‘The culture of complaint disgusts me’: Werner Herzog on walking without a backpack and the kindness of strangers

When the American director Errol Morris saw Werner Herzog’s film Fata Morgana for the first time, he was heard to mutter: ‘I didn’t know anyone was allowed to write things like this.’

I didn’t know anyone was allowed to live like this. Herzog’s new memoir Every Man For Himself and God Against All is astonishing and – whether you know his films or not – potentially life-changing, at least for me.

I made a list as I went along of all the situations in which Herzog has nearly died: in a crevasse on K2; under the hooves of a bull in Guanajuato, Mexico; in a giant wave in Peru; shortly after his own birth, when an Allied bomb hit his home in Munich. After the explosion, his mother picked tiny Werner from the pile of rubble and broken glass in his cradle and found him miraculously unscathed. (He started as he meant to go on.)