Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir

Legendary filmmaker and celebrated author Werner Herzog tells in his inimitable voice the story of his epic artistic career in a long-awaited memoir that is as inventive and daring as anything he has done before

Werner Herzog was born in September 1942 in Munich, Germany, at a turning point in the Second World War. Soon Germany would be defeated, and a new world would have to be made out of the rubble and horrors of the war. Fleeing the Allied bombing raids, Herzog’s mother took him and his older brother to a remote, rustic part of Bavaria where he would spend much of his childhood hungry, without running water, and in deep poverty. It was there, as the new postwar order was emerging, that one of the most visionary filmmakers of the next seven decades was formed. Herzog made his first film in 1961 at age 19, and the wildly productive working life that followed—spanning the seven continents and encompassing both documentary and fiction—was an adventure as grand and otherworldly as any depicted in his many classic films, from early features Aguirre, the Wrath of God and Nosferatu the Vampyre, to Fitzcarraldo and later documentaries such as Grizzly Man and Cave of Forgotten Dreams.

Every Man for Himself and God Against All is at once a personal record of one of the great self-invented lives of our time and a singular literary masterpiece that will enthral fans old and new alike. In a hypnotic swirl of memory, Herzog untangles and relives his most important experiences and inspirations, telling his full story for the first and only time.