Herwig Kipping  Herwig Kipping (born 31 March 1948) is a German film director and script writer. Herwig Kipping was born in , a hamlet of fewer than 200 people located between Weimar and Leipzig, and some 9 km (4 miles) to the south of Naumburg. His father was a farmer and (since the area was by now part of the Soviet occupation zone in what remained of Germany) became the president of the local Agricultural Production Cooperative shortly after the boy was born. By the time he attended school the Soviet occupation zone had become the German Democratic Republic, a one-party state sponsored by, and in key respects politically modeled on the Soviet Union. Kipping left school in 1964 and started an apprenticeship as a fitter at the vast VEB chemical plant on the south side of Halle. Unusually, however, before completing his apprenticeship at Leuna he returned to school in order to work for and pass his school final exams  In 1967 he moved on to the Humboldt University of Berlin where he started a five-year degree course in Mathematics. However, as he explained in an interview more than twenty years later, university life expanded his intellectual horizons: he became persuaded that he was better suited for Philosophy than Mathematics, and that the mathematics he was being taught was uninspiring and mechanistic. According to another more succinct source, he discovered that he was being prepared for a career in the Central Statistical Office. In any event, after progressing through slightly more than three years of the five year degree course he dropped out of the university. During his time at the Humboldt Kipping developed an intense love for the works of philosopher-poets such as Georg Heym, Trakl, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Dostoyevsky and, most particularly, Nietzsche. He also wrote his own poetry (which remained unpublished). Having left university at short notice, he now obtained work with the postal service in order to support himself, while still nurturing an ambition to become a philosopher-poet himself. Between 1972 and 1975 he performed his military service, serving in the People's Army as a radio operator stationed at (Neubrandenburg) in the north-east of the country. On completing his military service, in 1977 he volunteered for an internship with Deutscher Fernsehfunk (DFF), the national television service. During his internship period he worked as a production assistant for . The next year, by now aged 30, he applied successfully for a study place at the in Potsdam-Babelsberg.