THE 2013 VENICE FILM FESTIVAL INCLUDED the premiere of a film directed by Edgar Reitz entitled Die andere Heimat, in which Werner Herzog plays Alexander von Humboldt on his way to meet Jakob Simon, with whom Humboldt had exchanged letters on the topic of indigenous Brazilian languages. Die andere Heimat's emphasis on Humboldt's interest in South America occurs in the context of a film that Die Welt called a “Heimat-Film … a romantic narrative” (eine romantische Erzählung) in spite of its historical realism. The choice of Herzog to play Humboldt underscores an affinity between Herzog and German cultural history. Alexander von Humboldt's older brother Wilhelm is perhaps better remembered today, as the foremost proponent of the modern notion of Bildung and a significant contributor to thinking around 1800 about how the modern German nation should be built. But Alexander's enormous body of travel writing, as well as his massive Kosmos (1845), constituted more overtly romantic attempts to provide an encyclopedic overview of knowledge about the natural world while preserving the distinctions between different cultures and nations.

And Alexander von Humboldt was, among other things, a mountain climber and visitor of volcanoes: in 1802, for instance, he climbed Chimborazo, a volcanic peak in the Andes thought at the time to be the world's highest mountain. In the nineteenth century, Humboldt's mountain-climbing exploits were not only famous but repurposed in anticolonial struggles: Simón Bolívar portrayed his own Chimborazo climb as an allegory of liberation from Spanish rule, and declared that he was following Humboldt's “traces” while simultaneously creating a new legend of ascent. If Werner Herzog has a symbolic ancestor overseeing his own South American journeys, then it is not Lope de Aguirre, but Alexander von Humboldt.

In playing a fellow traveler to South America, and in playing a German romantic, Herzog re-performs the act of mediating between two cultures: or, rather, between images of concepts of those cultures. Die andere Heimat comments on images popularly associated with the Heimat film, as, for instance, does Herzog's own Heart of Glass. Both productions reflect not only on a subgenre of film, but on a subgenre of German film in particular. I have argued here that Herzog's oeuvre can be read as a contribution to a new romantic cinema; this implies that his work also comments on romanticism.