Werner Herzog on memory, the elusiveness of truth and sleepwalking into new wars ‹ Literary center

Photos of Laurence von der Weid.

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One thing is clear from the start: Werner Herzog, the enigmatic German icon of all things art, likes things to be precise. He makes sure I know within the first few minutes of our meeting. He is in Paris for 48 hours to publish the French translation of his memoirs Every man for himself and God against allhe has no time to waste, and certainly less at the age of 82.

Werner Herzog has written, produced and directed eighty films, worked as an actor, staged operas and written books. You can find him in Congo, Peru or Greece, Mexico or Alaska; he traveled to rainforests, caves and the edge of a volcano on the brink of eruption. This afternoon, however, he is sitting across from me, at the small dining area of ​​the Parisian hotel where he lives, glaring with eyes that contain a mixture of madness, clarity and freedom.

Before I even hit my tape recorder, Herzog said, “I don’t want to talk about my movies.” I’ll admit to hearing it from a man who’s been making movies almost as long as he’s been alive, if Aguirre, Wrath of God (1971), Nosferatu the Vampire (1979), Cobra Verde (1987), Grizzly man (2005), Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009), Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) are some of the most controversial and outstanding cinematic creations, was nothing short of confusing.

I couldn’t help but think of the bravery, resilience and amazing sense of risk and confidence required to overcome to move a 340 ton steamship over a mountain in the jungle (eg. Fitzcarraldoin 1982, for which he was awarded Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival), but we didn’t want to discuss it.

As this year draws to a close, Herzog, unstoppable, takes it by storm: in October the paperback of his memoirs, Every man for himself and God against allwas published at the same time as the audiobook, of course read by the author himself! The French translation of the book, Chacun pour soi et Dieu contre tous, has just been published by Les Éditions Séguier.

And in December, a retrospective of his films will be shown at the Pompidou Center in Paris. One thing is crystal clear: whatever he does, however he does it, Werner Herzog is a man with stories, he lives and tells them with intensity.

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Ayşegül Sert: I noticed that there is a “formula” you repeatedly use in your conversations, including the conversation last night you had on stage at La Maison de La Poésie: “Film is my journey and writing is home.”

Werner Herzog: Be more precise. Yes, I say that, but last night I also said that my prose has a longer life than my films.

SEAM: How does it come?

WH: I know. And that’s enough.

SEAM: Do you feel it? Is that what you mean?

WH: No, I know. Feeling is something else.

SEAM: You started writing poetry at a very young age. Filming and screenwriting followed.

WH: I didn’t know cinema existed until I was eleven. But I started writing before I made my films. At the age of eighteen I had two and a half kilos of sms. My first movie was when I was nineteen. I write my own scripts.

SEAM: So what is it about writing that transcends any other art form?

WH: It “does not exceed.” It is simply a different form of storytelling. It’s probably more – how can I explain it – it’s probably more direct than when you make a film. There are so many things in between in the cinema, so many things are between you and the end result – finances, organization, filming, editing, the psychology of the actors – it’s a whole lot of steps. But when you write, it’s just plain writing.

SEAM: Your book ends in the middle of a sentence and without final punctuation. What was your process there?

WH: When I write, I don’t make big plans, I have the text in me. When I wrote my memoir, it’s just my life, so it comes easily to me, I don’t have to make anything up.

And I don’t care where I write – I can write on a noisy bus with my football team drunk singing obscenities around me, or when I have time for it, or when I have to do my tax returns, I quickly write ten pages , which is three to four hours or before I have to go to the pharmacy…

When I write, I don’t make big plans, I have the text in me.

And the next day I write another ten pages. But of course it’s based on my memory, and memories are deceiving, you shape your own memories.

SEAM: In the book, you quote the French writer André Gide: “I change the facts in such a way that they resemble the truth more than reality.” And you also mention Shakespeare: “The truest poetry is the finger. Do you think writers can never perfectly record experiences and feelings from their past because one’s own memories are wired to fail them?

WH: Whoever tells you he/she/it knows what the truth is is not worth listening to. I quote Gide because he gives clear guidance on how to deal with facts and with truth. And that is a very important thing to say. History is a construction of perspectives. Memories are, in a sense, also constructed; you begin to change your memory and actually it’s a good thing we can do that or life wouldn’t be bearable.

There is one thing that struck me when I was making my documentary (in 2016 Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World-about the Internet, the brain and artificial intelligence), and this is what one of the most famous brain scientists told me in a single sentence, and of course he has an argument with scientific tests and evidence to support it. He said, “There is no truth in the human brain.”

SEAM: Does this mean that writing a memoir is seeking a truth that can never be achieved?

