Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir

by Werner Herzog, Michael Hofmann (Translator)

Legendary filmmaker and celebrated author Werner Herzog tells in his inimitable voice the story of his epic artistic career in a long-awaited memoir that is as inventive and daring as anything he has done before

Werner Herzog was born in September 1942 in Munich, Germany, at a turning point in the Second World War. Soon Germany would be defeated and a new world would have to be made out the rubble and horrors of the war. Fleeing the Allied bombing raids, Herzog’s mother took him and his older brother to a remote, rustic part of Bavaria where he would spend much of his childhood hungry, without running water, in deep poverty. It was there, as the new postwar order was emerging, that one of the most visionary filmmakers of the next seven decades was formed.  

Until age 11, Herzog did not even know of the existence of cinema. His interest in films began at age 15, but since no one was willing to finance them, he worked the night shift as a welder in a steel factory. He started to travel on foot. He made his first phone call at age 17, and his first film in 1961 at age 19. The wildly productive working life that followed—spanning the seven continents and encompassing both documentary and fiction—was an adventure as grand and otherworldly as any depicted in his many classic films.

Every Man for Himself and God Against All is at once a personal record of one of the great and self-invented lives of our time, and a singular literary masterpiece that will enthrall fans old and new alike. In a hypnotic swirl of memory, Herzog untangles and relives his most important experiences and inspirations, telling his story for the first and only time.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, Memoir, Film, Audiobook, Autobiography, Biography Memoir

367 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2022

About the author

Werner Herzog (born Werner Stipetić) is a German film director, screenwriter, actor, and opera director.

He is often associated with the German New Wave movement (also called New German Cinema), along with Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Margarethe von Trotta, Volker Schlöndorff, Wim Wenders and others. His films often feature heroes with impossible dreams, or people with unique talents in obscure fields.

Reviews

[Dylan Matthews · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everything you'd hope a Werner memoir would be. Let me just quote:

We boys were friends with young Eckart Lang, whom we called the Butter, because his brutal father always made him churn the butter.

I have an observation to make on the Bavarian Pope Benedict XVI, who was head of the Roman Catholic church from 2005 to 2013 … I presume too that he retired prematurely because he was losing his faith.

I'd rather die than go to an analyst, because it's my view that something fundamentally wrong happens there. If you harshly light every last corner of a house, the house will be uninhabitable. It's like that with your soul; if you light it up, shadows and darkness and all, people will become "uninhabitable." I am convinced that it's psychoanalysis — along with quite a few other mistakes — that has made the twentieth century so terrible. As far as I'm concerned, the twentieth century, in its entirety, was a mistake.

I wasn't given a visa for Guatemala, but I was obsessed with the vague idea that I would help form an independent Mayan state in Petén.

I have always wanted to direct a Hamlet and have all the parts played by ex-champion livestock auctioneers; I wanted the performance to come in at under fourteen minutes.

I wanted to write and produce an oratorio and ballet for elves in a place in Alaska called North Pole … Hundreds of thousands of letters addressed to [Santa] are mailed there from the United States and beyond … There is a sizable company of elves who answer letters on behalf of Santa. The best students at the local middle school are chosen for elf duty, and the bizarre thing was that from this very group of elves a massacre was planned.

I want to make a film with Mike Tyson about the early Frankish kings.

Cinema verité was an idea from the 1960s; its representatives nowadays I call the "bookkeepers of the truth." That got me furious attacks. My answer was "Happy New Year, losers."

I live in Los Angeles. Lena and I had to decide where we would live in the United States, and the answer was clear right away — in the city with the most substance.

I have never taken drugs. The culture of drugs has always repelled me. I also believe they wouldn't have done me any good; there's so much turmoil inside me anyway.

Occasionally, I watch trash TV because I think the poet shouldn't avert his eyes.

[emily · Rating 5 out of 5]

‘I’m a writer who incidentally also makes films—films are my voyage, and writing is home. And—40 years, I keep preaching to deaf ears that my writing will arguably outlive my films, all of them.’ — Werner Herzog

I don’t even like Herzog (as in I don’t know much about him or his work, but loved his thoughts on Baker’s ‘The Peregrine’, which then got me to read this), but this is brilliant. The audiobook is also fucking fantastic – read by the author himself, of course. If a piece of work gets me swearing affectionately, I must consciously/subconsciously regard it with a substantial amount of raw admiration/affection.

To clarify, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience even though (needless to say) I don’t necessarily agree with all of Herzog’s views. Perhaps sometimes I find him even more interesting and endearing when our views on certain matters clash (mostly because he's got such a meticulous and brilliant way of expressing his thoughts, one can’t help but surrender one’s full attention). He’s a strange one; and that’s a top-tier compliment (coming from me anyway). Too many fab chunks to choose from, but here’s a whole lot of them anyway :

‘‘He never read the books he was supposed to read; he never studied. It seemed he never knew the things he was meant to know. But then, in fact, Werner always knew everything. His senses were extraordinary. He could pick out some note or sound and ten years later remember it exactly. He would talk about it and use it in some way. He’s completely incapable of explaining anything. He knows, he sees, he understands, but he can’t explain. That’s not in his nature. With him, everything goes in. And if it comes out again, then it will be in some altered form.’ It’s not an easy matter, quoting one’s own mother, and I don’t think she’s always right. I do think I’ve learned to explain a thing or two, maybe. But I have a deep aversion to too much introspection, to navel-gazing.’

‘I’d rather die than go to an analyst, because it’s my view that something fundamentally wrong happens there. If you harshly light every last corner of a house, the house will be uninhabitable. It’s like that with your soul; if you light it up, shadows and darkness and all, people will become “uninhabitable.” I am convinced that it’s psychoanalysis—along with quite a few other mistakes—that has made the twentieth century so terrible. As far as I’m concerned, the twentieth century, in its entirety, was a mistake.’

‘From my early childhood, I knew what radio and newspapers were even though we didn’t always have electricity, but I never saw a film. I had no notion of cinema. I didn’t know such a thing existed until one day a man with a mobile projector came to us in our one-room village school in Sachrang and showed us a couple of films, which utterly failed to impress me—There were televisions only from the 1960s; it was in Munich that we first watched the news or a soccer game in the janitor’s flat a floor above ours. I experienced the onset of the digital age, the internet, with content chosen for me not by human beings but by algorithms—Social media has essentially changed all forms of communication even though I make no use of them myself. Video games, surveillance, AI, there has never been such a cluster of radical changes in human history, and I can hardly imagine that future generations will experience such density of change in a single human lifespan.’

‘ —in my childhood—I was quiet, reserved, inclined to sudden outbursts of temper; in general, I was a danger to those around me. I was capable of silent brooding, for instance, because I wanted to understand why six times five came to be the same thing as five times six. It even seemed to be a general principle, so eleven by fourteen was the same as fourteen by eleven. Why? There was a law hidden in the numbers that I could not wrap my head around until I pictured a rectangle with rows of six pieces by five spread out in front of me, and if you turned the shape by ninety degrees, then the principle became visible. Even now I find mathematics thrilling, Riemann’s hypothesis regarding the distribution of prime numbers, for instance. I don’t understand the first thing about it because I don’t have the mathematical equipment, but to me, it’s the most significant of all open questions in mathematics. A few years ago, I met probably the greatest living mathematician, Roger Penrose, and asked him how he proceeded, whether by abstract algebraic methods or by visualising the problem. He told me it was entirely by visualisation.’

