Werner Herzog
speaker
545 appearances
3 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 1 Jul
Werner Herzog’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Well, I was too young. You see, number one, when my mother fled Munich, I was only two weeks old, 14 days old, when there was carpet bombing on Munich. Of course, there's no memory, anything. The childhood was very, very closed and very beautiful. But when I was two and a half, and it's my very first memory, my mother wakes us up abruptly in the middle of the night. It must have been April 1st.
1945. And she says, you have to see it, boys, wraps us in blankets, rushes up on a slope. And at the end of the valley, the entire sky was red and orange, but not flickering because Rosenheim is 40 miles away. So the entire sky is pulsing slowly, red and orange. And that somehow is embedded in my memory forever. And of course, I knew all of a sudden there's something out there.
There's a world out there. There's war out there. There's a conflagration out there. And I became curious. And it's strange because my two brothers who grew up with me did not move out and were that curious. They were very successful in their professions, but not like me. I was one who would move to Antarctica or to the jungle or to the Sahara Desert to do my work.
It was from one moment to the next. I knew that something like that cannot happen again. And that's how a character is being formed, defeats, catastrophes that are created by And of course, that shaped my character. And from one moment to the next, I knew you have to control what is wild in you. You have to be disciplined. And until today, 90% of what you see when you meet me is discipline.
People think, yeah, I'm the wild guy out there. And so, no, I'm a disciplined professional. And at that time, family, of course, was important because we grew up with our mother who raised us. We were three brothers and one mother. We lived in one single room in a sort of pension, we called it. It's a boarding house building.
And of course we had clashes like brothers would have and until today it's mysterious to foreigners. Not long ago, a few years ago, I visited my older brother in Spain. where he had built himself a big house and he had a wonderful sailing boat. And we were at a fish restaurant and I studied the menu and he put his arm around my shoulder.
And all of a sudden I feel some stinging thing in my back and I smell smoke. And I realize he has set my shirt on fire with his cigarette lighter. Wow. And we laughed so hard and everybody around on the table was appalled. But sometimes that's how brothers sometimes function. And I love him dearly and we do mischievous things to each other. It does happen and it's not that serious.
You see, somebody gave me his T-shirt and we cooled my back with a few glasses of Prosecco. And that was that.
No, it was hilarious. Come on, a shirt doesn't really burn. I mean, it glows and glimmers a little bit, but that was his joke.
Well, that's my profession. That's my profession as a poet. And you look deep into who we are and you describe it. But you shouldn't make the mistake to believe that memoirs are confessional. I'm not into that business and I never liked too deep introspection. There's enough in my memoirs. There's enough introspection. There's no doubt it's in there, but to a certain limit.
And I do not want to step beyond a certain threshold. It is not healthy if you circle too much. around your own navel. And it is not good to recall all the traumata of your childhood. It's good to forget them. It's good to bury them. Not in all cases, but in most cases. So psychoanalysis is doing that. I do not deny that it is good and necessary in a very few cases.
Yes, I admit it, but it's not my thing. And I keep telling men. So you see, rather dead than going to a psychiatrist, but at the same time, rather dead than ever wearing a toupee. Yeah. You see, my hair is thinning and I just accept it as it is. So nothing, rather dead.
And women would immediately agree with me. You cannot live with a man who starts to wear a toupee and thinks he is handsome now and rejuvenated.
No, no, I know who I am and I know where I come from and I know where I'm heading toward. No fear and no regrets. Sure, I made massive mistakes and I'm in a way a result of my own defeats. So be it. They formed me. They made me thinking differently. beyond what I normally thought before.
Well, they are somehow touching a chord that's in us, something mad or borderline mad, something of power and dementia and madness. And through such figures, all of a sudden we have it spelled out. We can feel it. We can touch it. We can read it and sense it and start to compare it. Where I am standing, how mad am I myself?
No, no. I'm the only one in the entire profession who is clinically sane.
Oh, come on. I wouldn't have made some 80 films without having my wits together and my sanity and my professionalism. I'm the only one. When you look at the craze of Hollywood and all these red carpet events and the statements at the red carpet, which are all performative, it's all performative borderline insanity in a way, or saccharine... pink sort of vanilla ice cream emotions.
I'm the only one who is sane. The only one.
Please make sure. And you can read it. Every single line in my memoir shows you that I'm absolutely sane in an ocean of craze.
We have to be careful. I said it. Yes, he was mad in moments of paranoia, but he had splendid moments of friendship and warmth and insight. So he had quite a few facets.
Showing 481–500 of 545 · page 25 of 28
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