Pola Kinski is three years old when her parents divorce. She is the first child of Klaus Kinski, an aspiring young actor at the time, in the mid-1950s. After the divorce the girl goes to live with her mother and grandfather in Munich; she rarely sees her father. Everything changes with Kinski’s breakthrough in film and on television.

He uses every opportunity to have his daughter with him in Berlin and later in Rome, having her travel to visit him on the sets of his films. Pola experiences her father’s extravagance and his fits of rage: he hurls abuse at her and showers her with gifts and money. Both her mother and her father fail to provide what she longs for most of all: the love and protection of her parents. Soon, her mother’s attention is devoted exclusively to her new husband and second child. And for years her father treats his own daughter as his child bride.

Kindermund is Pola Kinski’s autobiography of her childhood and youth. She writes about what it was like to be the daughter of the enfant terrible of German cinema, and speaks out, unsentimentally and unsparingly, about a man to whom any and all boundaries were there to be crossed and who had absolutely no scruples about destroying the life of his own child in the process.

»I’m cold, and at the same time I’m hot. I can smell the fear seeping out of my pores, and yet I can’t feel myself. I reach out and touch the burning end of the cigarette – I can’t feel it. I pinch my cheek – I can’t feel myself. I’m inside a sphere – you can see through it. A thin membrane, like a soap bubble, between me and my life.«