Film: From Trümmerkind to the world citizen: Wim Wenders becomes 80

When Wim Wenders opened his eyes for the first time, the world was full of rubble. A few days earlier, two atomic bombs had been thrown on Japan. The war was already over in his home country of Düsseldorf, but the city was largely destroyed. Perhaps this look for the big one in the small – and for special places – caught there.

Little Wim found the ruins in which others only recognized the war, at least great. “As a two- and three-year-olds, I was in every cellar hole and on every rubble ditch,” he told the German Press Agency. He was a little boy, he also knew nothing else. “For me these were adventurous playgrounds. We children were not allowed to enter them – but they still climbed in,” he says. “When I gradually understood that it was nicer elsewhere, it was a shock.”

Today Wim Wenders, who turns 80 today, are considered a director with a world fame – and as a specialist for films in which places play a meaningful role. You don’t even have to see the films for this, it is enough to read the titles – such as “Paris, Texas” or “Heaven over Berlin”. Places are important to him.

In the “Hotel Matze” podcast, he said the funny sentence: “My creative life begins: to Neuss, where you don’t get there, still get there.” Neuss, not necessarily navel of the art world, is located on the opposite Rhine side of Düsseldorf.

How far Wenders came can currently be seen in Bonn. For his birthday, the Bundeskunsthalle dedicates him a large -format exhibition that not only nobs him as a filmmaker, but as a kind of light form.

Some artists are only given such a review after their lifetime. Wenders is still fully in the shop – in 2026 his next film could come to cinemas, a documentary in 3D about the architect Peter Zumthor. Last year he was again nominated for an Oscar (with “Perfect Days”). The short film “Key of Freedom” recently appeared, which he made for the Federal Foreign Office.

The mother hoped for a “real” job

He actually wanted to be a painter. Wenders was born in Düsseldorf in 1945, in 1949 the family moved to Boppard, then to Oberhausen. The first pictures he sees are art prints by Vincent van Gogh and Camille Corot. He will soon draw himself. In the Bonn exhibition, a children’s drawing can be seen from him on which a knight fights with a kite. He doesn’t know whoever has lifted them one day. He didn’t suspect his mother.

“She was more inclined to mercilessly dispose of everything she found,” he says. The parents were initially not enthusiastic about the artistic ambitions. “My mother secretly hoped for a long time that I would get” something right “,” says Wenders.

In the beginning, it did not look bad – from the mother’s point of view. Wenders studies medicine and philosophy. In 1966 he breaks this off and goes to Paris to become a painter. The most important place for him there will be the Cinémathèque Française – a film institute in which film classics run from 2 p.m. to the night. Wenders are said to see more than 1000 films in one year. Today you would probably say Binge Watching.

Films with wanderlust and depth

The film finally becomes its art form. From 1967 he belongs to the first year of the University of Film and Television (HFF) in Munich. With the film adaptation of Peter Handke’s novel “The Fear of the goalkeeper at the penalty” (1972), he becomes the figurehead of the “New German Film”. The melancholic “Paris, Texas” (1984) will soon be considered a masterpiece and wins the Golden Palm in Cannes. “The sky over Berlin” (1987) is an iconic meditation about the city that was still shared at the time.

If there is a genre with which it is associated with it to this day, then certainly the road movie – when traveling, people come to himself with Wilhelm Ernst Wenders, according to his bourgeois name. This mechanism also applies to him. Walking and getting to know other places has become the biggest topic for him, even as a child, but then even more than adolescents, he says. “” To be somewhere else “was my topic,” he says. “And then I also kept that about filmmaking as a topic.”

The travel principle runs through Wenders, even when dealing with scripts. He also prefers to drive in sight. “I no longer looked at most of the screenplays from the first day of the shoot. I didn’t have to look at them anymore,” he says. “Turning after a script is more of a reproduction than producing. Many films are therefore only assembly line work. And I don’t have fun.”

You simply don’t have to know how things go the next day, says Wenders. “Many people fear this idea, but not me.” On the contrary, he always freed him that it was open.

Movement is essential for him. Perhaps that is why he also throws his forehead when you ask him about recent communication means. “I find it extremely important that you look out as a youthful things. I can also expose myself on the Internet, but that’s a completely different form, it is virtual and not actually,” says Wenders. “You can also travel anywhere through the Internet without really being there,” he says. “This is a horror idea for me.”

Then prefer adventure playground.