Of Walking in Time: Werner Herzog’s Every Man for Himself and God Against All

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. – Werner Herzog on the “end of images” 

You no longer have to pretend to be under dragon attack while standing in front of a green screen. The cinema is back to where it always was and where it belongs. – Werner Herzog on The Mandalorian

Werner Herzog recently turned 81 years old. It’s an impressive feat, turning 81, for a man whose life story is a litany of the many times he’s almost died. And being 81, born in the middle of World War II, 1942, in Munich, the legendary German director writes of his childhood in his new memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All, as one of “extreme poverty.” Later, he rails against “the so-called culture of complaint” like one’s fed-up grandfather. He reflects on a memory “burned into [his] brain” of when, very small, he and his brother, “whimpering with hunger,” pulled at their mother’s dress until she responded with “a face full of anger and despair” and told her boys she would cut the meat from her own chest to feed them if she could. But she couldn’t. 

He files this memory in a chapter titled “Mythical Figures,” describing his formative hunger as a state of being that, in his experience, is functionally alien to later generations. Hunger forged in him a primordial drive, an enduring mettle required to thrive in this world. “A good part of my character to this day is determined by sheer discipline,” he states firmly. And he remembers when he first became aware of just how little his family had. “At that moment, we learned not to wail.” Not like these millennials nowadays.

Hunger and pennilessness are Herzog’s close companions throughout his life. They aren’t themes of Every Man for Himself and God Against All so much as tentpoles of his reality. They fill Herzog’s cup when nothing else will, sustain him and deliver him through undreamable situations. In the chapter “Peru,” Herzog writes of the disaster surrounding the production of Aguirre, the Wrath of God in the rainforest, how Klaus Kinski inspiring murderous threats was only the most visible of the film’s problems. Multiple, unreproducible rolls of film had gone missing, lost to local corruption, and Herzog didn’t have the heart to tell the already beleaguered crew that their hard work literally rotted in the sun. His memories from the Peruvian jungle all but eschew the romance of adventure and the thrill of artistic epiphany:

I remember there sometimes wasn’t anything to eat, and at night, I and a couple of pals set out in dugout canoes to an Indigenous village to try to find food. Once, I swapped my good shoes for a bathtub full of fish; another time I left my wrist watch as payment. I remember one night we paddled out and met at a bend in the river. None of the three of us had managed to find anything. At four in the morning, we tied our canoes together and drifted downstream and cried.

Then, as a beneficent deus ex machina, the director’s younger half-brother Lucki flew in to save Aguirre. Lucki came up with the plan to, in exchange for immediate Peruvian funds from local rich people, have their brother Till wire that same amount of money (with some extra on top) to the United States. Peruvian rich people wanted their money to go to the U.S. to avoid Peruvian tax authorities, and Herzog gave them an opportunity to have that happen directly and cleanly. In fact, one of the film’s largest investors, Joe Koechlin, badly needed an influx of American dollars to fund a Carlos Santana concert. Aguirre gave Koechlin the smoothest of venues to obtain the cash, so much so that Koechlin eventually produced Fitzcarraldo and Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams and is still Herzog’s friend today. But the starvation, wasted work, Kinski’s abuse, a Carlos Santana concert—was Aguirre worth so much suffering? Is any film?

Every Man for Himself and God Against All isn’t a cynical book, struck with relating the brutal indignity of sacrificing one’s all for the demands of art, but it’s a visceral one, ripe with passages devastating for their candor and for the beauty of their coincidence. Living is dangerous and revelatory and overwhelming as Herzog remembers his life, as if everything he tells us he’s witnessed first-hand with such clarity is too unbelievable to be confined to the life of one man. 

Many of Every Man for Himself and God Against All’s most arresting passages are collected from Herzog’s many diaries written over the 60-some years he’s been making films, punctuated with as many lovely observations as traumatic visions, but always awash in the empathy and—maybe even better for a filmmaker—fearlessness that’s rooted in his soul. The book’s most prominent array of diary entries comes in the chapter “The Ballad of the Little Soldier,” culled from the shoot for his 1984 documentary about child fighters in Nicaragua, The Ballad of the Little Soldier. The chapter’s final excerpt is especially wrenching:

“Cuentame algo,” I said to him. Tell me something. “No, nothing to say,” [the soldier] answered. He had his M16 leaning against the table next to him. He was too young to be a soldier. He looked very Indigenous. His name was Paladino Mendoza, he said; a name exists forever if you’re dead.

Overhead was a wheel of vultures, black and ominous. There are too many stars at night too… Gunfire alarmed me. The soldier Paladino Mendoza was gone. I didn’t notice him leave.

I next saw him on the pier amid more gunshots, closely spaced… I saw the soldier Paladino with his rifle pressed against his hip and empty his magazine into the air. Everyone was looking at him. He wanted their attention.

