At this stage, Wenders was more interested in watercolour painting than pursuing an academic career. He then moved to Freiberg to study philosophy, left that and moved back to Düsseldorf to study sociology, before finally discontinuing his university studies altogether. In the four years before settling on a study of filmmaking, Wenders, the son of a chief doctor at a Catholic hospital, dropped out of studying for a medicine degree in Munich after two semesters. Wenders is also the only ‘member’ of the 1970s German film movement to have attended film school (the then theatre director/playwright Rainer Werner Fassbinder was turned down by Munich’s Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen, from which Wenders and his long-time cinematographer, Robby Müller, and long-time editor, Peter Przygodda, graduated). Wenders, the most commercially successful exponent of the neue deutsche Kino, has become known as the most “American” member of the movement, in terms of his filmic content as well as the measure of success that he has achieved in carving his own niche as a European filmmaker in America. One of the formative elements in Wenders’ youth was an obsession with the mainly American (but also British) pop culture of comics, pinball machines and, most importantly, rock and roll. Born only a few months after the end of the Second World War, Wim Wenders is a product of post-war (West) Germany.

Das deutsche roadmovie