Every Man for Himself and God Against All (2023)
"I avoid contact with fans."
Today, two things related to Werner Herzog occurred:
His latest book, a memoir called Every Man for Himself and God Against All—the incredible title he originally wanted to give The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser—came out, and
I “reviewed” the book over at Paste Magazine, a publication and Movies section (edited by the wonderful Jacob Oller) who have always allowed me to write about Werner Herzog pretty much whenever I wanted to.
With the piece hovering around 3,000 words, I had to leave a lot out. The man’s written about himself and the many times he’s almost died regularly throughout his life, publishing more than one book comprised of diary entries and otherwise soldering anecdotes together into impenetrable, meme-able myths—quoting myself: “Werner Herzog has always had a not-so-hidden hand in crafting the legacy of Werner Herzog”—and Every Man for Himself careens from thought to thought, time to time, wandering and following where his memories take him. But it covers his whole life, ends literally at the moment he writes the last sentence of the book. It begins, too, with first a foreword stating that the book will end at the exact moment he stopped writing it—meaning he wrote the whole thing in order? Which is how I imagine Ice Cube wrote the screenplay to Friday (based on what happens in Straight Out of Compton, which is how I remember it here:), sitting down at a typewriter one day, declaring out loud, “I will write a screenplay,” and 2 weeks later we see him get up from the typewriter, pulling the last page from the reel with a crisp kkkkrrrrr followed by a clang as the whole machine lurches, placing the page face down on the large stack to the left of the typewriter, picking up and straightening the stack, then saying to the room after clearing his throat, “I wrote a screenplay,” and that movie was Friday, a huge success and cultural touchstone—and then it does. Then he begins with a short memory of the south coast of Crete, working on a fishing boat for a few nights at the age of 16 (he writes “sixteen” and one can easily hear the whole drawled-out word) and how during those long hours of waiting in the middle of nowhere on the water, he could stare up into the stars and
below me, lit up brightly by the carbide lamp, was the depth of the ocean, as though the dome of the firmament formed a sphere with it. Instead of stars, there were lots of flashing silvery fish. Bedded in a cosmos without compare, above, below, all around, a speechless silence, I found myself in a stunned surprise. I was certain that there and then I knew all there was to know. My fate had been revealed to me. And I knew that after one such night, it would be impossible for me to ever get any older. I was completely convinced I would never see my eighteenth birthday because, lit up by such grace as I now was, there could never be anything like ordinary time for me again.
“Now was”—he entertains disbelief in everything he’s telling us, but everything still comes alive in the immediacy and the detail in which he tells it. A 16-year-old feeling immortal when facing the sublime is not unbelievable, and what greasy teenage angst in young Werner having the epiphany of “know[ing] all there was to know.” But he’s also almost died so many times, and hasn’t, and has, in turn, endured a proportionate amount of pain for his not dying. If one can earn immortality, right?
An early chapter, entitled “Mythical Figures,” begins with a recollection of “one of the mythical figures from [his] childhood” in Sachrang, a village in Bavaria. The man was called Sturm Sepp, a giant permanently stooped over from, local children speculated, the one time he had to carry a massive tree trunk down from the mountain because his horse “had broken down.” From there, Herzog wades through further murky past events and silhouettes—“I’m not sure if this is a memory or not” he admits, later confirming, however unconvincingly, “which certainly happened”—recalling a run-in with a witch who taught him to not pee his pants, as well as the time his mother pulled him and his brother from bed to watch a village, Rosenheim, on fire 40 km away, the ravaged victim of allied bombers, “[i]t was said,” discarding excess payload on their way out. Herzog then considers another “riddle” from childhood, when a circling airplane dropped a parachuting “something shiny and mechanical” just outside of the village, and Herzog was never allowed to know what that metal object actually contained. Then Herzog remembers also finding guns left behind by the allied troops: “I myself found a submachine gun under a woodpile; I’m not sure if I fired it or not; I know I imagined going hunting with it.” This memory sparks another, all his memories mitigated by poverty and shrouded in hunger, of once joining a group of workers who had killed a crow, plucked and boiled it for soup, which gave young Werner his first glimpse of “globules of fat in the soup, quite a sensation” only to immediately reveal the punchline: “I was given none of the soup.” This grim joke gives way to more lessons in firearms, followed by a confession of the unique timbre of his generation (post-war, just following the “greatest” generation), how “extreme poverty” shaped him in ways millennials and zoomers will never understand, how he’s experienced so much dramatic technological and ecological and societal change, how he witnessed “lads who worked like serfs in medieval times” become genetically modified seeds and “farming done by robots without any humans anywhere,” only to dispel the notion that it was love at first sight with him and cinema. “I had no notion of cinema. I didn’t know such a thing existed until one day a man with a mobile projector came to us in our one-room village school in Sachrang and showed us a couple films, which utterly failed to impress me.” Then back to the uniqueness of his generation—“I can hardly imagine that future generations will experience such density of change in a single human lifespan”—then into the trauma of his poor childhood (which I cover some of in my piece for Paste) in a village so without basic necessities that Herzog’s mother, a biologist with a doctorate, is the closest locals have to a medical doctor, which not only inspires in him a distaste for “the so-called culture of complaint,” but leads him to admit that he was, for the sake of argument, a fucked up kid, “quiet, reserved, inclined to sudden outbursts of temper” and didn’t really realize it until he cut his brother badly with a knife and was “deeply shaken by [his] own behavior,” inspiring him to get his shit together “by means of absolute discipline,” a seriousness he credits with the bedrock of his character, even though to this day he and his brother Till still have a morbid, playful, sometimes violent way with each other. These mythical figures are the unsolved mysteries of childhood that shape who we are today.
One item I forgot in the deluge of items that I pushed into my Paste piece is that, when describing a sort of rogue spirit of filmmaking Herzog gained from Philippe Petit, a man Herzog knew and admired deeply, they are further, and stupidly coincidentally, connected through the Academy Awards. Despite the length and breadth of his career, Herzog has only been nominated once, in 2009 for Encounters at the End of the World. He lost to James Marsh’s Man on Wire, the film about Philippe Petit’s tightrope walk between the Twin Towers, a feat Herzog calls out (without mentioning the film) as formative for his understanding of how to approach the world.
Beyond Petit, in the book Herzog writes at length of his heroes. Here, I write at length of him. “I avoid contact with fans,” he states singularly near the end of the book, and immediately moves on to another subject, “trash TV” and the poet not looking away. I feel like I’ve had the chance to meet Herzog a number of times, but I’ve never tried, and I feel too like I’ll never meet him, though the way he writes of his life and films the cosmos speaks to me indelibly. I don’t know if he wants to hear that. I don’t think so. I do think of all the DVD commentaries he did with Crispin Glover, an avowed fan of Herzog’s, and how awkward they are, Glover often asking some question I’d probably also ask and Herzog dismissing it outright. But I still dream of telling him how deeply his films affect me, how everything he does is so devoid of pretention and so self-contained, not influenced by anything or validated by anything but inspired by the entelechial urge to capture the world’s extinguishing images, to create for the sake of it, unromantically but powerfully until the day you die incinerated in a lava flow, your idol never having known you loved him so.