Werner Herzog on the OED: ‘the book of books’

In my last post, about filmmaker and author Werner Herzog’s voice and its mimics, I promised an anecdote about the Oxford English Dictionary. That appears below with two shorter bits from Herzog’s recent memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All.

The publisher’s page for the book, I forgot to say before, has an excerpt read by Herzog, if that sounds like something you’d like to listen to.

That the OED is for Herzog ‘the book of books’ does not surprise me, given his love of learning and literature and his admiration for diligence and excellence. But he brings it up unexpectedly, in a medley passage in which he muses on his habits and nature:

I avoid contact with fans. Occasionally, I watch trash TV because I think the poet shouldn’t avert his eyes. I want to know what others aspire to. I’m a good but limited cook. My steaks are excellent, but they’ll never touch what you can get on any street corner in Argentina. Tree huggers are suspicious to me. Yoga classes for five-year-olds—which in California are a thing—are suspicious to me. I don’t use social media. If you see my profile anywhere there, you can be sure it’s a fake. I don’t use a smartphone. I never quite trust the media, so I get a truer picture of the political situation by going to multiple sources—the Western media, Al Jazeera, Russian TV, and occasionally by downloading the whole of a politician’s speech. I trust the Oxford English Dictionary, which is one of mankind’s greatest cultural achievements. I mean the one in twenty massive volumes with six hundred thousand entries and more than three million quotations culled from all over the English-speaking world and over a thousand years. I reckon thousands of researchers and amateur helpers spent 150 years combing through everything recorded. For me, it is the book of books, the one I would take to a desert island. It is inexhaustible, a miracle. The first time I visited Oliver Sacks on Wards Island north of Manhattan, I had mislaid the house number but knew the name of the little street. It was evening, winter-time; the slightly sloping street was icy. I parked and tiptoed along the icy pavement looking into every lit-up home. None of the windows had curtains. Through one window I saw a man sprawled on a sofa with one of the hefty volumes of the OED propped on his chest. I knew that had to be him, and so it was. Our first subject was the dictionary; for him as well, it was the book of books.

(The translation from the German is by Michael Hofmann.)

I am utterly won over by the image of Herzog tiptoeing along an icy street in search of Oliver Sacks, peering into windows until he recognises him thanks to the dictionary they both adored. Oliver Sacks considered the OED ‘the most coveted and desirable book in the world’.

Of artist and photographer Lena Herzog, Werner’s wife, he writes:

We speak neither German nor Russian with each other because it has turned out that it is good for us to meet on a plane that is neither all hers nor all mine. It makes us both careful in a language that was originally neither of ours.

I find this fascinating. Most mixed-language couples would use one or the other’s first language in their interpersonal communication, or they may alternate, depending on fluency, context, perhaps the power dynamic, and so on. The Herzogs, though they could speak their native German or Russian to each other, instead reach for more neutral ground and are linguistically skilled enough to have that option.

Herzog muses on his languages, from the video clip linked below.

Finally, Herzog touches on the topic of classical languages. He was educated at the Maximilian Gymnasium in Munich, where he felt like a stranger:

The school enjoyed a distinguished reputation. In addition to offering eight years of Latin and six of Greek, it set high standards in math, physics, literature, and art. Two of the great theoretical physicists of the twentieth century, Max Planck and Werner Heisenberg, had studied here. It’s hard to explain the point of dead languages to people today. Latin, in a pinch, but only for lawyers, theologians, and historians. In purely practical terms, these languages are useless. But their study gave us a profounder understanding of the origins of Western culture, of literature, of philosophy, of the deepest currents of our understanding of the world we live in.

This can serve to accompany a popular clip of Herzog, with which I’ll conclude the post. He’s asked how many languages he speaks, and his answer takes a characteristically wild turn, into a story only partly true:

See the Sentence first archives for more on language and film, or the OED.

Werner Herzog on his voice and its mimics

Few voices in film are as distinctive and cherished as Werner Herzog’s. That applies to voice in both literal and figurative senses, but my focus here is on the singular instrument with which he narrates many of his documentaries.

In case you’re not familiar with Herzog’s speaking style, or would like to listen to it right now, here’s a short clip of him talking about chickens:

He returns to the subject of hypnosis in his 2022 memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All,* before segueing into the characteristics and effects of his voice:

But there is at least a memory of my role as hypnotist in the timbre of my voice in documentaries. What matters, though, is not the voice itself but what the voice has to say. It is the content that spooks the audience. What I write and record could never appear, say, in a National Geographic film. At the end of my film on volcanoes, Into the Inferno, you see the streams of lava erupting from the interior of the earth, and my voice reminds the listener that deep under our feet is glowing magma “that wants to burst forth and it could not care less about what we are doing up here. This boiling mass is indifferent to scurrying roaches, retarded reptiles, and vapid humans alike.” Sentences like that demand the appropriate intonation. I accept then that my voice in German has the South German twang of my first language, Bavarian. And I accept too that I speak English with a strong accent, maybe not quite so strong as Henry Kissinger’s English but still sufficiently so for there to be a number of imitators on the Web who in “my” voice read fairy tales or give advice for living. There are dozens of imitators, but none of them has really caught my sound. My voice has found a great community of fans, which combined with my view of life asks to be imitated. I am a grateful victim of such satirists.

After listening to Herzog in documentaries or interviews, it is indeed tempting to affect his accent – and his existentialist Weltanschauung, since they go hand in hand. His voice infiltrates one’s head, in a good way. I’m glad he’s aware of and gratified by the mass mimicking.

Comedians in particular are drawn to it: Stephen Colbert has described Herzog’s voice as iconic, while Paul F. Tompkins recorded a popular skit in the form of a fictional Yelp review by the filmmaker (whose assessment that ‘the accent could be better, but it’s a very funny text’, is fair).

Every Man for Himself and God Against All is a very funny text too, yet intensely serious at the same time – much like the chickens clip or any other clip of Herzog you’re likely to find. It’s an excellent read for anyone who admires his work or is interested in his life.

I don’t care for the phrase ‘retarded reptiles’, because of the adjective’s use as a slur and because it doesn’t square with my understanding of evolution or intelligence. But I don’t know what German word was used in the original, which was translated by Michael Hofmann, or whether that word is similarly vexed in its own context.

Twang is another contentious word, albeit mildly so. When Herzog refers to the ‘South German twang of my first language, Bavarian’, I don’t think he (or the translator) means to imply a nasal quality in his voice, which is what definitions of the word say it often refers to. But twang can also refer simply to regionality in an accent, or more specifically rural regional characteristics in an accent. Phonetician Lisa Davidson spoke about this on the Vocal Fries podcast episode ‘Everybody Hertz‘ (transcript).

For an introduction to Bavarian, see this page at Omniglot.

I’ll have more from Herzog’s memoir soon, including a great anecdote about the OED. In the meantime, the Sentence first archive has a short item about amateur linguist Mick Jagger, taken from Herzog’s earlier book Conquest of the Useless. And lots more about film. Now I’m off to listen to the director’s commentaries on my Werner Herzog DVD box sets.

*

* The book’s title is a translation of the German Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle, which was the German title of Herzog’s 1974 feature film The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser.