Werner Herzog Didn't Say America is Waking up as Germany Once Did
The Claim
Werner Herzog said, “Dear America: You are waking up, as Germany once did, to the awareness that 1/3 of your people would kill another 1/3, while 1/3 watches.”
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Social media users have been attributing the quote to Herzog since as far back as 2019.
Misbar’s Analysis
Our investigation concluded that this quote did not originate from the German film director Werner Herzog, but came from a parody account. The quote was first posted on Twitter in 2017 on the Herzog parody account @WernerTwertzog.
Twertzog’s account bio describes itself as “Werner Herzog's unpaid internet stooge. #Twertzog: A tweet that is gnomic, erudite, existential and spoken with a Bavarian accent.”
According to Wired, the mastermind behind @WernerTwertzog is a man named William Pannapacker. Pannapacker is an English professor at Hope College in Michigan and a fan of Herzog. He set up the account after watching all of Herzog’s films. According to him, “I started, almost beyond my control, doing imitations of things Herzog would say, in my daily life, in the voice, out loud, I started thinking in Herzogian ways, and I felt like I needed an outlet for that.”
Herzog himself isn’t a fan of social media. When presenting a documentary at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, Herzog made this fact clear. He claimed that he has “never seen a single tweet that I found interesting at all,” calling tweets “stupidities in 140 characters.”
During a 2016 interview with Conan O’Brien, Herzog told O’Brien that he did not use social media. He stated: “No, I’m not on Facebook or Twitter. However, on the internet, you find me [on] Facebook, Twitter but it’s all imposters. I have a lot of doppelgangers out there and it’s fine.” In another interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Herzog reiterated that he doesn’t use social media but he said that he doesn’t mind if Twitter users imitate him on the platform.
