Russian edition of Werner Herzog’s memoirs published

The publishing house Individuum published a Russian translation of Werner Herzog’s memoirs, entitled “To each for himself, and God against all”, supplementing it with another small book by the same great filmmaker – “On Walking in Ice”. According to Mikhail Trofimenkov, both books are a typical fruit of the “gloomy German genius”, only pretending to be memoirs.

Herzog’s prose is crazier than “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” and “Fitzcarraldo”: he constantly returns to the shooting of these extreme masterpieces as to the worst nightmare and the radiant happiness of a lifetime. This could be written either by Munchausen under hallucinogens, or by the Nietzsche superman. And even a curious Martian, poking into all the deadly traps for people – from the peaks, reputed to be the cemeteries of climbers, to the fields of civil wars.

He allegedly does not see dreams, and he doesn’t need to: his very life is a dream, all the more sound that Herzog stops any analysis of it. “I would rather die than go to a psychoanalyst (…) If you illuminate the entire room to the last corner with merciless light, then it will become impossible to live in it. The same is the case with the soul – if all its corners are illuminated, then there will no longer be room for life. I am convinced that psychoanalysis (…) has made the 20th century terrible. And I consider the entire 20th century a mistake.”

He releases the text of life from the cell of coordinates “reality-fiction”. “Truth does not have to match facts. Otherwise, the Manhattan telephone directory would be a Book of Books” and security cameras “the perfect tool for filmmaking.” Herzog professes not the truth and not a lie, but an “ecstatic truth”, elegantly dodges the explanation of its meaning: they say, it is too long and boring.

The reader learns least of all about cinema as a process. Professional details dissolve in a thick brew of magical realism. Herzog annuls the linear time not of the text, but of life itself, as if being in a multitude of epochs. The virginal merciless inhumanity of the Himalayas and the primitiveness of Australia and the Amazon; the middle ages of the Bavarian outback of the 1940s and the future tangible in NASA laboratories.

The scenery of military childhood is realistic: the glow of the city under bombs on the horizon, caches with weapons of “werewolves”, hunger and cold. But the scenery is inhabited by creatures not of this world. Forever bent at a right angle is the giant Sturm Sepp, who has put a gigantic trunk on his back. The strongman smuggler Siegel Hans teases the chase by playing the pipe from the mountain slopes. The girl, whom Herzog shared with his cousin, is driven to suicide by some kind of damage: and he himself was bitten by a witch.

The author’s ancestors are also good. Take at least his parents, in their youth romantic Nazis. The biologist mother studied the hearing of fish and played the recorder for them. The father, with the scarred face of a duelist, was fantastically gifted, spoke both Arabic and Japanese, and spent his life in the blissful illusion that he was writing some great scholarly work.

With such a history, Herzog found himself a hated and idolized alter ego in Klaus Kinski. He had not yet thought about directing, and Klaus was already playing on stage, periodically raining down waterfalls of dirty abuse on the audience. He lived naked, slept, buried in piles of leaves, smashed glasses with his voice and did not open the door, but the bouncer. Access to weapons on expeditions to the ends of the world made them deadly, as if Herzog did not have enough of his own ability to attract pain and death.

The first book turns into a catalog of catastrophes that haunt the author, who has long ceased to count “ordinary” fractures. The bite of a poisonous rat disrupted a trip to the war in the Congo, from where Herzog’s potential companions did not return alive. Under crossfire in Nicaragua, he was blinded by a wasp biting him in the eye. On the set of It’s Hard to Be a God by Peter Fleishman, he lost his teeth; on the set of Peter Patchak’s Burning Heart, hundreds of splinters stuck into his face.

It would be nice if he alone suffered, but it ricochets. On the set of “And the dwarfs start small,” the midget actor was engulfed in flames, it was not immediately possible to catch up and extinguish him. “Fitzcarraldo” was remembered for two plane crashes and a flood, the Indians struck strangers with arrows, and one extra, bitten by a snake, sawed off his foot. As soon as Herzog started a play about elves in Alaska, local schoolchildren plotted mass murder, and in Nicaragua, the hero of the film, a boy soldier, suddenly shot himself in front of him.

One can travel far for a powerful masochistic experience, allegedly recorded in “On Walking …”. In November 1974, having learned about the illness of his “goddess” Lotta Eisner, the great film historian, Herzog, averting death from her, stomped on foot from Munich to Paris. According to the harshly hysterical text, the cannibal jungle will seem like paradise compared to 700 km in the heart of Europe.

Everyday details – the same erased legs – set off the otherworldliness of the author. Moving through continuous snowstorms and downpours, it rises above the vile earth, cut by tractors, littered with gutted mechanisms and cigarette packs that “look like corpses.” “Stood for ages in a butcher’s shop thinking about murder.” All his fantasies about death: the strangled emperor of Ethiopia or the Cambodian soldiers, the girl who collapsed on the porch, or the schoolboy who fell out of the bus.

A gaping void grows around him to the size of the Universe. Even the speech of dangerous natives, whose houses he breaks into for the night, is incomprehensible: either an ominous fitter on a pole is watching him, or a tattooed nun beckons. It’s good that there are fewer people than mushrooms the size of wagon wheels and crazy animals: pheasants dancing like drunks, hundreds of thousands of “horses gray with age.” But the loudest of all is the croaking and barking of relentless crows.

And the birds flew in straight from the Poe airport, literaryizing the “non-fictional” horror. Herzog gave himself away as an incorrigible romantic of a purely German kind. The test of fidelity to tradition – this is “ecstatic truth” – passed brilliantly, not so much removing, but hanging the question, but how the hell did everything “really” happen. And really, how?

Werner Herzog. Each for himself, and God against all: Memoirs. Moscow: Individual, 2023

Werner Herzog. About walking in ice. Moscow: Individual, 2023