What’s Up With All That Werner Herzog Graffiti Around Town?

A friend passes along an example of local graffiti:

@joelmmathis Relevant: This, at 16th and South pic.twitter.com/WRL9OtkJS4

— Andi Buchanan (@andibuchanan) January 4, 2014

Which is where I’d leave it, except for this post today at Philadelphia Speaks:

Werner Herzog graffiti everywhere

What is the deal with this? It’s everywhere after New Years. Most of them say “I believe in Werner Herzog” or “Werner Herzog believes in the Mummers”.
I saw it once before a while back, but now its up and down south street, Broad street and across the neighborhood. I haven’t seen it yet outside Graduate Hospital, recently but I believe I saw it somewhere else in west Philly.

Do they ever put effort into figuring out who the tags belong to?

So what’s up with that?

Apparently: It’s a meme created by Paradigm Magazine, originating as a series of photos of increasingly unavoidable “I believe in Werner Herzog” graffiti, which … apparently serves to let the reader know they’ve just been tagged by a fan of the slightly insane German auteur, whose movies and documentaries generally come from left field.

You should check out his work. Either that, or you can get the spirit of Herzog from this parody below. Either way, we’d be happy to see this particular trend go away. (Read in soft, insane German accent.) Because it creates monstrous despair that reveals the essential depravity of man.