Review: Christian Caryl on Werner Herzog

Once, when Werner Herzog was a toddler growing up in the Bavarian Alps in the last days of World War II, he was attacked by a witch: “On my right hand, I had a mark where the witch had bitten me.” I’m not sure that he believes this story—but I’m intrigued that he doesn’t see the need to question it.

And that’s just twenty pages into his extraordinary memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All. In the three hundred or so that follow we experience a number of other curious episodes. We learn that Herzog made his first film with a camera he stole. He describes how he jumped into a field of cactus to fulfill a promise to one of his film crews. In the early 1960s, he recalls attending a Rolling Stones concert in the US:
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.
And he wistfully notes that Guatemala once denied him a visa—a pity, because he was “obsessed with the vague idea that I would help form an independent Mayan state in Petén. Word of this endeavor had reached me.”

That last one is characteristic. Most people write memoirs to enumerate their achievements, but Herzog has a cussed fondness for projects that never got off the ground. He explains how he once planned to make a movie that would have involved circumnavigating all of Germany—but this was the middle of the Cold War, and only belatedly, he claims, did it occur to him that communist East Germany was unlikely to give a green light to such a project. It seems like an odd thing to overlook. In the 1970s, he tells us, he hired a fast-talking auctioneer for a scene in his film Stroszek, set in the American Midwest. That inspired him: “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.”

Perhaps none of this should come as a surprise. Herzog, after all, is known to the world of film as the man who masterminded two legendary productions: Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972) and Fitzcarraldo (1982). In the first, Klaus Kinski plays a megalomaniac sixteenth-century conquistador whose quest for the mythical South American city of El Dorado ends up driving everyone on his expedition to their deaths. In the second, Kinski is a megalomaniac entrepreneur who dreams of building an opera house in an Amazon frontier town—which for some reason requires dragging a steamboat over a mountain. Kinski was—how shall I put this?—difficult. “The collaboration between the two of us was often maniacal to the point of endangering us,” Herzog writes. “Each had plans to murder the other, but that was probably pantomime.”

The disclaimer notwithstanding, he then lists a number of occasions when they came close to making good on their threats. One of the Peruvian tribesmen who worked as extras on Fitzcarraldo approached the director with an offer to finish Kinski off. “I politely declined,” Herzog assures us.

And yet, despite all these shenanigans, Herzog somehow managed to create dozens of movies big and small, some of which (like the two named above) remain fixtures in the twentieth-century cinematic pantheon. Along the way he also directed operas, wrote books, and acted, popping up everywhere from Family Guy and The Simpsons to The Mandalorian. He’s especially proud of his “revolting” role as the villain Zec in Jack Reacher (2012).

Senior citizen Herzog’s enshrinement as a pop culture superstar has to be one of the oddest twists in a life story that consists pretty much entirely of odd twists. Aside from his late-stage career as a character actor, he’s even become a sort of king of the memes, his unmistakable voiceover gracing clips from his films that have taken on new and viral lives of their own (like the one about the depressed penguin, which in its various forms has been viewed several million times). I am hard pressed to explain it. Today’s Hollywood is a place that somehow manages to meld the worst kind of corporate groupthink and ostentatious greed with frantic virtue signaling. It doesn’t seem like a world that would embrace an exemplar of Bavarian gnarliness. “I’d rather die than go to an analyst,” Herzog tells us. “The so-called culture of complaint disgusts me.” “When people come up with this kind of New Agey twaddle, I get irked.” So why in god’s name did he choose to live in LA?

Herzog is hardly mounting an attack on wokeness, though. He just happens to be deeply skeptical of our urge to domesticate ourselves. For a famous auteur he’s no cheerleader for civilization. His sympathies are with the heretics, the backwoods crackpots, the last speakers of dying tongues. His ultimate artistic target, he tells us, is something he calls “ecstatic truth,” which transcends boring facts. He is a proudly unreliable narrator. He started one of his films with a fake quote from Blaise Pascal. When the Australian aborigines didn’t have a myth that satisfied his needs, he made one up. His fictions have sometimes pretended to fact, and his nonfiction stories often feel mystically charged.

At its weakest, Herzog’s hunger for hyperbole sometimes descends into outright blarney or oracular silliness. I am not, I confess, quite as enthralled as some by Aguirre or Fitzcarraldo. I’m drawn to his more recent films—especially Grizzly Man (2005), which tells the real-life tale of a deeply Herzogian figure by the name of Timothy Treadwell, who believed that he knew how to win the trust of wild bears (a tragic miscalculation). The story is anchored in Treadwell’s own voluminous video footage, which acts as a salutary check on Herzog’s effusions.

So why do the Hollywood bean-counters love this man so much? My guess is that he reminds them of what they’ve lost. Hollywood has never managed to plane down his edges. He prizes illogic and vision and messiness in a reality that is in thrall to conformity. I’m glad he managed to pack some of this into a memoir, to show us how it’s done.

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Christian Caryl is the author of Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the 21st Century. He has worked as an Opinions editor at The Washington Post, a foreign correspondent for Newsweek, and an editor and columnist at Foreign Policy. He lived in Germany from 1985 to 1997. He has written for Book Post on Colin Thubron, Jósef Czapski, Edward Gorey, and a dystopian novel on North Korean armageddon, among other subjects.

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