Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir

by Werner Herzog

Also included is Pharaoh Akhenaton, who introduced an early form of monotheism half a millennium before Moses. After his death, his name was expunged from all temples, buildings, and steles. He was rubbed off all lists, and his statues smashed to rubble.

Not many years ago, the Bayerischer Rundfunk made a film about Siegel Hans, and that made it clear to me that he almost died under the terrible conditions in the Kufstein Fortress where he was imprisoned.

I thought only its poets would be able to keep Germany together.

I started on my long march on June 15, 1982; thereafter the manuscript contains no dates.

On a meadow in front of the woods, two young stags and a female were grazing; they looked and sniffed appraisingly for a moment. Who was this then? Stranger that I was, even to myself, they didn’t know. Herzog, I introduced myself, at your service, whereupon in a few majestic bounds they vanished into the woods.

The feebleminded son of the forester in the lodge next door turned up, and with strange noises from his strange insides, he first tugged at me, then at a clever-looking hunting dog.

For a long time, two cows pursued me through the paddocks, as though they hoped to hear something to their advantage. “You are no cows,” I said to them. “You are princesses.”

Germany seemed undecided, frozen perhaps, as though the performance of a new composition had just ended and the audience doesn’t trust themselves to applaud because no one is quite certain that it is the end.

The latest thing to happen was this: a ladies’ group had decided in their ripe old age to learn the trade of butchery, and to prove they were serious, they set a moped on fire outside the nearest bar.

Perhaps I am being too subjectively concentrated on my own family here. Families are strange creatures, and mine is no exception. In addition, there is the circumstance that I knew my grandfather only when he was already insane.

I know much less about my parents’ meeting. On the face of it, it’s very straightforward; they met as students in Munich, where they were both studying biology and my mother was minoring in sports. They were both early, committed members of the Nazi Party.

She wasn’t a racist, and I remember how encouraging she was when I got pally with a member of the American occupying forces, the first Black person I had ever met. Before that, there were only the blackamoors from fairy tales.

The roots of my father’s Nazism are in his enthusiastic membership of the student brotherhoods that since the early nineteenth century had been an engine of the German Reich.

After the war, both my parents were put through “de-Nazification,” and for years after, my father was still bitter that Germany had been defeated and that an American lifestyle was coming to dominate West Germany. American barbarism, as he termed it, nettled him.

That question gives me the feeling that people know too much anyway. My publications and film releases render me vulnerable enough: so many breaches in a fortification that stands unprotected anyway.

Later in life, Lucki played a decisive part in my career. Beginning with Aguirre, the Wrath of God in 1972, he was always by my side. He has extraordinary organizational gifts, and it is thanks to him that I had the chance to do so much.

Most of the books in Rudolf’s library were copiously underlined and annotated, but in the mania of his last years, he started underlining everything in a book from beginning to end, every line, every word, every letter.

Sometimes I feel a similar shock when someone names one of my films to me. Did I really make that? Is it possible I’ve just persuaded myself that I have, or could it be that the film exists, but someone else has made it, not me at all?

because our little sister had just begun to talk, and she would stand up in her cot and harangue the sleepers. Later, at the Otto Falckenberg School of the Performing Arts in Munich, she would train three generations of actors, and I owe her for the discovery of Sepp Bierbichler, who played the lead in my film Heart of Glass. That was my 1976 movie in which all the actors are under hypnosis. Sigrid always felt a pull to the theater and directed plays in Germany and the United States. Of late, she has been directing mainly operas.

Kainzen Ruepp later became a dairy hand on the agricultural estate on the Fraueninsel in Chiemsee and died of burns. He must have been drunk and got his bed caught on fire with a cigarette.

We bought the cheapest plonk we could find, a red wine fortified with vermouth. Reeling, I barely made it back to my father’s apartment, who put me to bed and brought me a bucket to be sick in. I puked all night, and my father was incredibly proud that he had a son who behaved like a proper frat boy. The fact that I wasn’t yet twelve put the icing on it for him.

Once I bumped into God there. I was four-ish, and my brother Till and I were bragging about how on Saint Nicholas Day, on the dark landing, we would rig up a trip wire for Krampus, who in Austria and Southern Germany was a kind of rustic demon in fur and horns rattling about to terrorize naughty children with a heavy chain. We were thrilled by the idea; we weren’t scared a bit; we outdid each other in our fearlessness. We also had the notion that Saint Nick in person would stumble into our kitchen and land flat on his belly, and all the presents would come tumbling out of his sack, and we wouldn’t have to listen to his admonishments. But the nearer Saint Nicholas Day approached, the more our courage seemed to evaporate. We never put up the trip wire.

The other thing I remember was that I spent several days playing with a loose thread that I had pulled from the seam of a blanket. I was mesmerized by the incredible possibilities of the thread—it was a revelation to me. My mother told me later that for a whole week I had nothing but this thread, but my time with the thread was thrilling.

My mother walked the dog, and sometimes, after there had been substantial meals, the woman of the house swept the leftovers into a dish and gave it to her. “Elisabeth, this is for the dog and you.”

But our pleasure in the bike was too great. We called it “D’machine,” capital D, apostrophe, machine. We didn’t ride D’machine; we fucked her. Beer wasn’t drunk but instead, after we’d got it out of the kitchen, married.

