Germany’s Lost Son, Germany’s Dark Dream: Werner Herzog, Ecstasy, and <em>Einfühlung</em>

Abstract

I maintain terror is not of Germany, but of the soul.-Edgar Allan PoeIn 1837 Georg Buchner, a young genius confronting dark times Germany, created the character Woyzeck a fragmentary drama with name as its title. Woyzeck finds himself betrayed by the woman he loves, as indeed by everyone else, and exclaims Jeder Mensch ist ein Abgrund, es schwindelt einem, wenn man hinabsieht.1 That cry, echoing again as Every man's an abyss-you get dizzy looking in when rendered English for the filmed version Werner Herzog made 1979, could define both the vivid kernel illuminates all of Herzog's work and the distance Herzog maintains from such a state of experience. When 2011 he released his film the Abyss: A Tale of Death, a Tale of Life, many people commented the phrase Into the Abyss could sum up the totality of his work to point. In an interview with Govindi Murty, Herzog confirmed he had seen its significance the same way.2 Yet we also need to acknowledge the phrase as spoken by Buchner's Woyzeck denotes something different from Herzog's. The camera carries us close to an abyssal depth, but the man behind the camera is not, as Woyzeck is, subject to vertigo. Herzog certainly feels drawn to these outermost extremes human experience but every case maintains a kind of serenity, perhaps sometimes an inhuman kind of serenity, as he contemplates the void overwhelms Woyzeck.The position of a filmmaker who so obsessively contemplates himself this act of abysmal contemplation is both fascinating and foreign to an American perspective. Edgar Allan Poe probably comes closest to representing it the American tradition, yet Poe has been cast a most equivocal role among his own countrymen. There he figures too often as the epitome of the wrecked soul, ruined by alcohol and mental infirmity. The quality of his art has constandy been called into question on basis too. T. S. Eliot described Poe's sensibility as pre-adolescent and lacking that which gives dignity to the mature man: a consistent view of life.3 Herzog shares Poe's predilection to look into the furthest recesses concealed within any heart of darkness but, by contrast, demonstrates an utterly unshakable view of life.For this reason, an American sensibility will all too easily perceive an exploration of Herzog's work as being hagiographie if it represents Herzog's own view of his place tradition. The claims to represent poetic truth or ecstatic truth the statement presented on his official website certainly cast him a heroic role.4 When Herzog describes himself as a poet, for example, he clearly attaches himself to a line of cultural inheritance goes far back into history before the advent of film. The human essence he implicidy invokes here does not even have an exact name English, much less an explicit sequence of historical precursors and institutions. In German we know it as Geist. Since this term designates both an individual capacity of spirit or mind and a larger, more general domain, the individual who manifests capacity experiences her or his role the unfolding of Geistesgeschichte. Such individuals identify themselves through a place history understood both as the vicissitudes of Geist time and as the fulfillment of human existence time made comprehensible through the universality of Geist. Herzog takes on the function of mediating an inheritance with origins more than two centuries the past and includes not only the poets but also the representatives of Bil-dung-the gathering of knowledge the humane purposes of the Geisteswissenschaften.Though Herzog has chosen the medium of film, the innovations he has achieved as a filmmaker are often better understood as expressions of older tradition renewed by technological means. Film scholarship naturally tends to emphasize questions raised by a constandy evolving technology and its institutions are medium specific. …