By Werner Herzog

At the end of November 1974, a friend from Paris called and told me that Lotte Eisner was seriously ill and would probably die. I said that this must not be, not at this time, German cinema could not do without her now, we would not permit her death. I took a jacket, a compass, and a duffel bag with the necessities. My boots were so solid and new that I had confidence in them. I set off on the most direct route to Paris, in full faith, believing that she would stay alive if I came on foot. Besides, I wanted to be alone with myself.

What I wrote along the way was not intended for readers. Now, four years later, upon looking at the little notebook once again, I have been strangely touched, and the desire to show this text to others unknown to me outweighs the dread, the timidity to open the door so wide for unfamiliar eyes. Only a few private remarks have been omitted.

–Werner Herzog

Delft, Holland, 24 May 1978

Saturday 23 November 1974

Right after 500 meters or so I made my first stop, near the Pasinger Hospital, from where I wanted to turn west. With my compass I gauged the direction of Paris; now I know it. Achternbusch had jumped from the moving VW van without getting hurt, then right away he tried again and broke his leg; now he’s lying in Ward 5.

The River Lech, I said to him, that will be the problem, with so few bridges crossing it. Would the villagers row me across in a skiff? Herbert will tell my fortune, from cards as tiny as a thumbnail, in two rows of five, but he doesn’t know how to read them because he can’t find the paper with the interpretations. There is the Devil, with the Hangman in the second row, hanging upside down.

Sunshine, like a day in spring, that is the Surprise. How to get out of Munich? What is going on in people’s minds? Mobile homes? Smashed-up cars bought wholesale? The car wash? Meditating upon myself makes one thing evident: the rest of the world is rhyme.

One solitary, overriding thought: get away from here. People frighten me. Our Eisner mustn’t die, she will not die, I won’t permit it. She is not dying now because she isn’t dying. Not now, no, she is not allowed to. My steps are firm. And now the earth trembles. When I move, a buffalo moves. When I rest, a mountain reposes. She wouldn’t dare! She mustn’t. She won’t. When I’m in Paris she will be alive. She must not die. Later, perhaps, when we allow it.

In a rain-sodden field a man catches a woman. The grass is flat with mud.

The right calf might be a problem, possibly the left boot as well, up front on the instep. While walking, so many things pass through one’s head, the brain rages. A near-accident now a bit further ahead. Maps are my passion. Soccer games are starting, they are chalking the center line on plowed fields. Bavarian flags at the Aubing (Germering?) transit station. The train swirled up dry paper behind it, the swirling lasted a long time, then the train was gone. In my hand I could still feel the small hand of my little son, this strange little hand whose thumb can be bent so curiously against the joint. I gazed into the swirling paper and then wanted to rip my heart apart. It is nearing two o’clock.

Germering, tavern, children are having their first communion; a brass band, the waitress is carrying cakes and the regular customers are trying to swipe something from her. Roman roads, Celtic earthworks, the Imagination’s hard at work. Saturday afternoon, mothers with their children. What do children at play really look like? Not like this, as in movies. One should use binoculars.

All of this is very new, a new slice of life. A short while back I stood on a flyover, with part of the Augsburg motorway beneath me. From my car I sometimes see people standing on the motorway flyovers, gazing; now I am one of them. The second beer is heading down to my knees already. A boy stretches a cardboard barricade between two tables with some string, securing it at both ends with sellotape. The regulars are shouting, “Detour!” “Who do you think you are?” the waitress says. The regulars would love to see the boy reach under the waitress’s skirt, but he doesn’t dare.

Only if this were a film would I consider it real.

