A short life of the author
Werner Herzog (born Werner Stipetić, 5 September 1942) is a German filmmaker, author, opera director, and actor who has made more than seventy films — including some of the most extraordinary and unclassifiable works in the history of cinema — and who has also produced a small but remarkable body of written work. His books share the qualities of his films: a visionary intensity, a fascination with extreme landscapes and extreme human behaviour, and a narrative voice that is simultaneously deadpan and ecstatic. Herzog is not a writer who happens to make films; he is a storyteller who works in multiple media, and his prose is an essential part of his achievement.
Life
Herzog was born in Munich and grew up in the Bavarian village of Sachrang, in a house without running water, electricity, or a telephone. He did not see a film until he was eleven. He has described his childhood as almost medieval in its austerity — an experience that gave him an appetite for extremity that has never diminished.
He made his first film at nineteen and has since directed more than seventy features and documentaries, including Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser (1974), Stroszek (1977), Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), Fitzcarraldo (1982), Lessons of Darkness (1992), Grizzly Man (2005), Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), and Into the Inferno (2016). His collaboration and rivalry with the actor Klaus Kinski — who starred in five of his films and who was, by all accounts including Herzog’s own, genuinely insane — is one of the great artist-performer relationships in film history.
Herzog is famous for the extremity of his filmmaking methods: he dragged a 320-ton steamship over a mountain in the Peruvian jungle for Fitzcarraldo, hypnotised his entire cast for Heart of Glass (1976), ate his shoe after losing a bet to Errol Morris, and was shot by a sniper during a BBC interview (he continued the interview). These stories are so well known that they risk obscuring the fact that Herzog is also a profoundly intelligent artist whose work explores, with genuine philosophical seriousness, the relationship between human beings and the indifferent, hostile, and overwhelmingly beautiful natural world.
Of Walking in Ice (1978)
Herzog’s first book is a diary of a three-week walk from Munich to Paris in November–December 1974, undertaken in the belief that the walk would save the life of his friend and mentor, the film historian Lotte Eisner, who was critically ill. The book records the journey — the cold, the mud, the loneliness, the hallucinations, the encounters with farmers and truck drivers — in prose that is spare, hallucinatory, and occasionally beautiful. It is one of the great walking narratives, comparable to Patrick Leigh Fermor’s work in its attention to landscape and very different in its visionary intensity.
Eisner survived. Herzog has always maintained that the walk saved her.
Conquest of the Useless (2009)
This diary of the making of Fitzcarraldo — the years-long production in the Peruvian jungle that nearly killed several crew members and drove Herzog and Kinski to the edge of mutual homicide — is Herzog’s most sustained piece of prose writing. The book is a descent into the jungle and into madness: entries about weather, insects, equipment failures, Kinski’s rages, and the local population’s bewilderment at the spectacle of Europeans dragging a ship over a mountain. The prose is matter-of-fact and hallucinatory by turns, and the cumulative effect is overwhelming.
The Twilight World (2022)
Herzog’s first novel tells the story of Hiroo Onoda, the Japanese soldier who continued fighting World War II in the Philippine jungle until 1974, unaware that the war had ended. Herzog, who met Onoda and became his friend, turns the story into a meditation on duty, madness, time, and the jungle itself. The novel is short, dreamlike, and written in the same register as Herzog’s best films — a register in which fact and vision are indistinguishable.
Every Man for Himself and God Against All (2024)
Herzog’s memoir — named after the German title of The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser — is a characteristically unconventional autobiography. It does not proceed chronologically; it moves between episodes from his life with the freedom and apparent randomness of a dream. The stories are extraordinary — not because Herzog exaggerates (though he may) but because his life has been extraordinary.
Critical Standing
Herzog’s literary work is inseparable from his filmmaking — the books are extensions of the same artistic sensibility. Of Walking in Ice and Conquest of the Useless are essential texts for understanding his vision, and The Twilight World is a significant novel. As a prose writer, Herzog is sui generis: no one else writes like this, because no one else has lived like this.
Collecting Herzog
Of Walking in Ice (1980, Tanam Press, first English edition translated by Martje Herzog and Alan Greenberg) brings $100–$300. Conquest of the Useless (2009, Ecco) brings $30–$80. The Twilight World (2022, Penguin) brings $15–$30. Signed copies are available — Herzog is a generous signer at his many public appearances — and bring modest premiums.