Book Review #2 for 2024: Every Man for Himself and God Against All by Werner Herzog

“It was only from the swindler that the real truth could be gleaned. And that doesn’t exist, and I call it “ecstatic truth,”” is a line from Werner Herzog’s scattershot, impractical, ego driven, whiplashing, brilliant, ominous, chaotic Every Man for Himself and God Against All memoir, originally written in German.

An English translation of the kaleidoscope book was given to my wife Kari by a student who directed Jump-Man or Train Hopping Because Werner Herzog Told Me To, one of the productions from her most recent documentary film class at the Reynolds School of Journalism.

I’ve been a fan of some of Herzog’s work I’ve been fortunate to come across, especially Grizzly Man, as many documentary film buffs are, and the Nicolas Cage starring feature Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, which the now 81-year-old German filmmaker also ranks among his proudest accomplishments.

Grizzly Man barely gets a mention, while arguably his best work, the 1982 feature Fitzcarraldo, based on a would-be rubber baron in Peruvian jungles determined, like Herzog, to get a heavy steamboat over a steep hill, gets the royal treatment with many false starts, doomed dead ends and heroic returns.

It’s hard not to read the book without hearing Herzog's stoic, gravelly Gothic English accent, and doubting many details, but these should not get in the way of a high wire read, beginning in a remote village in the German Alps, injuries piling up with every coming of age accident and ending with a doomsday lamentation that pictures themselves are on their way out.

Another favorite part: “I started a thing called the Rogue Film School, a counter method, 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.”

Momentous accomplishments come and go in a flurry, a former wife is separated from in a line, a new love is introduced mid anecdote, an old brother’s shirt is set on fire as a prank during a reunion meal, names from across the world, from the obscure to the famous, are dropped in a frenzy, films are introduced in circular fashion, one friendship leads to another, one project to the next, documentaries, features, operas, cascading into a formidable, uneven body of work.

What comes through is Herzog’s relentlessness, never giving up on size, scope or vision, whatever the financial, health and collateral damages, using his unmatched force of nature to rally family members, flames, financiers, former neighbors, unsuspecting staff and childhood friends into his celluloid calvacade.

He says he’s never taken drugs because his mind is so troubled. The book is a plunge into it, wires crossed and all, intoxicatingly adventurous, while searching for a “distant echo of divinity.”

Another favorite line: “There were dark trees and chipmunks, which have something consoling about them.”