Where I’m going to sleep doesn’t worry me. A man in shiny leather jeans is going east. “Katharina!” screams the waitress, holding a trayful of pudding level with her thighs; she is screaming southward: that I pay attention to. “Valente!” one of the regulars screams back. His cronies are delighted. A man at a side table whom I took for a farmer, suddenly turns out to be the innkeeper, with his green apron. I am getting drunk, slowly. A nearby table is irritating me more and more with its cups, plates, and cakes laid out, but with absolutely no one sitting there. Why doesn’t anybody sit there? The coarse salt of the pretzels fills me with such glee I can’t express it. Now all of a sudden the whole place looks in one direction, without anything being there. After these last few miles on foot I am aware that I’m not in my right mind; such knowledge comes from my soles. It occurs to me that in front of the tavern was a haggard man sitting in a wheelchair, yet he wasn’t paralyzed, he was a cretin, and some woman who’s escaped my mind was pushing him. Lamps are hanging from a yoke of oxen. In the snow behind the San Bernardino I nearly collided with a stag; who would have expected a wild animal there, a huge wild animal? With mountain valleys, trout come to mind again. The troops, I would say, are advancing, the troops are tired, for the troops the day is done. The innkeeper in the green apron is almost blind, his face hovering inches from the menu. He cannot be a farmer, being almost blind. He is the innkeeper, yes. The lights go on inside, which means the daylight outside will soon be gone. A child in a parka, incredibly sad, is drinking Coke, squeezed between two adults. Applause now for the band. The fare tonight shall be fowl, says the innkeeper in the Stillness.

Outside in the cold, the first cows; I am moved. There is asphalt around the dungheap, which is steaming, then two girls traveling on roller skates. A jet-black cat. Two Italians pushing a wheel together. This strong odor from the fields! Ravens flying eat, the sun quite low behind them. Fields soggy and damp, forest, many people on foot. A shepherd dog steaming from the mouth. Alling, five kilometers. For the first time a fear of cars. Someone has burned illustrated papers in the field. Noises, as if church bells were ringing from spires. The fog sinks lower; a haze. I am stock-still, between the fields. Mopeds with young farmers are rattling past. Further to the right, towards the horizon, many cars because the soccer match is still in progress. I hear the ravens, but a denial is building up inside me. By all means, do not glance upwards! Let them go! Don’t look at them, don’t lift your gaze from the paper! No, don’t! Let them go, those ravens! I won’t look up there now! A glove in the field, soaking wet, and cold water lying in the tractor tracks. The teenagers on their mopeds are moving towards death in synchronized motion. I think of unharvested turnips but, by God, there are no unharvested turnips around. A tractor approaches me, monstrous and threatening, hoping to maul me, to run me over, but I stand firm. Pieces of white polystyrene packaging to my side give me support. Across the ploughed field I hear faraway conversations.

There is a forest, black and motionless. The transparent moon is halfway to my left, that is towards the south. Everywhere still, some single-engine aircraft take advantage of the evening, before the Goon comes. Ten steps further: the Goon will come when Hell freezes over. Where I am standing lies an uprooted, black and orange signpost; its direction, as determined from the arrow, is northeast. Near the forest, utterly inert figures with dogs. The region I’m traversing is infested with rabies. If I was sitting in the soundless plane right above me, I would be in Paris in one and a half hours. Who’s chopping wood? Is that the sound of a church clock? So, now, onward.

How much we’ve turned into the cars we sit in, you can tell by the faces. The troops rest with their left flank in the rotting leaves. Blackthrorn presses down upon me; as a word, I mean: the word “blackthorn”. There, instead, lies a bicycle rim entirely devoid of inner tube, with red hearts painted on around it. At this bend I can also tell by the tracks that the cars have lost their way. A woodland inn wanders past, as big as a barrack. There is a dog – a monster – a calf. At once I know he will attack me, but luckily the door flies open and, silently, the calf passes through it. Gravel enters the picture, then gets under my soles; before this one could see movements of the earth. Pubescent maidens in miniskirts are getting set to climb on to other teenagers’ mopeds. I let a family pass by me; the daughter is named Esther. A cornfield in winter, unharvested, ashen, bristling, and yet there is no wind. It is a field called Death. I found a white sheet of homemade paper on the ground, soaking wet, and I picked it up, craving to decipher something on the topside, which was turned towards the wet field. Yes, IT would be written. Now that the sheet seems blank, there is no disappointment.

At the Doettelbauer’s everybody’s locked up everything. A beer crate with empty bottles waits for delivery at the roadside. If only the shepherd dog – that is to say, the Wolf! – wasn’t so hot for my blood, I could do with the dog kennel for the night, since there’s straw in it. A bicycle comes and, with each full turn, the pedal strikes the chain guard. Guard rails next to me, and over me, electricity. Now it passes over my head crackling from the high voltage. This hill here invites No One to Nothing. Just below me, a village nestles in its lights. Far to the right, almost silent, there must be a busy highway. Conical light, not a sound.

