Werner Herzog's Dark Wisdom for All
The great director's new memoir attempts to reveal the heart of chaos
I once went through Werner Herzog’s filmography, nearly chronologically, which is nothing less than a revelatory descent into a genius that is madness. I highly recommend this exercise to any artist or poet.
Here’s a daring artist who hypnotizes an entire cast of actors and make a movie with them (1976’s Heart of Glass). Or an entire cast with only dwarves (1970’s "Even Dwarfs Started Small).
He’s known for shots of insane dancing chickens and scenes of massive boats hauled over steep hills in the remote Amazon. The shoots for Aguirre, Wrath of God and Fitzcarraldo are now legendary for their daring insanity.
He’s descended into volcanoes. He’s gone into caves where no one goes, searching for the world’s oldest known paleolithic art, made by artists no one knows and no one will ever remember.
I therefore confess to loving Herzog, and that meant that I had to dive into his new memoir, released late in 2022. The title seems confrontational: Every Man for Himself, and God Against All.
But if you know his filmography, you know that’s the proper English translation of one of his greatest movies, “The Enigma of Kasper Hauser.” In it, a man walks into Nuremberg in the 19th century. He has been raised on a farm, isolated, never having been taught culture or language at all.
In a filmography of isolated freaks and eccentrics — e.g., Nosferatu, Timothy Treadwell in Grizzly Man, Little Dieter — Kasper Hauser stands out, a social experiment that seems, in the end, devastating. A man who is nearly an alien learns of human society, and he ends up despising it. Herzog calls what society did to Hauser a “murder.”
Herzog perhaps identifies with Hauser somewhat, hence the title of his memoir. I’m not sure that he despises society so much as he looks at the modern world with an awe and terror of his own dark Germanic-Romantic perspective. He does state outright that the twentieth century “in its entirety . . . was a mistake.”
I’ve long thought that Herzog, pace Burke and Kant, is looking for the sublime in reality — and this gets translated into his works of art, an oeuvre now at twenty feature films, thirty-four documentaries, and dozens of shorts.
What he finds in his reality-search, mostly, is the same end to the sublime: death itself.
The path towards it, however, contains encounters with awesome aspects of nature: volcanoes, meteorites, psychopaths, dictators, hostile jungles, and the ultimate terror, the mind of any single human. Usually men.
To go down the path requires a strong combination of bravery and curiosity. Why does Herzog exercise that?
I’m not sure the memoir fully answers that question, or any question you’d have about him. Herzog, through his memoir, remains as much an enigma as the encounters with the sublime in his films. It’s a chaotically written book, with many lyrical passages, such as his outstanding standalone sixth chapter on his attempted walk around West Germany, a failure on his part to perform a politically-motivated artistic act of unity.
Chaos does fit Herzog, not just because of his thematic concerns — he has said many times that he believes the universe is nothing but a chaotic madness — but also his films sometimes have an unstructured feel. So does his memoir. I forgive him: he’s not a professional author.
The memoir contains many digressions, some welcome, opening with his childhood in post-war Germany and discussions of his family. Later on, Herzog more chaotically discusses his film career. He largely avoids name-dropping, and frustratingly for me, avoids a coherent discussion of how he became a filmmaker and developed his craft.
Incoherence is a strategy, though. For Herzog, it’s seems impossible to comprehend how such a life happened. One of his great documentaries is titled “Lessons of Darkness,” and that could also work as this memoir’s title.
I was most moved by the early chapters on his childhood. He grew up in Bavaria in total poverty, relying on American aid, after the devastation of World War 2. He vividly describes being giving chewing gum by a black American GI and then chewing that gum for weeks on end, staving off hunger. This encounter with the GI helped him form positive views of blacks and of America, a country that has indeed blessed him enormously. That shows up in the American idioms within the writing.
On that — digression here fits Herzog’s MO — I was surprised that Herzog didn’t write this in English. The original is in German, and it’s translated by Michael Hofmann, who has absolutely nailed Herzog’s voiceover stage persona.
In fact, I strongly suggest that you don’t read this book; instead you should listen to it.
As you probably know, Herzog is one of the top voiceover narrators in movie history, which came about as a kind of chaotic accident. The audiobook version of this is simply more arresting than his words on page — and yes, I tried both for several chapters.
The Herzog in this book has a particular view of his filmography that I don’t care for. He focuses on the wild adventures of his filmmaking, though fragmenting stories about them across dozens of chapters. Probably his most discussed film here is 1982’s Fitzcarraldo, the one about the madman in the Amazon who tries to lug a boat over a hill in order to build an opera house in the jungle. For Herzog, that infamous production was formative, negatively, in too many ways.
Film for Herzog’s is partly a realization of crazy dreams. It’s also a way of asking insane questions, such as the one Herzog asks in one of his films, “Does the Internet dream of itself?” Therefore, Aguirre, Wrath of God comes up repeatedly, as does, surprisingly, the forgettable Where the Green Ants Dream, his early ‘80s Australian-Aboriginal tale.
I felt the book break off somewhere in the middle, when after describing his childhood and family and friend influences richly, Herzog began fragmenting his film career into disordered fragments. This is especially obvious if you read the book: he includes notes from his diaries from film shoots, which don’t seem to have as much relevance or resonance as those early chapters. It’s as if the man he grew into is a kind of Kasper Hauser, unable to articulate the wild career of a man with dozens of films and acting gigs, including, wildly, in Tom-Cruise action movies and the mainstream Star Wars franchise.
That is perhaps why the title is what it is. The second half of it is very curious: “God Against All.” I was shocked to hear/read Herzog say he’s a Catholic.
He doesn’t mean what you might think he means, though. Against his atheist parents, he went looking for something sublime as an early teenager. Catholicism was the answer back then, a spiritual move that “bemuses” him now. He stopped attending church long ago, yet he claims because of the Catholic theology of baptism, once a Catholic, always a Catholic — and that’s despite his admitted preference for Arianism and Pelagianism.
And now, to him, the universe is a chaos. Few filmmakers state their ontological and teleological views so matter-of-factly, perhaps because many of them haven’t self-reflected on what theirs are.
Herzog has, greatly, and the structure and method of his memoir reveal as much about that reflection process as he can now muster.
For Herzog’s greatest movies, see my list at letterboxd. The top 15 movies are outstanding and should be watched by anyone with the bravery and curiosity that Herzog requires of us.
Picked up this book a few days ago. Didn’t know he did the audiobook. I will have to get a copy of the audiobook to listen along with. Would enjoy more writing on literature from you 🙏