linguistic:voice_change, information:extraction, structural:reformatting
Early life

Herzog was born Werner Stipetić in Munich, German Reich on 5 September 1942, the son of Elisabeth Stipetić and Dietrich Herzog. His mother was Austrian with Croatian ancestry, while his father was German. When he was two weeks old, his mother took refuge in the remote Bavarian village of Sachrang in the Chiemgau Alps, after the house next to theirs was destroyed during an Allied bombing raid in World War II. He, his older brother Till and younger half-brother Lucki grew up without running water, a flushing toilet, or a telephone. He recounted that his family had "no toys" and "no tools" and said that there was a sense of anarchy, as all the fathers of the village's children were absent. He never saw films, and did not even know cinema existed until a traveling projectionist came by the one-room schoolhouse in Sachrang.

When Herzog was 12, he and his family moved back to Munich. His father had abandoned the family early in his youth, but he later adopted his father's surname (which is German for "duke") as he thought it sounded more impressive for a filmmaker. Herzog made his first phone call when he was seventeen; two years later, he started work on his first film, Herakles. Herzog says that when he eventually met his father again, "fairly late in life", his mother had to translate Werner's German into the Bavarian dialect which his father spoke so the two could communicate. Herzog, aged thirteen, was told by a bullying music teacher to sing in front of his class at school in an effort, Herzog said, "to break my back." When he adamantly refused he was almost expelled. The incident scarred him for life. For several years Herzog listened to no music, sang no songs, and studied no instruments, but when he turned eighteen he immersed himself in music with particular intensity.

At an early age, he experienced a dramatic phase in which he converted to Catholicism, which only lasted a few years. He started to embark on long journeys, some on foot. Around this time, he knew he would be a filmmaker and learned the basics from a few pages in an encyclopedia which provided him with "everything I needed to get myself started" as a filmmaker—that, and the 35 mm camera he stole from the Munich Film School. In the commentary for Aguirre, the Wrath of God, he says, "I don't consider it theft. It was just a necessity. I had some sort of natural right for a camera, a tool to work with".

During Herzog's last years of high school, no production company was willing to take on his projects, so he worked night shifts as a welder in a steel factory to earn the funds for his first featurettes. When he finished school, but before he formally graduated, he followed his girlfriend to Manchester, England, where he spent several months and learned to speak English. He found the language classes pointless and "fled". After graduating from high school, he was intrigued by the post-independence Congo, but in attempting to travel there, reached only the south of Sudan before falling seriously ill. While already making films, he had a brief stint at the University of Munich, where he studied history and literature. Herzog subsequently moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in order to study at Duquesne University.