By the time I was twenty-one, I had made two shorts and was dead set on making a full-length feature. But at that time, it was unthinkable for a young man to be entrusted with such a project. There was no one under thirty-five in the profession anywhere. Several things came together at the same time. I was continuing to earn money for my productions and did occasional stints at the university. That was mostly fraudulent, but it got me a little extra money through a scholarship even though I wasn’t learning anything. I had no time. I remember asking a fellow student to write a term paper for me, which he did quite effortlessly. In jest, he asked me what I would do for him in return, and joking back, I promised I would make him immortal. His name is Hauke Stroszek. At a public event in 2017, forty-five years after my time in Munich, when I was given a European Film Award, a young woman introduced herself to me as his daughter. Hauke Stroszek had lately retired as a professor at a university in North Rhine-Westphalia. His last name was given by me to the main character in my screenplay Signs of Fire, which I went on to film in 1967 as Signs of Life. I later called my second film Stroszek, which I made in 1976 with Bruno S. (of whom more later). Also, when I was somewhat better known, I entered a literary competition sponsored by Münchener Abendzeitung, and for a bet, I submitted five separate short texts. There were prizes for the ten best entries, the writer had to be under twenty-five, and the texts had to begin with “A young person stood in the middle . . .” Impersonating a clutch of young authors, I entered five pieces, among them a poem by a pseudonymous Wenzel Stroszek.
I received four congratulatory telegrams at my grandmother’s address in Grosshesselohe; my fifth entry went unrewarded and so I lost my bet.
But there were some things in my studies that 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; in fact, it was a set of five clumsy mutually reinforcing forgeries, one supposedly going all the way back to Julius Caesar and Nero. This feigned title deed had to do with expanding the power of the rising Habsburgs, in this case, Rudolf IV, and the definition of their territory, which is almost identical with that of present-day Austria. The false documents led to the establishing of legally binding conditions and ultimately to the creation of the state of Austria. The falsification was already recognized by the Renaissance poet Petrarch, but in historical terms, it was crowned with success. It was an early instance of fake news, and I developed in my work a method that—not that I knew it—had never previously been used. Because my films to this day are preoccupied with questions of factuality, reality, and truth, in the sense of what I am pleased to call “ecstatic truth,” I offer no more than a short account of it here. I declared, even if it was illogical, that the “privilegium” was a true account and knocked props into the ground to view the documents from all possible perspectives while always using a contemporary argumentation of the time—power politics, social change, understanding of the law, balance of military power—and at the end, one could take out the props and one still had a supportable tissue of argument. In other words, the falsification, the fake news, turned in its structure to truth because history had anchored its changes there, as in an evolving truth.
What seemed to me a natural way of proceeding somehow got attention. Because I knew it would be hopeless to try to make a feature film right away, I accepted a scholarship to go to the United States—I barely had to apply for it. People were surprised that I wasn’t a historian, but I was applying to a university that had cameras and a film studio to be able to work practically and continue my development as a filmmaker. My early short films had been my only apprenticeship. I could have gone to a more prestigious university, but I chose Pittsburgh because I had the sentimental notion that if I went there I wouldn’t be tied up with academic waffle because I’d be in a city with real down-to-earth working people. Pittsburgh was the steel city and I felt drawn to it because I had worked in a steel factory myself. At the same time, at twenty-one, in the space of a few weeks, I wrote my screenplay Signs of Fire and entered it for the Carl Mayer Prize, which was named for the author of such celebrated silent films as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and The Last Laugh. A few months later, by now just twenty-two, I was awarded the prize of five thousand deutsche marks, but because it hadn’t been awarded the previous year, I was given ten thousand marks in 1964, the prize money for both years. With that, I would be able to make another short film right away. Every established and up-and-coming filmmaker had entered; I remember that Volker Schlöndorff was one of my competitors with his Young Törless. Later on, that became an important argument vis-à-vis the film-funding people who liked to turn me down but funded the projects of others. I was able to point to my screenplay being chosen ahead of all others, plus I had already made films, which was not the case with my rivals. Pittsburgh turned out to have been a bad idea; for a start, the steel industry was almost dead; it was in precipitous decline, and the shuttered plants were rusting away; and secondly Duquesne University, which had the film studio, turned out to be an intellectually impoverished place. I had no idea that there were differences among universities. Later, for other reasons, I came to love and respect the city.