WH: Let’s face it, we don’t know what the truth is. It took me much longer to fact-check after I wrote my book than it did to write it. There is not a single stone left unturned here! And sometimes I had conflicting memories…

SEAM: Okay, and you write about it:

In the labyrinth of memories, I often ask myself how much is in flux, what meant when, and how much has evaporated or changed tonality. How true are our memories? The question of truth has occupied me in all my films. Today, it is even more urgent for all of us because we leave traces on the Internet that take on a life of their own.

WH: My brothers (Till and Lucki) read the script. Sometimes they had different memories of the same event, not very divergent, but different versions of it, and quite often I changed my text if they both agreed that I was partly wrong.

SEAM: Your response to young people who come to you for advice on how to make films and on how to write is twofold – you tell them to go away, for the world is revealed to those who traveling on foot, you say, and you tell them to “read, read and read!”

WH: For me, Virgil’s Georgians is arguably the greatest poem ever written; it’s long, it’s about farming and country life, and he knows about it because he grew up on a farm in northern Italy, and what’s amazing about him is that he’s never really descriptive, but he names the glory of the beehive and of the apple trees he names the horror of the pestilence invading.

Hölderlin, the German poet, is another great one. Montaigne is also a wonderful writer. Or the Chinese Poetry of the Eighth and Ninth Centuries. And the fourteenth-century Persian poet Hafez. And Hemingway, I mean mostly his short stories contain a very dense prose power. And Joseph Conrad!

I could rattle on; I could name you another fifty or a hundred authors to read. (Herzog almost always has Luther’s 1545 translation of the Bible with him to shoot).

SEAM: You speak several languages, but you mainly write in your native German. When your books are translated, do you read the manuscripts in translation and make suggestions before they go to press?

WH: Yes, but my knowledge of languages ​​is limited, maybe eight or nine languages, and two of them are no longer spoken (Latin and Ancient Greek). I am looking into the translation into Spanish and French. For the English translation, I have made a few hundred suggestions.

In one of the earlier books (Conquest of the useless) I sent over two thousand changes from German to English when I checked the translation. I don’t know how the translation to Mandarin or Armenian or Lithuanian is. You have to let it happen, you don’t have to look at everything.

SEAM: You have seen many places, periods and political shifts. Would you say history repeats itself?

WH: That would be a superficial way of looking at things. If you look back in history, earlier centuries were uglier and more violent than today, the difference is that today there are nuclear weapons which are a threshold and people have become ignorant and oblivious to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They are like sleepwalkers dangerously walking into a disaster and you see the same kind of madness of wanting a war.

One of the best examples is World War I, everybody wanted it – the Germans, the French, the British, everybody in a way. The young recruits went on the trains, and the girls threw flowers at them, and the bishops blessed them, and in jubilation they went to the fronts, and within a week came one of the greatest shocks to humanity ever: the Battle of Verdun, the Battle of the Somme… .

The other thing that’s new, not just nuclear wars, but we have the beginnings of artificial intelligence, it’s amazing the possibilities, but we’re very close to having let’s say thousands of drones – whole clouds of drones – interacting with each other. quickly coordinating who should take which target, autonomously and eventually making their own decisions whether to attack or not, and of course that’s something dangerous and it’s rapidly evolving.

SEAM: George Orwell i Why I write:

From a very early age, maybe around the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I was going to be a writer. Between the ages of seventeen and twenty-four I tried to give up this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was offending my true nature, and that sooner or later I would have to settle down and write books.

What is your motivation for writing?

WH: I have never read Orwell. Writing is not for me to understand. Writing is for the joy of telling.

People think cinema has power, no, it doesn’t. Real power comes from two things: speakers that have microphones, the big speakers. And the other is rifles, guns. This is what changes the world.

Books yes, to a certain extent, because they help form perspectives, but we must not overestimate the naked power of writing. It’s better that books just become part of your inner landscape, let’s leave it at that.

We should not overestimate the naked power of writing. It’s better that books just become part of your inner landscape.

SEAM: What’s next for Werner Herzog?

WH: I am writing a new book and working on two other projects — a documentary and a feature film.

SEAM: Not bad for an 82-year-old who writes in his memoirs:

I was deeply convinced that I would not live to see my eighteenth birthday. Once I passed it, it was out of the question that I would ever live past twenty-five. The result was that I started making films that I could assume would be all that was left of me.

WH: It happens that there are moments with my films when some people feel almost enlightened, and it is the same with my books. If they become a companion it would be wonderful and it happens I know.

(This interview has been shortened and edited for clarity.)

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Every man for himself and God against all by Werner Herzog is available in English via Penguin and in French via Les Éditions Séguier.