The publishing house Aminori has released a new volume in their cinema series. The autobiographical work Every Man for Himself and God Against All by German film director Werner Herzog – one of the titans of 20th-century film – recounts, in the first person, the author’s creative career and life. For the first and only time, telling the story of his life, Herzog unravels and brings to life his most important experiences and inspirations in a hypnotic whirl of memory.

Herzog was born in September 1942 in Munich, Germany, during the Second World War. Soon Germany would be defeated, and from the ruins and horrors of war a new world would have to be built. Fleeing from the Allied bombing raids, Herzog’s mother takes him and his elder brother to the Bavarian countryside, where he spends much of his childhood in hunger and deep poverty. That is where, in the formation of the new post-war order, one of the most visionary filmmakers of the next seven decades grows up.

Until the age of 11, Herzog is unaware of the existence of the medium of cinema. His interest in films begins at 15 as a self-taught enthusiast but, since no one is willing to finance them, he works night shifts as a welder in a steel factory. Herzog begins to travel on foot. He makes his first telephone call at the age of 17, and watches his first film at 19. The following years mark the beginning of an astonishingly productive working life – spanning seven continents, documentary and feature films, as well as literature and diverse projects.

Having recently received a lifetime achievement award at the Venice Film Festival, Herzog continues to work, exploring ugliness and ruin, courage and self-sacrifice, the sublime and the critical. It would be no exaggeration to say that his films – Fitzcarraldo (1982), Grizzly Man (2005) and his latest piece, Ghost Elephants (2025), set in the Angolan savannah – contemplate the omnipotence and mystery of nature and the humans who exist alongside it.