The mystery of Werner Herzog

Many movie actors are famous for their unmistakable voices – people like Sean Connery, John Wayne and Peter Lorre, who all pub comedians mimic. But how many directors are like that? Only one: the German auteur Werner Herzog, hero of the New German Cinema, who at the age of 81 has published this headspinning, free-associating memoir. Its German title, Jeder Für Sich Und Gott Gegen Alle, was also the original, anarchic title of Herzog’s 1974 film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, based on the true story of a boy reportedly brought up in an isolated darkened cell.

Herzog’s rasping, lilting, inscrutably sibilant and sinister voice, a vital part of all his documentaries and the various villains he’s played on screen for other directors, is described by him as having

the South German twang of my first language, Bavarian. And I accept too that I speak English with a strong accent, maybe not so strong as Henry Kissinger’s.

He says that he developed this voice through an interest in hypnosis and it’s got him three different cameo-gigs on The Simpsons.

You have to hear that extraordinary voice in your head while reading this book – as, for example, when he recalls how upset he was to interview a traumatised child soldier in Honduras while researching his 1984 movie Ballad of the Little Soldier: ‘His mother was chopped to pieces with a machete before his eyes… Christ on a bike.’ A fellow film critic and I used to terrify each other with the thought of what it would be like to be shouted at by Arnold Schwarzenegger in his native German. What could be scarier? One thing: being shouted at by Werner Herzog in German.

Herzog is often facetiously called a mad genius, and yet maybe there is no other way of thinking about him, and this book underlines it.