For such an advanced civilization as ours to be without images that are adequate to it is as serious a defect as being without memory. - Werner Herzog

I'm completely aware and utterly aware that Russia [the Soviet Union] lost 25 million people for winning the war, and I know that Russian troops were the ones who liberated concentration camps, Auschwitz and others, and I'm aware that there's an incredible sacrifice on the side of Russia, and I do believe that it's ignored because of course of political interests. It's very much the question what are the facts, maybe 600 or so thousand American soldiers lost their lives in the Second World War, 25–26 million Russian. Those are facts that cannot be ignored, and today it's not that really important what really happened, it's more the question who owns the narrative, and occupying the narrative has created some sort of lopsided ideologies in lopsided information, that we see every day.

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 the most exotic people in the world right now.

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