[D66] Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir

[René Oudeweg]

  penguin.co.uk
The wisdom of Werner Herzog
Werner Herzog
~4 minutes

Book, Every Man for Himself and God Against All by Werner Herzog, 
against an orange background

Werner Herzog is a true international icon. He has produced, written and 
directed more than seventy features and documentary films, including the 
multi-award-winning Grizzly Man, Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre, the Wrath of 
God. But his life has been equally as eventful as his cinematic work: 
hauling a steamship over a mountain in the jungle; walking from Munich 
to Paris in the dead of winter; descending into an active volcano; 
living in the wilderness among grizzly bears. He has always been 
intrigued by extremes of human experience.

In his long-awaited memoir, Herzog reveals the influences that have 
driven his creativity, and shares what he’s learned about life over 
eight decades. Here is just a sample of his wisdom on film-making, 
walking, the phone book and psychoanalysis.

The long-awaited memoir by the legendary filmmaker and celebrated 
author. Told in Werner Herzog's inimitable voice, this is the story of 
his epic artistic career, as inventive and daring as anything he has 
done before.

     ‘I feel some relief in knowing my origins are somewhat swathed in 
mystery . . . people know too much anyway. My publications and film 
releases render me vulnerable enough: so many breaches in a 
fortification that stands unprotected anyway.’

     ‘Many things in my life look to me like a high-wire act, even 
though most of the time I don’t even notice there are abysses to either 
side of me.’

     ‘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?’

     ‘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 here. If you harshly light every 
last corner of a house, the house 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 world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.’

     ‘The proponents of the so-called cinema verité . . . 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.’

     ‘I always thought of myself as making mainstream films, but that I 
was a sort of secret mainstream.’

     ‘To me, the deciphering of [the Minoan script] Linear B is one of 
our greatest cultural and intellectual achievements bar none . . . 
Unfortunately, it transpired that the texts were nothing like Homer or 
Sophocles, not poems at all, but bookkeeping and inventories – who owed 
how much corn and olive oil to whom and when.’

     ‘I have trouble describing myself because I have a vexed 
relationship with mirrors. I look in the mirror when I shave so I don’t 
cut myself, but that shows me my jaw-line, not my person. To this day, I 
couldn’t tell you what colour my eyes are.’



--

  amazon.nl
Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir : Herzog, Werner, 
Hofmann, Michael: Amazon.nl: Boeken
Werner Herzog (auteur),
5–6 minutes
Recensie

“Stepping outside a conventional human identity to achieve an ecstatic 
vision is the ruling passion that runs through this astonishing book. 
Translated by Michael Hofmann, Herzog’s memoir invites comparison with 
Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s, published in 1782, four years after the 
author’s death—though it is a better written and markedly more enigmatic 
text than Rousseau’s scandalously revealing Confessions . . . Regaling 
stories that sometimes seem beyond credibility, Herzog does not claim to 
be offering a literal rendition of the events of his life . . . His 
memoir should be read for what it is: a visionary masterpiece that 
speaks, as did the ancient Greek daimon, of the world of mortals and the 
regions that seem to lie beyond.” —John Gray, The New Statesman

“The book is nonlinear and exuberantly free-associative, less a 
narrative than an extravagant demonstration of sensibility . . . Like so 
many of his films, his memoir is not at home in its ostensible genre. A 
very thin thread of autobiography runs through an otherwise vibrant 
tapestry of anecdotes and adventures . . . His melancholic, meditative 
and theatrically nostalgic way of being is as irrepressible in his 
writing as it is in his films . . . I feel the same sense of awe when I 
contemplate the phenomenon of Werner Herzog as I do when I contemplate 
the pyramids. Amazing, that this fabulous impracticality exists.” —Becca 
Rothfeld, The Washington Post

Over de auteur

Werner Herzog was born in Munich on September 5, 1942. He made his first 
film in 1961 at the age of nineteen. Since then he has produced, 
written, and directed more than sixty feature and documentary films, 
including Aguirre, Nosferatu, Fitzcarraldo, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, 
My Best Fiend, Grizzly Man, Encounters at the End of the World, and Cave 
of Forgotten Dreams. Herzog has published more than a dozen books of 
poetry and prose, most recently The Twilight World, and directed as many 
operas. He has appeared as an actor in Jack Reacher, The Mandalorian, 
and The Simpsons, and exhibited an art installation, Hearsay of the 
Soul, at the 2012 Whitney Biennale and the Getty Museum. He also founded 
his own Rogue Film School as a counterpoint to what is taught in most 
film schools around the world. He lives in Munich and Los Angeles.

Michael Hofmann is a German-born poet who writes in English. He has 
translated the works of Bertolt Brecht, Franz Kafka, Hans Fallada, and 
Joseph Roth, and teaches at the University of Florida in Gainesville.