"You know, school, I really hated it. We spent half a year Goethe's Iphigenia, and another six months reading his ‘Faust’. It was terrible, inhuman... I have never read ‘Faust’ since, because it made me vomit.
At the time I knew: something decisive is missing there. All that pseudo-academic analysis and pulling to pieces! All the love we could have developed for these things was knocked out of us.
And I always found it important to be able to develop a simple fondness for a literary work or a painting, and today I know even more: Nowadays, when I see a film, say, by Murnau: Nosferatu or when I see Todd Browning's ‘Freaks’, or other films, there are times when a sudden realization comes over me, and then I know I am no longer alone.
There are such moments in film-making and such moments in real life, too. And it's well worth while putting up with years of humiliation for that. To be quite personal, looking back over the last ten, twelve years, I have struck up no deep human relationship that did not arise out of film making. That's the only way I really got at people. I have never been able to strike up a relationship these past 15 years any other way. That's one side. And the other is, to put it rather stodgily: my responsibility towards history. If I were supposed to make a ‘Sex Life of Schoolgirls’, well, that wouldn't be possible, I couldn't do it.”
Q: Many children have a secret... How about you?
A: Sure, we had that a lot in our family. But I would never talk about it. Yeah, there are things that must remain untouchable, even if you are, let's say, married. If you know everything, it doesn't work. Life then becomes unbearable. That's what I have against psychology, too. First, because they act insolently, as if it were a normal science with a secure body of knowledge, whereas really it has reached a stage that skull surgery maybe had reached under the Pharaohs. That's one thing, the other is, I don't think it's wrong to pursue this branch, because we have too many symptoms of sickness that must be investigated. But still... it is, somehow, a state of helplessness, just as letting blood for centuries documented the helplessness of medicine. Psychology is the helplessness of our age. It tries to illuminate the tiniest corner of what makes us to human beings. A room that is illuminated down to its tiniest corner is no longer habitable. It makes for uncomfortable, uninhabitable people.
