Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir

by Werner Herzog

I arranged an installation on Hercules Seghers for the biennial at the Whitney, which was later shown at the Getty; I made a film called Gesualdo: Death for Five Voices; and there were a few short-lived plans for a film on Akhenaton.

Just like me in the Alps, these children in the city in the immediate postwar years had the most wonderful childhood imaginable. Even Dieter Dengler, who I later made a film about—two films, a documentary and a drama, Little Dieter Needs to Fly in 1997 and Rescue Dawn in 2006—who had grown up in some seclusion in Wildberg in the Black Forest, said the same thing, though their poverty had been even worse than ours.

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 the postman knocked, a stark-naked Kinski would come rustling to the door.

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.

I’d rather die than go to an analyst, because it’s my view that something fundamentally wrong happens there. If you harshly light every last corner of a house, the house will be uninhabitable. It’s like that with your soul; if you light it up, shadows and darkness and all, people will become “uninhabitable.” I am convinced that it’s psychoanalysis—along with quite a few other mistakes—that has made the twentieth century so terrible. As far as I’m concerned, the twentieth century, in its entirety, was a mistake.

I moved inland to San Miguel de Allende, a beautiful little colonial town now completely spoiled. Around the time I was there, the first wave of artists had begun to settle there, who over the decades were to draw vast numbers of confused and prosperous Americans after them, all wanting to get in touch with their creativity. I find it hard to set foot there now.

In 1976 I made a film about the world championship of livestock auctioneers, How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck, which had to do with my fascination with the limits of language. That’s why Hölderlin and the Baroque poet Quirinus Kuhlmann are so important to me, because in their different ways they approached the limits of my language, German.

Tree huggers are suspicious to me. Yoga classes for five-year-olds—which in California are a thing—are suspicious to me. I don’t use social media. If you see my profile anywhere there, you can be sure it’s a fake. I don’t use a smartphone.