Werner Herzog

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.

A Memoir

Every Man for Himself and God Against All

Bastien Vaucher

l'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 still needed a camera though. […] I stole my first one. […]

It felt to me more like expropriation than theft, or to put it differently, I was exercising a natural right to put the camera to its intended use. With it, I made my first short films.

On Fitzcarraldo, the Asháninka Campas were clearly afraid of his (Klaus Kinski’s) rampages, and they would sit on the ground in a circle. whispering. There were never loud disputes between them. One of their chieftain told me later that I had seen that they were afraid but that I wasn't to think it was fear of the roaring maniac; it was of me because I was so quiet. He offered to kill Kinski for me. I politely declined, but I know they would have done it like that.

About what Herzog calls “ecstatic truth”. Truth does not necessarily have to agree with facts.

The French novelist André Gide once wrote: "I alter facts in such a way that they resemble truth more than reality." Shake- speare observed similarly: "The most truthful poetry is the most feigning." That busied me for a long time.

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