How frightened I was when, before reaching Alling, I broke into a chapel to possibly sleep inside, and there was a woman with a St. Bernard dog, praying. Two cypresses in front let my fright pass through my feet into the bottomless pit. In Alling not a single tavern was open; I poked about the dark cemetery, then the soccer field, then a building under construction where window fronts are secured with plastic covers. Someone notices me. Outside Alling a matted spot – peat huts, it appears. I startle some blackbirds in a hedge, a large, terrified swarm that flies recklessly into the darkness ahead of me. Curiosity guides me to the right place, a weekend cottage, garden closed, a small bridge over the pond, barred. I do it the direct way I learned from Joschi. First a shutter broken off, then a shattered window and, here I am, inside. A bench along the corner walls, thick ornamental candles, still burning; no bed, but a soft carpet; two cushions and a bottle of undrunk beer. A red wax seal in a corner. A tablecloth with a modern design from the early ’50s. On top of it a crossword puzzle, one-tenth solved with a great deal of effort, but the scribbling inside the margin reveals that every verbal resource had been tried. Solver are: Head covering? Hat; Sparkling wine? Champagne; Call Box? Telephone. I solve the rest and leave it on the table as a souvenir. It’s a splendid place, well beyond harm’s way. Ah yes, Oblong, round? It says here, vertical, four letters, ends with “L” in “Telephone,” horizontal; the solution hasn’t been found, but the first letter, the first square is circled several times with a ballpoint pen. A woman who was walking down the dark village road with a jug of milk has occupied my thoughts ever since. My feet are fine. Are there trout, perhaps, in the pond outside?

Monday 25 November

[...] Raging storm and raging rain from the River Lech to Schwabmuenchen; nothing noticed but this. In the butcher’s shop I stood waiting for ages, brooding Murder. The waitress n the inn understood it all in a glance, which did me good, so now I’m feeling better. Outside, a radio patrol car and police; I’ll make a long detour around them later. While changing my large note in the bank, I had a definite feeling the teller would sound the alarm at any moment, and I know I would have run instantly. All morning I was ravenously hungry for milk. From now on I have no map. My most pressing needs: sticking-plaster, a torch.

When I looked out of the window, a raven was sitting with his head bowed in the rain and didn’t move. Much later he was still sitting there, motionless and freezing and lonely and still wrapped in his raven’s thoughts. A brotherly feeling flashed through me and loneliness filled my breast.

Hail and storm, almost knocking me off my feet with the first gust. Blackness crept forth from the forest and at once I thought, this won’t end well. Now the stuff’s turning into snow. On the wet road I can see my reflection below me. For the past hour continual vomiting, only little mouthfuls, from drinking the milk too fast. The cows here break into a gallop quite unexpectedly. Refuge in a bus stop of rough stained wood, open to the west so that the snow blows into the most distant corner, where I am. Along with the storm and snow and rain, leaves are swirling as well, sticking to me and covering me completely. Away from here, onward.

A brief rest in a stretch of woodland. I can look into the valley, as I take the short cut over wet, slushy meadows; the road here makes a wide loop. What a snowstorm; now everything’s calm again, I’m slowly drying out. Mickenhausen ahead of me, wherever the hell that is. Raindrops are still falling from the fir trees to the needle-covered ground. My thighs are steaming like a horse. Hill country, lots of woodland now, everything seems so foreign to me. The villages feign death as I approach.

Just before Mickenhausen (Muenster?), turning further west, following my instincts. Blisters on the balls of my toes give me trouble; had no idea that walking could hurt so much. High upon a telephone pole a repairman was hanging by his straps undaunted, shamelessly staring down at me, the Man of Sorrows, entrusting his weight to the taut strap while smoking a pipe. His glance followed me for a long time as I crept past below. Suddenly I stood rooted by my feet, then turned on my heel and stared back. All at once a cave in the craggy slope behind me howled down to the sea with its mouth wide open. The rivers streamed to their end in the sea, with the Grotesque also cowering in a crowd on the coast, just like everywhere else on this Earth. Overwhelming all was a sudden, strange, otherworldly whistling and whining in the air, from the gliders circling over the slopes. Further on, towards the rising sun where the thunder of faraway guns was rumbling, a radar on a mountaintop, mysterious and forever taciturn, like a huge eavesdropping ear, yet also emitting shrieks that no one can hear, reaching into fathomless space. Nobody knows who built the station, who runs it, to whom it addresses itself. Or does the repairman strapped to the pole have something to do with it? Why is he staring after me like that? The radar station is often shrouded in clouds, then they scatter and the sun goes down, days passing as I stand there, and still the station glares fixedly at the ultimate edges of the universe. Over the mountain forest outside of Sachrang, in the last days of the War, an airplane dropped a metal device that was visible in the treetops by its flag. We children were certain the flag was wandering from tree to tree, that the mysterious device was moving forward. During the night some men went off and, when they returned at daybreak, they refused to divulge information concerning what they’d found.

