gesualdo’s castle, did we hear such sounds again. Also included is Pharaoh Akhenaton, who introduced an early form of monotheism half a millennium before Moses. After his death, his name was expunged from all temples, buildings, and steles. He was rubbed off all lists, and his statues smashed to rubble. I arranged an installation on Hercules Seghers for the biennial at the Whitney, which was later shown at the Getty; I made a film called Gesualdo: Death for Five Voices; and there were a few short-lived plans for a film on Akhenaton.
At the Cannes Film Festival, sometime in the mid-seventies, the Lebanese French producer Jean-Pierre Rassam, who had just completed La Grande Bouffe in a crazy race against time, proposed that we make a film together. “But what subject?” he asked. “Akhenaton,” I replied. Thereupon the producer emptied our just-opened bottle of champagne on the tiled floor, declared it to be flat, and ordered another. Champagne at the Carlton was criminally expensive. We touched glasses to the project, which I was already certain was completely unfeasible. “How much money do you want,” he asked, “to start on the preparations?” I said: “A million dollars,” whereupon he pulled out his checkbook and wrote out a check for a million dollars. At that stage, he had already gone broke several times; he took drugs, and not many years later, he, in fact, died of an overdose. But he was a wild, productive man, and I loved him. I never cashed the check. For years I kept it pinned above my desk to look at; the check had a longer life than poor Rassam.
The most important of all my heroes, though, was the Siegel Hans. In Bavarian dialect, we put the definite article before the name and the family name before the given name. It’s the way the Hungarians do it too. Siegel Hans was named after the farm where he lived; I don’t know his actual surname to this day. He was a young and incredibly strong woodcutter who delighted us all with his boldness. In one unforgettable fight in the village pub, he got the better of Beni, the young farmer from the Berger farm. Beni had a trunk like an oak tree, and for years no one dared to call him out. Then one day in the pub, Siegel Hans provoked him, and the innkeeper pushed the two of them out into the gents’ because he didn’t want his bar to come to harm. Some people wanted to separate the pugilists, but most were in favor of letting matters take their course. “Leave them to it,” they pleaded, “then we’ll finally see which one’s stronger.” There, in the bathroom, whither all the male clients had followed, battle was joined, and Hans finally won. He got Beni in a headlock and rammed his head into a newly installed china pissoir. Or maybe it was a toilet bowl and that part of the story is apocryphal because I can remember pissing against a tin wall with a metal gutter for drainage. At any rate, Hans rammed Beni so forcefully against the bowl that his brow was ripped open and hung down over one eye. “Yer had enough now? Yer had enough now?” Hans kept saying to Beni before ramming him into the toilet again until, bleeding profusely, Beni called it quits. We lads heard about this with amazement. For us, Hans had already been deified when one day the milk truck caused the bridge at the back of the Berger farm to collapse. It was a narrow wooden bridge, and only the truck’s front wheels had made it across to the far side; it looked as though it were trying desperately to hang on with both hands. Everything else had slumped into the streambed along with the wreckage of the bridge. Horses were sent for to tow the truck with its heavy tank of milk, but this wasn’t even attempted because the thing probably weighed ten tons. Someone suggested getting Siegel Hans because he owned a caterpillar tractor. This was something resembling a small tractor, only it ran on caterpillar tracks like a tank. It was usually used for dragging heavy tree trunks out of the forest. But after Hans had been brought to the site of the mishap, he took a quick look at the damage and remarked that his vehicle wasn’t powerful enough for this. We boys had an inkling of what was coming next. Hans climbed down into the stream and began by pulling off his shirt. I presume now with the wisdom of hindsight that this was to show off his extraordinary muscles. He looked like the fellows who nowadays compete for the title of Mr. Universe. Hans bent down and picked up the back end of the truck; and with all the strength in him, he tried to do the impossible. The mere effort delighted us. His muscles bulged; his carotid artery swelled; his face turned purple. Then he gave up the magnificent effort. The next day a crane was deployed, and it finally managed to hoist the milk truck out of the stream.