‘—a Catholic priest. We referred to him as der Läben because of the sheeplike bleat in which he kept talking about “das äwige Läben” (for das ewige Leben, the eternal life), but that would be a big simplification. Friends of mine thought my step to Catholicism might have been an act of protest against my father, but that was a superficial and actually rather foolish idea because, after all, my mother was an atheist as well. My father was a marginal figure in my life; I never had to assert myself against him to attain my independence. Nor was it a matter of replacing an absent father with some higher substitute as though I had missed his love. It’s a familiar phenomenon—having difficulties when there is a dearth of love and intimacy in their lives. In my case—indeed, in the case of us all—we had the obverse: a father who was not loved. Not one of my siblings from the first or second or third litter had any affection for him; even his three wives turned away from him. In the case of the third, that’s an inference I draw because she conspired against him with my mother and with Doris. His sister detested him; even his own mother, my grandmother, would never talk about her son, Dieter; he was always just the asshole. When I was fourteen, I got myself baptised —I was a Catholic of my own will.’

‘In 1976 I made a film about the world championship of livestock auctioneers, How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck, which had to do with my fascination with the limits of language. That’s why Hölderlin and the Baroque poet Quirinus Kuhlmann are so important to me, because in their different ways they approached the limits of my language, German. In Stroszek, when Stroszek’s dream of America is broken, his mobile home is put up for auction. The actor in the scene was a one-time world champion livestock auctioneer whom I had followed to Wyoming and brought out of retirement for my film. His auction, in which language becomes singsong, a cascade of madness impossible to intensify further, is surely unforgettable to anyone who sees the film. I always had the suspicion that this raving was the last form of poetry or at least the last language of capitalism. I always wanted to direct a Hamlet and have all the parts played by ex-champion livestock auctioneers; I wanted the performance to come in at under fourteen minutes.’

‘Jack Nicholson was impressed by my films and wanted to play the lead, but it soon became clear that he and 20th Century Fox intended to have the film shot in San Diego in the botanical gardens with a plastic scale model for the ship. It was the early eighties, we didn’t yet have the current digital box of tricks. Also, Nicholson only took parts that left him free to watch Los Angeles Lakers’ games.’

‘‘Meeting Gorbachev’ was a special experience because we were both in Russia. We speak neither German nor Russian with each other because it has turned out that it is good for us to meet on a plane that is neither all hers nor all mine. It makes us both careful in a language that was originally neither of ours.’

‘Women always played a dramatic role in my life, no doubt because there were deep feelings involved. But I never really saw the great mystery and agony of love. My relationships were hardly ever superficial. I was driven by the demon of love, but without women, my life would have been nothing much. Sometimes I try to imagine a world without women. It would be unbearable, impoverished, tumbling from one void to the next. But I was lucky in love, presumably luckier than I deserved to be.’

Anyway as per usual, I’m partial to writers who are both shameless and unashamed about their love for football. Not ‘partial’ per say, but it makes my heart go weird for a salty-sweet sublime second. For instance, Mariana Enríquez (affectionately) asking Megan McDowell to deal with it (McDowell’s disinterest in the sport) and not fuck up the translation of football-related lines in her book because of how important football is to her is always incredibly endearing (to me).

‘—I was able to go on playing soccer in Germany—Munich Black-Yellow, and I played either in goal or centre forward. The other members of the team were taxi drivers, bakers, office workers, and I loved them all. Black-Yellow didn’t play in any of the official leagues, but we might have held our own in the fifth. My brother was a better goalie than I was. When he was fourteen, he caught the eye of a talent scout from 1860 Munich, which was the dominant local team before the rise of Bayern Munich, but my mother talked him out of a career as a professional sportsman. Black-Yellow was started by a pastry chef by the name of Sepp Mosmeir. I never met such a charismatic man. Sepp radiated unconditional warmth; he loved opera, and he had astonishing leadership qualities. We would do anything for him. But there was a shadow over him as well. When he was growing up in South Tyrol, he and his friends had clambered up an electrical pole by a railway line, and one of his friends had clambered up an electrical pole by a railway line, and one of his friends had grabbed hold of the power line. The boy shook and shook for minutes on end and smoke started to pour out of him. Sepp described the sound it made when the boy’s charred body finally hit the ground. It made the sound of a sack of briquettes hitting the gravel ballast under the rails. Sepp’s wife, “Mrs. Moss,” died after long torments of cancer, and he suffered the same fate. I saw him shortly before he died. He left a gap in my life.

I moved from goalie to outfield player. At the Cannes Film Festival, I think it was 1973 when Aguirre was shown in the directors’ section called Quinzaine des Réalisateurs—the official festival had rejected the film—there was a game of actors against directors, and I was in goal. Most of the directors were unfit, and a few were so fat they could barely run, whereas the actors were generally in pretty good shape. Actually, we were hopelessly outclassed, but I kept out everything that came my way. Thereupon the actors changed their tactics. They allowed the directors to advance into their half, and then they would hit long balls over the top to where two or three of them would turn up in front of my goal unopposed. One of them was Maximilian Schell, who had once played on a Swiss national amateur eleven. I saw him chase down a long pass all by himself. Way outside the penalty area, I got to the ball first and lashed it away a split second before he got there, and then Schell smashed into me. He could have taken evasive action, but even in a friendly like this one, he was pretty intense. I saw stars. My elbow was dislocated and bent forward instead of back. It was another year before I felt over it. Schell and I bonded over this collision, and in his Oscar-nominated film called The Pedestrian, I have a little walk-on part.

From then on, I always played centre forward even though most of the Black-Yellow team was faster or technically more gifted. But I had a quicker apprehension of movements in space and always had an instinctive nose for goal. That often drew the opposing defenders to me, which created space for my teammates. I could read situations, and those were the kind of players who always impressed me most, someone like the 1980s Italian defender Franco Baresi, who could intuit the collective intentions of the opposing forward line; no one matched the depth of his understanding of the game. As a forward, the Bayern Munich player Thomas Müller is the same species; he seems able to ghost into the area unopposed; he identified space like no one else, and no one seemed able to track his movements. In the way he could read a landscape, my grandfather was not dissimilar. Sepp Mosmeir played defence, and his dream of one day scoring a goal was never fulfilled. In the course of his farewell match, we were awarded a penalty. The whole team insisted he take it. Sepp Mosmeir scored. We led him from the field in tears. The referee had to suspend the game for several minutes.

I had my share of the usual soccer injuries, a cruciate ligament, for instance, and once, when I was still goalie, in a game against the Bavarian butchers’ guild, lots of hearty butchers’ apprentices went at us as if we were so many calves, and one of their strikers rammed me under the chin. I had caught the ball and was lying on the ground. When I came around, I didn’t want to leave the field and tried to tell the referee that I shouldn’t have been carded; it was the other fellow who had committed the foul, not me. The referee was shouting, but I couldn’t hear because of the buzzing in my head. Finally, he plucked at my shirt and pointed to the blood on it, which had to have been mine; I did at least understand that much. I had fourteen stitches put in my chin, but I didn’t have health insurance at the time and needed to keep the costs down, so I had them stitch me up just like that. In a similar way, I had a tooth pulled without the customary painkilling injection. To put it down to masochism on my part I think would be a mistake. I didn’t love pain; it was just something that was there in my frame of reference—the way I expected the world to be.’

Definitely worth re-reading and/or re-listening at a later date.

‘But I’ve always been athletic. My approach to film-making has always been very physical as well. But I think aerobics studios would be an abomination for me. Yoga even worse. Rather dead than sitting in a lotus pose.’ — Werner Herzog (The Guardian)

[Kathrin Passig · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ärgerlich und enttäuschend. Eine Autobiografie, wie sie auch viele andere alte Männer geschrieben haben, langweiligste Aufzählung aller anderen Männer, die Herzog in seinem Leben gekannt hat. (Am Rande vorkommende Frauen: Herzogs Großmutter, Mutter und seine aktuelle Ehefrau.) Andere Themen: Beschreibung zahlreicher Unfälle aus Fahrlässigkeit (vermutlich, um zu illustrieren, wie zuwider ihm die "Kultur der Wehleidigkeit" ist), "Schaut her, ich weiß irgendwas über Fürst Chlodewig den Entlegenen und ihr nicht" und Beschwerden über die Gegenwart. Es wird noch unangenehmer dadurch, dass Auszüge aus Herzogs Tagebuchnotizen eingestreut sind, in denen man sieht, dass er poetisch und phrasenlos schreiben kann, oder jedenfalls mal konnte. Drei Sterne nur aus alter Liebe, und weil ein paar schöne Stellen drin sind, insgesamt fünf bis zehn Seiten.

