2023: Werner Herzog, “On Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir”

November 10, 2023

Werner Herzog, “On Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir (Penguin, 2023).”

UC Berkeley Mosse Lecture

Friday, 10 November 2023, 13:00 PDT

BAMPFA
2155 Center Street
Berkeley, CA

Moderator: Deniz Göktürk

Sponsored by:
Global Mosse Lecture Series
The Mosse Foundation
UC Berkeley Department of German
BAMPFA

Lecture Description: 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 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, 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.

Until age 11, Herzog did not even know of the existence of cinema. His interest in films began at age 15, but since no one was willing to finance them, he worked the night shift as a welder in a steel factory. He started to travel on foot. He made his first phone call at age 17, and his first film in 1961 at age 19. 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.

Every Man for Himself and God Against All is at once a personal record of one of the great and self-invented lives of our time, and a singular literary masterpiece that will enthrall fans old and new alike. 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.

The UC Berkeley Department of German and BAMPFA are pleased to host Werner Herzog’s Mosse Lecture. The author of more than a dozen books of prose, Herzog reads from the long-awaited Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir (Penguin Random House, 10 October 2023) and engages in conversation with the audience.

Lecture Series Description: The annual Mosse Lecture is generously supported by The Mosse Foundation and reflects the foundation’s mission to promote cultural exchange and political engagement. The Mosse Lectures were originally founded in 1997 at Humboldt University in Berlin to commemorate the history of the Mosse family, their patronage of the arts, and their contributions to intellectual life through the German-Jewish publishing house run by Rudolf Mosse and the newspaper Berliner Tageblatt.

**Deniz Göktürk** earned her PhD at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, in 1995, with a dissertation on literary and cinematic imaginations of America in early twentieth-century German culture. She also worked as a certified translator of Turkish for law courts, hospitals, and publishers for several years. Her first full-time teaching appointment was at the University of Southampton, UK, in the School of Modern Languages and the Film Program from 1995 to 2001. She joined the Department of German at Berkeley in fall 2001. She has served as graduate adviser and department chair.

She has held awards and grants from the DAAD, the Economic and Social Sciences Research Council (ESRC) in the UK, the Institute for European Studies, the Institute for International Studies, the Townsend Center for the Humanities, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, and Digital Humanities at Berkeley. She has been an invited fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study Konstanz and the Center for Cinepoetics at the Freie Universität Berlin.

On campus, she holds affiliations with the Department of Film and Media, the Berkeley Center for New Media, Digital Humanities, the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, the Center for Race and Gender, the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Program in Critical Theory. She has participated in cross-campus collaborations on “Cultural Forms in Transit” and a strategic working group on “Circulation.” She is co-founder and concept coordinator of TRANSIT, the electronic journal launched by the Berkeley German Department in September 2005, and coordinator of the Multicultural Germany Project.