Klaus Kinski and the judgement of history

It seems that another eccentric cultural icon with bizarrely blond hair has been posthumously accused of child abuse; this time it’s the late actor and all-round crazyman Klaus Kinski, whose daughter Pola claims that he raped her throughout her childhood and adolescence. Of course, such accusations should be taken seriously and investigated, just as the Savile claims are being investigated, even if the alleged perpetrator can’t be tried. The complication here – again, as with Savile – is that whether we mean to or not, we will also be trying Kinski’s public persona, and also his work. The first doesn’t present too many difficulties; he was widely known to be a very strange man, and not really in a very pleasant way; he never ran a marathon for charity, as far as I know. Adding paedophilia to his many sins wouldn’t be such a big stretch of the imagination. But what do we do about his movies? Do we treat him like the sculptor Eric Gill? The revelations about his multiple sexual misdemenours prompted calls for his works to be removed from public view, but to no avail. Or will Kinski become another Savile or Gary Glitter, pretty much airbrushed, Trotsky-style, from pop history? And why the distinction anyway? Was it because Gill produced proper, worthwhile art and Savile and Glitter were merely vulgar, tawdry showmen? On that basis, will we still be allowed to watch the Herzog Nosferatu, which was A Great Film, but not Jess Franco’s Count Dracula (in which Kinski played Renfield) because it was just a bit of Euroschlock?

Essentially, does artistic worth trump moral revulsion?

PS: In Der Spiegel, Arno Frank writes that – in common with Savile – Kinski hid his proclivities in plain view; but also concedes that his evil was a key component of what made him so compelling a performer.