Then he calmly took his rifle in both hands and shot himself in the mouth. Since he had the muzzle in his mouth, the shot this time sounded like no shot I had ever heard… I picked up one of the cartridges off the boards, still hot, knowing it couldn’t give me any information… Right by Paladino’s feet were a few coarse, torn, paper cement sacks. They were left there because they had absorbed moisture… A pig pretended to snuffle the concrete, but its eyes were on the corpse. It had tried to lick the pasty brains, and someone had shooed it away with a stick.

In 2012, Herzog made two seasons of On Death Row, a documentary series that, like 2011’s Into the Abyss, filmed a series of interviews with death row inmates, examining their crimes and the state of the American penal system. He was supposed to release another season but had to quit after investigators accidentally showed him the body of a girl murdered by one of Herzog’s potential interview subjects. “I’ve seen many horrible, horrible things. I’ve never been afraid to look into the abyss, but I wouldn’t want my worst enemy to see what I saw then…I knew I had to end the series and leave the subject there and then. There is such a thing as one’s own household of emotions.”

My film Lessons of Darkness, about the blazing oil wells in Kuwait, begins with a quotation from Pascal: ‘The collapse of the stellar universe will occur, like creation, in grandiose splendor.’ …But the quote isn’t from Blaise Pascal, the French philosopher who left us wonderful aphorisms about the universe; it’s by me. I think Pascal couldn’t have put it any better.

“How true are our memories?” he asks much later in this book composed almost totally of memories, strung semi-chronologically but mostly stream-of-consciously across his existence. If you’re familiar at all with Herzog’s films, you know you won’t get a definitive answer. You know this whole book may be full of events that never happened. Herzog admits to making up a quote by Blaise Pascal and then doubles down on the legitimacy of that made-up quote.

“The question of truth has preoccupied me in all of my films,” he reminds us, as he’s written before. His documentaries, he’ll explain, are more fiction—more manipulated—than his fiction films. He also writes novels, directs operas, designs art installations, his work inhabiting what he refers to as the “interzone” between media and truth. Between materials and the ability to address experience accurately. 

Already, Every Man for Himself and God Against All is one more document in the man’s ever-iterative slipstream of content. The incredible details and biographical minutiae all over his memoir are nothing altogether new. He’s told many of these stories before. He’s published Of Walking in Ice in 1978, assembling his 1974 diaries during which he walked from Munich to Paris to superstitiously prevent German film luminary Lotte Eisner from dying, and Conquest of the Useless (2009), his diaries from the making of Fitzcarraldo, and A Guide for the Perplexed (2002), his tome-length collection of conversations with Paul Cronin that he edited himself. If there was any Bible of sorts available to help audience members—cinephiles and curious viewers alike—navigate the director’s career and philosophies, Guide is overwhelming in its scope, Herzog using “interviews” (ringing with the man’s inimitable cadence) to craft, or at least stymie, his own mythology. 

Werner Herzog has always had a not-so-hidden hand in crafting the legacy of Werner Herzog, negotiating truth with reality to excavate something deeper, something truer. In Every Man for Himself and God Against All, he pairs a loaded phrase like “this almost certainly happened” with an especially bonkers anecdote that actually might not have happened. Qualifying the Pascal forgery, he’s sure to mention that “in such instances, I always pointed out that I made something up.”

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 dozen James Millers in there. His number and address are indeed correct. But why does he cry into his pillow every night? 

Rather than accumulate a coherent narrative thread throughout his life, Herzog draws magnificent lines over the course of the memoir from his poor post-war childhood, to his passion to excavate the world, to his bottomless reserve of artistic inspiration. Rogue filmmaking techniques he learned from “tightrope walker, juggler, and musician” Philippe Petit (the Man on Wire himself) when Petit told Herzog how he pulled off the stunt at the World Trade Center. Later, when in Kashgar shooting with his wife, Lena, and Michael Shannon for 2009’s My Son, My Son What Have Ye Done, Herzog attempted the same—heading into danger with confidence, pulling off the illusion that you belong there—and ended up getting the shot he wanted for his film. “It is only from the swindler that the real truth could be gleaned. And that doesn’t exist, and so I call it ‘ecstatic truth.’”

It eventually doesn’t matter whether any of this is made up, how much is a faltering memory, how little his stories have evolved to compensate for false accounts, and for time, and for the sake of writing a compelling book accessible to people who may know nothing about Herzog outside of Grizzly Man and the “You must never listen to this” scene. The power Herzog unearths, the essence of the thing he captures on film or in prose, is sometimes a revelation regardless. 

He can do this because he has been everywhere. He’s unafraid of dying, of enduring pain, of the unfathomable. In last year’s The Fire Within, he confesses a kinship with volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, understands intimately their need to step closer and closer to the edge, to stare into the pyroclastic flow. The images Herzog brings us in his films—and the experiences he brings us in this memoir—can only come from a life lived fully. Fearlessly. 

