Actor Klaus Kinski: "I never die!"

The house on Munich's Martiustraße is decorated with stucco and bay windows. In the stairwell and the apartments, the ancient parquet creeps uncannily, as if it were told by its famous previous tenant. Klaus Kinski used to live here, probably the craziest German star of the post-war era. Today, his old apartment houses a practice for psychotherapy.

Shortly before his death, he wanted to build a ship for a final flight from the world. On 72 pages of his estate, Kinski wrote down exactly what was missing, the materials and provisions, a blueprint. For his ark Kinski. Before that, he wrote a last letter to his son: "If someone tells you I'm dead, do not believe it ... I'm the rain and the fire, the sea and the whirlwind, do not be sad, I'll never die."

At the end of November 1991 he died. Another heart attack, his heart was already scarred by several untreated infarcts. Kinski did not want a grave. His last will: "Scatter my ashes under the Golden Gate Bridge!"

"He was a tyrant"

Klaus Kinski was one of the few German world stars, an actor with many brilliant moments. He was also a madman - and a creep who had apparently sexually abused his own daughter for over a decade. The revealed Pola Kinski only in 2013.

In her autobiography Kindermund, Kinski's eldest daughter describes a youth as in a particularly sinister Grimm fairy tale, her father as a monster, which was already lost to the little girl. The book is an indictment of Klaus Kinski's physical and mental assaults. "He was a tyrant," said Pola Kinski's half-sister Nastassja Kinski. She had "terrible fear" because of his raving and overtures. Her father had not raped her, but "touched him too much".

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Not only his films, Klaus Kinski's public appearances were like a big show. As eternal Enfant terrible he had fool freedom. For decades, the public watched spellbound, amused in amazement, shuddering, frightened: Is that real? Is this egomaniac really so quick-tempered and unpredictable, or does he stage this only for self-marketing?

Today it seems clear: His anger was real. He always burned. His whole art was to burn. "I'm not playing! It's me!" Kinski shouted once, when another journalist asked him how he had created this or that role.

The man from Sopot near Gdansk, born in 1926 as Klaus Günter Karl Nakszynski, offered a canvas to all facets of acting. His far too big eyes, as his first critics wrote, were of an "enchanting childishness and dwelt in an ancient face". For the broad German public, he was often just a quarter-round noise or a jerk. But the biggest in the industry paid homage to him. Bruno Ganz, for example, shot "Nosferatu" with Kinski and recalls in Christian David's Kinski biography how he "wore the crown, having arrived in his own way of sophisticated star-being".

Compete for the wildest look

Eva Mattes raved about "one of the most professional shooting partners" she ever had. And Joachim Fuchsberger said of his old friend and partner in the Edgar Wallace films, "He was so smart to know that you're insane, and he gave sugar to the monkey." Of course, these colleagues all expressed themselves so before the scandal became known. However, Kinski had already known his incestuous machinations in 1975 in his early memoirs. At that time he trusted everything - but believed him little.

With Harald Juhnke he once attended the drama school of Marlise Ludwig in Berlin. In front of a large mirror, they vied who could see more. Both rehearsed "Romeo and Juliet", Kinski gave the female part, Juhnke remembered the "crocodile look" that he used to capture or repel the environment, and I seemed silently and softly beside him, giving off barricade air ".

Kinski had no measure. Never a mediocre. The only standard he accepted was himself. He was narcissist and grandmouth. He played obsessed, whether as Woyzeck or Nosferatu, in "Fitzcarraldo" or spaghetti westerns. Emsig he worked on his immortality. Because the hymnic reviews were not enough for him, he tapped himself as a young man reviews with punch ("Kinski owns sublime acting magic, a flame that burns out of itself") and sent the newspaper expensive produced star portraits with the same. At the end he had stationery printed with the likeness of his penultimate roll - he as a Paganini silhouette, next to a kitsch heart.

