Every Man for Himself and God against All: A Memoir

‘He is in a category of one. You can’t believe that a person like this stalks the earth. A complete original and an amazing person’ MARINA HYDE
‘A visionary masterpiece’ JOHN GRAY, NEW STATESMAN

The long-awaited memoir by the legendary filmmaker and celebrated author. Told in Werner Herzog’s inimitable voice, this is the story of his epic artistic career, as inventive and daring as anything he has done before.

Hauling a steamship over a mountain in the jungle; walking from Munich to Paris in the dead of winter; descending into an active volcano; living in the wilderness among grizzly bears - Werner Herzog has always been intrigued by extremes of human experience. Here, he illuminates the influences and ideas that have driven his creativity and shaped his unique worldview.

Herzog’s life matches the drama of his famous films: the boy growing up in poverty in a small village in the Alps after the Second World War; the teenager travelling the world in search of adventure that almost cost him his life; the director trying to calm his leading actor Klaus Kinski in the Amazonian jungle. And along the way, Herzog tells of ordinary people with extraordinary stories: rural labourers, circus acrobats, child soldiers.

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 masterpiece that will enthral fans old and new. In a hypnotic swirl of memory, Herzog untangles and relives his most important experiences and inspirations, telling his story for the first and only time.

*A New Statesman Book of the Year 2023*

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Praise for Werner Herzog’s previous books:

‘Has the eerie power of the best fairytales. It hits you with the force of dreams’ HELEN MACDONALD

‘Surely the strangest, strongest walking book I know … only Herzog could have written this weird, slender classic’ ROBERT MACFARLANE

‘Herzog’s writing bristles with the same eerie and uncompromising energy as his films’ GUARDIAN