In his documentary “The Dark Glow of the Mountains” (1985), the German filmmaker Werner Herzog asked the notoriously daring mountaineer Reinhold Messner why he routinely risked death to ascend the world’s highest peaks. “I can’t answer the question of why I do it, just as I can’t say why I live,” Messner replied. “And I never asked myself the question when I was climbing. The question just doesn’t exist then, because my entire being is the answer.”
It is a response after the director’s own heart. Certain mountains summon Messner, and certain films scream out to Herzog and will not let him rest. As he writes in his new memoir, “Every Man for Himself and God Against All,” the 1982 film “Fitzcarraldo” “blew me away. I had no choice.” It did not matter that “Fitzcarraldo” turned out to be so outrageously difficult to make that there is an entire documentary (“Burden of Dreams”) about its somewhat miraculous completion. As production in a remote stretch of the Amazon dragged on, Herzog was “so reduced” that he was “living in a converted chicken coop with a papier-mâché ceiling just a little higher than the top of my head. Rats scuffed around at night. Finally, I was left with no food.” Nonetheless, he never doubted that it was his “duty to follow a grand vision.”
“Every Man for Himself and God Against All” takes its name from the German title of Herzog’s 1974 film, “The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser.” The book is nonlinear and exuberantly free-associative, less a narrative than an extravagant demonstration of sensibility. Its chapters are arranged thematically rather than chronologically: One is about Herzog’s unrealized projects (among them, incredibly, “an oratorio and ballet for elves in a place in Alaska called North Pole”); another is about films and series in which he has appeared as an actor (including, incongruously, “The Simpsons”). The book’s oddities will delight devotees of Herzog’s singular cinema, but readers unfamiliar with his tragicomic tirades and brooding philosophical meditations may find his digressions vexing.
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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. Haltingly, it emerges that Herzog was born in Munich in 1942. His estranged father was a womanizing layabout interminably working on a multidisciplinary magnum opus that never materialized; his ferociously practical mother was trained as a biologist but was obliged to abandon her profession when she fled to the Alps with Herzog and his brother during the war. In the rural town of Sachrang, the family took refuge in a ramshackle house with no running water and unreliable electricity. They were sometimes so hungry that they brewed “syrups from ribwort and fresh pine shoots” for food. Herzog did not enter a movie theater until his family moved back to Munich when he was 12 years old.
The usual teenage tumults — a short-lived flirtation with Catholicism, an equally transitory infatuation with motorcycles — ensued. Ultimately, however, Herzog has only ever loved one thing, and he has always loved it with lunatic vehemence. When he was 19, he stole his first camera from a film school in Munich. “It felt to me more like expropriation than theft,” he writes. “I was exercising a natural right to put the camera to its intended use.” He has since made more than 50 documentary and feature films.
Though Herzog concedes that he has always relied on “helpers, family, women,” he clarifies that his book “is not about them.” But it is not about him, either, or at least not straightforwardly so. Aside from several chapters of fond childhood reminiscences, he is comparatively silent about his private life, his daily routines, his tics and aversions, his favorite foods, his hobbies; one senses that he is too grave and too distracted for such frivolities. Herzog claims that he declines to discuss his marriages (there have been three) and his children (also three, one out of wedlock) because of his “natural discretion,” but I could detect more than a twinge of relief when he reverted to his favorite subject: the movies that are evidently the most intimate and urgent business of his life. “When I spontaneously decided in 1977 to fly to the Caribbean for ‘La Soufrière,’ the film about the volcanic eruption, I stopped at home for a couple of minutes to pick up my passport,” he recalls. “There was our little boy, and it was far from clear whether I would return alive. I mention it because this is not the sort of behavior that a marriage can tolerate.”
Perhaps not, but it is the sort of behavior that art-making can demand, and there is plenty of it in Herzog’s memoir. On practically every page he is scything through the jungle, trudging up remote mountains or narrowly evading arrest in one of the war-torn countries where he stubbornly persists in filming, no matter the dangers, in a quest to secure the perfect shot. He recounts near-fatal exploit after near-fatal exploit with unwavering sang-froid, as if it is perfectly natural, even inevitable, to pursue the impossible to the brink of death. When he was about to start shooting “Signs of Life” in Greece, a military coup broke out. “I was expressly forbidden to clear the harbor of the island of Cos of people or to bombard the promenade with fireworks,” he writes. But the site was ideal for a scene he had envisioned, so he “did it anyway. The place was crawling with soldiers, but I was never arrested.” Later, when he was at work on a second film about mountaineering, he was trapped in a whiteout in the Andes with two other members of his crew. They had no sleeping bags or tents. “You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face, and there was a hundred-and-forty-mile-an-hour gale and a temperature of twenty below,” he remembers. For three days, the three men huddled in the snow and subsisted on the chocolate bars that Herzog happened to have in his pocket.
