Werner Herzog Books In Order

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of's Biographies & Memoirs

Publication Order of Anthologies

Werner Herzog is a literary fiction, history, memoir, and biography author from Germany.

The author was born in Munich, Germany in 1942 to Dietrich and Elizabeth Herzog. A few weeks after he was born, his mother had to flee Munich which was then under heavy bombing from the allies.

Settling in a very small Bavarian town near the border with Austria he had a very difficult childhood in post-war Germany. His parents separated soon after his father came back from the war in 1947 plunging him and his mother deep into poverty.
Nonetheless, while he had a very humble childhood, he loved roaming the hills and catching trout, even if he never had access to running water at home.

He was just eleven when he saw his first film when his village was visited by a traveling projectionist. When he was twelve, he went to a humanistic school and learned Latin and Green since the family was then back living in Munich.
In his teenage years, he started dreaming of becoming a film director and started saving money to produce films as he then worked at a steel factory.

After he was done with school, he traveled extensively across North Africa and Greece, and at some point, he almost died from bilharziosis.

Going back to Germany, Werner Herzog shot “Herakles” his first short film in 1962 and then began to study literature and history in Munich, even though he never graduated as he moved to the University of Pittsburgh on a scholarship.
He followed up his first short with two more and worked several jobs to finance them. “Lebenszeichen” his first script was the winner of the 1963 Carl Meyer Price which paid for the feature that was subsequently shot in the Greek isle of Kos.
The work then won a Best First Feature Film Silver Bear Special Jury Prize in 1968 and was aired at the International Film Festival in Berlin.

He would go on to produce many other films that gained international acclaim, won awards, and caused much controversy.

Later in his career, he focused more on documentaries but returned to feature filmmaking when he co-produced “Invincible” the feature film in 2000.

In recent times, he has been active both behind and in front of the camera and behind it. He has directed three feature films and was the antagonist in the 2012 movie “Jack Reacher” where he starred alongside Tom Cruise.
He published “The Twilight World” his first novel in 2021.

Outside of his writing, Werner Herzog has three children and has been married three times. He first got married to his first wife in 1967 before he divorced in 1985 after which he married Christine Maria Ebenberger who he divorced in 1997.
After moving to the United States in 1996 he met and married Elena Pisetski a Russian-American photographer.

He is also a voracious reader and in addition to his native Bavarian German, he is a speaker of Spanish, English, Greek, and French, and can also read Ancient Greek and Latin.

“The Twilight World” by Werner Herzog is the incredible story of a Japanese soldier named Hiroo Onoda.

He is best known around the world as the man who defended a small Filipino island for nearly three decades following the end of the Second World War.
Werner was directing an opera in Japan when one of his hosts asked him which Japanese character he would like to meet and he said Hiroo Onoda.

The two developed an instant connection and spent hours talking about his decades-long ordeal in the forest.

In 1944, Hiroo was stationed on Lubant Island in the Philippines and he was instructed to hold the island until the return of the Imperial Army.

He was asked to defend the island at all costs and never die by his own hand. If he was captured, he was to provide misleading information. So began his long ordeal and over the years, he would become fluent in the jungle language where he lived.
Soon, weeks became months and months became years, and then years turned into decades until everything turned into one endless stretch.

All this time, he refused to back down as he fought a fictitious war at once tragic and surreal at first with soldiers, then all alone as he became a character in a story that he wrote all by himself.

Werner Herzog’s “Of Walking in Ice” is a work set during the winter of 1974.

Herzog had made a solo three-week journey from Munich to Paris. He walked all the way as he needed to visit Lotte Eisner his ailing friend well-known historian and film critic.
During his journey to the French capital through a monumental blizzard, he documented all he felt and saw with amazing sincerity.

This diary is full of rants about the utter loneliness, extreme cold, personal philosophizing, and poetic descriptions of the snow-covered countryside.

It is remarkable how cinematic this work feels and how similar it is to the best Werner Herzog films. Through the author’s odyssey, we are witness to how he gets the inspiration for his films.
“Of Walking on Ice” is an emotionally impressive, introspective, and beautifully written masterpiece that won Werner Herzog a literary award.

It is the first in several color-coded series of long-forgotten but remarkable titles that you have to read to appreciate the expertise of one of the best voices in the genre.

“Conquest of the Useless” is a work in which the author reflects on the making of one of his most admired and honored films “Fitzcarraldo.”

The enigmatic and revered filmmaker pens more than just a journal relating to the making of the problematical and monumental motion picture.

He details everything from the reshoots, major changes in the cast, and how a 360-ton steamship was hauled onto the set without special effects.

The novel is a work of art just like the film from which it got its inspiration.

It comes with fascinating observations regarding the cast and crew, including the lead in the film, Klaus Kinski who seems to some extent demented despite his international reputation.
We also get some interesting insights into how films are made, particularly the Werner Herzog films.