[Michael Nielsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

The myth of Werner Herzog, as told by Werner Herzog. Marvellous!

[María Carpio · Rating 4 out of 5]

Herzog es el último de los hombres renacentistas. Lo ha hecho todo, o casi todo. Ordeñador, obrero, soldador, valet parking, futbolista, monaguillo, hipnotista, aventurero, trashumante, vendedor (contrabandista) de armas, director de ópera (sí, es su segunda profesión más importante y yo no lo sabía), escritor, novelista y cineasta (y profesor de cine). Todo eso y más ha sido, y este libro es la narración de todo aquello. No es una biografía como tal, son memorias y están divididas en capítulos más temáticos que temporales, aunque sí empieza por el comienzo: su infancia y su familia. Herzog es hijo de dos padres que fueron pro-nazismo, como muchos, casi todos en aquella época. Nace en plena Segunda Guerra Mundial, en una época de carencias y hambre pero nos cuenta el otro lado de la historia: había felicidad infantil pese a todo. Él vivió en el campo su niñez pero llegó luego a un Berlín posguerra en el que los niños jugaban en los escombros de los edificios derruidos y vivían a sus anchas sin que nadie los controle.

Herzog no conoció el cine sino hasta finales de su adolescencia, pero él ya le buscaba el sentido poético-visual a la vida desde siempre. Aprendió griego antiguo y latín en la escuela pero pronto supo que la academia no era lo suyo, así que dejó el colegio, al igual que lo había hecho su hermano años antes y ahí supo que cada persona tiene su talento, no todos están hechos para los estudios convencionales. Su hermano en pocos años se convirtió en un exitoso empresario y él, bueno, Werner, hizo todo lo que hizo.

Este libro no tiene una pretensión literaria como sí la tienen sus anteriores libros como "Conquista de lo inútil" (que es un lírico diario de rodaje de su película Fitzcarraldo, que trata sobre un cauchero que en el siglo XIX lleva un barco a vapor a traves de la montaña en la selva), o como "El crepúsculo del mundo", novela basada en hechos reales sobre el último soldado japonés en rendirse en la Segunda Guerra Mundial, veinticinco años después, pero sí tiene un brillo narrativo genuino procedente de esa vida exprimida hasta el máximo que ha vivido.

Este es el tenor de las historias que le gustan a Herzog, que no sólo ha hecho ficción sino también documental, y en general, todas sus obras giran al rededor del hombre y su relación con el entorno o, mejor dicho, de cuando el hombre saca todas sus capacidades máximas para enfrentarse a una magnánima naturaleza. Es el cineasta de los bordes del asombro humano. Ha sido muy enriquecedor enterarme a través de este libro que muchas de las escenas icónicas de sus películas (escenas cautivantes y detonantes dramáticamente) han surgido de experiencias literales de Herzog. Él asegura que no hay simbolismo alguno sino una fijación visual-poética que no tiene significado más allá de esa sensación que produjo aquello en él. Y es que Herzog es el cineasta de las sensaciones, calificado de pasional, cosa que es cierta, pero no disparatado o chalado como a veces se lo ha catalogado, ya que cada "locura" que ha cometido en sus rodajes o en su vida han sido casi con un objetivo claro, marcado y determinante. Así como fue su tortuosa relación con el actor Klaus Kinski, con quien rodó cinco películas. No habla mucho de él en este libro (ya le dedicó un magnífico documental: "Mi mejor enemigo"), pero sí cuenta cómo le conoció: en una especie de pensión en la que vivía con su madre en Berlín, cuando Kinski era un actor de teatro excéntrico que era mantenido por la dueña de la pensión y que armaba berrinches descomunales donde lo destrozaba todo. Herzog aún era un niño pero, como dice, desde entonces ya sabía a lo que se metía cuando decidió trabajar con Kinski años después. (También cuenta que quiso matarle, o sea lo pensó).

Este es un libro sobre una vida llena de vida, valga la redundancia. Sobre un hombre que no se ha guardado ninguna carta bajo la manga, ha vivido a tope y la vida se le ha ido abriendo y entregándole de todo casi sin pedirlo (como la ópera, por ejemplo), pero que ha estado ahí al pie del cañón de lo incierto, con los sentidos alerta, siempre en la misión de descifrar o interpretar el lenguaje de las cosas y el significado del mundo. Y eso es lo que son sus películas, sus documentales, sus libros y hasta sus montajes operísticos.

Finalmente, el último tramo es un cuestionamiento a todo lo que el acelerado mundo de la tecnología va dejando atrás. Hergoz cree que en unos miles de años ya no habrán libros ni películas y que quizás el lenguaje escrito y las imágenes habrán desaparecido. ¿Podrá alguien del futuro interpretar los vestigios de nuestros lenguajes escritos o visuales? O quedarán como misterio sin resolver, diluidos en el tiempo como lo son hoy en día los jeroglíficos del "disco de Festo", un disco de arcilla de Creta que hasta ahora nadie ha podido descifrar.

"No más loros del viaje de Alexander von Humboldt, que en 1802 se topó con un pueblo del Orinoco donde todos los habitantes habían muerto de una epidemia. Su lengua había desaparecido con ellos, pero en el pueblo vecino seguían cuidando al loro superviviente, traído de allí cuarenta años atrás. Aún hablaba sesenta palabras claramente comprensibles de los habitantes de la aldea muerta, su lengua muerta. Von Humboldt las anotó en sus diarios. ¿Y si hoy enseñáramos a dos loros estas palabras y las utilizaran para conversar? ¿Y si, en un futuro lejano, imagináramos cosas —creadas por nosotros— que duraran no para siempre, sino, digamos, doscientos mil años? Una época en que la humanidad seguramente se habría extinguido por completo, pero ciertos monumentos nuestros todavía estarían allí, casi indestructibles".

[Radiantflux · Rating 4 out of 5]

2nd book for 2024.

The title of Herzog's recent memoir, which I think sounds better in German—Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle—has been a quote on my Goodreads profile for years along with several others not only place Herzog in my mental landscape, but do a reasonable job of summarizing the themes of his life/book:

* A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on. A psychotic is a guy who's just found out what's going on—William Burroughs

* America...just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable—HST

* Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us—JG Ballard

This books is probably essential reading for anyone interested in Herzog and his works. It's vaguely chronological—at least his early childhood is at the start of the book—but for someone who has had such an interesting life most of the chapters are just snippets of his experiences/memories from various trips/productions/films. How much can you fit in life as rich has his in just over 300 pages?

I also really enjoyed and can highly recommend two of Herzog's previous books, which I read in German: Eroberung des Nutzlosen (English: Conquest of the Useless) which detailed the (insane) process of making of Fitzcarraldo; and Vom Gehen im Eis (Of Walking in Ice) his diary of walking from Munich to Paris in winter 1974 as an act of pilgrimage to save the life of Lotte Eisner. I thought both of these were superior in prose and just better as literary works perhaps simply because of their narrower focus.

4-stars.

