Filmmaker Werner Herzog named his memoir “Every Man For Himself and God Against All,” which is the English translation of the title of his 1974 film, “Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle.” That film was released here as “The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser” and starred a rugged actor credited as Bruno S. At first, the choice seems odd, considering the more familiar film titles Herzog could have used. Plus, there aren’t many mentions of this film in the book.
But near the end of the memoir, the reason for the title becomes crystal clear. In a chapter entitled “Villains,” Herzog expresses his admiration for Bruno S.
“He had a depth, a tragedy and an honesty that I have never seen anywhere else in cinema,” he writes. Continuing on, he describes Bruno S.’s life story, a tale full of violence, madness, cruelty, sadness, and above all, perseverance.
In other words, Bruno S. sounds like a real-life version of many of Werner Herzog’s protagonists.
“Every Man For Himself and God Against All” provides insight into Herzog’s films. It is less of a how-to guide — there are few technical details on the process of filmmaking — and more a deep, often tangent-filled dive into the director’s thought process and his inspirations. Several times, the main narrative pauses for long passages from diaries or notes Herzog kept on the set or during one of his many adventures.
One diary entry describes his thoughts while attempting to walk across Germany in 1982, the same year Herzog made “Fitzcarraldo,” the film about a rubber baron’s quest to carry an entire steam ship over a steep hill in the Amazon. “Germany seemed undecided,” he wrote as he overlooked the landscape, “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 entire memoir sounds like that, written in that rich, dramatic speaking style that many a Herzog impressionist has attempted. You’ll hear his voice in your head, too, but don’t trust that it’s a perfect recreation. “There are dozens of imitators,” he writes, “but none of them has really caught my sound.”
Throughout the book, fans of Herzog’s work will have fun discovering the often strange connections between life and art. For example, the filmmaker’s first encounter with Spanish soldier Lope de Aguirre, the subject of his 1972 classic “Aguirre, The Wrath of God,” was in a book about explorers that he discovered on a classmate’s bookshelf.
The book had been written for 12-year olds and featured barely ten lines on the conquistador. One of those lines mentioned his quest for El Dorado, the fictional city of gold; another revealed that Aguirre referred to himself as “The Wrath of God.” Leave it to the young Herzog to stumble upon that particular page in happenstance and burn the details into his brain.
Leave it to Herzog the memoirist to provide this information mere pages after introducing us to the man who played Aguirre, the volatile actor Klaus Kinski. The 23-year old Kinski roars into “Every Man” like the extreme force of nature he really was, terrorizing a boarding house owner and her tenants while leaving an indelible first impression on 13-year old Herzog.
Filmmaking seemed an odd choice for the man born Werner Stipetić on Sept. 5, 1942 in Munich, Germany. Herzog writes that he didn’t see a film until he was twelve, and he was completely unimpressed by it. Instead, later, he was fascinated by a TV show called “Grenzstationen,” or “Borderline Situations,” which showed “people in extreme predicaments” — a description that can be applied to many characters in Herzog’s oeuvre.
“Every Man for Himself and God Against All” isn’t a scandalous tell-all book, at least not where personal relationships are involved. “To speak about my wives violates my natural discretion,” Herzog writes in a chapter called “Wives, Children.” However, there are details about his family and his upbringing, all of it nonchalantly dropped into the story.
We hear about his parents, Elisabeth and Dietrich, and the two siblings he admired, older brother Till and younger brother, Lucki, both of whom would work with him on several films. There’s also his grandmother, Ella, who took care of his grandfather, Rudolf when dementia felled him. In a poetic moment, Herzog describes how Rudolf told Ella, the wife he no longer remembered, that if he had not been already married, he would have asked for her hand.
There are other bits of poetry sprinkled throughout, but what really sticks with the reader are the more bizarre details that fill the pages. Herzog suffers numerous, often horrific injuries, as do other people. They either recover or die without much emotional fanfare.
Herzog also documents gruesome acts of violence he witnessed, the worst of which he deems too heinous to describe. That’s the one that sticks with the reader, as we are left to our own trauma-inducing devices. Anyone who has seen “Grizzly Man,” the documentary Herzog made about Timothy Treadwell, a bear enthusiast who was ultimately eaten by a bear, will be reminded of the scene where he listens to the audio tape of Treadwell’s fatal encounter. The viewer doesn’t hear it, because the filmmaker finds it too terrifying to share.
“Every Man for Himself and God Against All” is packed with memorable vignettes and tidbits of information, like the time Herzog almost made a movie about the early Frankish kings with a surprising expert on that subject, Mike Tyson. God also makes two appearances, which is unsurprising given the author’s Catholicism. But what He’s wearing is something only Herzog could dream up. So is every word in this entertaining and informative book.
EVERY MAN FOR HIMSELF AND GOD AGAINST ALL
By Werner Herzog, translated by Michael Hofmann
Penguin, 368 pages, $30
Odie Henderson is the Boston Globe's film critic.