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  • Werner Herzog and Preposterous War
  • Jennifer Fay (bio)

I. Burning Desire

As a child in Wildberg Germany, Dieter Dengler became obsessed with flying when in 1944 an American pilot navigated so close to his bedroom window that the two exchanged glances. At that very instant machine gun fire from an Allied fighter plane's wingtips riddled the boy's house with bullets before the same plane dropped bombs that destroyed the entire town. What Dengler himself describes as a "senseless attack" became the founding, even sense-making moment for the rest of his life. Transfixed by a "vision" of this "all-mighty being," Dengler reflects, "I knew from then on that I wanted to be a pilot—that I wanted to be a flyer. From that moment on Little Dieter needed to fly."1 So inextricable were aeronautics with war in 1945 that the victorious Allies suspended Germany's commercial airline, Lufthansa, until the mid-1950s. As a result, Dengler, harboring a powerful desire to take flight, [End Page 241] immigrated to the United States as a teenager and enlisted first in the U.S. Air Force and then as a pilot in the Navy. In this way, the imposed demilitarization and pacification of Germany ironically and incrementally enhanced America's war-making power. Dengler's first flying mission, a secret bombing raid over Laos, ended 40 minutes after take-off when the Viet Cong shot down his plane and the Pathet Lao took him captive. Dengler was eventually to become one of the few prisoners ever to escape a Vietnamese prison camp: after six months in captivity and nearly three weeks foraging in the jungle, he became famous when an American pilot just happened to notice Dengler's makeshift signal on the ground and orchestrated his rescue. As Dengler explains in retrospect, his childhood ambition was far from militaristic: "I never wanted to go to war. I only got into this because I had one burning desire—and that was to fly. But that there were people down there who suffered and who died only became clear to me much later when I was their prisoner."

Werner Herzog has devoted two films to Dengler, Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997) and Rescue Dawn (2006) both of which reenact, with a difference, the brutality of Dengler's imprisonment in Laos and the spectacular heroism of his escape. Echoing his subject's curious logic, Herzog insists that neither of these are war films, because, he says:

Though I feel that the war is always very much in the margins of the film, you have to remember that for Dieter [the war] lasted only forty minutes. It was never his aim to go to war: he just wanted to fly, and the only chance as a German to do this was to emigrate to the United States. It is only a chain of coincidences that he ended up in a war three weeks after he got his wings. So the humanity of the film is somewhere else . . . Dieter's story is that of a man and his dreams, his punishment and redemption.

(Herzog 2002, 267-68)

Evading the political, Herzog plots Dengler's biography as a mythic story of survival that redeems his humanity outside of war: "There was," Herzog contends, "a real innocence about the man" (2002, 264). As Brad Prager remarks, such a strategy is typical of Herzog's "war films" in which an individual's trauma and its reenactment are isolated from the forces of politics and history that produce them (2007, 143, 153, see also Gerhardt 2006). My interest, [End Page 242] however, is precisely on the so-called margins of Dengler's story where the experience of war becomes inseparable from flight, where peacetime becomes indistinct from wartime, and where innocence colludes with culpability. The "chain of coincidences" to which Herzog casually refers, I will argue, are the logical consequences of a history that begins before Wildberg and persists beyond Iraq, and that may be productively read through Dengler's uncanny childhood encounter with an American pilot. Dengler's is more than a daring escape-and-survival story: what makes him so fascinating, especially to Herzog, is...

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