Beautifully hilly countryside, a great deal of forest, all is still. A hawk screeches. On the prayer cross behind me is written:

Ere night falls, all can swiftly change

And have a different face from early morn.

On earth a restless stranger was I born

In mortal danger, though in the midst of life.

Through Christ’s blood for me my God pray send

Some good end to all this strife.

Our time is high, Eternity draws nigh.

I noticed that the road turned more and more southward; thus, cross-country: Kirchheim, then, around a forest, dusk approaching. Obergessertshausen: no break, since it is almost totally dark. I’m rambling more than walking. Both legs hurt so much that I can barely put one in front of the other. How much is one million steps? Uphill towards Haselbach, in the darkness I can discern something, but, stumbling forward, it turns out to be just a thoroughly filthy shelter for cows. The ground is trampled knee-deep in wet clay by their hooves, and my feet collect pounds of heavy, sticky colds of earth at once. On a rise before Haselbach two holiday homes, the prettier of which I break into without causing any damage. Remnants of a feast inside, it can’t be long ago. A pack of cards, an empty beer mug, the calendar showing November. Outside there’s a storm and inside there are mice. How cold it is!

Thursday 28 November

[...] Beyond Geising the snowfall starts to turn into a squall and I walk more aggressively, for stopping would mean I’d start to freeze at once, as I’m soaked to the skin, so in this way I can at least keep the machine running. Wet, driving snow falls intensely in front, sometimes from the side as well, as I compulsively lean into it, the snow covering me immediately, like a fir tree, on the side exposed to the wind. Oh how I bless my cap. On old brown photos the last Navajos, crouching low on their horses, wrapped in blankets, covered in rugs, move through the snowstorm towards their doom: this image refuses to leave my mind and strengthens my resolve. The road is quickly buried in drifts of snow. In the blizzard a truck gets stuck in the much of the field with its lights on and cannot move; the farmer standing next to it gives up, not knowing what to do. The two of us, specters both, don’t salute. Oh, it’s such a hard march as the wind bearing burning snow blows bitingly into my face, complete horizontal. And most of the time it’s all uphill, though downhill everything hurts as well. I am a ski jumper, I support myself on the storm, bent forward, far, far, the spectators surrounding me a forest turned into a pillar of salt, a forest with its mouth open wide. I fly and fly and don’t stop. Yes, they scream. Why doesn’t he stop? I think, “Better keep on flying before they see that my legs are so brittle and stiff that they’ll crumble like chalk when I land.” Don’t quit, don’t look, fly on. Then a dwarfish winegrower on a tractor, then my little one listened to my chest to see if my heart was still beating. The watch I gave him is also going, he says it’s ticking. I always wanted a postcard from the dam that burst in Fréjus, because of the landscape. And in Vienna, when the old Danube bridge crashed down at dawn, an eyewitness who had wanted to cross said that the bridge had flattened out like an old man going to sleep. All around there are cornfields, which calls for more thinking.

My right ankle has worsened. If it goes on swelling I won’t know what to do. I cut across the curves sloping downward to Gammertingen, it’s getting so steep and it really hurts. At a sharp turn my left leg suddenly tells me what a meniscus is, as heretofore I’d known it only in theory. I’m so dramatically wet that before entering an inn I hesitate outside for quite a long time. But necessity forces me to overcome my worst fears. Haile Selassie was executed. His corpse was burned together with an executed greyhound, an executed pig, and an executed chicken. The intermingled ashes were scattered over the fields of an English county. How comforting this is.