[Alex Sarll]

I assumed this memoir would be one of those books where people say the audiobook is definitive, but where I'm fine just reading it all inwardly in the author's voice. Curiously, though, I found that doing a mental Herzog voice slowed me down in a way that even a Partridge voice doesn't, so a lot of the time I dropped it - and if anything that made the book more arresting, because suddenly all of the absolutely staggering stories weren't being placed at a distance by the identifiable, imitable character of Werner Herzog, they were just outrageous risks and privations and projects happening to a person - or, especially in the early stages, a child. I wonder if being translated, even though Herzog is obviously very fluent in English and presumably at least read through this version, was a factor in that effect? Regardless, all the stories you've heard over the years are here - the shooting, the shoe, the steamboat - but so are many, many more, often even stranger, yet somehow, once that Herzog-ness descends again, never wholly surprising (of course he was at school with, and later worked with, an Ungern-Sternberg). Sometimes the structure can wrongfoot you - hang on, weren't we on milking cows, why is he breaking into NASA now? - but it always makes sense in the end, for a given value of 'sense'. Simply to have lived this life would be remarkable - sometimes he nearly dies multiple times per chapter, and they're not long chapters - but the fact that he managed to fit so many films in there too, at least a handful of them masterpieces, boggles the mind. And then it finishes halfway through a sentence because a hummingbird flew past and he knew he was done.

[Bücherangelegenheiten · Rating 5 out of 5]

For someone who knows Herzog's work, i.e. the films, books and operas. Interesting insights into the mind of this person.

For someone who was hoping for an autobiography, the book is 3/5. Herzog tells things from his life, but in a jumpy and non-chronological order. Not the best introduction to Herzog's world.

[Andrew Hardy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Most of this book consists of anecdotes like

"Von X was my best friend since we learned to butcher chickens in Bavaria after the Nazis left. When were filming in the jungles of Bolivia, he broke every bone in his bottom because I had a premonition that he should represent Jesus walking on water off a waterfall. He stopped talking to me several years later. I do not have the faintest clue why. Social media breaks the bones of human connection. "

[Elena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Llego a "Cada uno por su lado y Dios contra todos", las memorias de Werner Herzog, de la forma más apasionada y subjetiva posible. Desde que hace casi veinte años vi por primera vez una de sus películas, "Grizzly Man" (2005), siento verdadera devoción por el alemán, uno de los creadores más grandes de nuestro tiempo. Pero fue, poco después, con "Encuentros en el fin del mundo" (2007), esa oda a los hielos de la Antártida y los soñadores y científicos que pasan por allí, que caí totalmente hechizada. Entre los cientos de anécdotas y curiosidades que nos cuenta, me hizo "entenderlo todo" una cosa: y es que, efectivamente, usa técnicas de hipnosis en sus voces en off para sus documentales. Después vino la recuperación de sus películas anteriores, especialmente "Fitzcarraldo" (1982) que tuve la suerte de ver proyectada en la antigua sala de la Filmoteca de Barcelona. Herzog publicó el loquísimo diario de rodaje de aquella odisea con el título "Conquista de lo unútil". Tras la lectura de sus memorias nadie podrá decir que Herzog no ha vivido. Mi más profunda admiración y respeto.

[Gavin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The stunning thing about Herzog - this cultured, wild, Mitteleuropan, pessimist, arthouse, Neue Deutsche Welle, Gothic fellow with a predilection for opera and the minor works of unknown Renaissance mystics - is that he is unpretentious.

Yes. He will milk the cow. He will omit to tell his fiancee that he is a famous film director. He will not mention he saved Joaquin Phoenix’s life until JP does. He will go on Rick and fucking Morty. “I think the poet shouldn’t avert his eyes”

people know too much anyway. My publications and film releases render me vulnerable enough: so many breaches in a fortification that stands unprotected anyway.

most of the time I don’t even notice there are abysses to either side of me

To this day, I couldn’t tell you what color my eyes are. Introspection, navel-gazing, is not my thing

it is often assumed that I must be obsessional. No, I’m not. Nor is it true that I had got enough money together to embark on another film. In fact, I risked all the money I had in the world to get the thing off the ground. After a very short time, I was so reduced that I was living in a converted chicken coop with a papier-mâché ceiling just a little higher than the top of my head


All these [media] inventions sound well and good and don't bother me. They don’t bother me because I know who I am. Or, rather, there are areas where memory forms itself, becomes autonomous, acquires new guises, spreads over the sleepwalker like a gentle veil... Ten days after the incident in the vacuum chamber, I received a summons from the immigration authorities. I was to present myself immediately and bring my passport. I knew what that meant. Because I had violated the conditions of my visa, I was about to be deported not just over the nearest border but all the way to Germany. In Pittsburgh, I quickly bought a Spanish dictionary and drove off

Interest incessant. One of the rare times you actually want the audiobook. Something to raise an eyebrow at at least on every page. (He is discursive as fuck - it is more like a series of shaggy dog fireside stories than a composition. A lot like Taleb if he wasn't constantly angry. He also jumps forwards and backwards by decades from paragraph to paragraph. It works, it dreams.)

The first thing is that he had lived a full and book-worthy life by 17. Wartime poverty which he remembers fondly (no fathers around meant freedom; necessity meant his labour was valued). An actually tragic romance. Constant work and fractures and infections. This is on top of the usual unprecedented shock of his generation moving from scythes to computers in one leap.

I will always be grateful to America for [Marshall Plan aid]. The packages contained, among other things, corn flour, which we were unfamiliar with and which was therefore suspicious to us. My mother got us to try it by telling us the reason the flour was so yellow was that it contained egg yolks, so it was especially nutritious. From then on, we ate it enthusiastically...
stripped the wallpaper off the ruined walls. Then his mother would boil the paper because there were nutrients in the glue... in all my childhood I never once slept on a flat surface... mother was unable to produce enough food for us. We ate salad from dandelion leaves; my mother made syrups from ribwort and fresh pine shoots; the former was more a house remedy for coughs and colds, and the latter stood in for sugar. Once a week, there was a longish loaf of bread from the village baker purchased with our ration coupons. With the point of a knife, our mother scratched a mark in it for each day, Monday to Sunday, allowing about a slice of bread for each of us... in one violent quarrel—the subject, as I recall, was the care of our pet hamster—I was so beside myself with fury, I laid into my brother with a knife. I struck him once in the wrist as he tried to fend me off and once in the upper thigh. In no time, the room was awash with blood. I was deeply shaken at my own behavior.

...a magnificent time, especially as there were hardly any fathers anywhere in the village, so everything was in the best sense anarchic. I was certainly delighted that we didn’t have a drill-sergeant type in the house telling us what to do. We found out for ourselves without being told...
All my friends who grew up in Munich remember those early postwar years with enchantment. They had the best settings to play in. Bands of kids ruled the roost, lording it over the bombed-out streets and blocks. They collected bits of metal and sold it to scrap dealers. They turned up weapons, pistols, and hand grenades. Once they found a corpse dangling from the beams of a ruin. They grew up early and fast, and they loved... the local priest screamed at us for being godless and slapped my older brother in the face. We might have been six or seven at the time

...we would rig up a trip wire for Krampus

We bought the cheapest plonk we could find, a red wine fortified with vermouth. Reeling, I barely made it back to my father’s apartment, who put me to bed and brought me a bucket to be sick in. I puked all night, and my father was incredibly proud that he had a son who behaved like a proper frat boy. The fact that I wasn’t yet twelve put the icing on it for him

[Working on a fishing boat aged 16]: Above me was the orb of the cosmos, stars that I felt I could reach up and grab; everything was rocking me in an infinite cradle. And below me, lit up brightly by the carbide lamp, was the depth of the ocean, as though the dome of the firmament formed a sphere with it. Instead of stars, there were lots of flashing silvery fish. Bedded in a cosmos without compare, above, below, all around, a speechless silence, I found myself in a stunned surprise. I was certain that there and then I knew all there was to know. My fate had been revealed to me. And I knew that after one such night, it would be impossible for me to ever get any older

I was seventeen. I had followed my then girlfriend to England, where I acquired a part share in a brick terraced house in a working-class area near Elizabeth Street in Manchester with four Nigerians, three grown-ups and a small child

I made my first telephone call when I was seventeen... I, though, got to witness and experience, even though I was no part of an agricultural civilization, how fields were mown by hand with scythes, how the grass was turned, how hay wains drawn by horses were loaded up with great two-tined hay forks, and the hay brought into the barns. There were lads who worked like serfs in medieval times. Then, for the first time, I saw a machine—still drawn by a horse—that turned and tossed the hay up in the air with two horizontal forks... there has never been such a cluster of radical changes in human history, and I can hardly imagine that future generations will experience such density of change in a single human lifespan.