People didn’t fly in the early sixties, and I had won another competition for a free Atlantic crossing. I took passage on the Bremen, where a year before me, Siegfried and Roy had worked as stewards, diverting the passengers with magic tricks before going on to Las Vegas. 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 eight hundred passengers was empty after two days. There was one round table where the tough customers had left their own allotted places for the company of their fellows who were still walking. Martje was on her way to begin a literature degree in Wisconsin. The heavy seas didn’t bother her. The view of the Statue of Liberty didn’t interest us; we were engrossed in a game of shuffleboard on deck. Later, she concluded her studies in Freiburg, and we got married. She is the mother of my first son, Rudolph. He bears the names of three very important persons in my life: Rudolph, Amos, and Achmed. Rudolph after my grandfather—oddly, I always thought his name ended with a ph and it’s only while taking a closer look for these memoirs that I saw it’s actually Rudolf with an f. Amos after the American author, festival director, and film distributor Amos Vogel, who, like Lotte Eisner, was a mentor of mine. I remember his taking me aside after three years or so of marriage and asking me if everything was all right. Of course it was all right. “Why don’t you have any children then?” he asked right out. I thought, Well, indeed, why not? So Amos, who fled from the Nazis under the grimmest imaginable circumstances from Vienna to the United States, was a sort of godfather. And Achmed after the last remaining worker of my grandparents’. My first time in Cos, when I was fifteen, I looked him up and introduced myself to him as the grandson of “Rodolfo.” Achmed started to cry, then he threw open all the cupboards, drawers, doors, and windows, and told me, “All this is yours.” He had a fourteen-year-old granddaughter as well and suggested that I might want to marry her. It wasn’t easy to get him to drop the idea and gradually accept my cautious objections—I was too young; I couldn’t feed a family—until I promised him I would name my firstborn son after Rudolf and him. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and in spite of ethnic cleansing, he managed to remain behind on the now-Greek island. Achmed worked as a guard in the archaeological digs at the Asclepieion on Cos, but every day he was put through a martyrdom. When he spread out his prayer rug, the children threw stones at him and yelled, “Achmed! Achmed!” But he said his prayers and endured it all. There is a sequence with him in my film Signs of Life. He lost his wife, his daughter, and even his granddaughter; all he had left at the time I next saw him when I was making preparations for the film was his dog, Bondchuk. But that day, Achmed again threw open all the wardrobes and drawers and doors and windows, and instead of a greeting, all he said was: “Bondchuk apethane, Bondchuk apethane,” or Bondchuk is dead. His dog had died the previous day. We sat together crying for a long time and said nothing.
In Pittsburgh it soon became clear to me that I was in the wrong place, and after a week, I knew that I couldn’t stay. There was the film studio, true, but that was set up like a TV news studio, with a desk for the newscaster flanked by three maneuverable but extremely heavy electronic cameras. Old-fashioned spotlights were fixed to the ceiling and you couldn’t take them down or move them. But quitting school would have meant losing my visa status and therefore having to leave the United States right away. So I kept my registration but gave up my lodgings. There was a group of young writers clustered around a magazine at the university; I published my first short story there. In my memory, it all feels blurred, events piled on top of each other. Sometimes I would sleep on the library floor, but that had its downside because the cleaners would find me there at six in the morning. I switched among the sofas of various acquaintances and my original host, a professor, forty but terrified of his mother, who forbade him contact with female students and perhaps women in general. In front of the window at his place, there were dark trees and chipmunks, which have 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. I admitted to the mother of my host that a woman had visited him the night before, but I claimed that she had been with her fiancé, another student. The fiancé was my host’s invention. The mother fed her son as if he were a little kid—or, 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 2009 film called 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, playing the part of Orestes in a theater production, can no longer keep performance and reality apart, and ends up killing his mother with a stage prop, a Turkish saber.
A freak chance changed everything. My temporary abode was in a place called Fox Chapel that was in the hills way outside of 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 I was walking this last stretch, I noticed I was several times passed by a woman in a car. Usually, all the seats were full of youngsters. On that day, it had started raining, and I wasn’t dressed for it. The car drew up beside me, and the woman wound down her window; she could give me a lift; this wasn’t hiking weather. It was a two-minute drive to Fox Chapel; that made a hundred and twenty seconds. Where was I from anyway? Germany, I was a “Kraut.” My expression made everyone in the car crack up. Where was I staying? I explained my situation. Oh, said the woman, she knew the man, he was a weirdo, or worse, he was a wacko, a wacko-weirdo. Without hesitating, 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. So, from one minute to the next, I found myself adopted in this family as though I’d always been part of it. The name of the mother was Evelyn Franklin. She had six children between seventeen and twenty-seven, and she said a seventh would be good, seeing as her oldest daughter had just married and moved out. So there was a vacancy in the gang. The father had died an alcoholic, which must have meant years of misery for Evelyn. She only mentioned him briefly in passing, and always as Mr. Franklin. The youngest 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, and then another, twenty-five, a little slow and with a soft heart, who some people considered mentally disabled. As a child, he had fallen out of a moving car and since then had been a little slow. 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 otherwise just junk. It had a pitched roof, and it was only in the middle under the rooftree that I could stand upright.