Reading Every Man for Himself and God Against All affirms the vitality of Herzog’s filmography. Watching 1985’s The Dark Glow of the Mountain, witnessing iconic mountaineer Reinhold Messner weep while huddled in his tiny tent on the eve of an unprecedented climb when asked about his brother’s death on an earlier expedition, feels insurmountably sad in light of most human endeavors—let alone in thinking about one’s own paltry accomplishments. But Herzog admires Messner for more than his endurance and his will; in Messner, Herzog finds someone who knows that what they do has nothing to do with a death wish. “He did exactly what was humanly doable. To lift a ship over a mountain wasn’t a gamble either; it was my recognizing that this was doable.” Lifting a ship over a mountain is one of many sublime moments Herzog’s witnessed. Likely, reader, you’ve been lucky to have caught one.

I have had some rare moments in my films, how I did it I can no longer say, in which something extraordinary came to me as by God’s grace, some mysterious unfathomable beauty and truth, moments lit up as though from within.

Toward the later pages of Every Man for Himself and God Against All, Herzog details his guest spot on the Disney+ flagship property The Mandalorian (as “The Client,” the imperial baddie in the business of buying Baby Yoda) by fawning over creator Jon Favreau’s embracing of “a new technology…that would obviate the need for green screens” as if he’s heralding a Dogme-95-like return to stripped-down realism.

“The cinema is back to where it always was and where it belongs,” he writes unironically, because Herzog doesn’t tread in irony. His visiting the chocolate factory to come out of it convinced that Willy Wonka isn’t murdering children whiffs a bit too much of old man cluelessness, but Herzog’s always been a font of delightful, painfully blunt contrarianism and his broad passion for the world is not suddenly forgotten next to a hyper-detailed sunset on the desert planet Nevarro. It’s still unclear whether Herzog knows he has his own action figure, or cares.

After all, Herzog was only on set because Favreau was “a great admirer of [his] films,” admitting that, prior to the casting, he’d never seen a Star Wars movie before. In that same chapter, titled “Villains,” Herzog remembers what a “good job” he’d done as a voice actor on The Simpsons, another show with which he wasn’t familiar before Matt Groening reached out and incredulously, when discovering Herzog didn’t know anything about Bart or Homer, “guffawed down the phone at [him].” Groening “thought [Herzog] was kidding” when the German director wanted to catch a few new episodes on DVD to become acquainted with primetime adult animation.

This is how many of Herzog’s stories from Hollywood play out: Industry stalwarts like Nicolas Cage or Nicole Kidman or Christian Bale either sweeping Herzog into their projects or agreeing to inhabit Herzog’s world, almost inevitably starring in something antithetical (and predictably poisonous) to box office success. They did this not only because they wanted to, but because they could, without fear. Herzog traverses the interzone in Hollywood too, keyed into the business’s reality while never really at the mercy of it. Queen of the Desert made $3 million on a, reportedly, $36 million budget, and ostensibly nothing has come from the film’s disastrous performance, financially and critically. Herzog never even mentions it in his book.

While Herzog introduces a memory of Sturm Sepp, a local mountain man from Herzog’s childhood in the village of Sachrang in Bavaria, as myth, as a verse in a Tom Waits song, Herzog’s recollection of interactions with people like Tom Cruise or Mike Tyson are sometimes hilariously denuded of all idolatry.

“I want to make a film with Mike Tyson about the early Frankish kings,” he states while relating his many projects yet to come to fruition, and goes on to praise how knowledgeable Tyson is, having “voraciously” read up on the subject while in jail. Oh, just Mike Tyson, misunderstood scholar, able to lecture on “the early Frankish dynasty of the Merovingians—Clovis, Childeric, Childebert, Fredegund.”

Of Tom Cruise, with whom he worked while playing the bad guy in Jack Reacher, Herzog “was impressed by his absolute professionalism” and comfortable enough to joke with the A-lister, who “seemed happy there was someone on set who wasn’t rigid with awe.”

When Jack Nicholson expressed interest in playing the lead in Fitzcarraldo, Herzog would sometimes watch telecasts of Lakers away games while stretched out in bed with Nicholson and Anjelica Huston, a situation given to dozing. “I was at the foot of the bed, tired after a long flight, and Jack finally had to nudge me awake to point out that the basketball game was over. He needed his bed for something else now.” Time for Jack to fuck, nothing more and nothing less.

If there’s anything Herzog is concerned about, it’s that we’re losing irreplaceable images. Maybe it’s an unacceptable sentiment from a guy who praises Jon Favreau’s expensive dearth of practical sets and effects, but Every Man for Himself and God Against All is a testament to the physicality of his filmmaking. To seeing for oneself. It’s often moving because of that. “My films were always films on foot. I don’t mean it metaphorically either,” he states after countless stories of walking. We are shrinking the wonder of the world the more we refuse to walk it. At 81, and with this memoir, Herzog continues to push out, to push against, that constriction. “The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot.”

Later, he ends his book in the middle of a sentence, as if he’s gotten up and left, abandoning the manuscript completely. He’s already on to whatever’s next.

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Dom Sinacola is a Portland-based writer and editor. He founded a blog on Werner Herzog movies, The Werner Herzblog. He’s also on Twitter.