Book Review: ‘Every Man for Himself and God Against All’ by Werner Herzog

This hugely enjoyable memoir by German film-maker Werner Herzog is every bit as Herzogian as you would hope and expect. It’s impossible to read it without hearing Herzog’s intense, deadpan, hypnotic voice in your head.

The early chapters, which were my favourites, recount Herzog’s early life and youth in wartime- and post-war Germany. I found them uncannily reminiscent of W. G. Sebald’s accounts of the same period. So, Hertzogian and Sebaldian: what’s not to like?

I’m pretty sure, like Sebald, Herzog embellishes many of his tales for artistic or comic effect. Are we, for example, seriously expected to believe he has such an aversion to looking in the mirror that he is uncertain of the colour of his own eyes? Here he is, towards the end of the book, writing about the difference, as he sees it, between truth and facts:

In the labyrinth of memories, I often ask myself how much are they in flux, what mattered when, and how much has evaporated or changed tonality. How true are our memories? The question of truth has preoccupied me in all my films. […]

From early on in my work, I was confronted by facts. You have to take them seriously because they have a normative force, but making purely factual films has never interested me. Truth does not necessarily have to agree with facts.

Such conflation of fact and fiction usually annoys the hell out of me, but I’ve always made an exception for Sebald, and I’m now prepared to do the same for Herzog.

A wonderful read.