When there was food on the table, I had to eat quickly, because if I didn’t, my brothers would hoover everything up. To this day, I bolt my food even if I tell myself to chew each bite and eat mindfully. And the second is that I have trouble throwing food away, especially bread. My fridge is always closely attended to.

To this day, I bolt my food even if I tell myself to chew each bite and eat mindfully. And the second is that I have trouble throwing food away, especially bread. My fridge is always closely attended

Even today I can read or write in the middle of a mob of people, seemingly oblivious to their presence. Under the pressure and the multiple demands of endless people on a film set, I am capable of rewriting a whole section of a screenplay when some external necessity compels a sudden change of course.

I unlocked the door of the apartment, and the first thing that met my eyes was Hermine, eighteen, a stout country girl from Lower Bavaria. She was chasing after a young man I’d never seen before, smacking him with a wooden tray. The man was yelling shrilly. He had reached under her skirt. It was Klaus Kinski.

Not far from us, he had squatted in an empty attic in an old apartment house and frightened away the legitimate owner, who wanted to throw him out. Instead of furniture, he had scattered dry leaves throughout this apartment until eventually they were knee-deep. He slept in them. Like my father, he never wore clothes when he was at home; he disdained them as the hypocrisy of civilization that kept us from ever experiencing true nature.

When he had a monologue in one production where he knew only the beginning, he rolled himself up in a carpet on the stage and lay there until the audience started to protest and the theater was forced to drop the curtain.

Kinski could yell louder than anyone I ever knew. He could shatter wineglasses with his voice; when he shrilled, they cracked.

But I know that, aside from my mother, I was the one who was not afraid of him. To me, he was a force of nature; it was like watching the devastation wrought by a passing tornado.

Even in my schooldays, though, I had a sense of everyone working on their careers; that was something that struck me. I had few friends and hated the school, sometimes so passionately, I imagined going there at night when it was empty and setting it on fire.

Intelligence is always a bundle of several qualities: logical thought, articulacy, originality, memory, musicality, sensitivity, speed of association, organizational capacity, and so on and so forth; but in my case, the bundle seemed to be differently composed.

Till didn’t make anything on the cars, but interest rates at the time were 8 percent, so in the space of six months, he cleared 800,000 marks interest. In its best years, his company had a turnover exceeding 100 million marks, always with highly profitable deals focused on Yugoslavia. At the age of fifty-one, after thirty-six years of intense work, Till was burned out.

The original plan had been for Aguirre to begin at high altitude on a glacier with distant ribbons of men and beasts, Spanish conquerors and Indigenous enslaved laborers chained together, alpacas and a herd of black swine, muskets, cannons, and litters. The pigs were supposed to fall victim to altitude sickness and reel about on the zigzag path, and for that, I needed a vet to make some tests.

To seal our reconciliation, they put us to bed on a couple of straw mattresses and brought us a couple of young women. “Here are two ponies you can ride all night,” we were told. It was a curious image that etched itself into my memory. In front of us were the two women, both barefoot and wearing several layers of skirts. The cold seemed not to bother them. They had the bright-red cheeks of people who live at great altitude. Both had the bowler hats that Quechua women affect and were holding them up in the air. They stood that way for a long time, perfectly still, as though made from a different kind of reality. I did not remotely understand this display of something so utterly alien. I was excluded from the reality around about me but still felt deeply immersed in its mystery.

My details had surely landed me on lists of suspected RAF sympathizers, but I had nothing in common with those people.

It was through him that I discovered the first reference anywhere to Lope de Aguirre for my film Aguirre, the Wrath of God. I visited him once, and he hardly greeted me, then dashed back to the phone. He was lovesick. I saw that he had no time for me, so I went along the endless rows of his books. Almost at random, I took one down because it seemed to stick out. It was a book for twelve-year-olds, say, about discoverers. Vasco da Gama appeared in it, and Columbus, but there was a single brief paragraph about ten lines long that aroused my curiosity. It was a passage about one of the conquistadors named Aguirre, who in the quest for El Dorado, the fabled kingdom of gold, had traveled the length of the Amazon. Having reached the mouth of the river, he made for the Caribbean and wanted to snatch the whole of South America from the Spanish crown. He called himself the “Great Betrayer,” the “Pilgrim,” and the “Wrath of God.”

Not one of my siblings from the first or second or third litter had any affection for him; even his three wives turned away from him. In the case of the third, that’s an inference I draw because she conspired against him with my mother and with Doris. His sister detested him; even his own mother, my grandmother, would never talk about her son, Dieter; he was always just the asshole.

My religious phase didn’t last long; it evaporated. After a couple of years, I officially left the church even though, according to Catholic dogma, baptism leaves an indelible mark on the human soul. In theory, one can leave the church or even be excommunicated and still remain a Catholic. But that idea didn’t make much impression on me either.

“I looked around, and there was the jungle, manifesting the same seething hatred, wrathful and steaming, while the river flowed by in majestic indifference and scornful condescension, ignoring everything: the plight of man, the burden of dreams, and the torments of time.”

“What is your idea of an honorarium?” asked Mitterrand. I replied: “One euro, and I will donate it to the state as soon as I get it.” Cave of Forgotten Dreams from 2010 remains my only work in 3D. For me, it was the fulfillment of a dream.

Myself included, there were to be no more than four persons working in the cave at any time, and then for no more than four hours a day. The filming was to take less than a week. One could move about only on a metal grid that was two feet wide, and our lights were not to create any heat—all of these perfectly reasonable requirements.