Book Review: Werner Herzog’s Every Man for Himself and God Against all

George Achebe

There is an old line in Tom Stoppard’s Night and Day in which a journalist remarks that a foreign correspondent is someone who believes “the most exciting thing about any story is that he has arrived to cover it.” It is a barb directed at a certain kind of self-mythologizing adventurer, the sort of person for whom the spectacle is never quite as thrilling as the fact of their own presence at it.

Werner Herzog’s memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All, is a study in that instinct, a portrait of a man who has spent a lifetime in pursuit of the extreme, and who now wishes to ensure that the defining drama of those moments is the fact that he, Werner Herzog, was the one who captured them.

If that makes it sound as though Every Man for Himself and God Against All is a cynical exercise, then that would not be quite right either. It is, above all, a fascinating book—compelling, at times wildly entertaining, at times frustratingly evasive, but never dull. Herzog, one of cinema’s most distinctive figures, turns the camera on himself and reveals a character who is, by turns, profound, foolhardy, amusing, and grandiose. His is a life lived at the edges of civilization, and the memoir is a reflection of that same manic energy. There are shipwrecks, encounters with bears, armed conflicts, and the legendary tale of dragging a steamship over a mountain for Fitzcarraldo. The Herzogian myths are here in full force.

But is a memoir without introspection really a memoir at all? Herzog has always been allergic to conventional self-reflection, and he makes no attempt to disguise this aversion. “I have a deep aversion to too much introspection, to navel-gazing. I’d rather die than go to an analyst,” he declares at one point. Elsewhere, he suggests, “I feel some relief in knowing my origins are somewhat swathed in mystery… people know too much anyway.” There is an argument to be made that this is precisely what makes Herzog Herzog—he is, after all, a filmmaker of immense visual power, a chronicler of human struggle in its most heightened form, not a chronicler of his own interior life.

Yet, at times, the refusal to interrogate his own experiences or motivations feels less like a stylistic choice than a limitation. In a book filled with extraordinary encounters, what remains elusive is the sense of what, if anything, Herzog has learned from them. Why this endless pursuit of madness? Why the insistence on seeking out moments of physical extremity? Is it, as he claims, an artistic necessity? Or is there, lurking beneath the bravado, an insecurity about what a more reflective Herzog might find?

Of course, part of what has made Herzog such a cult figure is precisely this bravado. He embodies a very specific strain of artistic machismo: not the Hemingwayesque version of bar fights and bullfights, but something stranger and more extreme, a sort of cinematic conquistador. He does not just tell stories about danger—he must live them. He does not merely depict human obsession—he must become obsessed.

This is both his greatest strength and his most consistent weakness. On the one hand, it has led to some of the most astonishing images in the history of cinema, from Klaus Kinski staring into the abyss in Aguirre, the Wrath of God to Timothy Treadwell’s doomed love affair with Alaskan grizzlies in Grizzly Man. On the other, it leads to a sort of wackiness that occasionally makes it difficult to take him as seriously as he takes himself. When, in the memoir, he recounts walking from Munich to Paris because he believed it would save a dying friend, it is an extraordinary story, but also one that feels oddly self-conscious, as though Herzog is aware that he is engaged in a very Herzogian act, a grand gesture designed to be retold.

There is also a performative quality to his relationship with suffering. Herzog does not merely document hardship; he relishes it, embraces it as a kind of personal badge of honour. It is as if hardship validates the work, gives it the weight of authenticity. This leads to some of the memoir’s most gripping moments—there are tales of surviving hostile film sets, guerrilla warfare, and dangerous landscapes—but also moments where one wonders whether Herzog is too enamored of his own suffering to ever truly reflect on it.

One of the more striking claims in Every Man for Himself and God Against All is Herzog’s assertion that his writing will be his true legacy. “I am fairly certain that my written work will outlive my films,” he states with characteristic self-assurance. It is a bold claim, and one that is difficult to take at face value. Herzog is a formidable storyteller, but his genius—if one accepts that he is a genius—is fundamentally visual. He is an artist of landscapes and faces, of movements and silences. His films are not merely stories; they are experiences.

Can the same be said of his prose? The book is written with Herzog’s usual intensity, and there are passages of real power. Yet, in the absence of his singular cinematic eye, the writing does not quite reach the same heights. Herzog’s films endure not because of their plots but because of the sheer force of their images: the opening sequence of Aguirre, the boat on the mountain in Fitzcarraldo, the strange beauty of the wind through the bushes in Grizzly Man. It is difficult to imagine that his written words will leave quite the same mark.

In the end, Every Man for Himself and God Against All is a book that is impossible to ignore, even as it resists easy categorisation. It is a memoir in the sense that it chronicles a life, but it is not an introspective memoir. It is a story of adventure, but it is also a self-mythologizing performance. It is a book filled with unforgettable moments, but also one that raises as many questions about Herzog himself as it answers.

Perhaps that is the point. Perhaps the enigma is part of the appeal. But one cannot help but wonder whether, after all these years of pursuing the extreme, of staring into the abyss, of pushing himself and his subjects to the limits of human endurance, Werner Herzog will ever be willing to turn the camera fully on himself.

One suspects that, even if he did, he would find some reason to keep walking, away from the analysis, away from the quiet, and toward the next impossible challenge.