Werner Herzog, Who Recorded the Audio Version of His Memoir, Insists His Words Will Outlive His Movies

Peter Debruge Chief Film Critic Werner Herzog has traveled to the ends of the earth for his art, rolling cameras in places rarely seen by human eyes — from rapids along the Amazon River for 1972’s “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” to the rim of an active volcano in Antarctica. But what’s inside Herzog’s head is what fascinates fans of the German director. As revealed in a new memoir, “Every Man for Himself and God Against All” (the phrase served as the original title of his 1974 film “The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser”), Herzog’s far-ranging filmography represents only a fraction of the encounters and adventures that have shaped his worldview.

The book came easily, or so he insists as we huddle in a quiet corner of the Montrose, Colo. airport following the Telluride Film Festival. “It could have been five times as long, but now it’s only 350 pages.

I will not kill you with the weight of stories,” he says of the manuscript, which he wrote in his native German, then entrusted poet Michael Hofmann to translate. The memoir begins with the challenges of his Bavarian childhood and follows the threads of his interest in everything from Honduran child soldiers to a Bronze Age script called Linear B. The book is loaded with things he never found a way to convey on film, driven by the same impulse that compelled him to write his 2021 novel “The Twilight World,” which was based on the story of Japanese soldier Hiroo Onoda.

An extreme Herzogian protagonist if ever there was one, Onoda did not realize that World War II had ended and went on serving his country for decades, alone in a jungle of the Philippines. With the memoir, the idea was to avoid being redundant with work he had already written or shown. “It’s not a biography.

Don’t expect that,” Herzog says. Eight time zones away, it is already his birthday, and Werner (not “Verner,” as some mispronounce it) is in good spirits. “Some friend of mine said, ‘We’ll learn all about your sex life.’ No, you will not.