My greatest good fortune, though, wasn’t that as an eighteen-year-old I had survived such an illness but that I hadn’t managed to make it across the Congolese frontier

One tagline for the Herzogian philosophy is "ecstatic absurdity", but this misses the understatement and lugubriousness which stabilises and deepens it. Kinski was ecstatically absurd too, but he was also far less of a mensch because he had no sympathy or decency or gravity. Art is larger than mere liminal experience. He is benevolent and forgiving, warmly remembering his brushes with death and the negligence of others:

I didn’t love pain; it was just something that was there in my frame of reference—the way I expected the world to be.

Dietrich, my father, lived with the fantasy of composing a vast work encompassing many intellectual disciplines. Of this, he never wrote a line. This work was his pretext for never working and earning money. In a way, he was principled

fleas, thousands of them, which I bore uncomplainingly so as not to embarrass my hosts

In cases where the drivers were so drunk that every yard they travelled could be fatal to themselves and others, I would demand the keys, but that didn’t often get results. So I reached in through the open window and snatched them. Some of the drivers would try to sock me as I reached in. One man bit me in the arm. Another tore out a hank of my hair

[Going to college at] Pittsburgh turned out to have been a bad idea... after a week, I knew that I couldn’t stay... Later, for other reasons, I came to love and respect the city.

I’d rather die than go to an analyst, because it’s my view that something fundamentally wrong happens there. If you harshly light every last corner of a house, the house will be uninhabitable. It’s like that with your soul; if you light it up, shadows and darkness and all, people will become “uninhabitable.” I am convinced that it’s psychoanalysis—along with quite a few other mistakes—that has made the twentieth century so terrible. As far as I’m concerned, the twentieth century, in its entirety, was a mistake.

The names seem made up: Tilbert, Ortwin, Markwart, Gundula, Giselher, and Gernot, Hercules Seghers, Wolfgang von Ungern-Sternberg von Pürkel

He nearly lost Aguirre thanks to some lazy bastards: "Lucki wasn’t allowed into the customs area in Lima, but on impulse, he scaled a ten-foot wire fence, and behind one shed he found all of our still-sealed film canisters on a pile of rubbish. The sensitive material had been exposed to the sun’s heat for weeks. It turned out that the shippers had bribed the customs authority, hence the stamps, which allowed the shippers to collect their fee. Lucki picked up the canisters and carried them himself as hand luggage to Mexico".

This is the right attitude but an unusual lack of agency and curiosity for him: "[The Riemann hypothesis:] I don’t understand the first thing about it because I don’t have the mathematical equipment, but to me, it’s the most significant of all open questions in mathematics



I learned the basics about cinema in about a week from reading the thirty or forty pages on radio, film, and TV in an encyclopedia. I still think that’s about all there is to know... I grasped the workings of a camera, how the film moved, what an optical soundtrack was. From there, I could deduce how to do a time lapse or slow motion. I still needed a camera, though. These were still the days of celluloid and mechanical cameras. I stole my first one... With it, I made my first short films: Herakles, Game in the Sand, The Unprecedented Defence of the Fortress Deutschkreutz, and Precautions Against Fanatics



"When the [Rolling Stones] concert was over, I saw that many of the plastic bucket seats were steaming. A lot of the girls had pissed themselves. When I saw that, I knew this was going to be big"



He is an NGO: the charitable foundation that today administers all my films and literary works



A decent amount of this book will be false but he's not doing it on purpose and is quite modest about his memory. He is a fantasist in the best sense, a contrarian in the best sense (being himself and not like other people, not conditioned on other people).

I dream maybe once a year, then always banally, that I had a sandwich for lunch, for instance... I feel bad that I didn’t dream, and maybe that’s why I compensate by making films.

I write my screenplays once I can see the entire film in front of me, and I’ve rarely taken more than a week to complete one

there was one soldier standing guard. I shouted that he was to fire a shot in the air, but he was frozen with panic. I had to tear his rifle from him and fire it myself. Frightened, those pushing into the tunnel withdrew, and only then did four or five unconscious women slip to the ground.


At the dress rehearsal of Wagner’s Tannhäuser in Palermo, there was a bomb threat, and the theater had to be vacated. (This time, it wasn’t my doing.)

To this day, I couldn’t tell you what color my eyes are. Introspection, navel-gazing, is not my thing

I’m a slow reader because I often depart from the text in front of me to picture scenes and situations and only then return to the words

I live in Los Angeles. Lena and I had to decide where we would live in the United States, and the answer was clear right away—in the city with the most substance. LA is associated with the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, but it’s in LA that the internet was born, and all the big painters are no longer in New York but here, same with the writers, the musicians, the mathematicians. The number of Mexicans has greatly enlivened writing and music. Electric cars are being designed here; reusable rockets are built on the southern outskirts of the city. The mission control center for a number of space enterprises is just north of Los Angeles in Pasadena. A lot of banal phenomena are from here as well: aerobic studios, inline skating, weird sects. I could go on.

My voice has found a great community of fans, which combined with my view of life asks to be imitated. I am a grateful victim of such satirists.


I want to make a film with Mike Tyson about the early Frankish kings... I always wanted to direct a Hamlet and have all the parts played by ex-champion livestock auctioneers; I wanted the performance to come in at under fourteen minutes... had an unfinanceable project on the conquest of Mexico seen from the point of view of the Aztecs, and for that, I had studied the basics of classical Nahuatl



[Before directing his first opera] I went to see a production at La Scala in Milan, the first I had ever been to; I had no idea what operas were supposed to look like... while I may be an opera director, I can’t read music


Cinema verité was an idea from the 1960s; its representatives nowadays I call the “bookkeepers of the truth.” That got me furious attacks. My answer was “Happy New Year, losers!"

the Rogue Film School, a countermethod, a guerrilla school or hedge school where the only two things I actually teach are the forging of documents and the cracking of Yale locks


the Whitney museum in New York. This was a spatial installation with several projections of prints by Hercules Seghers with music by Ernst Reijseger, who has collaborated with me on many recent films. One of the Museum’s curators called me to ask about possibly contributing to the upcoming Biennal, but I refused right away, because I have problems with contemporary art. “Why?” the curator asked me. I referred broadly to the art market and its manipulations and its preference for conceptual art over actual exhibits, but the curator refused to be shaken off so easily. Would I not be interested as an artist? I said that I didn’t think of myself as an artist and that this term was better applied to pop singers and circus performers. If I wasn’t an artist, then what was I? I said I was a soldier and hung up

This is the fourth book on / by him I've read and there are of course reused stories and leitfmotifs. It is still hair-raising to me that Herzog lived in the same building as Kinski as a boy, and thus as a director later knew deep things about his demonic character and incredible talent.

One day when I was going up the stairs on my way home from school, I heard a commotion from inside. I unlocked the door of the apartment, and the first thing that met my eyes was Hermine, eighteen, a stout country girl from Lower Bavaria. She was chasing after a young man I’d never seen before, smacking him with a wooden tray. The man was yelling shrilly. He had reached under her skirt. It was Klaus Kinski... Good-hearted as she was, Clara Rieth had taken Kinski in off the street, where he was pleased to style himself as a starving artist. Already at that time, Kinski had acquired a reputation as an unusual performer of various small roles in different theaters. He didn’t make much money, but it must be said that he also loved the part of the misunderstood starving genius. Not far from us, he had squatted in an empty attic in an old apartment house and frightened away the legitimate owner, who wanted to throw him out. Instead of furniture, he had scattered dry leaves throughout this apartment until eventually they were knee-deep. He slept in them. Like my father, he never wore clothes... As an opponent of all forms of civilization, he also disdained silverware

Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus, who for a long time was my editor... Beate thought all my films were so bad that she refused to go to any of the premieres, including Aguirre’s.

