Werner Herzog
THE FUTURE OF TRUTH
ALSO BY WERNER HERZOG
Conquest of the Useless Every Man for Himself and God Against All The Twilight World
A Guide for the Perplexed Of Walking in Ice Scenarios series
THE FUTURE OF TRUTH
Werner Herzog
Translated by Michael Hofmann
LO NDON BH
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First published in Great Britain by The Bodley Head in 2025
First published in the United States of America by Penguin Press in 2025
Originally published in German, as Die Zukunft der Wahrheit, by Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich, 2024
Copyright © 2024 by Carl Hanser Verlag GmbH & Co. KG, München
Translation copyright © 2025 by Michael Hofmann
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God had a great mirror, and when God looked in the mirror, he saw the truth. One day God dropped the mirror, and the mirror shattered in a thousand pieces. Men fought to secure a piece of the mirror for themselves. They all looked into their own shards, saw themselves, and thought they saw the truth.
—PERSIANLEGEND
PREFACE
Shadows lurk in the jungle, in fever dreams, they have the k nack of becoming substance, of thickening into things.
Caruso takes shape, he sings Italian arias in an opera house built in the Amazon at the height of the rubber boom. Sarah Bernhardt, who then already had a wooden leg, and could never really sing anyway, hobbles down a flight of stairs onto the stage from a black void. A steamer is hauled bodily over a mountain, “just like a cow flying over a church steeple,” as the ship’s drunken cook Huerequeque likes to say.
This is all in my film Fitzcarraldo (1982), where there is no clear separation between imagination and reality. In this and many similar undertakings— and I am no exception— what compels me is a remote goal, a distant glimmering truth. Toward the end of the film, I incorporated a scene that was not in the script. After the hero, Fitzcarraldo, has successfully dragged the steamer over the mountain with the help of some eight hundred Indigenous people, they realize a separate dream
PREFACE
of their own. One night, they quietly unmoor the ship and let it drift downstream, through terrifying rapids, to appease the river gods. Fitzcarraldo’s ship, damaged by collisions with the rocks to either side, limps down to the first outposts of civilization.
Without particularly knowing what prompts him, Fitzcarraldo tells a rubber baron the story:
At the time when North America was hardly explored . . . one of those early French trappers went west from Montreal . . . he was the first white man ever to see Niagara. When he returned, he told of waterfalls that were more immense . . . than people had ever dreamed of. But no one believed him. They thought he was a madman or a liar. They asked him, “What’s your proof?” And he answered, “My proof is that I have seen them.”
Werner Herzog Los Angeles, July 2023