Werner Herzog Books in Order

When film historian Lotte Eisner falls gravely ill, Werner Herzog walks from Munich to Paris in the belief that his journey can keep her alive. His diary records the winter landscape, physical hardship, and strange intensity of that pilgrimage.

Herzog's prose scenarios present the early visions behind Aguirre, Every Man for Himself and God Against All, Land of Silence and Darkness, and Fitzcarraldo. Blending narrative and cinematic directions, they reveal how his films began on the page.

Herzog's journal follows the making of Fitzcarraldo, his film about a would-be rubber baron hauling a steamship over a mountain. The entries record the production's demands and the director's imaginative response to an extraordinary undertaking.

Four prose scenarios trace Herzog's visions for Signs of Life, Even Dwarfs Started Small, Fata Morgana, and Heart of Glass. Brief introductions describe their origins, while the texts combine cinematic planning with dreamlike storytelling and poetry.

Herzog's scenarios for Stroszek, Nosferatu, Where the Green Ants Dream, and Cobra Verde reveal his early films taking shape in prose. Their differences from the finished works offer a view of his developing imagination and craft.

Ordered to defend a Philippine island in 1944, Japanese soldier Hiroo Onoda continues his mission long after the war ends. Herzog imagines the decades of isolation, endurance, and distorted time that sustain a soldier's private conflict.

Herzog considers the relationship between factual accuracy and the deeper truths conveyed by art and imagination. Memories of filmmaking join stories of propaganda, exploration, and artificial intelligence in an examination of how people recognise and manufacture truth.