Werner Herzog plays a certain role in the public imagination. At least I think it’s the public imagination and not just my own. The German film-maker has become meme-ified and satirised – not his work, but his person, his wild-haired, Bavarian-accented, sad-eyed, difficult-truth-intoning person. As I read Herzog’s new book, I found myself thinking of the bears at my local zoo. Two young grizzlies were introduced last year; I became fascinated by them and went to see them almost every week. As I watched the bears play and swim and sleep, I was occasionally visited by strange, glinting moments of dark understanding: that they were predators, that if I met them in the wild, they might very well consign me to the void.
Of course, bears are Herzogian (if I may turn man into adjective) – after all, he made the documentary Grizzly Man, about one conservationist’s obsession with the creatures. And the void, too, is ineluctably Herzogian – it hovers at the centre of his work, from Aguirre, the Wrath of God to Fitzcarraldo to the great and largely unloved Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. But really I was thinking about the gap between the way the bears are perceived – adorable! – and the reality of their being: they will eat you. Herzog himself has undergone some kind of similar schism in the popular consciousness. He has become, personally, a zoo animal, and this autobiography reminds us once again that he is a fearsome and strange force.
Herzog’s book covers the expected elements: accounts of the making of his films; descriptions of his relationships with actors such as Klaus Kinski and friendships with luminaries such as Bruce Chatwin and the mountaineer Reinhold Messner; glimpses into his personal life, including an exploration of his parents’ Nazi ties and his relationships with his several wives. Fans of his work (and perhaps fans of his persona) will find much to love here, all of it jumbled up into a kind of memoir-diary-polemic hybrid. At times so jumbled I found myself wondering: is this actually a book? But that hardly seems to matter, given the power and specificity of Herzog’s writing. In fact, what we have here is something weirder and truer than a mere autobiography. The subject of every memoir is “how I got this way” – and in the case of Werner Herzog, it’s a very specific way indeed. An important artist like Herzog doesn’t necessarily need to do the memoirist’s work of answering that question. It’s enough to get the dates down and the anecdotes told; we’re already interested. But his book does do the serious labour of letting us into his deepest compulsions and yearnings.
When he was just a baby, his family home was damaged during allied bombing raids on Munich: “My mother found me in my cradle covered in a thick layer of broken glass, bricks, and rubble. I was unhurt, but my mother in her panic snatched up my older brother, Tilbert, and me and left the city and fled up into the mountains to Sachrang, surely the remotest place in all Bavaria.” Of course this was Herzog as a baby: swaddled in shards of glass.
In Sachrang, during the war and after, Herzog grew up poor, hungry and free. He and his brother roamed the mountains and fended for themselves. The countryside was like a setting from myth or folktale: inhumanly strong men, swarming weasels, fairy forests. Life was incredibly rudimentary, even pre-industrial. In Sachrang, Herzog and his family eddied out of the river of modern life, and this liberated him to become the artist he is. He speaks of his early interest in film-making: “It was … clear to me that – in almost complete ignorance of the cinema of others – I would have to come up with a cinema of my own. The world of the Alps at Sachrang was, after all, one we’d partly made up.”
The glory of this book is that Herzog lets us see him making the world up. He writes throughout with enviable attention to the world around him. Anyone who has read his travel memoir Of Walking in Ice knows his ability to pull the reader up short; he demands that we wonder at the tangible world, in all its mystery. His writing here about childhood reduces that quality, the way a stock is reduced. A throwaway paragraph about a hospital stay when he was young gives a sense of that almost magical noticing: “There are two things I remember from the hospital: I was given an orange. I had never seen such a thing before, and a nurse had to show me how it was peeled. Then she left me. I didn’t know what to do then, so I carefully segmented it then just stared at the segments. Finally, I started to peel the individual segments. The longish crescent forms, now naked, I then pressed into my mouth. The taste was indescribably wonderful. 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.”
As I said, there are other attractions to this book – gossipy talk of actors; detailed rundowns of film-making strategy; and yes, plenty of bracing crankiness (including a few tiresome moments of anti-wokeness). This is Herzog’s more public self, and for the most part a very entertaining bear he is. But, for me, the real story here is of a somewhat cross little boy with an empty stomach and a howling sense of his own difference, clinging to a mountainside populated by gods and demons.
• Claire Dederer is the author of Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma (Sceptre). Every Man for Himself and God Against All by Werner Herzog is published by Vintage (£25). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