Saturday 30 November

[...] In Boesigen I’m put up in a private home; two women, a grandmother and her daughter, take me to heart immediately, and that does me good. I get peppermint tea, fried eggs, and a hot bath. The television weather forecast says that during the course of the day tomorrow things will improve. The older woman manufactures pink brassieres at home, a whole heap of them is piled up in the kitchen. I wanted to sit with her and watch, but I’m too tired.

Along the way I’d picked up some scraps of paper from the ground, the middle section of a pornographic magazine which someone had torn to shreds. I try to recreate how the pictures might have looked, where an arm belongs, for instance, or where the tangled limbs go. It’s striking how the women, though naked, are wearing loads of cheap jewelry. One woman is blonde, the man has bad fingernails, the rest is just snippets of genitalia.

Tuesday 3 December

Difficulties in finding a place to spend the night. When I tried to break into a house in the dark, without noticing it I lost the compass that was on my belt; I’ve been attached to it ever since the Sahara and it’s a painful loss. Up on the summit, towards evening, I met a group of men at the edge of the forest who were waiting, strangely frozen, with their backs to me; chainsaws were still working in the woods though it had long been quitting time. As I approached them I could see they were convicts consigned to forestry detail; they were waiting for their transportation. A guard was with them, all in green. I was overtaken later by several barred VW vans. [...]

Many, many ravens flying south. The cattle keep stamping during transport, they are restless. The Rhine seems to me like the Nanay, although there’s absolutely nothing at all that could remind someone of the Nanay. I wish the ferry had taken longer coming over from the other shore, as a crossing such as this is meant for man to fully digest. With me are three or four cars, the water is light brown, no other ships in sight. The towns here are asleep, but they’re not dead. Called M, troubles. I think a lot about Deleau, Dembo, Wintrebert, and Claude. I got the new number for Mme Eisner. Missing: compass, torch battery, ointment, otherwise all is well. Very warm; sparrows and children in Boofzheim. I say Thirst. Bought milk in a shop, the second quart today. The children here sneak into the corner shops and grab the comics, which they proceed to read quickly while crouching in a corner where the convex mirror of the shopkeeper can’t find them. I get drunk on milk. Cocks are crowing, doors slam, sunshine, I rest on a bench in front of the church.

Flat countryside, only the crows, shrieking all around me; I suddenly ask myself seriously whether I’ve lost my mind, as I hear so many crows but see so few. There is dead silence around me, as far as I can hear, and then there’s the shrieking of crows. Mistily the heights of the Vosges Mountains are penciled along the horizon. On the plain below, two amusement parks; ferries wheels, a haunted house ride, a medieval castle, utterly deserted and closed down. It looks permanent. In the second one there was also a zoon, a pond with geese, to the rear a pen with roebucks. Somebody’s driving a load of hay on a tractor. The war memorials are my resting place. The farmers’ wives talk a lot to each other. The farmers themselves are dead tired. I’m always seeing empty buses. All right, I say, keep it going.

In Bonfeld there were kindergarten kids around me who took me for a Frenchman. Finding a place to spend the night will be difficult. On the final stretch to Barr, a few kilometers out, a woman picked me up in her car; I had no qualms in accepting the lift since it gave me the chance to buy a compass before the shops closed. The compass is hydraulic, but it doesn’t have my friendship yet. Among the bald bare poles of Stangen Woods, workmen have hacked off branches and built a fire, bundling all the twigs as well. The ravens continue shrieking around my head, here in this town. For the first time, no pains in the legs beyond my fatigue, although now and then, perhaps, there’s the left knee. The right Achilles tendon doesn’t seem too critical anymore, since I’ve padded the place where the back of the boot bends inward with all the foam I had and laced the boot carefully. I have to wash my shirt and woolen jersey today, they both reek so strongly of me that I have to zip up my jacket whenever I’m among people. The turnover of liquids is very high: today two quarts of milk, a pound of tangerines, and shortly thereafter I was so thirsty again that my spittle was sticky, thick, and white as snow. When I approach people I wipe the corners of my mouth, because I have a feeling that there’s foam on them. I spat into the River Ill, and the saliva floated away like a solid cotton ball. At times the thirst is so great that I can think only in terms of thirst: the farmhouse there at the end of the road must surely have a well; why is this pub closed today, a Tuesday, when I need a beer or Coke so badly? Tonight I shall wash the jersey, the tricot that Nuber from the Offenbach Kickers was wearing during his farewell game. I might walk along the River Aube, I heard somewhere the Aube is good. The wit of the people here stems from settling in one place for a thousand years. I have a feeling it’s better that Alsace belongs to France.