Many letters he sent to his most beloved child Nikolai, who today quite often appears in German feature films and reluctant to talk about his father. These letters sound like goodbye: "I love you more than anything in the universe, I'm yours forever." Nikolai and his mother Minhoï found Kinski late in life. Previously, the madman did not last long. Already in the sixties he was able to demand 4,000 marks per recitation evening and moved from one fine address to the next, residing in a Rococo palace in Berlin and in Munich in Elisabethstrasse. He put almost no furniture in the living rooms, which would have "disturbed him while passing". And while spinning.

"I'm not outstanding, I'm monumental!"

His most important director, Werner Herzog, who lived briefly with Kinski in Munich, described one of these outbursts of rage. How Kinski got started and sprinted in the kitchen to run through the closed living room door. To soothe him, Herzog invited a theater critic to eat, who vied for Kinski's favor and praised the last performance as "outstanding." Then Kinski threw boiling potatoes into his face and yelled, "I'm not outstanding, I'm monumental!"

Acting colleague Klaus Löwitsch told how Kinski drilled holes in the floors and poured hot water into the apartment below because the neighbor had somehow disturbed him. Ingo Insterburg, formerly singing partner of Karl Dall, lived together with Kinski in Berlin. He remembered how Kinski always heard the "drumming of African folk music" on the turntable, until at night "sex sounds came out of his room".

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Everything could have been over early, when Kinski was admitted to the mental hospital Wittenauer Heilstätten at the age of 24. The Berlin physicians confirmed to him "common danger": "His speech is powerful, his self-centered personality stands out, which can not fit into any bourgeois circumstances, and he consistently sticks to his egocentric view of the world." From then on he felt like many who were already in an asylum: "The true madmen are the others," as Udo Lindenberg once sang.

His first appearances were Klaus Kinski as a soldier in the British prison camp. His already eccentric skull with his hungry cheeks and eyes in deep caves also captivated the British. The international breakthrough came later with films such as "Doctor Zhivago" or "For a few dollars more" on the side of Clint Eastwood, almost in "Hunter of the lost treasure" - but as Steven Spielberg him the role of a Nazi boss next to Harrison Ford Kinski refused in a fit of rage.

He was able to claim several 10,000 mark daily fees, drove six Rolls-Royce, three Maseratis, seven Ferraris. Because Kinski could only tolerate friendly staff in his luxury hotels, he sometimes spread out rugs from banknotes in front of his suites. As a boy he was never really full, he often said, so he orders himself too much in restaurants.

"Lightning flipped me over, I was still so happy"

Désirée Nosbusch met Kinski in 1982 in his adopted home California to the television interview. And breathed soft questions: "How did you act as a boy, Klaus?" It was up to Nosbusch, 17 at the time, that he did not even let go. Instead, he put his skull in her lap, looked with his Kinski eyes in the Désirée-eyes and told how his mother admonished him: "Boy, do not shout like that or you'll get a mouth that's too big!" Then he tore the interviewer into the tall grass on the ocean-strewn Stinson Beach.

Here Kinski found his dream destination. For hours on the cliffs he blew the spray into his tangled hair and wrote down: "The surf is 15 meters high, the storm whips, the thunder makes the sky collapse, lightning flashes over me, I have never been so happy in my life. " He was finally at home. He only flew to Germany to blow up one or two talkshows.

Kinski was distinctive, eccentric, aggressive. "I see in him only his obsession with himself," said Nastassja Kinski in 2001, twelve years before Pola Kinski's book, and remembered his "megalomania and a massive egocentricity." She did not forgive her father much, nor did he leave her and her mother when she was eight. At age 15, she shot the "Tatort" episode "Graduate Certificate", became known abruptly and became a world star for a few years. Today, Nastassja Kinski dreams of new roles, a performance in the "jungle camp" she said in 2017 just before the start.

Most recently, her father dreamed of a new task. Once in a lifetime he wanted to become one with the role, the reality and the whole madness. And so he played in his lost final film a stuntman who plunges from the Golden Gate Bridge.

Shortly afterwards, Klaus Kinski died. Near the bridge they scattered his ashes in the place where he would have dived in the film. It was his wish: "If already die then under the great wave that buries one."