Review: Every Man For Himself and God Against All

In his memoir, Werner Herzog relates a story from his childhood in a remote Bavarian village, where his family lived in extreme poverty.

My deepest memory of my mother, burned into my brain, is a moment when my brother and I were clutching at her skirts, whimpering with hunger. With a sudden jolt, she freed herself, spun round, and she had a face full of an anger and despair that I have never seen before or since. She said, perfectly calmly: “Listen, boys, if I could cut it out of my ribs, I would cut it out of my ribs. But I can’t. Alright?” At that moment, we learned not to wail. The so-called culture of complaint disgusts me.

And that’s just one anecdote from Every Man For Himself and God Against All, Herzog’s sprawling account of his life on the margins of the eschaton. Herzog was born in 1942’s Munich to a German soldier, then stationed in France, and a Viennese mother of Croatian descent. The Wehrmacht was losing the Battle of Stalingrad, leading to the defeat of the Nazis, when Herzog’s mother packed up her sons and fled to a Bavarian village. Herzog lives on the margins of the Third Reich, born too young to properly remember it, but old enough to have a mother who renounced the tenets of Nazism, which “quit the continuum of European culture when they opted for National Socialism.”

Herzog’s work reflects a search for a lost history — his family came from a variety of backgrounds, and his father abandoned his family early in his life. He came of age in a post-Hitler Germany, never seeing the worst of the Nazis. Perhaps it’s no wonder that so many of his films are about madmen on the margins of history — the ones who never quite make it into the history books, only making futile conquests. Fitzcarraldo hauls a steamship over a hill in the Amazon just to build an opera house. Aguirre conquers an empire of dirt and monkeys. And Grizzly Man’s Timothy Treadwell dies as he lived: with bears.

The men Herzog declares his heroes — inevitably men, of course — are figures like Fabius Maximus, Hercules Seghers, Carlo Gesualdo, Akhenaten. They are not figures at the center of history. They’re lunatics who undertake great endeavors against the odds. They’re also often monstrous and bloodthirsty, responsible for gruesome deaths. Herzog is an aesthete, understanding power more as a way of looking at the world than a weapon used against people. Rarely is this more clear than a paragraph where, while discussing the ethics of staging Wagner’s operas, he finally addresses the allegations of sexual abuse against his late collaborator Klaus Kinski by Kinski’s daughter, where Herzog is right and wrong in equal measures:

Similar questions about guilt and general condemnation arose to do with Kinski after his daughter Pola wrote in a book about continued incest with her father. Pola—like a number of young women lately—had asked me for advice and support before she published her book. I have absolutely no doubt about her account. But does that mean I have to rethink my aesthetic position regarding Kinski and withdraw the films I made with him? My answer here consists of two questions, though the number could be indefinitely extended. Should we remove the paintings of Caravaggio from churches and museums because he was a murderer? Do we have to reject parts of the Old Testament because Moses as a young man committed manslaughter? At this point, I am generally looked at in bewilderment because, while everyone likes to invoke the Bible, very few people bother to read it.

Herzog does not raise the contextual detail where Moses was defending an enslaved man from a brutal beating, which seems to showcase his blind spots. Of course the aesthetic merits of Aguirre, Fitzcarraldo, and Nosferatu the Vampyre are legitimate. But does that release Herzog from responsibility for employing someone who abused everyone in his vicinity? It’s a fascinating ethical dilemma that Herzog doesn’t quite seem to glimpse, even as he exhibits good will towards victims and nobly stands up for Pola Kinski.

This myopia is part and parcel of Herzog’s approach, and his ability to make sense of the world through oblique signs, underlines his finest work. This is a man whose best film frames the post-Gulf War oil fields of Kuwait as a literal alien planet, “an event with cosmic dimensions, a crime against creation.” Herzog’s failures in terms of reckoning with colonialism and power go hand-in-hand with his fascinating perspective on the world. Every Man For Himself and God Against All is a late-career statement that was inevitable, if not exactly predictable.