Klaus Kinski - Ich bin so wie ich bin (Book review)

Klaus Kinski - Ich bin so wie ich bin (“Klaus Kinski - I’m just the way I am”) is quite possibly the best value film book I have ever discovered. 

Last year I bought this for only €2.76 (plus international postage of about €5 to Ireland) from one of Amazon Germany’s market sellers. Up until very recently it was still available along that priceline though the same seller (MEDIMOPS) that I also got my copy from and who is willing to ship internationally has recently raised the price to around the €15 mark but even at that price it is still a Must Have in my eyes.

This is for what they call the paperback version. The hardcover usually goes for considerably more but even the paperback version is not too far off from being a softcover coffee table book, not a standard sized paperback as one would expect from the description. 

Published in 2001 by DTV this is a 288-page book that is also of interest to international movie fans with no German language skills as it is chock full of often lesser known photos tracing Kinski’s career from his start on the German and Austrian stage to his numerous film parts. 

For those who only know Kinski as a film star, seeing nearly one half of the book dedicated to his theatre work, reciting, recordings etc. will probably come as a surprise but he was indeed first and foremost a serious classical actor, something that from an international point of view had never been that well reported. At one point in his career he had even played with the idea of opening his own theatre and his manic and excessive speech practises had become notorious. 

The book collects essays from a variety of different authors like Georg Seeßlen about the different stages of his life and career as well as a reprint of a famous cover article by leading German news magazine Der Spiegel from as early as 1961. The book also quotes from Kinski’s letters to his first wife. 

The emphasis of this book is very much on Kinski the actor. As such it leaves out most references to his private life. 

Something unknown to me was that prior to any acting success whatsoever Kinski had actually tried making it as an artist and in 1954 even had managed to get a gallery in Berlin to display his charcoal drawings but just two days prior to the opening managed to annoy the gallery owner so much that the grand opening ended up being cancelled on short notice. Kinski, seriously underweight and underfed, had visited the gallery owner at his apartment. The owner took pity on him and gave him a couple of sandwiches that Kinski then shared with the owner’s bull terrier. Despite being repeatedly told not to feed the dog, Kinski kept this up even more aggressively until he was told to leave and to forget about his exhibition. 

Even when Kinski was an up and coming star of the German language stage, he was already prone to scandals and pretty much got fired from just about any theatre that had employed him. He broke stage conventions at the time by throwing kiss hands to an enthusiastic audience or argued excessively when he even heard the slightest murmur from them. 

During stage performances he often changed the classic texts and got in trouble with Bertold Brecht’s wife and publishers over that whereas Schiller had no way to intervene. 

These antics turned him into a Bête Noire for Classic Theatre but also highly successful especially with a younger slightly more rebellious audience. His one-man recitations are sold out. His LP recordings break all sales records for Spoken Word albums. There is traffic chaos at his first public signing and in 1958 he even enthrals an audience of a staggering 80.000 people during an open-air event. 

And as much as he makes financially during that time, it is never enough to finance his life style which eventually brings him to a career in international cinema where he accepts roles based on the money he’ll make with them and only once more in 1971 returns back to the stage in a radical new interpretation of the New Testament that became notorious due to Kinski’s excesses and attacks on audience members. The book highlights how very physically Kinski got involved in the Spaghetti Westerns in scenes that would usually require a stuntman and also points out that in contrast to his stage antics he never really "ruined" a film as such but was often commented upon for his professionalism. This was helped by the fact that he for the most part was never the star of the films and the "lesser" the director the more he could often shine.

 A notable exception to all those points was of course Werner Herzog with whom by chance he had already shared an apartment house for a while when the director was still a teenager. (Of course Kinski ended up being thrown out of the house.) 

Not just his behaviour but also his looks were quite transgressive carrying both male and female traits or looking both young and old. No wonder that he never quite fit into the Hollywood system with his later films but instead had his biggest success with his European roles. 

Klaus Kinski - Ich bin so wie ich bin is an amazing richly illustrated book and at the price this is currently still going for a worthwhile addition to any cult film aficionado's book shelf.

You can BUY THIS BOOK ON AMAZON GERMANY. Please find below some sample images of it.