Werner Herzog’s contribution to Human-Animal Studies

Abstract

It was only in recent years that historians and cultural critics, and especially those of us who study human-animal relations throughout history, have begun to understand something Werner Herzog has been warning us about for the last half century: that “nature wants us dead.” In so saying he refers to the conflictive and asymmetrical nature of our relationship with nature, with the non-human world and in particular with animals. The aim of this paper is to propose a Herzogian reading of the animal world, one that reappraises the role of conflict in human-animal relations at the expense of the notion of consensus, or peaceful coexistence, so popular among researchers in this field. Fortunately, there are certain characters who, like Herzog, go against the grain.