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Reading “Every Man for Himself,” I got the impression that Herzog has not only never had a normal experience but that he has never encountered a normal person. When his mother was working toward her doctorate in biology, she conducted her research in an aquarium, where “she played tunes on her flute, to which the fish learned to respond.” A close childhood friend “suffered, not superficially either but to the depths of his soul, from terrible acne.”
The Alpine Bavaria of the director’s youth is also as fantastic as a fairy tale. The dilapidated house where Herzog grew up crackled with “mysterious creakings and hauntings. Once I bumped into God there.” Sachrang, or Herzog’s reinvention of Sachrang, was populated by phantasms whose eccentricities are never doused with the ice water of rational explanation. “By the Alpine meadow lived a family of cheese makers,” he writes. One of them became something of a recluse. “The story went that she would have nothing to do with the valley and the people down there since she had once fallen in love and been deserted by someone. … She had been down to the valley only once in her sixty years of adulthood because her signature was required for something; I think it was pension payments.” Then there was Sturm Sepp, an impassive farmhand who “bent forward at the hip like a ninety-degree hinge.” No one had ever heard this colossus “speak a word.” Once, Herzog alleges dreamily, he met a witch.
Is any of this true? These marvelously magical remembrances may not be flatly accurate, but childhood is, most essentially, a land of terrors and enchantments, and a sober account of its charms would only serve to distort them. No one understands better than Herzog that, as he puts it, “truth does not necessarily have to agree with facts,” that it is a matter of “poetic imagination.” “The ecstatic truth” is his wonderful name for the elusive quality he chases in his documentaries, which are not dry investigations but feats of storytelling with a distinctive point of view.
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In many ways, this is a shockingly impersonal memoir, but there is one sense in which Herzog is palpable in it. His melancholic, meditative and theatrically nostalgic way of being is as irrepressible in his writing as it is in his films. Sometimes, he verges on self-parody, as when he observes that “the twentieth century, in its entirety, was a mistake,” or confesses, “I watch trash TV because I think the poet shouldn’t avert his eyes.” But if Herzog is a fertile subject for satire, it is only because he is so inimitably and emphatically himself.
In this respect, he resembles the heroes of his best films, figures so grimly heroic that we can hardly tell whether we ought to laugh or cry in the face of their quixotic undertakings. Timothy Treadwell sets out to be befriend — or become — an Alaskan grizzly bear in “Grizzly Man”; Aguirre attempts to conquer El Dorado in “Aguirre, the Wrath of God”; Fitzcarraldo clambers to build a lavish opera house in the depths of the Amazon in his eponymous film — in my view, Herzog’s best. These men do not succeed, but they fail so fanatically that their very obstinacy is its own accomplishment. Herzog generally triumphs, and in doing so he proves himself a master of two arts: the art of filmmaking and, like his protagonists, the art of mad tenacity. In his memoir, he halfheartedly protests, “What isn’t doable I won’t do.” But what is doable is a question of what we are insane or inspired enough to insist on doing. Most people would say that hauling a steamboat over a hill in the Amazon in the aftermath of a nearby border war is not doable, but Herzog did not see things that way.
And what were all of his struggles for? “Fitzcarraldo,” the product of so much toil, was not for anything. Herzog acknowledged as much when he declared himself “a conquistador of the useless” in an interview about the making of the film. But he has also explained that he could not survive without his grandiose schemes. When his investors asked how he could carry on filming after so many setbacks, he replied, “If I abandon this project, I would be a man without dreams, and I don’t want to live like that.”
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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. Amazing, that we go to such lengths to achieve such magnificent superfluities. Amazing, that we create such burdens for ourselves, and for no other reason than that, if we didn’t, we would be living dully, without the respite of our dreams.
Becca Rothfeld is the nonfiction book critic for The Washington Post.
Every Man for Himself and God Against All
By Werner Herzog
Penguin Press. 355 pp. $30
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