In 2013, the German actress Pola Kinski, daughter of one of the most infamous film stars who ever lived, published her autobiography. Entitled Kindermund (“The Mouth of a Child”), it explained in harrowing detail what it was like to be the first-born child of Klaus Kinski. From the ages of 5 to 19, she was forced into an incestuous sexual relationship with her father, starting with open-mouthed kisses and culminating in many years of rape.
Pola’s mother, the singer Gislinde Kühlbeck, was blind to it all, wilfully or otherwise. Kinski’s younger daughter Nastassja, however, has backed up Pola’s account, adding for the record that her father would embrace her, too, “in a sexual manner” when she was 4-5 years old, but never had sex with her. She has called her half-sister “a heroine” for speaking out and lifting the weight of this terrible secret at long last.
These bombshell revelations are beyond myth, and have totally reframed any possible perspectives on Kinski as a man and artist. It feels repugnant even to consider his fabled genius as a performer in this light. All the accumulated lore about his legendarily monstrous, egomaniacal, and disturbed behaviour – did he really shoot an extra’s finger off during Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972)? Is it true that multiple filmmakers quite seriously thought about having him killed? – can’t be sifted through as entertaining scuttlebutt any more. Legends can be toyed with, confirmed or debunked. Blunt facts, when they’re this hideous, get the last word.
He should know. Drawn back again and again like an addict to a terrible drug, Herzog braved production with Kinski on five films: Aguirre, Nosferatu (1979), Woyzeck (1979), Fitzcarraldo (1982) and Cobra Verde (1987). On every one of these shoots, Kinski would scream the house down, refuse to be directed, and make mortal enemies of the crew and supporting cast.
The new documentary Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer gives a mere sketch of their relationship, but some of the behind-the-scenes footage, of Kinski letting rip in one of his colossal tantrums, reminds us afresh what a glutton for punishment the director truly was. They’d met when Herzog was 13, at a dingy boarding house in Munich. Kinski was the starving artist across the street – or at least, posing as such – when the owner of the joint let him move in rent-free for about three months.
In Herzog’s 1999 documentary My Best Fiend, which focuses entirely on their dealings together, the director revisits this apartment and explains to its new occupants, in that unsettlingly calm voice of his, what chaos ensued. “Of course, from day one, he terrorised everyone.” One of Kinski’s more routine habits was screaming at the landlady for not ironing his shirt collars well enough.
When a theatre critic came to supper, and said he was planning to praise the actor’s performance in a new production as “extraordinary”, Kinski responded by throwing cutlery and potatoes in the man’s face. “I was not extraordinary – I was monumental!” He also locked himself in the bathroom for two entire days. As Herzog remembers, “He smashed everything, to the point where you could sift it all through a tennis racket.”
Fifteen years later, Kinski was the first and last person Herzog thought of to play the deranged conquistador Lope de Aguirre in his first masterpiece. Kinski was coming off a one-man stage show about the life of Jesus Christ, which had devolved into something like a psychotic circus act: jeering audiences would show up to watch him proclaim his omnipotence into a microphone and fling it contemptuously across the stage.