The windmills of Crete I literally stumbled upon. It happened in the course of one of my early enterprises; I am no longer certain of the timing. I had visited Crete previously, at the end of my schooldays, with friends from the “group of saints,” but then we were mostly in the center and west of the island, in Rethymnon and Chania, and Hora Sfakion in the south. And I went there again on the trail of my grandfather Rudolf; I think this was immediately after I finished school. I had Cretan friends in Munich, with whom I had started speaking Greek. Then in the summer I joined a convoy of trucks that had been bought used in Munich and each had a car or two loaded on board. The aim was to get them to Athens, and then on a ferry to Crete, to sell them there. I had chipped in with some money and knew I would make enough from the deal to get across to Africa. I remember leaving Munich and heading south for Salzburg as the taillight of the column with an elderly Cretan farmer in front of me who had never seen such a straight stretch of road. He drove in squiggles, as though he were on the hairpins of his native island.
When I finally reached Crete, I was invited to stay with him in the village of Ano Archanes. I was offered the practically never used “best room” that was only used for official occasions like weddings and wakes. I slept on the floor. I noticed how, when the window shutters were pushed open, there was something jumping on the floor like champagne bubbles. In the light, these turned out to be fleas, thousands of them, which I bore uncomplainingly so as not to embarrass my hosts. Ano Archanes is situated on the lowest slopes of the island’s highest mountain, Psiloritis, the Mount Ida of antiquity, the birthplace of Zeus; with a few of the young men, I went hunting on its slopes for wild goats and partridges. Not long ago, I ran into an old photo of myself, shotgun in hand. There is a partridge dangling from my belt, and I have a knotted handkerchief on my head against the sun. I am standing there in profile, probably to show off my partridge. I had grown into a fit-looking young fellow, but shortly after, in Africa, sick, I was frighteningly reduced. There is another picture of me in Crete riding on a donkey that I had hired for a few weeks. I called him Gaston, I can’t for the life of me recall why, though I know that it seemed important to me at the time. I walked practically the entire length of the oblong island, not along the coast but through the mountains of the interior, trotting after the donkey that carried water and some food. I was completely alone and relished the fact that I was now an independent adult. When Gaston stopped, so did I, and when, after some geeing-up, he decided to go on, so did I. In the far east of the island, I came to a ridge where the rock suddenly fell away. Perfectly unprepared from one moment to the next, I saw below me a wide valley full of thousands of windmills all in motion, their white canvas sails turning, like a meadow full of thousands of crazy spinning flowers, a field of demented daisies. There was no village, no hut, just these windmills. I sat down, thunderstruck. I knew that this cannot be, this cannot be. I had a dreadful fear that I had gone mad because the sight wouldn’t go away, as a mirage would. I remember thinking: this is too soon, too soon. When I am as old as my grandfather then, presumably, I will follow him into madness. But this is too soon. I somehow collected myself when I started to hear quiet creaking sounds from down below. Could it be real after all? Did I still have my wits about me? I finally climbed down, and from close to, I could see that they were indeed windmills, all of them pumping up groundwater to irrigate the plain. It was called “the valley of the ten thousand windmills.” Only a year ago, the mayor of the nearby town of Lasithi wrote to me to ask if I would support efforts to restore the windmills to their original state. They all have been demolished and replaced by electric motors.
Three years later, I wrote the screenplay for Signs of Life. The protagonist, a World War Two German soldier with a head wound, is detailed with a couple of comrades to guard a fort on which, in boredom, they set fireworks improvised from explosives. On a reconnaissance expedition in the mountains, the patrol comes to the spot where I first saw the windmills. At the sight of them, the soldier becomes mentally unbalanced and starts shooting wildly about him. From the fort, he attacks the harbor and the town with horizontally aimed fireworks, makes war on friend and foe alike, and finally shoots at the rising sun. In the end, he has to be overpowered by his own men. The story was inspired by a novella by the Romantic author Achim von Arnim called The Crazed Invalid in Fort Ratonneau, but my plot went off in another direction. I can remember the novella begins with an old major who has lost his leg reminiscing at his fireside. He talks himself into such a rage, he fails to notice when his wooden leg catches fire.
