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 fundamen… - Werner Herzog

I have experienced comparable transformations in the realm of communications, beginning with ancient times. I remember the man working for the mayor's office in Wüstenrot in Swabia, a few hours from Munich and Sachrang, where my brother and I later lived for a year with our father. He was the town crier. There's an archaic German word for it. I heard him make his way through the village up to the Raitelberg, ringing his bell to get people's attention. Every three or four houses, he would stop and call out his "Hear ye, hear ye!" and announce official decrees and deadlines. From my early childhood, I knew what radio and newspapers were even though we didn't always have electricity, but I never saw a film. I had no notion of cinema. I didn't know such a thing existed until one day a man with a mobile projector came to us in our one-room village school in Sachrang and showed us

Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.

But walking became more important and more explicit in connection with my grandfather Rudolf, my father's father; I had the sense of walking in his landscapes. I was closer to him than to my actual father. I think it all had to do with the way the turn-of-the-century generation had deeper historical roots than the generation of my parents, who quit the continuum of European culture when they opted for National Socialism. They descended into a vague Germano-mystical archaism and went under with it. Perhaps I am being too subjectively concentrated on my own family here. Families are strange creatures, and mine is no exception. In addition, there is the circumstance that I knew my grandfather only when he was already insane.