I was still shocked to hear about his teenaged Catholicism and explicitly, conventionally religious pilgrimages

would have far preferred a religion like Islam, where the priestly caste plays a lesser role, because it leaves the human being alone with God with no mediation... What I wanted was a more radical form of Christianity, so I joined a group my age that my family called the association of saints... Had I lived in the fourth century, I’m sure I would have favored the Arian heresy... I would see the church father Augustine as the heretic sooner than Pelagius... there was something in me that the Catholics call certainty of salvation

I have only now just noticed that the book is originally in German. This means that its translator, Michael Hofmann, is at the pinnacle of his art. Gruß!

[Chris Steeden · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fitzcarraldo is one of my favourite films. I have watched a lot of Werner Hertog movies and documentaries so I was always going to read his memoir and rather good it is too.

Born in 1942 in Munich when the war was in full swing his father was fighting in France and his mother moved the family out to a remote Bavarian village of Sachrang. Sachrang is a place way back in time. It had not reached 1942. To say the family’s life was basic would be an understatement. Let me stop here and say that this is not the normal chronological biography. No way that Herzog was going to write one of those. Instead it is a memoir with 36 chapters of his life jumping all over the place but not in a bad way.

He goes over some of his more interesting family members. His stories do not disappoint. He talks about Klaus Kinski, of course, but also his friend, Bruce Chatwin. Then there is Bruno S (Schleinstein). It is one of those books that you just have to go wherever the flow takes you. It takes you on a more winding journey than the steamship in Fitzcarraldo. How Herzog is still alive I’ll never know. He must be close to using up his nine lives.

There is no ego here or not one I could detect; ‘Let me stress that I’m just as lazy as the next person…’ OK, that maybe the case but my word he has done and seen a lot. I now realize that I have hardly seen any of his total output. Talk about prolific as director and actor.

Wait until you get to the part where he was filming female identical twins.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

It should go without saying that audiobook format is essential here. As a compilation of wild Herzog quotes and stories this book is an easy 5-star. As an insightful or reflective memoir it’s more of a 3. I didn’t learn much about what makes him tick, why he holds certain opinions, or how he approaches his craft, but the experience was so enjoyable and amusing that I could listen to the whole thing again right now.

[Jeff Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating stories and insights, including many tales about his family history and formative years that have never appeared elsewhere. But if you're a newcomer to Herzog, Paul Cronin's "Herzog on Herzog" makes for a better introduction to his film work and "Of Walking In Ice" serves as a better intro to his impressive literary style.
3.5

[Brendan Monroe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'll nearly always take a printed book over the audio version, but a celebrity memoir, narrated by the author, is the exception.

I don't think I'm alone here. Who, after all, would choose to read Matthew McConaughey's Greenlights? Because, at best, "Greenlights" is a meh read that's elevated the moment we hear the first lines come out in McConaughey's Texas drawl.

The people who'd rather read "Greenlights"? Those are the people we need to watch out for.

So Werner Herzog writes a book about his life. You're really going to read that? Heck no. You're going to get the audiobook! You want to hear Werner's words read in Werner's delicious Bavarian accent. We're human, after all. These are basic wants and needs.

Other than having perhaps the best title of any book ever, "Every Man for Himself and God Against All" has everything you could possibly want in a Herzog autobiography.

Herzog on the problems of modern cinema?

Check.

Herzog railing against society's "complainers"?

Check.

Herzog on directing a version of Hamlet in which every role is played by auctioneers?

Check.

What more could you want, really?

[Daryn Moore · Rating 2 out of 5]

Disappointing.
Herzog has undoubtedly had an interesting life & career, but I do feel that it all could've been better delivered via a straightforward biography instead of this autobiographical memoir which often seems to wander off into irrelevance.

Basically, I struggled to remain interested.
For while I perked up and enjoyed myself during mentions of film and creative origins, I soon found myself drifting and losing interest when we'd get lost within the branches of his family tree.
Plus, the erratic chronology casually flips around between tales of youth and adulthood, to the detriment of the narrative and I found myself often thinking "What age is he now?" and having to reorient myself within the timeline.

In the end, I stayed with this as if I had discovered the lost diary of someone.
You don't know them and you don't particularly care, but you keep reading regardless out of some sense of halfhearted curiosity.

[Felix · Rating 5 out of 5]

Meine Lieblings-Stellen in diesem Buch:
- Wenn bei Werner Herzog irgendetwas bis in die Gegenwart nachklingt (etwa: "Sein Lachen höre ich noch heute", "... hat sich auf ewig in mein Gedächtnis eingebrannt", "... sehe ich noch ganz klar vor mir")
- Wenn Werner Herzog etwas eine große Bedeutung beimisst, ohne genau erklären zu können, wieso (etwa: "... sicherlich eine große Metapher für irgendetwas, allein, für etwas, das weiß ich nicht genau", "der Name dieses Esels hatte eine besondere Bedeutung für mich, doch so sehr ich mein Gedächtnis auch anstrenge, ich komme nicht mehr darauf, welche")
- Wenn Werner Herzog für irgendeine Nische besondere Experten ausmacht (und durch sein Verhältnis zu bzw. mit ihnen sich auch selbst auf subtile Art als ebenbürtigen Experten diagnostiziert) (etwa: "Er war der meiner Meinung nach fähigste Experte zu diesem Konflikt in jener Zeit", "Niemand konnte das Fußballspiel so gut lesen wie er", "Mit niemandem konnte ich so gut über Mathematik sprechen wie mit ihm")
- Wenn Werner Herzog betont, dass er kein Freund von Nabelschau und Selbstdarstellung ist und die Psychoanalyse als einen der größten Fehler des 20. Jahrhunderts beschreibt

[Kilburn Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Werner Herzog's memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All, is a journey into the mind of a filmmaker who relentlessly pursues what he terms ecstatic truth. Herzog's exploration of his life from post-war Germany to the present reveals his romantic and mystical view of artists as heroic figures who must commit to their craft with unwavering dedication. The book is a treasure trove of captivating anecdotes that showcase Herzog's unorthodox methods for capturing his vision on film. Whether it's filming in the perilous Amazon jungle or amidst military coups, Herzog's unflinching willingness to break rules, bend laws, and even risk his life in pursuit of this elusive ecstatic truth shines through. While Herzog's artistic genius is evident, the memoir also reveals the poetic weight of his reflections on his childhood in the remote Bavarian Alps, adding depth to his narrative and leaving us yearning for a more profound understanding of the enigmatic artist behind the camera.

[Nigeyb · Rating 4 out of 5]

A mixed bag. When it's good it's really good but there were sections where I zoned out.

I listened to the audiobook which I heartily recommend. Werner Herzog's distinctive and heavily accented English is a joy to listen to.

Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir contains some great stories, not least Werner's childhood and early life which are worth the price of admission on their own. He's a truly remarkable individual who has lived life on his own terms.

4/5


Legendary filmmaker and celebrated author Werner Herzog tells in his inimitable voice the story of his epic artistic career in a long-awaited memoir that is as inventive and daring as anything he has done before

Werner Herzog was born in September 1942 in Munich, Germany, at a turning point in the Second World War. Soon Germany would be defeated and a new world would have to be made out the rubble and horrors of the war. Fleeing the Allied bombing raids, Herzog’s mother took him and his older brother to a remote, rustic part of Bavaria where he would spend much of his childhood hungry, without running water, in deep poverty. It was there, as the new postwar order was emerging, that one of the most visionary filmmakers of the next seven decades was formed.  

Until age 11, Herzog did not even know of the existence of cinema. His interest in films began at age 15, but since no one was willing to finance them, he worked the night shift as a welder in a steel factory. He started to travel on foot. He made his first phone call at age 17, and his first film in 1961 at age 19. The wildly productive working life that followed—spanning the seven continents and encompassing both documentary and fiction—was an adventure as grand and otherworldly as any depicted in his many classic films.

