Klaus kinski

Klaus Kinski was one of Germany’s most celebrated postwar actors. Although he appeared in more than 130 films, including five for the director Werner Herzog, he began his career on the stage, returning in 1971 to perform a monologue, Jesus Christus Erlöser, before an audience of 6,000 in West Berlin. Benjamin Myers has long been fascinated by the surviving footage of Kinski’s performance and, in his latest novel, Jesus Christ Kinski, he attempts to recreate it on the page. He divides the book into two ‘acts’. The first consists of Kinski’s interior monologue as he struggles with both his own demons and an increasingly hostile audience. In the second, an

Many movie actors are famous for their unmistakable voices – people like Sean Connery, John Wayne and Peter Lorre, who all pub comedians mimic. But how many directors are like that? Only one: the German auteur Werner Herzog, hero of the New German Cinema, who at the age of 81 has published this headspinning, free-associating memoir. Its German title, Jeder Für Sich Und Gott Gegen Alle, was also the original, anarchic title of Herzog’s 1974 film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, based on the true story of a boy reportedly brought up in an isolated darkened cell. Herzog’s rasping, lilting, inscrutably sibilant and sinister voice, a vital part of all