Americans believe that they are normal, that they make sense, and that the rest of the world is exotic. They do not seem to understand that they are … - Werner Herzog

Taking a close look at what is around us, there is some sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate vileness and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle — we in comparison to that enormous articulation — we only sound and look like badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel, a cheap novel. And we have to become humble in front of this overwhelming misery and overwhelming fornication, overwhelming growth, and overwhelming lack of order. Even the stars up here in the sky look like a mess. There is no harmony in the universe. We have to get acquainted to this idea that there is no harmony as we have conceived it. But when I say this all full of admiration for the jungle, it is not that I hate it. I love it. I love it very much, but I love it against my better judgment.

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 here. If you harshly light every last corner of a house, the house 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.

But his most exciting action was something we witnessed ourselves. At issue were some five tons of contraband coffee, as we were informed much later. At any rate, word had got out, and one night the police were on their way to arrest Siegel Hans. He was able to escape out of a window. All he had on him was his trumpet, and the next morning when it got light, he blew down on his trumpet from the Spitzstein. The police gave chase, but by the time they got to the summit, he was blowing from the cloven top of the Mühlhorn or the peak of the Geigelstein on the other side of the valley. The police, humiliated, called up more and more reinforcements, but Hans continued tooting at them from peak to peak. We heard him. We saw troops of police running through the valley and up the slopes, but neither they nor the officials stationed at the pass got a glimpse of him. He was like a phantom. We children knew why they couldn't catch him. As far as we were concerned, he had run from the Spitzstein all along the border heading into the sunset until he had run right around the whole of Germany to the Geigelstein on its east-facing side. It was the only way he could avoid having to go down into the valley. Twelve days later, he surrendered to the police, but by then, he had a mythic status among his admirers.