Every Man for Himself and God Against All is at once a personal record of one of the great and self-invented lives of our time, and a singular literary masterpiece that will enthrall fans old and new alike. In a hypnotic swirl of memory, Herzog untangles and relives his most important experiences and inspirations, telling his story for the first and only time.

[Benoit Lelièvre · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, it was fun.

Very Herzogian also. A scattershoot of ideas, anecdotes and personal memories that intertwine into a larger-than-life, almost mythical portrait of this creative titan's time on Earth. I don't know what to make of it, but I'm glad that I know a little more about Werner Herzog now. Notably that his parents were part of the Nazi party and that he didn't love his father (he didn't hate him, but didn't love his absent-ass either) or that Klaus Kinski once threw a candelabrum full of burning candles into a crowd during a stage play because they were talking.

The old man has an eye for the specificities of the human condition and a lack of patience for banalities. I would've loved to hear him more about certain topics and less about others, but that meant I would've controlled the "Herzog experience" and there is no doing such thing. Another banality people love to throw around when they talk about themselves is the idea that they "feel deeply", but Herzog is more of the type of person who "thinks deeply" about stuff and, in my opinion, it's much more interesting.

Maybe more on Dead End Follies later, maybe not I'm not sure yet.

[Martina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mesmerizing Book! Dense and excellently written! To write a review, I will have to read it at least once again; I was far too fascinated by his thoughts and stories and curiosity and questions for life itself. A great artist, personality and narrator!

[Susan Rigetti · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely magical. I know I will read it again and again and again over the course of my life.

[andré crombie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I try to imagine the world without books like this one. For decades now, people have stopped reading; even university students no longer read. This development is the result of tweets and texts and short videos. What will a world be like with hardly any spoken languages, which are becoming extinct in their profusion and variety? What will a world be like without a profound language of pictures, where my profession no longer exists? The end is coming. I picture a radical turning away from thought, argument, and image, not just an approaching darkness in which certain objects can still be felt, but a condition where they no longer exist at all, a darkness filled with fear, with imaginary monsters. I think of a passage in the Florentine Codex written as though its speakers, amid the destruction of their culture and horizons, were still trying to find their way to their language: “A cave is terrifying, a place of terror, a place of death. It will be called a place of death, because people will die here. It is a place of darkness, dark, always dark. It stands there with mouth gaping open.” How could one depict the absence of images? Not just their removal, the final irrevocable turning away from images, but their nonexistence? I imagine two mirrors set up in exact opposition reflecting nothing but each other into infinity. But with nothing for them to mirror. If the mirrors were one-way mirrors, like the kind the detectives use for interrogations, then you would see a void reflected in the mirror opposite. No criminal confessing, no table, no chair, no lamp, just space containing nothing that is reflected over and over again. Nothing else, no living, no breathing. No Frenchman eating his bicycle. No second Frenchman switching into reverse and driving his ancient car backward through the Sahara. No truth, no lie. No river called the river of lies, Yuyapichis, the deceiving river that pretends to be the much larger Pichis River. No Japanese marriage agency ordering a bucketful of sand to be emptied out of a satellite so the bride can be astonished by a shower of meteorites. No more twins living in separate bodies but thinking and speaking in unison. No parrots from Alexander von Humboldt’s 1802 journey up the Orinoco, where he came to a village, all of whose inhabitants had been killed off by a plague. Their language had died with them, but the neighboring village had for the past forty years continued to look after their parrot. This parrot still spoke sixty distinct words of the inhabitants of the dead village, their dead language. Humboldt copied them down in his notebook. What if we taught those words to two parrots, and the two could converse in them? What if we project ourselves far into the future and imagine things that we’ve created, that still exist, not forever but for two hundred thousand years, let’s say. A time when humanity will almost certainly have died out but certain of our monuments might still exist, indestructible. The dam in the Vajont gorge that withstood the vast landslide of 250 million cubic meters of rocks and earth and gravel. At its foot, this dam is twenty-eight meters thick and poured from specially hardened concrete. This lower part would still almost certainly be there, standing majestically without relaying any message, no message for anyone. There at the foot of the smooth concrete wall there would be a crystal clear trickle of water from the rocks to the side; it would be sought out by herds of deer, as though

Notes: This passage ends abruptly, as Herzog explains in the introduction, because something (perhaps a hummingbird) flashed in the window above his desk while he was writing, and he decided he was done and put his pen down. This is a splendid memoir — equal parts profound, absurd, and funny, and filled to the brim with a dazzling array of bizarre anecdotes and surreal factoids. I listened to and read this on a road trip from DC to Florida for the holiday. I usually avoid audiobooks, but this one is narrated by the man himself — solid gold.

Here’s one quote that captures much of what makes the book great: “Occasionally, I watch trash TV because I think the poet shouldn’t avert his eyes. I want to know what others aspire to.” It’s hilarious, disdainful, sincere, empathetic, self-aggrandizing, but also honest in its way. Is it wild to refer to yourself as “the poet”? Yes. Is Werner Herzog The Poet? Also yes!

I will resist the urge to share every passage I found gobsmacking, but here are a few…

On his childhood:

He was far from being the only mystery around. I’m not sure if this is a memory or not, but I seem to see the outline of a man standing by the stream behind the house as it got dark. Against the cold, he has lit a mighty fire, strong enough to paint his face scarlet. He is staring into the flames. Someone says he’s a deserter fleeing into the mountains. Could I have remembered such a thing? Was I not too young? There was also a witch who came for me, but my mother caught up to her and snatched me back, and from that time on, I knew I wouldn’t wet my pants anymore but get to the potty on time.

On his method of walking/hiking:

Our way of walking, Bruce’s and mine, forces us to seek shelter, to throw ourselves at the mercy of strangers because of our utter defenselessness. I can’t remember he or I ever being turned away because there is a profound, almost a holy, reflex of hospitality that is only seemingly obliterated in our civilization. But there were many times in my life when there was no village, no farmhouse, no roof within reach. Then I slept in fields, in barns, and under bridges, and when it was raining and freezing and there was nothing but an empty hunting lodge or remote holiday cottage, then breaking into it was not a problem for me. I have often broken into locked-up houses, not causing any damage, because I always carry a little “surgeon’s kit” with me, a couple of wire rods with which I can open security locks. I will leave a note behind, thanking the owners, or I’ll finish the crossword puzzle on the kitchen table. In my unease with what is practiced in film schools all over the world, I started a thing called the Rogue Film School, a countermethod, a guerrilla school or hedge school where the only two things I actually teach are the forging of documents and the cracking of Yale locks. Everything else is instructions to dodge prevailing systems and make films out of yourself.

Explaining what he calls “ecstatic truth”:

From early on in my work, I was confronted by facts. You have to take them seriously because they have a normative force, but making purely factual films has never interested me. Truth does not necessarily have to agree with facts. Otherwise, the Manhattan phone book would be The Book of Books. Four million entries, all factually correct, all subject to confirmation. But that doesn’t tell us anything about one of the dozens of James Millers in there. His number and address are indeed correct. But why does he cry into his pillow every night? It takes poetry; it takes the poetic imagination to make visible a deeper layer of truth. I coined the phrase “ecstatic truth.” To explain that fully would take another book, so I’ll just sketch out a few lines of it here. It’s on this question that I have sought public conflict with the proponents of the so-called cinema verité who claim for themselves the truth of the whole genre of documentary films. As the auteur of a film, you are not allowed to exist, or not more than a fly on the wall anyway. That creed would make the CCTV cameras in banks the ultimate form of filmmaking. But I don’t want to be a fly; I’d rather be a hornet. Cinema verité was an idea from the 1960s; its representatives nowadays I call the “bookkeepers of the truth.” That got me furious attacks. My answer was “Happy New Year, losers.”

