“Romantic” may not be the first word that comes to mind when talking about Werner Herzog—known for such charming expressions as “I believe the common denominator of the universe is not harmony but chaos, hostility, and murder”—yet it is, perhaps, one of the most appropriate.
The German filmmaker can be considered a romantic in both the contemporary-everyday and historical-philosophical sense. Like the poets and painters who emerged from the Sturm und Drang movement of the mid-18th century such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Henry Fuseli, he gravitates toward the fantastical, transcendent, and sublime. His films, documentaries, and books frequently center on characters who attempt to do the impossible for the sake of its impossibility, and in doing so, posit that existence is, at its core, the stuff of feeling rather than thought. After all, reason alone can’t explain why someone would hoist a steamship over a mountain, live among grizzly bears, or—as in his latest documentary, Ghost Elephants—chase a potentially nonexistent herd of proboscideans across the Angolan highlands.
“Spiritual” is another word that, at a glance, seems antithetical to Herzog. By his own admission, he and his brother were raised as “heathens” in the Bavarian Alps. Although Herzog converted to Catholicism as a teen—a decision he now attributes to a fascination with its esoteric rituals—this religious phase lasted only a few years, cut short by the church’s demand for (and Herzog’s dislike of) conformity. In interviews, the filmmaker frequently refers to himself as an atheist, hesitant to refer to anything as holy or divine. This includes the ultimate object of his filmmaking, what he calls “ecstatic truth”—emotional truth that exists independently from and sometimes in contradiction to factual evidence.
Still, when on set, Herzog always keeps the Book of Job handy—a potent reminder that no matter how hopeless his famously difficult shoots become, things can always, always get worse. For a nonpracticing Catholic, his films are full of Christian images and sensibilities, including the concept of “ecstatic truth” itself. Aguirre, the megalomaniacal conquistador portrayed by megalomaniacal actor Klaus Kinski in the film of the same name, calls himself “the wrath of God.” The German title for The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, about the eponymous historical figure who claimed to have been raised in an environment devoid of any form of human contact, is “Jeder für sich und Gott gegen alle.” Later, Herzog reused this title for his 2023 autobiography, known in English as “Every Man for Himself and God Against All.”
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Almost always, Herzog speaks of God as a rebellious son speaks of a tyrannical father: accusatory and determined to oppose him, even if doing so will be to his own detriment. That said, when Herzog uses the word, he does not picture a deity so much as a force—not a creator, but that “common denominator” of a universe filled with yet indifferent to suffering. “Nature here is vile and base,” he famously said of the Amazonian jungle, where he spent several years trying to film Fitzcarraldo. “The trees here are in misery, and the birds are in misery. I don’t think they sing. They just screech in pain.”
Ghost Elephants puts this pain on full display in two harrowing moments that borrow footage from the 1966 documentary Africa Addio. The first—which reduced many in my cinema to tears—shows European trophy hunters gunning down a family of elephants with help from a helicopter. The men grin ear to ear as their giant prey collapse onto the grass. The second—which reduced the room to utter silence—is a seemingly never-ending pan shot of a field littered as far as the eye can see with the skulls of elephants and other large wildlife: an irrefutable testament to the fact that man, as one of the anthropologists Herzog interviews puts it, “is on a mission to destroy what he’s part of.”
Despite or perhaps precisely because of the omnipresence of pain, Herzog does not see the world in terms of good and evil. The stories he tells lack antagonists: Instead of fighting one another, characters are in conflict with the world at large. Justice is a social construct, as is sanity—these and other bulwarks of society are nullified when confronted by the overwhelming, apathetic power and permanence of nature.
Where some take this power and permanence as a reminder of their own insignificance, inspiring humility and selflessness, Herzog goes the other way. As a romantic, his art leans not toward submission in the face of unassailable obstacles, but stubborn defiance: in struggling, irrationally yet fervently, despite the likelihood of failure. “We are challenging nature itself, and it hits back,” the filmmaker said, still in the Amazon. “And that’s what’s grandiose about it.”
Throughout his career, Herzog has been almost exclusively interested in people who—like himself—possess the courage or the compulsion necessary to pursue their wildest dreams and, in doing so, live in a manner that is authentic to his own personal worldview. Whether a character is well-intentioned (like Timothy Treadwell, the literal bear-hugger of “Grizzly Man”) or utterly without compassion (like Kinski’s Aguirre) matters little compared to what it is they’re trying to achieve. Treadwell wanted to treat grizzlies like teddy bears without being mauled to death in the process, while Aguirre (inspired by an actual historical figure) searched for and sought to rule over El Dorado—the mythical city of gold. Both devoted their time on Earth to doing what others considered impossible; both lived, as Herzog’s metaphysics seems to suggest, if not the only kind of life worth living, the only kind of life worthy of being put to film. Both resemble the heroes of romantic art and writing, pursuing their own ecstatic truth in places where rational people dare not follow.
Throughout his career, Herzog has been almost exclusively interested in people who—like himself—possess the courage or the compulsion necessary to pursue their wildest dreams.
The main dreamer in “Ghost Elephants” is Steve Boyes, a conservation scientist who has spent a sizable portion of his career trying to track down a herd of African elephants that he believes may be related to the largest specimen ever recorded: a 24,000-pound creature shot by and named after Hungarian hunter Josef J. Fénykövi. Gazing upon its stuffed remains at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., Boyes looks somewhat like an extremely devout Catholic standing face to face with the bones of St. Peter.
Despite his evident sympathy for Boyes, whose lofty goals and motivations so strongly resemble his own, Herzog makes no clear moral distinction between Boyes’ team of compassionate conservationists and the hunters in “Africa Addio.” A closer look at the director’s theology—his view of the universe, and man’s place in it—explains why. In Herzogian terms, Boyes and Fénykövi, like Treadwell and Aguirre, each engages in the same, futile yet heroic struggle: to try to alter the unalterable course of nature, whose own power—even and perhaps especially in our current age of climate change and mass extinction—far exceeds our own.
To those concerned about the future of the planet, “Ghost Elephants” might sound like a demoralizing film. This is not the case. Although Herzog’s worldview leans toward the fatalistic, he inspires anything but fatalism. If there is one thing to take away from his Odyssean career and characters, it’s to keep moving forward in the face of difficulty, regardless of what it is you’re doing. If not in faith, then defiance.
Tim Brinkhof is a U.S.-based Dutch journalist who writes about religion, politics, and history.
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