Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir

by Werner Herzog

He studied Catholic theology and wrote a doctorate on the philosophical-religious significance of Christ’s purported descent into Hell.

Hades

saw Sturm Josef—Sepp, we called him—bathing stark naked and scrubbing himself all over with a brush made from some root. He didn’t seem to be a human figure, more like an ancient wodwo overgrown with lichen blowing in the wind.

What I found oppressive at the time was the way that a lot of intellectuals, the writer Günter Grass among them, had vehemently opposed the idea of German reunification. For that reason, I heartily detested him. The fact that shortly before he died Grass confessed to having been in the SS didn’t surprise me, but I had some admiration for his courage in dealing with his past.

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.

He suffered, not superficially either but to the depths of his soul, from terrible acne.

Carbon dating has shown us that a painting begun by one painter was completed more than five thousand years later by another,

ask myself, though, is there something like buried memory within families? Or, to put it differently, are there images that slumber within us and are sometimes set free by some sort of jolt? I believe so, and somehow all my works have pursued such images, whether it was the ten thousand windmills of Crete in my first feature film, Signs of Life, or the steamship that is lugged over a mountain, the central metaphor of my film Fitzcarraldo. I know it’s a wonderful metaphor, but what it means I am unable to say.

E.g., inherited trauma, historical trauma

I learned the basics about cinema in about a week from reading the thirty or forty pages on radio, film, and TV in an encyclopedia. I still think that’s about all there is to know. Studying literature won’t make you a poet; being able to type won’t either.

The world reveals itself to those who travel on foot. In Bruce’s case, this was paired with his deep understanding of nomadic cultures and his conviction that all human problems stemmed from the forsaking of nomadism.

Connects to The Actual Star

Bruce liked my ten commandments, my catalog of the sins of modern civilization—among them the first domestic pig, not to be compared with the first dog as a dog could be your companion on the hunt, and the first climbing of a mountain for the sake of it.

Petrarch was the first person we know of who climbed a mountain, and from the letter he wrote in Latin about it, we can feel his shudder at having done something extraordinary, almost forbidden.

In my unease with what is practiced in film schools all over the world, I started a thing called the Rogue Film School, a countermethod, a guerrilla school or hedge school where the only two things I actually teach are the forging of documents and the cracking of Yale locks. Everything else is instructions to dodge prevailing systems and make films out of yourself.

Because I’ve recently been attacked by crazily politically correct individuals who wonder why I would direct Wagner in the first place, I now have a series of prepared answers. The first one is a question: Why did Daniel Barenboim conduct Wagner and even do it in Israel? No doubt about it, Wagner’s personal character is awful, and worse, he was an antisemite. But he’s not responsible for Hitler and the Holocaust any more than Karl Marx was responsible for Stalin.

I coined the phrase “ecstatic truth.” To explain that fully would take another book, so I’ll just sketch out a few lines of it here. It’s on this question that I have sought public conflict with the proponents of the so-called cinema verité who claim for themselves the truth of the whole genre of documentary films. As the auteur of a film, you are not allowed to exist, or not more than a fly on the wall anyway. That creed would make the CCTV cameras in banks the ultimate form of filmmaking. But I don’t want to be a fly; I’d rather be a hornet.

in my feature film Heart of Glass I wasn’t sure how I could show a whole village sleepwalking into a wholly predictable catastrophe. The film’s subject is a real figure, a cowherd in the Bayerischer Wald in the late eighteenth century who had the gift of prophecy and, like Nostradamus, had visions of a world on fire and the end of mankind.

In fact, anyone can hypnotize. The cause of the mystifications is that we know very little about the mechanics of the brain switching off in hypnosis and sleep. All we really know is that we have to proceed methodically. There are simple techniques, fixing the eyes of the subject, say, with the point of a pencil. That is accompanied by a certain intense and suggestive way of speaking. In my later film voice-overs and commentaries, I was to draw on this way of speaking.

Beate thought all my films were so bad that she refused to go to any of the premieres, including Aguirre’s. She allowed one exception, Even Dwarfs Started Small, which she thought was great, and she took a bow at the premiere. Later, Harmony Korine and David Lynch would rank the film near the top of their favorites.

director Christopher McQuarrie and his star, Tom Cruise, turned to me. They wanted me to play the villain in the first Jack Reacher film. That was in 2011; the film was premiered in 2012. Before I agreed, I looked closely at the screenplay and found it more intelligent than those of run-of-the-mill action movies. The part of Zec was a challenge to me. Of course, there was a whole row of villains, and they all lashed out with their fists and stomped about and opened fire on one another indiscriminately with their disagreeably large assault rifles.

No parrots from Alexander von Humboldt’s 1802 journey up the Orinoco, where he came to a village, all of whose inhabitants had been killed off by a plague. Their language had died with them, but the neighboring village had for the past forty years continued to look after their parrot. This parrot still spoke sixty distinct words of the inhabitants of the dead village, their dead language. Humboldt copied them down in his notebook.