Siegel Hans was involved in all the smuggling in Sachrang, and everyone there smuggled. The border to Tyrol was no more than half a mile away. My mother would take me and my brother over the border, buy some cheap fabric, and wrap it around us underneath our clothes. On the way home, I looked like a little Michelin Man even though I was just four years old, but the customs guards turned a blind eye to us because they felt sorry for our poverty. From my mother’s stories, I already knew about a few of Siegel Hans’s rousing deeds. Once, he had smuggled in a barrel of butterfat strapped onto his back and almost walked into a night patrol in the mountains. To steer clear of them, he climbed down a sheer rock face but lost his way on the rocks. Not until late the next morning did he find his way out of the face, but because the sun had long since risen, the solid contents of the barrel had melted and kept slopping out as he climbed. It was possible to follow his steps many days later through the broad traces of lard. But his most exciting action was something we witnessed ourselves. At issue were some five tons of contraband coffee, as we were informed much later. At any rate, word had got out, and one night the police were on their way to arrest Siegel Hans. He was able to escape out of a window. All he had on him was his trumpet, and the next morning when it got light, he blew down on his trumpet from the Spitzstein. The police gave chase, but by the time they got to the summit, he was blowing from the cloven top of the Mühlhorn or the peak of the Geigelstein on the other side of the valley. The police, humiliated, called up more and more reinforcements, but Hans continued tooting at them from peak to peak. We heard him. We saw troops of police running through the valley and up the slopes, but neither they nor the officials stationed at the pass got a glimpse of him. He was like a phantom. We children knew why they couldn’t catch him. As far as we were concerned, he had run from the Spitzstein all along the border heading into the sunset until he had run right around the whole of Germany to the Geigelstein on its east-facing side. It was the only way he could avoid having to go down into the valley. Twelve days later, he surrendered to the police, but by then, he had a mythic status among his admirers. Not many years ago, the Bayerischer Rundfunk made a film about Siegel Hans, and that made it clear to me that he almost died under the terrible conditions in the Kufstein Fortress where he was imprisoned.
Many years later, when a large part of the political establishment in Germany had given up any idea of reunification, I had the thought of following the border around my own country. I can remember an official declaration from Willy Brandt to the effect that for him “the book of German reunification” was now closed. At that time, he was following a politics of “small steps,” which meant aligning the socialist GDR with the West by means of small, practical, mostly economic measures. There was a certain logic too in improving the lives of the GDR inhabitants; it was in this way that one of my greatest cameramen, Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein, was freed from his prison in East Germany. A few days after they had started building the Wall in 1961, he had been caught entering the GDR with a valid second passport for his fiancée to get her out. In a show trial, he had been accused of working for the CIA because they had been able to prove that he had once worked for a couple of weeks as an assistant cameraman for Sender Freies Berlin, which was partly financed by the Americans. The charge was attempted human trafficking in the interests of the class enemy. Jörg refused to disclose his fiancée’s name. To soften him up, he was made to spend half a year in the “hot room” in Bautzen in a cell through which the heating pipes ran. He was finally sentenced to five years in prison, but after just three and a half, he was allowed to go in exchange for a wagonload of butter. What I found oppressive at the time was the way that a lot of intellectuals, the writer Günter Grass among them, had vehemently opposed the idea of German reunification. For that reason, I heartily detested him. The fact that shortly before he died Grass confessed to having been in the SS didn’t surprise me, but I had some admiration for his courage in dealing with his past. I thought only its poets would be able to keep Germany together. I wanted to make a loop around Germany, to hold it together like a belt. I started off at the Ölberg Chapel outside Sachrang on the Austrian border and climbed the Spitzstein as Siegel Hans had done, and from there, as he did, I would follow the border west until, at the end of my tour of the country, I would circle around on the eastern side of the Geigelstein.