Werner Herzog

I do believe that the 20th century in its entirety was a mistake.

The entire 20th century?

The entire, yes.

Yes.

And I have good reasons to argue.

Let's hear some.

I would speak of the demise of social utopias.

It begins with communism.

It had its demise, and of course fascism and the barbarism of the Nazis, which has been unprecedented, postulating a master race dominating the planet.

So this social utopia, thanks God, has come to an ignominious end.

Atomic bomb, for example, and maybe the most significant of all that,

In the 20th century, the population of the world grew from one and a half billion roughly to six billion.

And that's the greatest of all disasters.

In the early time, yeah.

And my mother more the socialist, the Nationalsozialismus, meaning what Röhm represented, whom Hitler had eliminated, executed fairly early on, because he was more in the mainstream of socialism and not so much nationalism.

It's a long, complex debate, but that was more the sources of where my mother...

took her credo, but she was, shall I say, intelligent enough and she was so much rooted in the real world with three boys to raise all alone that she came to very sobering conclusions fairly early on.

Well, only much later when I was grown up enough to ask the right questions.

Still mysterious to me in a way.

My father, I barely knew, so I didn't have real serious conversations with him about it.