This passage about his experience with early rock’n’roll mania is almost banal, and then…

The twins and their girlfriends were wild with excitement because a new British band was playing the Civic Arena. They were called the Rolling Stones. So far, all these groups and pop culture as a whole had passed me by. The one exception was Elvis, whose first film I had seen in Munich, and the kids all around me started quietly and methodically taking the place apart. I remember the police being called. Now in Pittsburgh the twins took a piece of cardboard to the concert with the name of their favorite, Brian, on it. He was their front man at the time; not long after, he was found drowned in his swimming pool. I still remember my astonishment at the commotion and the girls’ screams. When the concert was over, I saw that many of the plastic bucket seats were steaming. A lot of the girls had pissed themselves. When I saw that, I knew this was going to be big.

Chapter 27 is solely dedicated to uncompleted projects, and each and every one of them is an absolute gem. For example:

I always wanted to direct a Hamlet and have all the parts played by ex-champion livestock auctioneers; I wanted the performance to come in at under fourteen minutes. Shakespeare’s text is widely known anyway, and to prepare for the production, an audience would only have had to refresh their memories of it briefly.

This chapter alone is worth the price of admission — the M’Baka dictator Hokassa recreating Napoleon’s coronation; a group of pre-teens from North Pole, Alaska who tire of writing responses to letters to Santa and plan a massacre; Mike Tyson’s extensive knowledge of pre-modern European history (he’s a big fan of Pepin the Short); twins who speak and act in synchrony.

So much joy and appreciation for life and human beings, and despair for the same.

[Thomas Aebischer · Rating 2 out of 5]

Insgesamt hat mich Werner Herzogs Autobiografie enttäuscht. Dass sein Leben so ist, wie es nun eben ist, daran kann ich selbstverständlich nichts kritisieren, umso mehr aber, wie er seine Lebensstationen und Erlebnisse in Szene setzt. In Kontrast zu seinen Filmen ist es ein Aneinanderreihen von mehr oder weniger abenteuerlichen Episoden seines Lebens, in Form und Sprache in platten Plauderton geschrieben. Das hat mich über weite Strecken gelangweilt und zum Teil auch geärgert, vor allem dann, wenn Herzog sich zu postpubertären Schilderungen seiner haarsträubenden Erlebnisse überall auf der Welt hinreissen lässt. Es fehlt das kreative Moment und irgendwie werde ich das Gefühl nicht los, ein ausdrucksstarker Kinski in der Rolle von Herzog auf der Leinwand hätte dieser Biografie gut getan. Und so komme ich für mich zum Schluss, ich spüre und verehre Herzog in seinen Filmen und finde in deren Machart einen Herzog, der mit seinem Lebenslauf Bilder auf der Leinwand zum Laufen bringt, die in mir Spuren hinterlassen. Das Buch konnte es nicht.

[Gilles · Rating 2 out of 5]

Herzog is interesting. That is a fact. His films are stunning and his impact on cinema is unquestionable. But when the lens is put on himself, one can’t help but feel that his living legend status has had an effect on his ego and several times in this book one can feel that he is incredibly self impressed. He says he will be remembered more for his books than his films, let’s hope that is not the case.

[Gijs Limonard · Rating 5 out of 5]

I just love the idiosyncratic Herzog; he lets his documentaries speak for themselves; ultimate 'negative capability' in cinematic action; deeply interested in all that makes a human human, Herzog illuminates by demonstration; he let's the viewer in by displaying in full view -a description that also served as the title of a collection of interviews- 'ferocious reality'.

[Arash Moradi · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would have liked to know more about the thoughts and inner workings of Mr. Herzog, but there is little to read in this regard. Writing appears incoherent at some points and each chapter goes in so many directions, containing a wild range of information perceived by WH during his life.

[sion · Rating 4 out of 5]

irgendwo zwischen alter weißer mann gefasel und eindrücklichen erfahrungsberichten, sind werner herzogs memoiren seinem selbstverständnis von wahrheit wahrscheinlich deutlich näher als dem unseren, aber darin liegt für mich der reiz.

außerdem unterhaltsam.

[Doctor Moss · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ll say right off that it’s impossible to read this book in anything other than Werner Herzog’s iconic voice. The translator. Michael Hofmann, has done a great job of rendering Herzog’s original German into Herzogian English — the strange, disjointed rhythms and oddly jutting word sequences. It really feels like Herzog has just casually sat down and is talking to us from the pages.

It’s also pretty much stream of consciousness, but there’s some order — the book starts with Herzog’s childhood.

It’s a childhood that might be a key to understanding Herzog’s personality and his work. He was born in Germany during World War II, and his mother took him and his older brother away to the small Bavarian village of Sachrang to get away from the dangers of the war. Werner was a newborn at the time.

In Sachrang, the family (without Werner’s father, who was serving in the war and was never really present in Werner’s life) lived an isolated, almost primitive life. No electricity, running water, etc. The children were left to explore the world around them on their own, to make up their own entertainments.

If you’ve seen Herzog’s films, that should already give you an “aha.” You never find him chasing popular themes or exploring well-known territory. He follows his own nose, whatever grabs his interest — the story of the rubber baron Fitzcarraldo, the conquistador Aguirre, the Japanese soldier holed up on an island not knowing for decades that World War II was over, the folk legend Kaspar Hauser, . . . on and on through unique and sometimes just plain strange characters and events.

And his style is fully out for display here. He never rests, and he’s always finding the novelty, the neglected points of interest and meaning. He plows through the brush, ignoring the trails, and making up his life and his art on the fly.

He doesn’t describe a method. At times he even seems at a loss to describe his own work — “. . . the steamship that is lugged over a mountain, the central metaphor of my film Fitzcarraldo. I know it’s a wonderful metaphor, but what it means I am unable to say.”

His mother’s words — “He knows, he sees, he understands, but he can’t explain. That’s not his nature. With him, everything goes in. And if it comes out again, then it’ll be in some altered form.”

It’s always something that has a tremendous spiritual effect but that can’t be understood clearly.

Herzog says, in a short rant against psychoanalysis, “If you harshly light every last corner of a house, the house will be uninhabitable. It’s like that with your soul; if you light it up, shadows and darkness and all, people will become ‘uninhabitable.’”

So don’t expect everything to be explained here. That would ruin the experience.

Herzog does talk about many of his films, sometimes at length, as with Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo. And he talks about his relationship with Klaus Kinski — if you haven’t seen his film “My Best Fiend,” go watch it.

Toward the end of the book, as if the clock were running out, there is an especially breathless accounting of his own personality, his wives and children, his friends, thoughts about history, culture, and the future, all in his own terms of course, preserving the unlit corners.

[Jordi J · Rating 4 out of 5]

Autobiografia, memòries o aquell que va explicant i no calla (com jo me l’imagino) Quin crack en Werner i quina sorpresa haver-lo conegut. Quina personalitat! Dir que era/és un pou d’idees, un hiperactiu i un temerari seria quedar-nos curts. És viu (82 anys) de casualitat. Ja des de la seva dura i pobra infantesa de posguerra, i adolescència, que ens va explicant amb un desordre ordenat, veiem el que serà: un home que sempre s’ha estat fent preguntes i que ha plasmat la seva recerca en infinitat de llargmetratges i documentals rodats a llocs com un volcà en erupció, el cim d’un 8.000, la frontera Equador-Nicaragua sobre els nens soldats, la jungla contractant indígenes que se li revolten o pujant un vaixell a una muntanya; i també en un bon nombre d’escenificacions operístiques a diferents punts del món. Increïble la darrera part amb els seus pensaments actuals sobre el cervell humà, sobre el futur d’aquest món o sobre les llengües i la comunicació.
El llibre potser és una mica irregular quant a l’interès del lector però les 4 estrelles són pel llibre i 5 pel personatge que he descobert.