Safe Return Doubtful

British Literature – published October 2025

I’m a fan of Myers and have read all of his novels. Within them, there is a variety in genres he addresses and in his style, but this is something completely different.
Klaus Kinski is not an obvious choice to philosophise on the future of the human race. It seems he was an angry man, and set himself apart, as a rebel and nonconformist, making unrealistic demands of those around him.

Despite this, on one night in 1971, on a Berlin stage he presented a furious one-man show about Jesus Christ. It collapsed into anarchy, as Kinski harangued the audience and they called ‘fascist’ heckles back at him. It was to be his last performance on the German stage, but one that fascinated the author when he came across it in the Covid lockdown. Here, he recreates that performance wonderfully well.

It’s a book of two parts though, as in two intermissions from the action on stage, Myers describes exactly how his attention was caught by Kinski, and something of the actor’s background. He doesn’t sympathise with Kinski, rather tries to explain his own investigation into what motivated him.
The Kinski sections are magnificently written, a brilliant rendering of the intense, almost insane and yet creative obsession of a genius and at the same time obstreperous, fractious and almost impossible to love.

Here’s a clip..

These youths. Look at them. These useless, callow youths. These worthless, bearded brave-boy Berlin babies barely born when the first bombs fell upon Dresden. With their beads and their imported beedi cigarettes and their claims to originality or liberalism or any other -ism. They have not suffered like you have suffered, nor screamed as you have screamed. Never understood that life is hate and war and little else. Yet still they consider it their birthright to heckle Kinski. To rattle Kinski. To declaim the special one, the number one. Upstage the master! Is it not the case that their mothers are whores and their fathers are cowards, and that when whores and cowards breed their offspring are deformed, defective – subhuman, even? Yes. These cross-legged pieces of shit who cower in the shadows; they will never know napalm. Never need to drink milk straight from the udder, or sleep weeping in frozen mud. Never sucked on carrots pulled from the soil. Hate and war.

My GoodReads score 5 / 5