There are various recurring tropes in my films that are almost always derived from personal experience. On the whole, films are not inclined to be abstract conceptions. There has been no shortage of speculation, for instance, on the empty, driverless car that goes around in circles in my film Even Dwarfs Started Small (1970). There are other circles in other films, and they all go back to the time when I was seventeen or eighteen. I had a job as a spot welder on the nightshift, which wasn’t badly paid as night work was paid extra, but then I had to be at school in the daytime, which in my exhausted condition I barely registered. There was also danger money because we were continually exposed to flying particles of burning metal. I always worked in a leather apron, but late at night, I got less careful, and some of the glowing scraps would bounce off the apron and not infrequently land inside my shoes at more than a thousand degrees centigrade. I would hit the roof with agony, but by the time I had pulled my shoes off, I had burns each time. The insides of my feet were always blistered.
I gave up the spot-welding job at the time of the Oktoberfest in Munich to work as a parking warden. That was really well-paid work. For the sixteen days of the beer fest, the area is overrun by hundreds of thousands of visitors, but back then, in 1959 or 1960, a small section of the meadow wasn’t filled with roller coasters and merry-go-rounds and shooting booths and beer tents but was left as grass for cars to park. This work was even more lucrative because some friends of mine had devised a way of selling each ticket twice over. We were issued blocks of a hundred tickets but managed to reuse them. There was always a torn-off part that was stuck under the windshield wipers, and the other was given to the driver. What we did was talk the drivers into giving us back their part, then at night we pressed the usually crumpled tickets flat and stuck them together. And so we sold them a second time—which we called “doubles”—and some we even used a third time and these were “trebles.” The beer tents stopped serving at 10 p.m., and by midnight, the place was usually completely empty. In those two hours, we earned our money as parking wardens. At that time, drunk driving was viewed as a technical offense; there were no seat belts, and traffic lights hadn’t really caught on. But after 10 p.m., I was dealing with drunks, hundreds of them, sometimes crammed into cars and everyone completely plastered. These car groups were always aggressive and occasionally dangerous. Sometimes I was sideswiped by starting cars when I tried to stop them and persuade the drivers to take a taxi. It was basically too much responsibility for me to handle; remember, I was still a schoolboy at the time. The police were nowhere around; they were busy dealing with fights and blackouts. In cases where the drivers were so drunk that every yard they traveled could be fatal to themselves and others, I would demand the keys, but that didn’t often get results. So I reached in through the open window and snatched them. Some of the drivers would try to sock me as I reached in. One man bit me in the arm. Another tore out a hank of my hair. Anyway, we got the daredevil drivers out of their cars and laid them out on the grass in a row. Usually, they would fall asleep like babies. Long after midnight, the police would show up, and I would give them the keys to the cars. The drunks were taken to cells to sober up. Before then, if I was bored, I sometimes used to take some of the cars for a spin. I didn’t yet have a license, so I contented myself with driving around and around the empty beer fest meadows; I didn’t trust myself to go out on actual roads. One night in one of the cars, I found a so-called spider, a rubber cable with a hook attached. I turned the steering wheel as far as it would go, then fixed the cable to it and had myself driven around and around in circles without having to touch the wheel. Then I had the idea of putting a weight on the accelerator pedal, found a stone that did the trick, and got out. From that time on, I usually had at least one driverless car going endlessly around and around, sometimes two. That image etched itself into my brain.
Elements from such personal depths had a habit of popping up in my stories. My mother once described it in an interview like this: “All the time he was at school, Werner never learned anything. He never read the books he was supposed to read; he never studied. It seemed he never knew the things he was meant to know. But then, in fact, Werner always knew everything. His senses were extraordinary. He could pick out some note or sound and ten years later remember it exactly. He would talk about it and use it in some way. He’s completely incapable of explaining anything. He knows, he sees, he understands, but he can’t explain. That’s not in his nature. With him, everything goes in. And if it comes out again, then it will be in some altered form.” It’s not an easy matter, quoting one’s own mother, and I don’t think she’s always right. I do think I’ve learned to explain a thing or two, maybe. But I have a deep aversion to too much introspection, to navel-gazing.
I’d rather die than go to an analyst, because it’s my view that something fundamentally wrong happens there. If you harshly light every last corner of a house, the house will be uninhabitable. It’s like that with your soul; if you light it up, shadows and darkness and all, people will become “uninhabitable.” I am convinced that it’s psychoanalysis—along with quite a few other mistakes—that has made the twentieth century so terrible. As far as I’m concerned, the twentieth century, in its entirety, was a mistake.