You may have encountered the unique voice of my favorite film director on South Park, The Simpsons or even telling jokes on Colbert. It also narrates most of his documentaries in a clipped, deadpan Bavarian accent that hypnotizes you to believe everything it says.
Who else could that be other than the 82-year-old film maker, actor, author and opera producer Werner Herzog? Having made close to eighty films and a hand in a bunch more, Herzog has spent his life seeking truth his own way. He recently sat down to talk to Steven Dubner on Freakonomics Radio to discuss his current concerns. Listen to their dialog or read the transcript here.
Truth isn’t accounting or to be gleaned from data, Herzog says. Truth is ecstatic, revelatory, sometimes wrenching, even soul-cleansing. In his new book The Future of Truth (Penguin, 2025) he says:
I don’t think truth is some kind of polestar in the sky that we will one day get to. It’s more like an incessant striving. A movement, an uncertain journey, a seeking full of futile endeavor. But it is this journey into the unknown, into a vast twilit forest, that gives our lives meaning and purpose; it is what distinguishes us from the beasts in the fields.
And strive he has, subjecting himself to the same harrowing ordeals and existential dilemmas as the characters his films portray: In turn, he has plodded through a Peruvian jungle, holed up in an Alaskan wilderness, trekked up snow-covered mountains, mingled with penguins on an Antarctic ice shelf, born witness on death row, ducked magma at the edge of a volcano, and on occasion, visited a sound stage.
Herzog spent his first decade in a remote village in Bavaria, where his mother fled to after the Allies started bombing Munich. He spent a lot of time exploring and wandering around.
“My mother found me in my cradle covered in a thick layer of broken glass, bricks, and rubble. I was unhurt, but my mother in her panic snatched up my older brother, Tilbert, and me and left the city and fled up into the mountains to Sachrang, surely the remotest place in all Bavaria.”
He was always an autodidact. In an interview, his mother said:
“He never read the books he was supposed to read. He never studied. But then in fact, Werner always knew everything. His senses were extraordinary. He could pick out some note or sound and 10 years later remember it exactly. He would talk about it and use it in some way. He’s completely incapable of explaining anything. He knows, he sees, he understands, but he can’t explain. That’s not his nature. With him, everything goes in, and if it comes out again, then it’ll be in some altered form.”
Herzog’s early exile from civilization seems to have prepared him for the rigors he would later undertake as a film maker to pay homage to people who take incredible chances simply for the experience, for reasons they may not know. Take the two German mountain climbers he followed on a 1984 expedition to ascend two of Pakistan’s highest peaks in one day, both over 8000 meters above sea level. In The Dark Glow Of The Mountains (full video) we see Hans Kammerlander and Reinhold Messner travel to the most remote village by land rover accompanied by a dozen local porters carrying immense loads. From there, they had to walk 150 kilometers to establish a base camp at 5000 meters, Herzog along with them. Then the two Germans set out alone, provisioned only with backpacks and no oxygen. Two cinematographers follow them part way up from there, but the climbers document their final ascents and long descent with an 8mm Bell & Howell movie camera.
When you have someone like that who goes to the far reaches of the earth to memorialize what most would say are marginal places, events, and people, you aren’t just witnessing exotica; you are experiencing other umwelts from inside out and in so doing, expand yours.
Herzog’s heroes include Buster Keaton, who undertook many risky shots without a stunt double. He cites the scene where the façade of a house falls on Keaton, who finds himself standing in an open second-floor window of the collapsed structure. “I rejoice for having seen that. It’s one of the all-time best moments in a movie ever,” Herzog said. Here it is.
Herzog doesn’t hike, he says, he walks, preferably far from traffic. In his brief memoir Walking on Ice, Herzog describes the three weeks he spent walking from Munich to Paris in severe wintry weather to visit a friend lying mortally ill in hospital. She was the film archivist Lotte Eisner, whom Herzog idolized and felt would not die if he made this arduous pilgrimage. As it turned out, he made it and Eisner did survive and lived for another nine years, after which she summoned Herzog to ask him to release her from his embargo on her dying. He complied, and she died within a fortnight.
Back to voice. If you inspect the book cover above you will see a penguin in the snow, walking toward mountains. This is perhaps Herzog’s most famous scene, from Encounters at the End of the World, shot in Antarctica. Before you view it, watch this segment from the German documentary The HypnoticVoiceOver of Werner Herzog, narrated in German with English subtitles, with Herzog speaking in English. In that clip, they contrast Herzog’s narration with one in BBC style repeating Herzog’s words. Which feels more compelling?
But is it the voice of truth? Herzog might restate Archilochus‘ maxim, “a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing” as “a fox knows many facts but a hedgehog knows one big truth.” What he does say is “Facts do not illuminate; They are like dust on the surface of things,” and he has never stopped looking under the surface of many things in search of their essential qualities.
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