A pile of garbage on the plain truly distracts me; I saw it from a distance and walked faster and faster, eventually as if I was seized with mortal terror, because I didn’t want to risk being passed by a car before I’d reached it. Gasping from the mad race I reached the mountain of garbage and needed quite a long time to recover from all this although the first car passed me several minutes after I’d arrived. Close by was a ditch with dirty, cold water and a wrecked car with doors, bonnet and boot wide open. The water reached up to the windows and the engine was missing. I see ever so many mice. No one has the vaguest idea just how many mice there are in the world, it’s unimaginable. The mice rustle very lightly in the flattened grass. Only he who walks sees these mice. Across the fields, where the snow lay, they’ve dug tunnels between grass and snow; now that the snow’s gone the serpentine traces still remain. Friendship is possible with mice.

In a village before Stotzheim I sat on the steps of a church, my feet were so tired and a sorrow was gnawing at my chest; then a window opened in the schoolhouse next door, a child was opening it following orders from inside, and then I overheard a young teacher scream so harshly at the children that I hoped no one would notice that a witness to these terrifying screams was sitting below the window. I went away, although I could hardly put one foot in front of the other. I headed towards a fire, a fire that kept burning in front of me like a glimmering wall. It was a fire of frost, one that brings on Coldness, not Heat, one that makes water turn immediately into ice. The firethought of ice creates the ice as swiftly as thought. Siberia was created in precisely this manner, and the Northern Lights represent its final flickering. That is the Explanation. Certain radio signals seem to confirm this, especially the intermission signals. Likewise at the end of the daily television programming, when the set buzzes and the screen in filled with snowy dots, implying the same thing. Now the order of the day is: all ashtrays must be put in place and self-control maintained! Men discuss the Hunt. The waitress dries the silverware. A church is painted on the plate, from the left a path is leading up, very sedately a costumed woman is moving there and next to her, with her back to me, a girl. I disappear with the two of them into the church. At a corner table a child is doing his homework, and often the beer is called Mutzig. The innkeeper cut his thumb days ago.

Wednesday 11 December

Walked a long way, a long way. Far off in the open fields, when another one of those stormy fits came and there was no shelter near or far, a car stopped and took me a little way to Romilly. Then onward. I stood leaning against a house, directly under a window, during a hailstorm, as again there was nothing better to be found in such haste, and there was an old man inside – so close I could have grabbed him with my arm – who was reading a book by the light of a table lamp. He didn’t realize anything was pouring down outside, nor did he see me standing nearby, breathing on his windowpane. My face, assessing it in a mirror again since an idea was stirring, wasn’t altogether known to me anymore. I could swim the rest of the way. Why not swim along the Seine? I swam with a group of people who fled from New Zealand to Australia – in fact I swam in front, being the only one who knew the route already. The only chance the refugees had of escape was to swim; the distance, however, was fifty miles. I advised people to take plastic footballs with them as additional swimming aids. For those who drowned, the undertaking became legendary before it even began. After several days we reached a town in Australia; I was the first one to come ashore, and those who followed were preceded by their wristwatches, which drifted half underwater. I grabbed the watches and pulled the swimmers ashore. Great, pathetic scenes of brotherliness ensued on shore. Sylvie le Clezio was the only one among them whom I knew. When it started to rain very hard again, I wanted to seek shelter in a roofed bus stop, but there were already several people there. I hesitated before finally creeping over to a school for cover. The gate that served as an entrance for cars closed shut, making some noise, and the teacher eyed me from the classroom. At last he came outside in sandals and blue overalls and invited me into the classroom, but the worst was over by then, and I was too much into the rhythm of walking to be able to rest very long. The distances I cover now are quite large. When I left I replaced the iron gate in its lock very gently, so that I left without further interruption. Walking endlessly up to Provins, I decided to eat prodigiously, but a salad is all I can get down. When I have to get up now, a mammoth will arise.

A complete edition of Werner Herzog‘s Of Walking in Ice, out of print since 1979, will be

re-released in late 2007 by the Free Association, New York.

This article appeared in 032c #13 as “Of Walking in Ice.”