I straightaway became part of the daily madness. Evelyn commuted into the city; she had a job as a secretary in an insurance company. The twins came back in the afternoon from high school in Fox Chapel, often with friends in tow. Long before that, though, from eight o’clock on, the grandmother would be trying to rouse Billy, who had usually been rocking in some bar until 3 a.m. She would go pounding on his locked door every half hour or so, trying to convert him from his sinful life, reading Bible quotes to him. The dog, who had a kind of symbiotic emotional 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 howled his accompaniment, but knowing what was coming next, he kicked up his back paws in the air. Billy switched into an imaginary canine language and started dragging Benjamin Franklin down the stairs by the back paws, a little like the way that Christopher Robin hauled Winnie-the-Pooh downstairs after him. At each carpeted landing, he stopped to resume lamenting his sinful scrapes in dog language. Down in the living room, the twins and their squealing girlfriends fled the naked youth, who now set off in pursuit of his runaway grandmother. Billy now proclaimed his jeremiads in a mixture of Old Testament prophet and cocker spaniel.
It was by no means unusual in this atmosphere of chaotic creativity for the twins to set off after me, squirting me with Woolworth’s eau de cologne. They were full of ideas. One day I spotted them plotting an ambush for me behind the door that led down to the garage, and 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, but there was only an inch or so of loose snow, which I thought was enough padding for my leap. I landed on the spiral concrete staircase that led down into the garage. My ankle made a penetrating sound that I can hear to this day; it was like a wet branch snapping when you step on it. The fracture was so complicated that I was operated on and encased in a plaster cast up to my hip. After a month of that, I was given a walking cast, which only went up to my knee.
I loved the Franklins. With them, I got to know some of the deepest and best things about America. Later on, I invited them to Munich and took them to Sachrang for a village party. Hugs, beer, squeals, and whoops. I took them up the Geigelstein. Contact got harder in later years because the entire family, Billy included, went over to fundamentalism. When I did see them, I could hardly recognize them, they’d all put on so much weight. When I was playing the villain in a 2012 Hollywood action film—it was Jack Reacher, and the director, Christopher McQuarrie, and the star, Tom Cruise, both wanted me—the filming was in Pittsburgh. But I couldn’t find the Franklins anymore; they were scattered to the four winds. I drove out to Fox Chapel. Almost everything in the area had changed; there were new buildings everywhere; it was very depressing. The house on Oak Spring Drive was almost unchanged; the lawn had the same old broad-leaved trees; but the path down to the garage was grown over with flowering shrubs. There was no one home. I tried several of the neighbors, found an elderly couple, and learned that the house had changed owners several times. I knew that Evelyn Franklin had died. A year later, I heard that Billy had died too; he had been like another brother to me. We had recognized our kinship almost instantly.
The twins and their girlfriends were wild with excitement because a new British band was playing the Civic Arena. They were called the Rolling Stones. So far, all these groups and pop culture as a whole had passed me by. The one exception was Elvis, whose first film I had seen in Munich, and the kids all around me started quietly and methodically taking the place apart. I remember the police being called. Now in Pittsburgh the twins took a piece of cardboard to the concert with the name of their favorite, Brian, on it. He was their front man at the time; not long after, he was found drowned in his swimming pool. I still remember my astonishment at the commotion and the girls’ screams. When the concert was over, I saw that many of the plastic bucket seats were steaming. A lot of the girls had pissed themselves. When I saw that, I knew this was going to be big. Much later, in Fitzcarraldo, Mick Jagger played the second 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. Mick Jagger was so peculiar, so unique, that I didn’t want to recast his part, so I wrote it out of the script altogether. I only had him on contract for three more weeks anyway, because the Stones had a world tour coming up and the dates were all fixed. He was to play Wilbur in my film, 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.